There were seven people at the table when he returned to it. The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds. — Yeh, I'm doing a psychoanalysis of it, said one of them, tapping Mother Goose on the table.
— I tell you, there's a queer conspiracy to dominate everything. Just look around, the boy with the red hunting cap said. — Queers dominate writing, they dominate the theater, they dominate art. Just try to find a gallery where you can show your pictures if you're not a queer, he added, raising a cigarette between paint-encrusted fingers. — What do you think women look so damned foolish for today? It's because queers design their clothes, queers dictate women's fashions, queers do their hair, queers do all the photography in the fashion magazines. They're purposely making women look more and more idiotic until nobody will want to go to bed with one. It's a conspiracy.
Near their table, the tall dark girl who had been talking with Anselm said to someone she knew, — Do you know that girl? I want to meet her.
With his hand on Esme's shoulder, Otto leaned down to say, — Let's get out of here. Ed Feaslëy looked up to say, — You want to go to a party? A big ball a bunch of queers are giving up in Harlem.
— Drag? someone asked.
— What's drag?
— Where they all dress like women.
— This ball is drag, someone else said. — High drag.
There was a loud yelp. Anselm, on all fours, had met the dachshund, and had one of its ears in his mouth. The tall dark girl looked up at the doorway to see a timid Italian boy with no chin start to enter, and get pushed aside. — God, she said, — there's my stupid cousin. I'm going next door. — I've got a doctor for her, a young man was saying. — He'll do it for two hundred and fifty, but I can't get hold of her. Every time I call all I get on the phone is Rose, her crazy sister Rose.
Otto and Ed Feaslëy, with Esme between them, moved toward the door. The Big Unshaven Man turned away when Feaslëy passed. — Of course I know him. A damn fine painter, Mr. Memling, he was saying, as he took a quart flask out of his pocket. — Would you mind filling this up with martinis? Yes, what you read about me is true, I like to have some with me. Sure, I'll look at your novel any time, he finished, as the boy handed a ten-dollar bill across the bar.
— I sure as Chrahst know him from somewhere, Feaslëy said.
— That's because he's Ernest Hemingway, said a voice nearby.
— Paris? said the light-haired girl. — I wouldn't reach up my ahss for the whole city.
Mr. Feddle was being pushed out the door ahead of them. There they met Hannah. — Is Stanley in there? she asked. — Haven't seen him. — He had to go to the hospital to see his mother, said Hannah. — She just won't die. Then Hannah melted into the stew, where the juke-box was playing Return to Sorrento.
— Where's Adeline? Otto asked.
— I don't know. The hell with her, Feaslëy said.
They found Adeline asleep in the car. Fortunately it was a new model, with a low chassis and a low center of gravity, which saved it from overturning at the corners. They had some difficulty getting in to the party, when Ed Feasley offered to fight anyone who kept them out. They were saved when a crapulous Cleopatra appeared, waving a rubber asp at Esme and Adeline, thought it knew them, squealing in rapturous welcome that their costumes were divine.
It was quite a party. There must have been four hundred.
They arrived as a beautiful thing in a strapless white evening gown finished a song called I'm a Little Piece of Leather, followed on the stage by a strip-tease in two parts. The first performer was all too obviously a woman, gone to fat. This tumbled about in the spotlights, wallowed a great unmuscled expanse of rump and bounced a mammoth front at the audience, jeering with laughter, railed off the stage in grisly flounces of flesh. Then towering loveliness appeared, bowed to thunderous applause, and moving with perfect timing slipped off one after another garment to reveal exquisite limbs (hairless but a trifle muscular) with long gathering motions of blond hair to the waist, serpentine caresses rising over the spangled brassiere. Ed Feasley, who had muttered with virile disgust at the first, watched this exhibition with wondering pleasure, until, in finale, the brassiere was waved aloft leaving a chest uninhabited, leaving Feasley sitting forward in astonished indignation, leaving, the stage through a curtain of wild applause.
— Are you really a girl? a young Bronzino in velvet asked Esme, punching in disbelief at her small bosom. She laughed, and Otto turned to brandish his sling; like Infessura, perhaps, writing of the papal court of Sixtus IV, "puerorum amator et sodomita fuit," he ordered a drink.
There was, in fact, a religious aura about this festival, religious that is in the sense of devotion, adoration, celebration of deity, before religion became confused with systems of ethics and morality, to become a sore affliction upon the very things it had once exalted. Quite as festive, these halls, as the Díonysian processions in which Greek boys dressed as women carried the ithyphalli through the streets, amid sounds of rejoicing from all sexes present, and all were; glorious age of the shrine of Hercules at Coos, where the priests dressed in feminine attire; the shrine of Venus at Cyprus, where men in women's clothes could spot women immediately, for they wore men's clothes: golden day of the bride deflowered by the lingam, straddling the statue of Priapus to offer her virginity to that god who, like all gods, even to the Christian deity who exercised it with Mary in the form of the Holy Ghost, had jus primae noctis, and no subterfuge permitted. So enough of these young brides had backed up upon the Priapean image and left their flowers there. So a voice said now, — Then let's go to Vienna, they've announced that you can wear drag in the streets if you don't offend public morals! Isn't that sweet? To which a dark-haired person in an evening gown of green watered silk said, — More than once I've dressed as a priest, just so no one would be troublesome about my wearing skirts. Sometimes I just can't breathe in trousers.
So priests down through the ages, skirted in respectful imitation of androgynous deities who reigned before Baal was worshiped as a pillar, before Osiris sported erection, before men knew of their part in generation, and regarded skirted women as autofructiferous. When they made this discovery, the sun replaced the moon as all-powerful, and Lupercalia came to Rome, naked women whipped through the streets around the Palatine hill, and the cross became such a glorious symbol of the male triad that many a religion embraced it, so notorious that when the new religion which extolled the impotent man and the barren woman triumphed over a stupefied empire, the early skirted fathers of the Church forbade its use.
So even now, under a potted palm with silver fronds, a youth making a solemn avowal held another youth by that part where early Hebrews placed their hands when taking oaths, for it represented Jahveh.
Ed Feasley had a hand on a smooth chocolate shoulder which rose from a lavender evening gown in organdy, standing in the less-lighted shelter of a pillar.
There were women there. At a large table near the dance floor one sat, with broad tailored shoulders, flat grosgrain lapels, shortcut hair and heavy hands (she looked rather like George Washington without his wig, at about the time he married Martha Dand-ridge (Custis) for her money), recently in trouble, someone said, over kidnaping a seal for immoral purposes. She had not spoken to a man for sixteen years. Somewhere submerged in childhood lay a little girl's name which had once been hers. Only her bankers knew it now. Friends called her Popeye. Now she was saying, to an exquisitely pomaded creature whom thousands knew as a hero of stage, screen, and radio, — I wish I were a little boy, so that I could dance with you. They were interrupted by Big Anna, in dinner clothes. — Have you seen Agnes? said the Swede. — My dear she has the key to my box, and simply everything's locked up in it. The most delicious gown Jacques Griffes made for me especially to wear tonight, and I've had to come in this silly tuxedo suit, simply everyone thinks I'm a woman. .