Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (10 page)

“Hasn’t it always been?”

“Yes—but David, it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected.”

“So,” he said, “I believe many people have found out before. I suppose all we can really share with people is a taste for the same kinds of weather.”

Vincent Youmans wrote a new tune. The old tunes floated through the hospital windows from the hurdy-gurdies while the baby was being born and the new tunes went the luxurious rounds of lobbies and grills, palm gardens and roofs.

Miss Millie sent Alabama a box of baby things and a list of what must be done for bathing infants to pin on the bathroom door. When her mother got the telegram about Bonnie’s birth, she wired Alabama, “My blue-eyed baby has grown up. We are so proud.” It came through Western Union “glue-eyed.” Her mother’s letters asked her simply to behave; they implied that Alabama and David were wanton to a certain extent. As Alabama read them over she could hear the slow springs creaking in on the rusty croaking of the frogs in the cypress swamps at home.

The New York rivers dangled lights along the banks like lanterns on a wire; the Long Island marshes stretched the twilight to a blue Campagna. Glimmering buildings hazed the sky in a luminous patchwork quilt. Bits of philosophy, odds and ends of acumen, the ragged ends of vision suicided in the sentimental dusk. The marshes lay black and flat and red and full of crime about their borders. Yes, Vincent Youmans wrote the music. Through the labyrinthine sentimentalities of jazz, they shook their heads from side to side and nodded across town at each other, streamlined bodies riding the prow of the country like metal figures on a fast-moving radiator cap.

Alabama and David were proud of themselves and the baby, consciously affecting a vague bouffant casualness about the fifty thousand dollars they spent on two years’ worth of polish for life’s baroque façade. In reality, there is no materialist like the artist, asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury.

People were banking in gods those years.

“Good morning,” the bank clerks said in the marble foyers, “did you want to draw on your Pallas Athene?” and “Shall I credit the Diana to your wife’s account?”

It costs more to ride on the tops of taxis than on the inside; Joseph Urban skies are expensive when they’re real. Sunshine comes high to darn the thoroughfares with silver needles—a thread of glamour, a Rolls-Royce thread, a thread of O. Henry. Tired moons ask higher wages. Lustily splashing their dreams in the dark pool of gratification,
their fifty thousand dollars bought a cardboard baby nurse for Bonnie, a secondhand Marmon, a Picasso etching, a white satin dress to house a beaded parrot, a yellow chiffon dress to snare a field of ragged robins, a dress as green as fresh wet paint, two white knickerbocker suits exactly alike, a broker’s suit, an English suit like the burnt fields of August, and two first-class tickets for Europe.

In the packing case a collection of plush teddy bears, David’s army overcoat, their wedding silver, and four bulging scrapbooks full of all the things people envied them for were ready to be left behind.

“Good-bye,” they had said on steel station stairways. “Someday you must try our home brew,” or “The same band will play at Baden-Baden for the summer, perhaps we’ll see you there,” they said, or “Don’t forget what I told you and you’ll find the key in the same old place.”

“Oh,” groaned David from the depths of the bed’s sagacious enamel billows, “I’m glad we’re leaving.”

Alabama inspected herself in the hand mirror.

“One more party,” she answered, “and I’d have to see Viollet-le-Duc about my face.”

David inspected her minutely.

“What’s the matter with your face?”

“Nothing, only I’ve been picking at it so much I can’t go to the tea.”

“Well,” said David blankly, “we’ve got to go to the tea—it’s because of your face that they’re having it.”

“If there’d been anything else to do, I wouldn’t have done the damage.”

“Anyway, you’re coming, Alabama. How would it look for people to say, ‘And how is your charming wife, Mr. Knight?’ ‘My wife, oh, she’s at home picking at her face.’ How do you think I’d feel about that?”

“I could say it was the gin or the climate or something.”

Alabama stared woefully at her reflection. The Knights hadn’t changed much externally—the girl still looked all day long as if she’d just got up; the man’s face was still as full of unexpected lilts and jolts as riding the amusements on the Million-Dollar Pier.

“I want to go,” said David, “look at this weather! I can’t possibly paint.”

The rain spun and twisted the light of their third wedding anniversary to thin prismatic streams; alto rain, soprano rain, rain for Englishmen and farmers, rubber rain, metal rain, crystal rain. The distant philippics of spring thunder hurtled the fields in thick convolutions like heavy smoke.

“There’ll be people,” she demurred.

“There’ll always be people,” agreed David. “Don’t you want to say good-bye to your beaux?” he teased.

“David! I’m much too much on their side to be very romantic to men. They’ve always just floated through my life in taxis full of cold smoke and metaphysics.”

“We won’t discuss it,” said David peremptorily.

“Discuss what?” Alabama asked idly.

“The somewhat violent compromises of certain American women with convention.”

“Horrors! Please let’s not. Do you mean to say that you’re jealous of me?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“Terribly. But I thought we weren’t supposed to be.”

“Then we’re even.”

They looked at each other compassionately. It was funny, compassion under their untidy heads.

The muddy afternoon sky disgorged a white moon for teatime. It lay wedged in a split in the clouds like the wheel of a gun carriage in a rutted, deserted field of battle, slender, and tender and new after the storm. The brownstone apartment was swarming with people; the odor of cinnamon toast embalmed the entry.

“The master,” the valet pronounced as they rang, “left word, sir, to the guests that he was escaping, that they were to make themselves at home.”

“He did!” commented David. “People are always running all over the place to escape each other, having been sure to make a date for cocktails in the first bar outside the limits of convenience.”

“Why did he leave so suddenly?” asked Alabama disappointed.

The valet considered gravely, Alabama and David were old clients.

“The master,” he decided to trust them, “has taken one hundred and thirty hand-woven handkerchiefs, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, two dozen tubes of Frances Fox ointment and sailed. Don’t you find, sir, the luggage a bit extraordinary?”

“He might have said good-bye,” pursued Alabama petulantly. “Since he knew we were going and he wouldn’t see us for ages.”

“Oh, but he did leave word, Madam. ‘Good-bye,’ he said.”

Everybody said that they wished they could get away themselves. They all said they would be perfectly happy if they didn’t have to live the way they lived. Philosophers and expelled college boys, movie directors and prophets predicting the end said people were restless because the war was over.

The tea party told them that nobody stayed on the Riviera in summer—that the baby would take cholera if they carried her into the heat. Their friends expected they’d be bitten to death by French mosquitoes and find nothing to eat but goat. They told them they’d find no sewage on the Mediterranean in summer and remembered the impossibility of ice in the highballs; there was some suggestion of packing a trunk with canned goods.

The moon slid mercurially along the bright mathematical lines of the ultra-modern furniture. Alabama sat in a twilit corner, reassuring herself of the things that made up her life. She had forgotten to give the Castoria to a neighbor. And Tanka could just as well have had the half-bottle of gin. If the nurse was letting Bonnie sleep at this hour at the hotel, she wouldn’t sleep on the boat—first-class passengers, midnight sailing, C deck, 35 and 37; she could have telephoned her mother to say good-bye but it would only have frightened her from so far away. It was too bad about her mother.

Her eyes strayed over the rose-beige living room full of people. Alabama said to herself they were happy—she had inherited that from her mother. “We are very happy,” she said to herself, as her mother would have said, “but we don’t seem to care very much whether we are or not. I suppose we expected something more dramatic.”

The spring moonlight chipped the pavement like an ice pick; its shy luminosity iced the corners of the buildings with glittering crescents.

It would be fun on the boat; there’d be a ball and the orchestra would play that thing that goes “um—ah—um”—you know—the one Vincent Youmans wrote with the chorus explaining why we were blue.

The air was sticky and stuffy in the ship’s bar. Alabama and David sat in their evening clothes, sleek as two borzois on the high stools. The steward read the ship’s news.

“There’s Lady Sylvia Priestly-Parsnips. Shall I ask her to have a drink?”

Alabama stared dubiously about. There was nobody else in the bar. “All right—but they say she sleeps with her husband.”

“But not in the bar. How do you do, Madam?”

Lady Sylvia flapped across the room like an opaque protoplasm propelling itself over a sandbank.

“I have been chasing you two over the entire boat,” she said. “We have word that the ship is about to sink, so they are giving the ball tonight. I want you for my dinner party.”

“You do not owe us a party, Lady Parsnips, and we are not the sort
of people who pay steerage rates and ride in the honeymoon suite. So what is it?”

“I am quite altruistic,” she expostulated. “I’ve got to have
somebody
for the party, though I hear you two are quite mad about each other. Here’s my husband.”

Her husband thought of himself as an intellectual; his real talent was piano playing.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you. Sylvia here—that’s my wife—tells me you are an old-fashioned couple.”

“A Typhoid Mary of time-worn ideals,” supplied Alabama, “but I consider it only fair to tell you we are not paying any wine checks.”

“Oh, we didn’t expect you to. None of my friends pay for us any more—I can’t trust them at all since the war.”

“It seems there’s going to be a storm,” said David.

Lady Sylvia belched. “The trouble with emergencies is,” she said, “that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.”

“I find the easiest way to provoke the unexpected is by deciding to sleep in pore cream.” Alabama crossed her legs to above the tabletop in a triangular checkmark.

“My place in the sun of incalculability could be had with five Octagon soap wrappers,” said David emphatically.

“There are my friends,” interrupted Lady Sylvia. “These Englishmen were sent to New York to save them from decadence and the American gentleman is seeking refinements in England.”

“So we pool our resources and think we’ll be able to live out the trip.” They were a handsome quartet intent on portraying the romantic ends they anticipated.

“And Mrs. Gayle’s joining us, aren’t you, dear?”

Mrs. Gayle blinked her round eyes with conviction.

“I’d just love to, but parties nauseate my husband, Lady Sylvia. He really can’t stand them.”

“That’s all right, my dear, so do they me,” said Lady Sylvia.

“No more than the rest of us.”

“But more actively,” her ladyship insisted. “I’ve given parties in one room after another of my house till finally I had to leave because of the broken fixtures, there being no place left to read.”

“Why didn’t you have them mended?”

“I needed the money for more parties. Of course, I didn’t want to read—that was my husband. I spoil him so.”

“Boxing with the guests broke Sylvia’s lights,” added milord, “and she was very unpleasant about it, bringing me to America and back this way.”

“You loved the rusticity once you became accustomed to it,” said his wife decisively.

The dinner was one of those ship’s meals with everything tasting of salty mops.

“We must all have an air of living up to something,” Lady Sylvia directed, “to please the waiters.”

“But I do,” sang Mrs. Gayle. “I really have to. There’s been so much suspicion of us about, that I’ve been afraid to have children for fear they’d be born with almond-shaped eyeballs or blue fingernails.”

“It’s one’s friends,” said Lady Sylvia’s husband. “They rope you into dull dinners, cut you on the Riviera, devour you in Biarritz, and spread devastating rumors about your upper bicuspids over the whole of Europe.”

“When I marry a woman she will have to avoid social criticism by dispensing with all natural functions,” said the American.

“You must be sure you dislike her to escape her condemnation,” David said.

“It’s approval you need to avoid,” said Alabama emphatically.

“Yes,” commented Lady Sylvia, “tolerance has reached such a point that there’s no such thing as privacy in relations any more.”

“By privacy,” said her husband, “Sylvia means something disreputable.”

“Oh, it’s all the same, my dear.”

“Yes, I suppose it actually is.”

“One is so sure to be outside the law these days.”

“There’s such a crowd behind the barn,” Lady Sylvia sighed, “one can’t find a place to show off one’s defense mechanism.”

“I suppose marriage is the only concept we can never fully work out of our system,” said David.

“But there are reports about that you two have made a success of your marriage.”

“We are going to present it to the Louvre,” Alabama corroborated. “It’s been accepted already by the French government.”

“I thought for a long time that Lady Sylvia and I were the only ones who’d stuck together—of course, it’s more difficult when you’re not in the arts.”

“Most people feel nowadays that marriage and life do not go together,” said the American gentleman.