Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (8 page)

I

It was the biggest bed that both of them together could imagine. It was broader than it was long, and included all the exaggerated qualities of their combined disrespect for tradition in beds. There were shining black knobs and white enamel swoops like cradle rockers, and specially made covers trailing in disarray off one side onto the floor. David rolled over on his side; Alabama slid downhill into the warm spot over the mass of the Sunday paper.

“Can’t you make a little more room?”

“Jesus Chr—Oh Jesus,” groaned David.

“What’s the matter?”

“It says in the paper we’re famous,” he blinked owlishly.

Alabama straightened up.

“How nice—let’s see——”

David impatiently rustled the Brooklyn real estate and Wall Street quotations.

“Nice!” he said—he was almost crying—“nice! But it says we’re in a sanitarium for wickedness. What’ll our parents think when they see that, I’d like to know?”

Alabama ran her fingers through her permanent wave.

“Well,” she began tentatively. “They’ve thought we ought to be there for months.”

“——But we haven’t been.”

“We aren’t now.” Turning in alarm she flung her arms about David. “Are we?”

“I don’t know—are we?”

They laughed.

“Look in the paper and see.”

“Aren’t we silly?” they said.

“Awfully silly. Isn’t it fun—well, I’m glad we’re famous anyway.”

With three running steps along the bed Alabama bounced to the floor. Outside the window gray roads pulled the Connecticut horizons from before and behind to a momentous crossing. A stone minuteman kept the peace of the indolent fields. A driveway crawled from under the feathery chestnuts. Ironweed wilted in the heat; a film of purple asters matted over their stalks. Tar melted in the sun along the loping roads. The house had been there forever, chuckling to itself in the goldenrod stubble.

New England summer is an Episcopal service. The land basks virtuously in a green and homespun stretch; summer hurls its thesis and bursts against our dignity explosively as the back of a Japanese kimono.

Dancing happily about, she put on her clothes, feeling very graceful and thinking of ways to spend money.

“What else does it say?”

“It says we’re wonderful.”

“So you see——” she began.

“No, I don’t see, but I suppose everything will be all right.”

“Neither do I—David, it must be your frescoes.”

“Naturally, it couldn’t be us, megalomaniac.”

Playing about the room in the Lalique ten o’clock sun, they were like two uncombed Sealyhams.

“Oh,” wailed Alabama from the depths of the closet. “David, just look at that suitcase, and it’s the one you gave me for Easter.”

Exhibiting the gray pigskin she exposed the broad watery yellow ring disfiguring the satin lining. Alabama stared at her husband lugubriously.

“A lady in our position can’t go to town with a thing like that,” she said.

“You’ve got to see the doctor—what happened to it?”

“I lent it to Joan the day she came to bawl me out to carry the baby’s diapers in.”

David laughed conservatively.

“Was she very unpleasant?”

“She said we ought to save our money.”

“Why didn’t you tell her we’d spent it?”

“I did. She seemed to feel that that was wrong so I told her we were going to get some more almost immediately.”

“What’d she say to that?” asked David confidently.

“She was suspicious; she said we were against the rules.”

“Families always think the idea is for nothing to happen to people.”

“We won’t call her up again—I’ll see you at five, David, in the Plaza lobby—I’m gonna miss my train.”

“All right. Good-bye, darling.”

David held her seriously in his arms. “If anybody tries to steal you on the train tell them you belong to me.”

“If you’ll promise me you won’t get run over——”

“Good—by—e!”

“Don’t we adore each other?”

Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the war. They were wonderful. They hung above the city like an indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows. They lay above the streets like a white fog off a swamp. Through the gloom, the whole world went to tea. Girls in short amorphous capes and long flowing skirts and hats like straw bathtubs waited for taxis in front of the Plaza Grill; girls in long satin coats and colored shoes and hats like straw manhole covers tapped the tune of a cataract on the dance floors of the Lorraine and the St. Regis. Under the somber ironic parrots of the Biltmore a halo of golden bobs disintegrated into black lace and shoulder bouquets between the pale hours of tea and dinner that sealed the princely windows; the clank of lank contemporaneous silhouettes drowned the clatter of teacups at the Ritz.

People waiting for other people twisted the tips of the palms into brown mustache ends and ripped short slits about their lower leaves. It was just a lot of youngness: Lillian Lorraine would be drunk as the cosmos on top of the New Amsterdam by midnight, and football teams breaking training would scare the waiters with drunkenness in the fall. The world was full of parents taking care of people. Debutantes said to each other, “Isn’t that the Knights?” and “I met him at a prom. My dear, please introduce me.”

“What’s the use? They’re c—r—a—z—y about each other,” smelted into the fashionable monotone of New York.

“Of course it’s the Knights,” said a lot of girls. “Have you seen his pictures?”

“I’d rather look at him any day,” answered other girls.

Serious people took them seriously; David made speeches about visual rhythm and the effect of nebular physics on the relation of the primary colors. Outside the windows, fervently impassive to its own significance, the city huddled in a gold-crowned conference. The top of New York twinkled like a golden canopy behind a throne. David and Alabama faced each other incompetently—you couldn’t argue about having a baby.

“So what did the doctor say?” he insisted.

“I told you—he said ‘Hello!’ ”

“Don’t be an ass—what else did he say?—We’ve got to know what he said.”

“So then we’ll have the baby,” announced Alabama, proprietarily.

David fumbled about his pockets. “I’m sorry—I must have left them at home.” He was thinking that then they’d be three.

“What?”

“The bromides.”

“I said ‘Baby.’ ”

“Oh.”

“We should ask somebody.”

“Who’ll we ask?”

Almost everybody had theories: that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell. Everybody knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell and how to get seats for the Yale game, that Mr. Fish inhabited the aquarium, and that there were others besides the sergeant ensconced in the Central Park Police Station—but nobody knew how to have a baby.

“I think you’d better ask your mother,” said David.

“Oh, David—don’t! She’d think I wouldn’t know how.”

“Well,” he said tentatively, “I could ask my dealer—he knows where the subways go.”

The city fluctuated in muffled roars like the dim applause rising to an actor on the stage of a vast theater.
Two Little Girls in Blue
and
Sally
from the New Amsterdam pumped in their eardrums and unwieldy quickened rhythms invited them to be Negroes and saxophone players, to come back to Maryland and Louisiana, addressed them as mammies and millionaires. The shopgirls were looking like Marilyn Miller. College boys said Marilyn Miller where they had said Rosie Quinn. Moving-picture actresses were famous. Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin. They were having the breadline at the Ritz that year. Everybody was there. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they’d been since last time. Charlie Chaplin wore a yellow polo coat. People were tired of the proletariat—everybody was famous. All the other people who weren’t well known had been killed in the war; there wasn’t much interest in private lives.

“There they are, the Knights, dancing together,” they said, “isn’t it nice? There they go.”

“Listen, Alabama, you’re not keeping time,” David was saying.

“David, for God’s sake will you try to keep off of my feet?”

“I never could waltz anyway.”

There were a hundred thousand things to be blue about exposed in all the choruses.

“I’ll have to do lots of work,” said David. “Won’t it seem queer to be the center of the world for somebody else?”

“Very. I’m glad my parents are coming before I begin to get sick.”

“How do you know you’ll get sick?”

“I should.”

“That’s no reason.”

“No.”

“Let’s go someplace else.”

Paul Whiteman played “Two Little Girls in Blue” at the Palais Royal; it was a big expensive number. Girls with piquant profiles were mistaken for Gloria Swanson. New York was more full of reflections than of itself—the only concrete things in town were the abstractions. Everybody wanted to pay the cabaret checks.

“We’re having some people,” everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us,” and they said, “We’ll telephone.”

All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there—that they were engaged. It was always teatime or late at night.

David and Alabama invited their friends to throw oranges into the drum at the Plantation and themselves into the fountain at Union Square. Up they went, humming the New Testament and Our Country’s Constitution, riding the tide like triumphant islanders on a surfboard. Nobody knew the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

In the city, old women with faces as soft and ill lit as the side streets of Central Europe offered their pansies; hats floated off the Fifth Avenue bus; the clouds sent out a prospectus over Central Park. The streets of New York smelled acrid and sweet like drippings from the mechanics of a metallic night-blooming garden. The intermittent odors, the people and the excitement, suctioned spasmodically up the side streets from the thoroughfares, rose in gusts on the beat of their personal tempo.

Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego their particular genius swallowed their world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.

The clerk in the Manhattan thought they weren’t married but he gave them the room anyway.

“What’s the matter?” David said from the twin bed under the cathedral print. “Can’t you make it?”

“Sure. What time is the train?”

“Now. I’ve got just two dollars to meet your family,” said David searching his clothes.

“I wanted to buy them some flowers.”

“Alabama,” said David sententiously, “that’s impractical. You’ve become nothing but an aesthetic theory—a chemistry formula for the decorative.”

“There’s nothing we can do with two dollars anyway,” she protested in a logical tone.

“I s’pose not——”

Attenuated odors from the hotel florist tapped the shell of the velvet vacuum like silver hammers.

“Of course, if we have to pay the taxi——”

“Daddy’ll have some money.”

Puffs of white smoke aspired against the station skylight. Lights like unripe citrus fruits hung in the gray day from the steel rafters. Swarms and swarms of people passed each other coming up the stairway. The train clicked up with the noise of many keys turning in many rusty locks.

“If I’d only known it would be like that at Atlantic City,” they said—or, “Could you believe it, we’re half hour late?”—or, “The town hasn’t changed much without us,” they said, rustling their packages and realizing their hats were all wrong for wear in the city.

“There’s Mamma!” cried Alabama.

“Well, how do ye do——”

“Isn’t it a great city, Judge?”

“I haven’t been here since 1882. There’s been considerable change since then,” said the Judge.

“Did you have a nice trip?”

“Where is your sister, Alabama?”

“She couldn’t come down.”

“She couldn’t come down,” corroborated David lamely.