They got off the bus at Eighth Street and found a table on the sidewalk at the Brevoort and Willie ordered a Martini. “To improve my appetite,” he said. “Give notice to the gastric juices. Red Alert.”
The Algonquin, the Plaza, the Brevoort, a job, a captain. All in one day. It was a cornucopia of firsts.
They had melon and a small roast chicken for dinner and a bottle of California red wine from the Napa Valley. “Patriotism,” Willie said. “And because we won the war.” He drank most of the bottle himself. Nothing of what he had drunk seemed to affect him. His eyes were clear, his speech the same.
They weren’t talking much any more, just looking at each other across the table. If she couldn’t kiss him soon, Gretchen thought, they would carry her off to Bellevue.
Willie ordered brandy for both of them after the coffee. What with paying for lunch and all the eating and drinking of the evening, Gretchen figured that it must have cost Willie at least fifty dollars since noon. “Are you a rich man?” she asked, as he was paying the bill.
“Rich in spirit only,” Willie said. He turned his wallet upside down and six bills floated down onto the table. Two were for a hundred apiece, the rest were fives. “The complete Abbott fortune,” he said. “Shall I mention you in my will?”
Two hundred and twenty dollars. She was shocked at how little it was. She still had more than that in the bank herself, from Boylan’s eight hundred, and she never paid more than ninety-five cents for a meal. Her father’s blood? The thought made her uneasy.
She watched Willie gather up the bills and stuff them carelessly into his pocket. “The war taught me the value of money,” he said.
“Did you grow up rich?” she asked.
“My father was a customs inspector, on the Canadian border,” he said. “And honest. And there were six children. We lived like kings. Meat three times a week.”
“I worry about money,” she confessed. “I saw what not having any did to my mother.”
“Drink hearty,” Willie said. “You will not be your mother’s daughter. I will turn to my golden typewriter in the very near future.”
They finished their brandies. Gretchen was beginning to feel a little lightheaded, but not drunk. Definitely not drunk.
“Is it the opinion of this meeting,” Willie said, as they stood up from the table and passed through the boxed hedges of the terrace onto the avenue, “that a drink is in order?”
“I’m not drinking any more tonight,” she said.
“Look to women for wisdom,” Willie said. “Earth mother. Priestesses of the oracle. Delphic pronouncements, truth cunningly hidden in enigmas. No more drink shall be drunk tonight. Taxi!” he called.
“We can walk to the Y.W.C.A. from here,” she said. “It’s only about fifteen minutes …”
The taxi braked to a halt and Willie opened the door and she got in.
“The Hotel Stanley,” Willie said to the driver as he got into the cab. “On Seventh Avenue.”
They kissed. Oasis of lips. Champagne, Scotch, Kentucky mint, red wine of Napa Valley in Spanish California, brandy, gift of France. She pushed his head down onto her breast and nuzzled into the thick silkiness of his hair. The hard bone of skull under it. “I’ve been wanting to do this all day,” she said. She held him against her, child soldier. He opened the top two buttons of her dress, his fingers swift, and kissed the cleft between her breasts. Over his cradled head, she could see the driver, his back toward her, busy with red lights, green lights, rash pedestrians, what the passengers do is the passengers’ business. His photograph stared at her from the lighted tag. A man of about forty with glaring, defiant eyes and kidney trouble, a man who had seen everything, who knew the whole city. Eli Lefkowitz, his name, prominently displayed by police order. She would remember his name forever. Eli Lefkowitz, unwatching charioteer of love.
There was little traffic at this hour and the cab swept uptown. Airman in the quick sky.
One last kiss for Eli Lefkowitz and she buttoned her dress, proper for the bridal suite.
The facade of the Hotel Stanley was imposing. The architect had been to Italy, or had seen a photograph. The Doges’ Palace, plus Walgreen’s. The Adriatic coast of Seventh Avenue.
She stood to one side of the lobby while Willie went to the desk for the key. Potted palms, Italianate dark wood chairs, glaring light. Traffic of women with the faces of police matrons and hair the frizzed blonde of cheap dolls. Horse-players in corners, G.I.’s on travel orders, two show girls, high-assed, long-lashed, an old lady in men’s work shoes, reading Seventeen, somebody’s mother, traveling salesmen after a bad day, detectives, alert for Vice.
She drifted toward the elevator shaft, as though she were alone, and did not look at Willie when he came up to her with the key. Deception easily learned. They didn’t speak in the elevator.
“Seventh floor,” Willie said to the operator.
There was no hint of Italy on the seventh floor. The architect’s inspiration had run out on the way up. Narrow corridors, peeling dark-brown metal doors, uncarpeted tile floors that must have once been white. Sorry, folks, we can’t kid you anymore, you might as well know the facts, you’re in America.
They walked down a narrow corridor, her heels making a noise like a pony trotting. Their shadows wavered on the dim walls, uncertain poltergeists left over from the 1925 boom. They stopped at a door like all the other doors. 777. On Seventh Avenue, on the seventh floor. The magic orderliness of numbers.
Willie worked the key and they went into Room 777 of the Stanley Hotel on Seventh Avenue. “You’ll be happier if I don’t put on a light,” Willie said. “It’s a hole. But it’s the only thing I could get. And even so, they’ll only let me stay five days. The town’s full up.”
But enough light filtered in from electric New York outside the chipped tin blinds, so that she could see what the room was like. A small cell, a slab of a single bed, one upright wooden chair, a basin, no bathroom, a shadowy pile of officer’s shirts on the bureau.
Deliberately, he began to undress her. The red cloth belt first, then the top button of her dress and then, going all the way, one button after another. She counted with his movements as he kneeled before her. “… seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …” What conferences, what soul searching in the workrooms farther down on Seventh Avenue to come to that supreme decision—not ten buttons, not twelve buttons, ELEVEN!
“It’s a full day’s work,” Willie said. He took the dress from her shoulders and put it neatly over the back of the chair. Officer and gentleman. She turned around so that he could undo her brassiere. Boylan’s training. The light coming in through the blinds cut her into a tiger’s stripes. Willie fumbled at the hooks on her back. “They must finally invent something better,” he said.
She laughed and helped him. The brassiere fell away. She turned to him again and he gently pulled her innocent white cotton panties down to her ankles. She kicked off her shoes. She went over to the bed and with a single movement ripped off the cover and the blanket and top sheet. The linen wasn’t fresh. Had Mary Jane slept there? No matter.
She stretched out on the bed, her legs straight, her ankles touching, her hands at her sides. He stood over her. He put his hand between her thighs. Clever fingers. “The Vale of Delight,” he said.