He smoked and sipped his drink. He listened to the music. The sound system changed to You’re The Top. He looked up and saw the barman standing in front of him.
“The one at the end,” the man said. Then he moved off.
Johnny looked down at the end. The woman was about thirty-five, trying to look twenty and managing to look thirty, which wasn’t too bad. She was dressed expensively and made up expensively. She was looking at him, and when he caught her eye she smiled.
That was his cue.
He picked up his drink, got up from his stool and walked toward her. Without a word he sat down on the stool next to her. He looked at her again, smiled.
She returned the smile.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I think so,” she said. “I think you can buy me quite a few drinks.”
He gestured to the bartender, indicating her empty glass with a toss of his head. The bartender came and began to prepare a rather complicated cocktail for her.
Then he felt something touch his hand. He turned his hand palm up and felt her slip a bill into it. His fingers closed around the bill. It was a ten. He paid for the drinks with it and left the change on the top of the bar. He knew there was going to be more where that had come from.
“You’re a nice-looking young man,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Johnny.”
“Johnny,” she said. “That’s a nice name. I think we’ll have a good time, Johnny.”
Chapter Five
The salesman did not recognize the young man who walked into Brinsley’s at 2:30 in the afternoon that Wednesday. He smiled his usual smile and asked if he could be of service. The young man grinned back at him.
“Don’t you remember me?”
The salesman looked blank. There was something definitely familiar about the polished young man but the salesman couldn’t make all the connections in his mind. He tried to cover his embarrassment.
“About two months ago,” the young man said, “a fellow entered your store wearing denim trousers and a black leather jacket. You outfitted him with a complete wardrobe. Now do you remember?”
The salesman’s jaw fell. He remembered now. But he didn’t believe it was possible. The young hood playing Hell’s Kitchen Goes To College had changed magically into a young man who could have come only from a good family, who could have gone only to an Ivy League college, who could work only on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. The transformation was astounding.
“My speech is better now,” Johnny Wells said. “I use the right words and I know what they mean. And the hungry look is gone. I had a way of looking at people, adding them up, so to speak. I don’t do that any more.”
The salesman closed his eyes. He remembered Shaw’s Pygmalion and his brain reeled.
“I need two more suits,” Johnny Wells said. “I think a brown tweed and a dark blue Continental would be good, but any suggestions are welcome. And I can use three or four pairs of slacks and two sport jackets. Plus a pair of brown shoes and several pairs of socks and undershorts. And shirts. The striped broadcloths in the window looked rather nice.”
“You’ve come a long way,” the salesman said.
Johnny just grinned.
“How high do you want to go?”
“It doesn’t really matter.” Johnny said. “I want good clothes. That’s all.”
The salesman took a step forward. He was a little more sure of himself now. He remembered Johnny very well, remembered that he had liked the boy, and decided that he liked the present young man even more. His hand went to Johnny’s tie.
“I see you still wear fifty-cent ties.”
“A dollar,” Johnny said. “But I thought you told me nobody can tell the difference.”
“Not many people can. I’m in the trade. I have to be able to tell the difference.”
Johnny sighed. “I guess you’d better sell me a dozen ties,” he said.
It had been one hell of a two months.
He was sitting now in a small bar on West 47th Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison. He was alone and intended to remain alone. A small glass of cognac rested in front of him on the top of the bar.
It had taken him a few weeks to discover that cognac was the right drink for him. It tasted fine, for one thing. It was a good drink to order — dignified and not at all trite. And most important of all, the proper way to drink it was to sip it very slowly, a little at a time, with plenty of time between sips. A single drink lasted close to an hour. This was very important because he did not like to get drunk. He had become drunk once when he was trying to see whether or not he liked dry martinis. He hadn’t liked them and he’d lost the fine edge of his control. He did not want that to happen again. The idea of giving up just a small portion of his self-control was galling. Cognac solved that problem for him.
He glanced at his watch, a fat gold timepiece with a stretch-link band that he’d received as a gift from a woman whose name he could not recall at the moment. It was a good watch. It looked good and kept perfect time. It told him now that it was precisely 4:27. He glanced at the wall clock over the bar and saw that the wall clock agreed with him.
In an hour he was supposed to pick up Moira for dinner. They wouldn’t eat until seven or eight at the earliest, but she wanted him there at five-thirty on the dot. He decided that he would be ten or fifteen minutes late. He had discovered that it was almost a point of honor never to arrive anywhere on time.
He had upwards of half an hour to sit in the bar before it would be time to head for the hotel and change for dinner. It had taken less time to pick out clothes than he’d thought it would take. He decided to use the half hour to review the past two months. It was something he did frequently. He liked to check just where he stood and see just what it had taken to get him there.
He remembered all the way back to the first woman, the one he’d latched onto in the Vermillion Room. If she hadn’t been the first she would have been easier to forget. There was nothing special about the evening — a few more drinks at the bar, then a cab ride to her apartment and a trip to bed. But she had wanted him to stay the night so that he would be around in the morning, and that was fine with him.
He couldn’t sleep, so he got up and went into the living room and prowled through the bookcases. There was a large blue book on etiquette and he went through the entire book in less than four hours. This was easy enough. Most of it, he decided, was baloney. He skipped how to answer wedding invitations and what to wear to a funeral and all that sort of nonsense, but a surprising amount of information soaked into his mind and stayed there. The most important point, far more valuable than How To Shake Hands With A Duchess, was a fact which the book did not state at all but which was its underlying premise. It ran something like this—
There were two kinds of men in the world. There were gentlemen and there were bums. You were one kind or the other because there was no room in-between. You could work forty hours a week at an honest job, live in a house with wife and kiddies, and still be a bum. You could lie and cheat and steal and be a total bastard to everybody who walked into your line of vision and still be a gentleman. Neither Amy Vanderbilt nor Emily Post would have thought of phrasing it so succinctly, but there it was.
Period.
When you were a gentleman you got the right kind of attention from waiters and bartenders and salesmen and clerks. When you were a gentleman the cops gave you a wide berth. They wouldn’t bug you because they knew you were out of their class. When you were a gentleman all the doors were open for you and everybody in the world was ready to accept you as an equal.