“I … I think so.” She shook her head, annoyed with herself now. “Of course.”
“Could you come to the Belasco at five with your bathing suit? The author and the director will be there.”
“At five.” She nodded. Farewell, Stanislavsky. She could feel the blush starting. Prig. A job was a job.
“That’s most kind of you, Miss Jordache.” Nichols stood, mournfully. She stood with him. He escorted her to the door and opened it for her. The anteroom was empty, except for Miss Saunders, blazing away.
“Forgive me,” Nichols murmured obscurely. He went back into his office.
“So long,” Gretchen said as she passed Miss Saunders.
“Good-bye, dear,” Miss Saunders said, without looking up. She smelled of sweat. Ephemeral flesh. I am quoting.
Gretchen went out into the corridor. She didn’t ring for the elevator until the blush had subsided.
When the elevator finally came, there was a young man in it carrying a Confederate officer’s uniform and a cavalry saber in a scabbard. He was wearing the hat that went with the uniform, a dashing wide-brimmed felt, plumed. Under it his beaked, hard-boiled 1945 New York face looked like a misprint. “Will the wars never end?” he said amiably to Gretchen as she got into the elevator.
It was steamy in the little grilled car and she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She dabbed at her forehead with a piece of Kleenex.
She went out into the street, geometric blocks of hot, glassy light and concrete shadow. Abbott and Mary Jane were standing in front of the building, waiting for her. She smiled. Six million people in the city. Let there be six million people. They had waited for her.
“What I thought,” Willie was saying, “was lunch.”
“I’m starving,” Gretchen said.
They walked off toward lunch on the shady side of the street, the two tall girls, with the slender, small soldier between them, jaunty, remembering that other warriors had also been short men, Napoleon, Trotsky, Caesar, probably Tamerlane.
Naked, she regarded herself in the dressing-room mirror. She had gone out to Jones Beach with Mary Jane and two boys the Sunday before and the skin of her shoulders and arms and legs was a faint rosy tan. She didn’t wear a girdle any more and in the summer heat she dispensed with stockings, so there were no prosaic ridges from clinging elastic on the smooth arch of her hips. She stared at her breasts. I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it. She had had two Bloody Marys at lunch, with Mary Jane and Willie, and they had shared a bottle of white wine. Willie liked to drink. She put on her one-piece, black bathing suit. There were grains of sand in the crotch, from Jones Beach. She walked away from the mirror, then toward it, studying herself critically. The Mystery of Woman. Her walk was too modest. Remember Primitive Serenity. Willie and Mary Jane were waiting for her at the bar of the Algonquin, to find out how it all came out. She walked less modestly. There was a knock on the door. “Miss Jordache,” the stage manager said, “we’re ready when you are.”
She began to blush as she opened the door. Luckily, in the harsh work light of the stage, nobody could tell.
She followed the stage manager. “Just walk across and back a couple of times,” he said. There were shadowy figures sitting toward the tenth row of the darkened auditorium. The stage floor was unswept and the bare bricks of the back wall looked like the ruins of Rome. She was sure her blush could be seen all the way out to the street. “Miss Gretchen Jordache,” the stage manager called out into the cavernous darkness. A message in a bottle over the night waves of seats. I am adrift. She wanted to run away.
She walked across the stage. She felt as though she were stumbling up a mountain. A zombie in a bathing suit.
There was no sound from the auditorium. She walked back. Still no sound. She walked back and forth twice more, worried about splinters in her bare feet.
“Thank you very much, Miss Jordache.” Nichols’s dejected voice, thin in the empty theater. “That’s fine. If you’ll stop in the office tomorrow we’ll arrange about the contract.”
It was as simple as that. Abruptly, she stopped blushing.
Willie was sitting alone at the small bar in the Algonquin, erect on a stool, nursing a whiskey in the greenish, submarine dusk that was the constant atmosphere of the room. He swiveled around to greet her as she came in carrying the little rubberized beach bag with her bathing suit in it. “The beautiful girl looks like a beautiful girl who has just landed herself a job as the Mystery of Woman at the Belasco Theatre,” he said. “I am quoting.” Over lunch, they had all laughed at Gretchen’s account of her interview with Nichols.
She sat down on the stool next to his. “You’re right,” she said. “Sarah Bernhardt is on her way.”
“She never could have handled it,” Willie said. “She had a wooden leg. Do we drink champagne?”
“Where’s Mary Jane?”
“Gone. She had a date.”
“We drink champagne.” They both laughed.
When the barman set their glasses in front of them, they drank to Mary Jane. Delicious absence. It was the second time in her life Gretchen had drunk champagne. The hushed, gaudy room in the four-story house on a side street, the one-way mirror, the magnificent whore with the baby face, stretched triumphantly on the wide bed.
“We have many choices,” Willie said. “We can stay here and drink wine all night. We can have dinner. We can make love. We can go to a party on Fifty-sixth Street. Are you a party girl?”
“I would like to be,” Gretchen said. She ignored the “make love.” Obviously it was a joke. Everything was a joke with Willie. She had the feeling that even in the war, at the worst times, he had made fun of the bursting shells, the planes diving in, the flaming wings. Images from news-reels, war movies. “Old Johnny bought it today, chaps. This is my round.” Was it like that? She would ask him later, when she knew him better.
“The party it is,” he said. “There’s no hurry. It’ll go on all night. Now, before we fling ourselves into the mad whirl of pleasure, are there things I should know about you?” Willie poured himself another glass of champagne. His hand was not quite steady and the bottle made a little clinking music against the rim of the glass.
“What kind of things?”
“Begin at the beginning,” he said. “Place of residence?”
“The Y.W.C.A. downtown,” she said.
“Oh, God.” He groaned. “If I dress in drag could I pass as a young Christian woman and rent a room next to yours? I’m petite and I have a light beard. I could borrow a wig. My father always wanted daughters.”
“I’m afraid not,” Gretchen said. “The old lady at the desk can tell a boy from a girl at a hundred yards.”
“Other facts. Fellas?”
“Not at the moment,” she said after a slight hesitation. “And you?”
“The Geneva Convention stipulates that when captured, a prisoner of war must only reveal his name, rank, and serial number.” He grinned at her and laid his hand on hers. “No,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything. I shall bare my soul. I shall tell you, in many installments, how I wished to murder my father when I was a babe in a crib and how I was not weaned from my mother’s breast until I was three and what us boys used to do behind the barn with the neighbor’s daughter in the good old summertime.” His face became serious, the forehead prominent, as he brushed back his hair with his hand. “You might as well know now as later,” he said. “I’m married.”
The champagne burned in her throat. “I liked you better when you were joking,” she said.