The man at the desk gave her a couple of cigarettes for the road. He spoke just enough English to tell her how to get crosstown but in the 77th Street station she went up the stairs to walk in an adverse northerly direction for several blocks before realizing her mistake.
She arrived at the appointed corner a half hour late. Christo took pains to mime his annoyance, flinging the butt of his hotdog at her as she advanced shading her eyes.
“I thought you’d maybe gone back to sleep.”
“Who can sleep with all this excitement?”
“Don’t get snotty.”
“So I’m here. What’s the project?”
Christo reported that he and Pierce had drawn up tentative plans for a joint business venture, something that would move him out of the man-Friday class. “He’s finally going to steer me onto something ripe, the bastard. A bit of the long green. After all this time.” An evening of revelry had been scheduled to celebrate their new partnership.
“Congratulations. I hope you’ll both be very happy, but did I really have to come all this way to hear about it?”
“Right now we’re looking for uniforms.”
“Uniforms?”
“The Canteen has a very strict dress code.”
The Canteen, he went on to explain, was the nightclub sensation of the nouveau hip nation, a “private” pleasure facility with an exclusivity that hardened Manhattan smarties had not yet fully decoded. Housed in an enormous structure occupying half a block on lower Tenth Avenue (it had been in previous incarnations a furniture warehouse, a television studio, and — briefly — a performance space for the Theatre of Last Resort, a dramaturgic cabal following the teachings of the structural anthropologist Claude Fantomas), the Canteen had with great expense and lavish attention to detail been made into a flyboy’s furlough wet dream of flash and high times circa 1944. In order to have any chance of being admitted, it was necessary to be decked out in scrupulously authentic period costume. Tennis champs and teevee luminaries with their own line of hair-care products had been turned away for reasons of unsuitable clothing. The management discouraged the patronage of celebs anyway. The Canteen was a place to get away from all that, where status licked the boots of style; no amount of juice, no carefully accrued influences and interfaces of the social powerplant could prevail if one was not “aw-reet” and in the swing with the Swing.
“Marvelous,” Tildy grumbled. “I came a thousand miles to play dress-ups.”
“Hey, you’re welcome to sit around the hotel all night doing crossword puzzles.”
The thrift shop aisles were jammed with women on safari for bargains — not that there were any bargains to be had. The shop’s volunteer staff, young debs unable to land a situation on the museum/gallery circuit and marking time until that photographic expedition to Ecuador could be finalized (“Daddy knows someone at National Geographic”), certainly knew the value of things: three-figure price tags on art deco cocktail sets; dinner gowns with designer labels intact at twice the cost of Orchard Street knockoffs; even crayon-defaced editions of Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins were a dollar and up. But money spent to good effect, when you were helping to defuse the population bomb.
It took them the better part of the afternoon to piece together their wardrobes, flashing in and out of the changing cubicle, posing for one another, rejecting one selection after another. Christo finally chose a headwaiter’s holiday suit, light brown with blue pinstripes and wedge lapels; a lemon-yellow shirt; two-tone wingtips and clocked socks; a hand-painted cravat by Al-Hy Haberdashery of Flatbush Avenue; and a rather decrepit snap-brim hat. Tildy, who was terribly hard to fit, was forced to settle for something rather more cutesie than she’d hoped — a flouncy print dress with Mardi Gras dancers on a mottled field of blue and black. With fishnet stockings, red satin wedgies and an orange chiffon scarf at the throat, she’d look like a real chippie. Blow jobs behind the PX. Hey, Joe, you got gum?
Six hours later they were traveling downtown in a Checker cab and drinking rye and ginger out of paper cups.
“Hubba hubba,” Christo said, fortifying his drink from the pint. “I just know we’re gonna sizzle tonight.”
Her feet propped on the jumpseat in front of her, Tildy gazed at the scene unrolling like a scroll past the window. She was amazed by the level of activity at this late hour, the sheer density of bodies on the avenue. In Houston, previously the largest settlement she’d visited, it had been nearly impossible to buy a box of tampons after ten P.M.
“I’m tired,” she said. “The last few days have been strange. I feel like I just got out of the hospital after a long series of tests.”
“But you’re fine, just fine. Look at those nice white muscles. Hubba hubba.”
Tildy cranked her window down and emptied her cup on the pavement.
The Canteen was situated in a zone of novelty wholesalers, juke box dealers and distributors of Latin records. The entrance was on a gloomy cross street with its own canopy of smells; spoiled meat, soot, wet newspapers. Tildy breathed through her mouth. In the doorway of a dead luncheonette a man with a bandaged head crooned softly while staring into a brown paper bag.
Tildy slid her arm through Christo’s. “Is my lipstick on straight?”
Their clothes passed muster at the door and their “temporary membership” cards were accepted by an Oriental bruiser in a Shore Patrol outfit after examination under an ultraviolet lamp. At the end of a long corridor lined with potted palms, Christo gave a fifty to a combat nurse toying sullenly with her cuticles, and was handed in exchange a book of ration coupons, the only currency recognized inside. They pushed through a pair of tufted leather swinging doors to another checkpoint (a woman in “Rosie the Riveter” masquerade presented Tildy with a heart-shaped box of chocolates, on the house), through a second set of doors, and into the jangle and heat of party time.
From the top of the carpeted stairs the room looked big enough to hold an aircraft carrier. Velvet hangings along the side walls were pulled back to reveal huge smoked mirrors that swallowed the room and spat it out on the opposite side. An all-white gutbucket combo — two brass, two reeds and rhythm — churned through “Bugle Call Rag” atop the terraced black glass stage, riffing away at vein-popping tempo while mucho authentic kittens and kats jitterbugged, lindy-hopped, trucked and pecked on the dance floor. Figures jostled and bounced in the blue backlighting of the large bar, built to resemble the front section of a medium-range bomber in profile, complete with cockpit and bubble canopy. Girls in Red Cross uniforms distributed coffee and doughnuts from stainless steel carts. Waiters in sailor suits glided among the tables (each with its own bowl of roses and shaded lamp throwing shadows across the damask cloth) on rubber-wheeled roller skates; the more ambitious would execute an occasional leap or pirouette, perhaps hoping that some starmaker in the crowd would notice them, perhaps merely happy in their work.
It was several minutes before they finally located Pierce sitting at a shadowy corner table beneath a sepia photograph of Joe Louis twisting Max Schmeling’s head around with a right cross. He was negotiating with two rice-powdered dollies who not long ago had made him the target for tonight and, without a word, helped themselves to seats at his table.
Dodie and Charmaine had known each other since junior high. They shared an apartment in the West Village. They worked for competing ad agencies but met each day on their lunch hour to promenade up Madison Avenue sharing a joint. Their one consuming ambition was to escape this urban anchorage for a brand-new hot blood dimension — a world, as Dodie often spoke of it, of Europe and yachts; and their sensitive antennae rated Pierce as someone with access.