“You don’t like May, do you?”
“That’s not the point. I like being treated like a partner in the evening’s plans, instead of a gate crasher. And I don’t like May.”
“Oh, come off it,” Jake said. “May’s only trouble is that she’s too adjusted. She’s living exactly as all you chaste and conventional harpies would like to live, so you treat her like a leper.”
“Don’t be so frantic about it,” Sheila said. “Can’t I dislike her for more interesting reasons, such as, for instance, that she’s a man-hungry, pampered, overdressed bitch?”
Jake grinned at her. “Charitable, aren’t you?”
Their cab stopped before a two-story brownstone house in the old-fashioned but eminently respectable Astor Street neighborhood. Climbing out, Jake saw lights shining through the drawn curtains of the wide bay windows, and heard loud, excellent jazz coming from the first floor.
“Just a few of the girls in for a sewing bee,” Sheila said drily, as they went up the steps.
The wide, polished door was opened by a maid in a frilly black and white uniform, who led them through a dim foyer to the arched entrance of the long, elegant parlor.
The room was decorated in a rococo modem Victorian manner, with oval mirrors in chalk-white frames hanging against the flat green walls, and white china lamps with fat roses shining palely in the design. Underneath the bay windows at the end of the room was a great curved divan, covered tightly in green striped satin, and before it, a vase of roses rested on a low coffee table. Orderly clusters of small oil paintings were hung about the room, slightly below eye level, and the great, ornately carved white fireplace was flanked by bookcases that reached from the beige carpeting to the high ceiling.
There were perhaps thirty people in the room, and their high-pitched conversation and laughter mingled quite well with the jazz that poured from the black lacquered player. The women present were slim and expensive-looking, and the men were precisely the sort who could afford them.
Jake noticed a couple of municipal judges, a state Senator, and an assortment of gamblers, writers, and racketeers, chief of which latter group was the amiable and gracious Mike Francesco, who operated the city’s brothels and handbooks.
Sheila glanced down at her simple dark suit, and nudged Jake sharply. “You bastard,” she said, through a tight smile.
“You look wonderful. Colorless and self-effacing. People will think you’re my cousin from What Cheer, Iowa.”
Jake saw May then, seated cross-legged on a window seat and laughing with a hard-faced jockey and a gray haired man whom Jake didn’t know.
She was sitting in what seemed to be an inconspicuous corner, but the grouping of the guests and the lines of the room drew attention to her inevitably. May had the talent of always being noticed and noticeable. She kept the spotlight on herself, no matter where she moved.
Sheila saw her too, and murmured, “Lovely, unaffected child, isn’t she?”
Jake grinned. May was wearing a blue peasant skirt with a white blouse and ballet slippers, and her fabulous golden hair was worn long in Alice-in-Wonderland style.
Her legs which were crossed tailor fashion were bare, and she was leaning forward slightly with her elbows on her knees, in a childish but effective pose.
“All she needs is a gay little parasol,” Sheila said.
“Oh, come off it. She’s an artist at her business. Notice how overdressed everybody else looks?”
“As dear, sweet May knew they would.”
May saw them standing in the archway then, and waved a greeting. She stood up with a flash of bare legs, and skipped across to them.
“Jake,” she said. “How wonderful.” Putting a hand on Sheila’s arm, in what seemed an afterthought, she said, “And you too, Sheila. Jake didn’t say he was bringing you.”
“No, he kept it a secret,” Sheila said. “I wasn’t in on it till we got into the cab.”
“You poor dear, being dragged around like someone’s aunt. And you look so sweet, too. Such a really simple suit.”
Jake saw a touch of color in Sheila’s cheeks and knew that May’s comparatively gentle malice was not being wasted. Sheila started to say something, which would probably have been effective, but May circumvented that by laughing and turning to Jake.
Sheila let out her breath slowly, and said, “Excuse me, please. I see an old friend.”
Alone with May, Jake said, “I’d like to talk to you a minute, in private. Okay?”
“This sounds exciting. Are you, at long last, going to make a pass at me?”
“No, this is important,” he said, and smiled at the involuntary annoyance that showed in her face.
“All right,” May said. “I’ll see that everyone has drinks and we’ll sneak up to the den of horror.”
She moved away and Jake watched her, thinking that for all her good sense and humor she’d never been able to appreciate the fact that there might be men in the world who were not longing for her desperately.
May was delightful to look at, as she drifted from group to group, taking the focus of interest with her as she went. The fact that held everyone’s attention on first meeting May, was the childish, pink-and-white freshness of her skin, and her air of enormous and vital health. Her eyes were light blue, almost lavender, and clear as mirrors; and although her body was slim, she created an impression of bland voluptuousness. May looked always as if she had just been massaged, bathed, perfumed, nourished, and rested, although in fact she could get along on four hours’ sleep a night, while living to the hilt the remaining twenty hours. She had an indestructible set of glands, organs, ligaments and tissues, and the whole functioned like a beautiful, well-oiled machine.
Jake went to the buffet to get a drink. He nodded to several people he knew, and tried unsuccessfully to fend off an intense young man who wrote daytime radio serials. The young man, whose name was Rengale, was defensive about his work, but not reticent.
Jake nodded absently to his remarks, and glanced over to the divan where Sheila was sitting with a successful young magazine illustrator. The illustrator was talking animatedly, and it was obvious that he was delighted with Sheila.
Jake frowned and sipped his drink. His marriage with Sheila hadn’t worked. Sheila had called it off good-naturedly after two years that had seemed exceptionally pleasant to Jake.
They were still married, technically. Sheila had not yet filed for a divorce. But that was just a matter of time. Jake still didn’t know what had been wrong. But he couldn’t see that the break had been completely his fault.
Rengale, the radio writer, disrupted his nostalgic reflections by tapping him squarely on the chest with his forefinger.
“There’s no room for argument,” he said, making a gesture of contemptuous dismissal with his horn rimmed glasses. “The soap opera has become a whipping boy for Book-of-the-Month-Club intellectuals, and other members of the culturally nouveau riche, and now,” Rengale paused for breath and twisted his lips into a sardonic sneer, “and now, it’s a hallmark of the most utter sophistication to treat radio writers with the gentle tolerance more usually reserved for hydrocephalous adults. Because—”
“What are you writing now?” Jake said, wishing to hell May would come back.
Rengale brightened. “I’m doing a show for Mutual. Judy Trent, Copy Girl. It’s about a copy girl, you know, who gets into one scrape after another.”
“Good twist,” Jake said, gravely.
“Actually it’s not a bad show. The character of Judy, as I’ve conceived her, is a nice blend of the insecurity and compensatory aggressiveness of this present generation.” Rengale paused and looked thoughtfully at his pipe. “It’s sustaining, at the present time, of course.”