August Is a Wicked Month (7 page)

‘Boy, you’ve got problems,’ Denise said, then stopped short because an exodus of people came through the arch. Hitching her dress up she lay back in the chair and stretched her legs full length. With the mirrors it was unlikely that she could be missed.

‘Here they come,’ she said in a whisper and then in her low, calculating drawl she spoke, ‘I just love olives, I went right across America once and I lived on three things, beer, avocado pears and olives. Right across the country. I ended up in a little town called – I forget what ‘twas called but you have no idea how beautiful our country is.’ It was well and professionally timed and he halted under one of the chandeliers and did the ‘Me a cowboy’ again, beating his chest over-humbly. He was with a large group, the men stood when he stood and older women filed behind, linking and talking earnestly. There were a few young girls walking straight with their stomachs held in. Ellen registered no face except his. She’d never seen him in the films, but he had a striking presence. He had the look of the gutter about him. She thought of men in lorries who whistle at girls’ legs and have bare dolls as mascots on their windshields. He was common and wild and undeniably handsome.

‘How about asking them to join us for a drink?’ one of the men said, and Denise let out a gurgle of shock as if an electric current had been passed through her. Ellen went on racing her coins, but careful now to put a hand at the other edge of the table to save them from falling off.

‘Girls, pretty girls,’ one of the older women said. She had a fur stole on with tassels of fur at the end of it, which made the stole itself look silly.

‘It so happens we would like to ask you ladies for a drink,’ the actor said, loudly. Ellen and Denise looked at each other, hesitated and then Denise said, ‘It’s very funny that you should ask us because we’re actually having a drink.’ She had moved forwards, though, in her chair.

‘Hey…’ he said.

‘Hey yourself,’ she said and got up. Ellen rose almost immediately. The first thing she ought to make clear was that they weren’t sisters, they weren’t even friends.

‘We just struck up a conversation,’ she said.

‘Tell me,’ said an older man guiding her politely towards the door, ‘have I seen you somewhere before?’

‘Not that I know of,’ she said, looking at him. His face was yellow from the heat and his eyes were light blue and he must have been handsome once upon a time. His name was Sidney.

Within minutes they were in cars swooping down the drive towards the main part of the town where the activity was. Ellen sat in the back of a chauffeur-driven Bentley between Sidney and the woman with the fur-tipped stole. The tips brushing her legs had the stealth of an animal sneaking up on her and she wondered how much it had cost. The movie actor was in front, talking to Denise about muscle. He believed in fights.

‘I don’t know anyone’s name,’ Ellen said to the two people she sat between.

‘She doesn’t know anyone’s name,’ said the woman who called herself Gwynnie. ‘Isn’t that cute?’

‘That’s terrible,’ the actor said in a false voice of sympathy, and turning he patted her knee and said, ‘Do me a favour, call me Bobby.’ She was a little embarrassed and did not know what to say.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Bobby,’ she said. Then he smiled and said she had the sort of voice he could listen to all night and he did not seem insulting at all.

‘Stick around,’ he said, giving her a friendly pat and then putting Gwyn’s fur stole back on her bare knees. There was not only luxury but security in being covered by the fur. She thought perhaps this response was first caused by having seen a couple make love within a belted beaver coat, in an alleyway, in childhood, years before. They’d shooed her away as if she were a dog, when in fact she’d wanted not to spy but to behold.

They converged on a night-club that was so dimly lit that it was like going into a cinema. The manager welcomed Sidney, and three tables were put together for them and a pile of chairs brought. They sat wherever they happened to have been standing. She was between Sidney and another man who told her he was Bobby’s understudy. Opposite was Bobby, Denise, and a pretty boy with a less pretty boy, joined to each other by two gold bracelets that were clipped together with a little gold padlock. She tried to smile at them but they were very aloof. There were about twenty people in all: a wide-shouldered man called Jason, whose wife had the fur-tipped stole, and some oriental girls with slit skirts, who never spoke, and the older women chirping like birds, and a platoon of people who said, ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ whenever the actor, Sidney, or Jason, the powerful element of the group, opened their mouths.

‘I definitely dig her, she is a law unto herself,’ the man Jason kept saying of some woman who lived on the East coast of America and wrote for movies.

‘How do you mean?’ Sidney said.

‘I mean she’s a law unto herself,’ Jason said, and his wife told the group that this girl came to stay with them one week-end when the temperature was in the nineties and wore pretty blouses all the time with sleeves that came right down to the wrist, and then she discovered the girl having a shower in the bathroom and found that she had this big growth on her arm with hair on it. The story sent a shiver through the gathering and Bobby said for God’s sake to get the drinks before they all went to sleep or something. At the word sleep Denise put her head on his shoulder and basked there for a second.

‘Don’t forget we’ve a date, I’m twenty-five at midnight,’ she said, pretending to be drunker than she was.

‘All rightie,’ Gwyn said as the waiter came with the first bucket of champagne. Vapour clouded the bucket except where his fingers had touched it, in putting it down, and there, four squat prints showed shiny. He brought four other tubs and various squat bottles of whisky with the black-and-white label she knew well, and fruit juice for the slim oriental girls.

‘You’re having what?’ Sidney asked as he dealt out numerous packets of cigarettes like a pack of cards. He was proud to be host to so many people and was paying particular attention to Ellen.

‘I’d like Pernod,’ she said, and Bobby who was halfway through a tumbler of whisky put it down and said he’d like that too.

‘What would I do without you?’ he said, smiling over at her. She smiled back. He said they must look at etchings some time. The evening was beginning to bloom.

‘Bobby’s the best in the world, the best in the world,’ the understudy kept telling her. She couldn’t see how he would fill in if Bobby fell sick. He had thicker features and spoke with oily Irish-American gusto, whereas Bobby had a sharp-boned face and spoke in a low, lazy manner.

‘Gave me forty-seven suits, no kiddin’,’ he said. ‘And my son got married and on their wedding day they didn’t know it but they had a honeymoon paid for, in Bermuda.’

‘Did they go?’ she said, thinking, ‘Supposing they didn’t want to go?’

‘Did they go!’ he said, affronted. ‘They had the time of their lives. Never forget it. Forty-seven suits he gave me, no kiddin’.’

‘Why don’t you kill him?’ she said, ‘then you could afford to buy your own suits.’ She hated his humbleness, his tell-you-the-honest-truth, jarvey driver’s drivel.

‘Hemlock,’ she said. ‘I have it on good authority, boil the roots.’

‘I was married to a woman like you once,’ he said, his face ground into a temper.

‘And you killed her,’ she said quickly.

He got up and took his drink and dragged his chair to the end of the table. She pretended not to notice and looked around as if she were looking for someone special. A little boy on a woman’s lap sat with his mouth open, his face enraptured by the noise, the lights and the great, green, spreading tree that was the roof. She missed her son then and thought of the resonance of all their kissing and wished that she could hold him in her arms. She shut her eyes and tried to memorize the shape of his face, but it eluded her. She searched for it frantically, in her mind, through shut eyes.

‘Wake up, ma’am, we’re going to have a ball,’ Bobby said. Their drinks had come. The waiter brought the

Pernod as he had been told to: an ice filter laid into each tall glass with small chinks as tiny and as splintered as diamonds, and a jug of water. Bobby did the pouring and as the water seeped through the filter the harsh green Pernod began to cloud, and looking from one green to another, she saw his eyes like the whey of the milk, and above them the great, green, spreading tree. She looked up at the tree, still trying to recall her son’s face, and he looked too, and was softened by the sight of it, and raising his glass he said:

‘Marje.’

‘I’m not Marje,’ she said.

‘I know you’re not Marje,’ he said, ‘but cheers,’ and still looking at the tree he asked if she had ever heard of white peaches.

‘Are there white peaches?’ she asked, shaking her head with surprise, with pleasure.

‘You can say that again.’ He described how they grew in New England and with his hands suggested how they squelched as they touched the ground. Because of a fatal softness.

‘I would love to see one,’ she said, not meaning that, but meaning, ‘You are nicer and less tough than you look.’

‘I like you,’ she said then.

‘I knew you would,’ he said. ‘I can read thoughts.’ It was beginning to be an adventure. The drink warmed her. A small boy in sequins was announcing the most fabulous strip tease of the season. Sidney said they could both watch and carry on their conversation. They had been discussing an American novelist.

‘He’s not a nigger writing about niggers, he’s a fairy writing about fairies,’ Sidney repeated, proud of his assessment.

‘Don’t talk like that,’ Gwyn said, injured, and looked towards the homosexuals as if they’d been hurt. They were absorbed in each other, and testing who could touch the farthest point of his nose with his tongue. The younger boy had a very clear and very pointed tongue, which he brandished like a knife. He could touch his nose quite easily with it, but his lover who was older found difficulty in doing the trick. Afterwards the older one gulped as if the exercise had made him sick. They seemed quite happy in their relationship.

‘He’s writing about fairy niggers, that’s what he’s doing,’ Bobby said suddenly. He had a knack of picking up the thread wherever the talk seemed liveliest.

‘Big theme!‘ Jason said in his powerful voice.

‘You see that stole, Jason, well that’s the one I always wanted,’ Gwyn said as she pointed to a woman who wore a cape of dark mahogany-coloured fur. It was the darkest, furriest fur Ellen had ever seen. You expected it to creep, it was so like an animal.

‘You never said, honey,’ he replied, patting his wife as if she were some sort of patient. Then he said to the actor, ‘He’s not even a nigger, for God’s sake,’ and an elderly lady from the next table requested to get the Yanks out. Her hair which was blonde was in a plait and she waved this menacingly at them. Then the lights were switched off completely and in the darkness Ellen heard Denise say to the actor:

‘How ‘bout us doing the shakes out of here?’ He didn’t move. On stage a woman on tip-toe circled a double bed which had a very frilly coverlet. Bathed in mauve spotlight the woman started to undress. She wore black mesh stockings and heels so high that she looked like some sort of bird perched on long, thin legs. As she disrobed she threw each garment to the audience. The actor caught her third and innermost petticoat, smelt it, and said, ‘A nursing mother,’ loud enough for everyone to hear.

There was laughing from various tables and a fan said his name affectionately. Sidney was pleased. When the girl was naked except for the petals over her breasts and the kerchief lower down, she took a natural-colour fox fur and began to draw it back and forth, slowly between her legs. Each time she moved it she let out a moan and a muscle in her bare thighs quivered. She had taken off her stockings too. There were whistles and gasps from the various tables. The first orgasm of the evening.

‘I can’t stand it, I tell you I can’t stand it,’ Gwyn said. She was sobbing. Jason took an enormous handkerchief and held it over her eyes, and she sobbed and kept saying it was an insult.

‘You hold it,’ he said. Ellen looked from the woman sobbing to the dancer teasing the audience and then in matchlight at hordes of ants advancing over the tablecloth, and suddenly her son’s face came to her: in his duffle coat with the hood framing his round pale face, emphasizing his big eyes. She thought of the holiday he and his father were having; the pure unsullied days: digging for worms in the morning, fishing the rivers when the sun went down, slitting a trout open on the river bank and taking the insides out, tipping them back in the river; the smell of methylated and wood smoke; he would make a second fire to keep the flies off, and eating the trout off the new tin plates they would dip their bread in the frying-pan to get the last of the lovely black, savoury, melted butter. She licked her lips for them. The lights on the top half of the dancer were lurid now and dark down below. The natural-colour fox was black between the legs. You could hear a pin drop. Everybody except the actor was engrossed. She caught his eye and he leaned across and said something to her.

‘A what?’ she said.

‘ It’s a man,’ he said and she asked how.

‘It’s behind,’ he said, pressing his thumb on to his palm and hiding it there to show that the man had likewise hidden part of himself. Then the music got very fast and the dancer discarded the fox tail and hung the rubber breasts on either bed post and stood naked except for a triangle of black sequins above the thighs. It was a man who had perfectly mimicked all the coquette of a woman. People clapped, but some must have felt cheated as Ellen did. She also felt a little sick.

‘You’re all right?’ Sidney asked.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. She was ashamed to say that she felt disgusted. Gwyn was blowing her nose now into the big handkerchief. It was navy with white spots. It could have been a scarf really. The oriental girls smiled as if they’d just seen a religious ceremony.

‘Hungry,’ the actor said. He ordered some artichokes because it was too late to get real food.