“Mrs. Manara,” I said, reaching for her hand. “And Mrs. Fayespringer. I’ve enjoyed meeting you. Don’t you worry — Nelton will get a town one day. I have hunches about these things.”
“Thank you, Mr. Boswell.” She seemed to understand what I meant.
“Pilchard,” I said crisply.
“Boswell,” Pilchard said.
“Perce, Mrs. Perce.”
“Goodbye,” they said together.
“Eugenie, goodbye.”
She didn’t answer.
“Irving. I really am sorry about all this.”
“It’s all right, Boswell.” He leaned forward. “You’ve money enough for a cab, haven’t you?” he said softly.
I frowned. “Please, Irving,” I said. “It’s a warm, lovely night. I may walk back to the Love.”
“You know best,” he said.
I retrieved my hat and coat from Miller and left.
When I stepped outside the Gibbenjoys’ big doors I saw that most of the party had moved outdoors. Although I had not noticed anyone when I came up the long drive, by now there were dozens of people strolling about through Gibbenjoy’s gardens. I took off my coat, folded it, put it and my hat in the low branch of a tree and lost myself among the other guests.
I was astonishingly content. I had been discovered, exposed, humiliated, but one can never be wholly miserable in a tuxedo. Indeed, one cannot be miserable at all in a tuxedo. At least I can’t. The tuxedo is a uniform, like any other. Inside one, the wearer’s emotions are dictated by the game that is to be played. In the case of the tuxedo this calls for charm and a disciplined lightness of step (after all, it’s the uniform of the dance). Why else had everyone been so agreeable? Gibbenjoy had thrown me out, of course, but because he had been wearing a tuxedo he threw me out with charm, with a disciplined lightness of step, with a man-of-the-worldiness which winked at the upsetting of convention. If either of us had been in a business suit we would have gotten down to business. I might have been arrested.
What is the gigolo? A manipulator, a liar, a thief, a cheat, a whore. But in a tuxedo! Redeemable, so long as he keeps his black pants on, his shoes shined, the velvet on his collar buffed. In a tuxedo his sins are comic, have nothing to do with the cellar, the ginny room, the unmade bed. Gibbenjoy had said, “Oh, it’s all right,” and the General, a man who understands uniforms, had chimed in, “It certainly is,” because all the world loves a prankster, a crasher. Crash is a funny word, even. It’s the word in comic books when two buffoons bang their heads together. I was a crasher. A clonker. A bang-smasher. A dealer in comical impacts. A cartoon cat who lost his fur in one reel, was whole again in the next. (A joke resurrection. No, a joke catastrophe, since all resurrections are serious, all second chances somber.)
So I walked immune, eternally young, in an oddly suspended autumn, foolish, forgiven, smiling, through the garden. I smiled at the brothers in the tuxedos and the sisters in the evening gowns on the marbled benches, and they smiled back at me. I took drinks from the trays of the servants. They were in formal dress themselves, a gay servitude. Princes, perhaps. In disguise, like myself. Masked playboys. I smiled in coded recognition.
A long-stemmed champagne glass in my hands, I walked through the garden of the Gibbenjoys, in weather preternaturally warm for the last day of October, among trees which had lost their leaves, but which seemed in the strange warm night to have lost them prematurely, like bald twenty-year-olds whose hairlessness — like my gaucheness — was just a joke.
I sat down next to a girl on a stone bench. “Why are you crying?” I said.
“I’m not crying.”
“Then why are you sitting alone?”
“I’m not doing that either,” she said.
“You’re tough,” I said. “All I get tonight are the tough ones. Isn’t anyone tender and vulnerable any more? How do you account for this warm weather? What’s the word you people use — unseasonable. How do you account for this unseasonable unseasonableness? This unreasonable unseasonable unseasonableness?”
“Dry up,” she said, and moved off into the trees.
A youth, I thought. You can’t con youth with youth.
I strolled some more. I interrupted conversations; I started others. Almost everywhere I was welcome. Once I spotted Mrs. Gibbenjoy and ducked behind a tree until she passed by. Another time I saw Hope Fayespringer. I tried to turn away, but it was too late; she had seen me. She shook her head and made shame-shame everybody- knows-your-name with her fingers. I smiled and gave her my caught-with-my-fingers-in-the-cookie-jar special and followed it with my boys-will-be boys-bangsmasher. She sighed deeply and walked away.
At about eleven o’clock the band came out of the house and set up their stands near a fountain and played while people danced among the trees. Servants were on ladders everywhere, hurriedly stringing lights.
I had stopped drinking. I didn’t want to get sick. Throwing up is amusing, too, of course, but not for the person doing it.
I went up to people. “Have you seen Perlmutter?” I asked. “Is Perlmutter here yet?” “Where’s Perlmutter?”
I went up to a dark, Jewish-looking man. “Dr. Perlmutter?”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said.
Gabrielle Gail was singing a Greek song while the band faked it. As phony as it sounded to me on records, it seemed beautiful there, and I danced in Greek on the lawn while she sang. I raised one leg and turned around slowly on my heel, digging a neat little divot in the Garden of the Gibbenjoys.
“Eureka,” somebody said.
“Is good my dance? You like it?” I said. “In old countrys is used to do all nights. Is ruins grow like flowers in my countrys. Is dig hole with heel once while dance and to discover temples. Like Dr. Morton Perlmutter.”
“Perlmutter’s an anthropologist.”
“Sure, but a terrific dancer.”
Gabrielle Gail stopped singing and I stopped dancing. “Is Perlmutter here?” I asked.
“Over there,” someone said, pointing to a group of people about fifty feet away. From where I stood, they looked like players in a huddle. The moonlight shone on the backs of evening dresses and dinner jackets. Strangely, the formal dress increased the impression that I was looking at some sort of a team of athletes.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Listening,” the man said who had pointed out the group. “The little Yid is making a speech.”
I walked toward them. As I got closer I saw that even more people than I thought were gathered around Perlmutter. The ones in the back were standing behind others who sat on the damp grass. I thought about the abandon of the rich, of their scorn for the indelible stains of chlorophyll. Real class, I thought. I moved closer, stalking the group from an oblique angle. (I have learned never to waste an important first view from a conventional position.) I walked past them, tracing behind their backs their semicircle on the lawn. Going by quickly, my gaze fixed on the interstices between their ears, I looked instinctively downward where Perlmutter appeared and disappeared rapidly like an object seen through the pickets in a fence. When I had twice moved past them in this way, I made a place for myself at one end of the semicircle.
My first thought was that something terrible had happened to Perlmutter and that these people had gathered around to watch while he died. He was stretched out in front of me on his belly, moving erotically up and down. In his left hand was a fistful of earth which he kneaded through his fingers.
“Like that,” he said suddenly, sitting up. “None of this occidental crap about beds or anything like that. They’ll screw in rivers, in fields, on the sides of mountains. I’ve seen them nail each other amongst a herd of their sheep, and on the day’s catch from the sea. You understand? Always against some natural background. Never in a house. Now, you noticed I had some earth in my hands. That’s necessary. The man holds one clod and the woman another. They smear it over each other’s organs when they begin and again when they finish. It’s very clear. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’”