“Well, I am very much taken with the emotive content found in the singing voice telling a story.”
“You know, Stephen, I should one day so very much like to hear you play. You must come and try our Steinway in the music room. What about I give you a tinkle.”
As we three of us went by taxi to an Italian restaurant in a quiet street in the mid-Fifties, I thought, well, since you’ve already given me a hard-on, Drusilla, why not a tinkle. And it would be a little less embarrassing. It was one of those casual crosstown streets you walk along in New York, hardly noticing anything and noticing everything. And finding a couple or more of lifelong inhabitants still lurking behind the jumble of doorways and windows. And with nearly my last few dollars, I paid the fare. Not to suffocate us with the stink of my feet, I kept the taxi window a little open. But now, my God, if the proprietor, Jesepo, who is flapping his hands and uttering hosannas at Drusilla’s appearance, gets a whiff of me, I’ll be thrown out the door. Thank God waiters are scurrying around wielding their napkins to clear the air in front of us, ushered as we are to, as Jesepo said, her usual discreet table. Be just as well if my squelching feet continue to smell to high heaven. As we at last sat down, there is poured and placed before each of us a tulip glass of vintage Charles Heidsieck champagne. Poured from its bottle, taken from an elaborate bucket on its stand by the table. Jesepo, before putting his towel to the bottle, twirling the bottom rim on the edge of the bucket to rid it of excess drops of moisture. Drusilla raising her glass, proposing a toast.
“To you two, or at least one of you. And Stephen, here’s to your minuet. I really know it’s going to be wonderful and have all the critics in town impressed.”
“Thank you, Dru. And this is such marvelous champagne.”
“I’m so glad you like it. You know, collecting napkin rings and ice buckets, I fear, are two of my real weaknesses. And Jesepo keeps this crested one for me. I’ve always felt the best champagnes deserve the best silversmith’s buckets to keep them chilled.”
One waiter pouring the last of the bottle into the ladies’ glasses as another waiter opens another bottle of champagne. One’s mind floats free on the alcohol, back north to the Bronx, where, as a member of a large family who did not observe the democratic and American God-given principle of weekly pocket money, it was only occasionally that I could afford to ask a girlfriend out to the movies and for an ice cream soda afterward, especially as sodas had gone up to fifteen cents from a dime. And one bottle of this champagne tonight could buy a hundred sodas at the old price of sodas. If ever I get anywhere in life, I will leave a legacy in a few printed words of advice. Despite quaffing marvelous champagne, wet socks in one’s shoes makes one feel at a distinct disadvantage in elegant company. Only a little bit less worse than if one had a conspicuously fatal disease. And following the toast, one excused oneself to repair to the men’s rest room. For in my last hysteria taking a piss, I repressed much of my pee.
“Ah, please do excuse me, if you will, ladies.”
As I walked rearward in the restaurant, one lady in six rows of pearls and wristfuls of diamonds sniffed the air as I passed her table. And my God, what a nice new nightmare it was in the men’s room. Some son of a bitch in black tie, tassels on his black loafers and looking me up and down, and mostly down, was, as I reached for the bay rum, already reaching for it, and had the nerve to say as he grabbed the bottle, “Do you mind. I’m rather in a hurry to get out of the disagreeable fumes in here.”
Amazing how deeply one takes personally ridicule, insult and humiliation and starts blending them all together, and what you’ve got when you sum them all up is a chip on the shoulder the size of an Egyptian pyramid. I merely told the guy, “Well fella, anchors away. You better hurry like hell. A fart like you can really stink.” Holy Jesus, you’d think I’d insulted God, the way this guy reared up in outrage. His head looked ready to explode off the top of his neck. I thought my remark was a reasonably clever riposte to his own implied insult, although I suppose he wasn’t to know it was me with my wet rancid socks who was stinking and providing the disagreeable fumes. But what I had objected to most were those words—“Do you mind”—when the fucker grabbed the bay rum. Of course I fucking minded, you stupid supercilious bastard. If you had any sense of good breeding, you would have let go of the bottle and said, “After you,” and I would have said, “No, after you.” And for a few minutes, out of that stilted rejoinder, we could at least have left the bottle there untouched.
Stephen O’Kelly’O exiting from the men’s room into the sound of voices, tinkling glass and laughter and aromatic enticingly appetizing smells, returns to the table. The menu produced in the glowering silence. And one could forget the men’s room for a minute. I was surprised at the prices, for there were none. Recalling Sylvia once saying that she did not grow up in the school of hard knocks. But then she went on to say it was much worse. That she got just one big knock, which smashed her psyche. To have found herself in adulthood misplaced among the sort of people who, all they have to be is who they are. And being who she was, she wasn’t one of them. Having gin and tonic before lunch and daiquiris before dinner. And over dinner, talk about horses, dogs and candlesticks and never, God forbid, should the human condition or a question that it wasn’t wonderful, ever intrude into the conversation.
But then when I’d first returned to the table, what was absolutely stunningly amazing was to come out of the men’s room and find that the fucker was not already assembling other tassel-shoed confederates to assault me or at least to have a couple of dozen lawyers ready to serve me with a summons. And there he was, with five others. At a table not that far away, clearly contemplating revenge. And as he gloweringly watched me rejoin my table with Drusilla and Sylvia, he spoke to his friends, who cast glances in my direction, and these friends seemed to speak back to him all at once. And imperceptibly, his manner utterly changed, and when he next looked in my direction, he actually nodded at me and smiled. And I, being a charitable sort, nodded and vaguely smiled back. But which made me wonder why his sudden change of attitude. Perhaps with their three ladies sent home, the tassel-shoed gang of them would be waiting outside to wreak vengeance in the usual New York manner.
Sylvia toyed with her food, leaving each course nearly untouched on her plate. Whereas I had an excellent appetite, scoffing down a really wonderful piece of fish in a magically delicious sauce and worthy of originating from the Fulton Fish Market. The vino was a superlative Sancerre. And we finished up with an exotic peach dessert with a Château d’Yquem which was beyond what one ever imagined wine could taste like. Or indeed could ever cost like, as whatever this was, I found later, maybe cost as much as twenty thousand ice cream sodas. Then outside, ready to enter a taxi Jesepo had called, we heard gunshots echoing in another street and then sirens of a dozen police squad cars converging on cross streets and screaming up and down the avenues. Sylvia taking it upon herself to refuse us both an invitation to return and have coffee and liqueurs back at Sutton Place.
“Oh, no thanks, Drusilla. But thanks. Stephen and I have to be up so early.”
Drusilla in her own ankle-length black tweed coat lined with chinchilla fur, climbing into the taxi and waving what I thought was a kiss as it pulled away. Someone I just caught sight of in a window across the street, with a pair of binoculars, watching us. Another taxi coming around the corner approached and was flagged down to stop. Sylvia announcing she was going on her own way alone, downtown to Pell Street to get her suitcase, and that she and I were parting ways on this chill sidewalk. And then she was going somewhere where I didn’t need to know. I watched the flexing of her calf climbing into the cab and she stopped halfway in and turned around, stared a silent second, and began shouting.