“I’ve been offered the summer in Europe,” Rudolph said evenly, “as a gift.”
“By whom?” Gretchen asked, although she knew the answer.
“Teddy Boylan.”
“I know my parents would let me go, too,” Julie said. “We could have the best summer of our whole lives.”
“I haven’t got time for the best summer of our whole lives,” Rudolph said, biting on the words.
“Can’t you talk to him, Gretchen?” Julie said.
“Rudy,” Gretchen said, “don’t you think you owe yourself a little fun, after the way you’ve been working?”
“Europe won’t go away,” he said. “I’ll go there when I’m ready for it.”
“Teddy Boylan must have been pleased when you turned him down,” Gretchen said.
“He’ll get over it.”
“I wish somebody would offer me a trip to Europe,” Gretchen said. “I’d be on that boat so fast …”
“Gretchen, can you give us a hand?” One of the younger male guests had come over. “We want to play the phonograph and it seems to be kaput.”
“I’ll talk to you two later,” Gretchen said to Rudolph and Julie. “We’ll work something out.” She went over to the phonograph with the young man. She bent down and fumbled for the plug. The colored maid had been in to clean that day and she always left the plug out after she vacuumed. “I bend enough,” she had told Gretchen when Gretchen complained.
The phonograph warmed up with a hollow sound and then it began to play the first record from the album of South Pacific. Childish voices, sweet and American, far away on a make-believe warm island, piped the words to “Dites-moi.” When Gretchen stood up she saw that Rudolph and Julie had gone. I’m not going to have a party in this place for a whole year, she decided. She went into the kitchen and had Mary Jane pour her a stiff drink of Scotch. Mary Jane had long, red hair these days and a great deal of blue eye shadow and long false eyelashes. From a distance she was a beauty but close up things came apart a little. Still, now, in the third hour of the party, with all the men passing through her domain and flattering her, she was at her peak for the day, flashing-eyed, her bright-red lips half open, avid and provocative. “What glory,” she said, whiskey-hoarse. “This party. And that new man, Alec What’s-his-name …”
“Lister,” Gretchen said, drinking, noting that the kitchen was a mess and deciding that she’d do nothing about it till morning. “Alec Lister.”
“Isn’t he dazzling?” Mary Jane said. “Is he attached?”
“Not tonight.”
“Blessings on him,” Mary Jane said, “the dear fellow. He drowned the kitchen in charm when he was in here. And I’ve heard the most terrible things about him. He beats his women, Willie told me.” She giggled. “Isn’t it exciting? Did you notice, does he need a new drink? I’ll appear at his side, goblet in hand, Mary Jane Hackett, the faithful cup-bearer.”
“He left five minutes ago,” Gretchen said, meanly pleased at being able to pass on the information to Mary Jane and wondering at the same time what women Willie was intimate enough with to hear from them that they had been beaten by Alec Lister.
“Ah, well,” Mary Jane shrugged philosophically, “there are other fish in the sea.”
Two men came into the kitchen and Mary Jane swung her red hair and smiled radiantly at them. “Here you are, boys,” she said, “the bar never closes.”
It was a cinch that Mary Jane had not gone two weeks without making love. What’s so wrong with being divorced, Gretchen thought, as she went back into the living room.
Rudolph and Julie walked toward Fifth Avenue in the balmy June evening air. He did not hold her arm. “This is no place to talk seriously,” he had said at the party. “Let’s get out of here.”
But it wasn’t any better on the street. Julie strode along, careful not to touch him, the nostrils of her small nose tense, the full lips bitten into a sharp wound. As he walked beside her on the dark street he wondered if it wouldn’t just be better to leave her then and there. It would probably come sooner or later anyway and sooner was perhaps to be preferred than later. But then he thought of never seeing her again and despaired. Still, he said nothing. In the battle that was being waged between them, he knew that the advantage would have to go to the one who kept silent longest.
“You have a girl there,” she said finally. “That’s why you’re staying in the awful place.”
He laughed.
“Your laughing doesn’t fool me.” Her voice was bitter, with no memory in it of the times they had sung together or the times she had said, I love you. “You’re infatuated with some ribbon clerk or cashier or something. You’ve been sleeping with somebody there all this time. I know.”
He laughed again, strong in his chastity.
“Otherwise you’re a freak,” she said harshly. “We’ve been seeing each other for five years and you say you love me and you haven’t tried once to make love to me, really make love to me.”
“I haven’t been invited,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “I invite you. Now. Tonight. I’m in room 923 at the St. Moritz.”
Wary of traps, fearful of helpless surrenders on a tumbled bed. “No,” he said.
“Either you’re a liar,” she said, “or you’re a freak.”
“I want to marry you,” he said. “We can get married next week.”
“Where will we spend our honeymoon?” she asked. “In the garden-furniture department of Calderwood’s Department Store? I’m offering you my pure-white, virgin body,” she said mockingly. “Free and clear. No strings. Who needs a wedding? I’m a free, liberated, lustful, all-American girl. I’ve just won the Sexual Revolution by a score of ten to nothing.”
“No,” he said. “And stop talking like my sister.”
“Freak,” she said. “You want to bury me along with you forever in that dismal little town. And all this time, I’ve thought you were so smart, that you were going to have such a brilliant future. I’ll marry you. I’ll marry you next week. If you take the trip to Europe and start law school in the autumn. Or if you don’t want to do that, if you just come down here to New York and work here. I don’t care what you do here, I’ll work, too. I want to work. What’ll I do in Whitby? Spend my days deciding which apron to wear when you come home at night?”
“I promise you that in five years you can live in New York or anyplace you say.”
“You promise,” she said. “It’s easy to promise. And I’m not going to bury myself for five years either. I can’t understand you. What in God’s name do you think you’re getting out of it?”
“I’m starting two years ahead of anybody in my class,” Rudolph said. “I know what I’m doing. Calderwood trusts me. He’s got a lot more going for him than just his store. The store’s just a beginning, a base. He doesn’t know it yet, but I do. When I come down to New York I’m not going to be just another college graduate from a school nobody ever heard of, waiting in everybody’s outer office, with his hat in his hand. When I come down, they’re going to greet me at the front door. I’ve been poor a long time, Julie,” he said, “and I am going to do what I have to do never to be poor again.”
“Boylan’s baby,” Julie said. “He’s ruined you. Money! Does money mean that much to you? Just money?”
“Don’t sound like Little Miss Rich Bitch,” he said.