Daisy Hansen probed, “I declare, I’m crazy about your husband. When you see so much of him, can he possibly go on being just as wonnerful as the rest of us girls think he is?” and Vestal interpreted this one as “Come on and tell us about refusing to sleep with that horrible swindler, now that you’ve found out he’s a—you know.”
Vestal answered all of them with nothing more than a modest presentation of Neil as the new Apollo with touches of Ajax and St. Sebastian.
Whether the things they said did have these secret meanings, whether their glee in her tragedy was real or a sick imagining, made no difference in Vestal’s uneasiness at being investigated, being the eccentric wife of a Negro, and she felt relieved when Eliot came in with a humming-bird sound of “What, you girls not getting any cocktails? Come on, Ves, help me make one.”
The well-appointed butler’s pantry in that select modern residence, with its special white-enamel miniature refrigerator for ice-cubes, was Eliot’s private café on the boulevards, and scene of the inception of many of his happiest seductions, over the swizzle-stick and the slightly gummy bottle of Italian vermouth. Solemnly pumping up and down the silver-plated shaker, which had a dent in it from the time Daisy had thrown it at him, he looked up at Vestal, who was half an inch taller, and purred, “Have you heard the story yet about the pilot that had a studio-couch put in his plane?”
“No—I mean yes—I mean I don’t want to hear it!”
“No? You’re missing something good, baby. Say, you remember Bradd Criley, the lawyer that used to live here—moved to New York?”
“Yes, I knew him.”
“Doc Kelly was in New York here recently, and he says Criley has a real, sure-enough New York actress for girl-friend now, and does he give her a good time! He blew her to a bed six feet wide with a sponge-rubber mattress—baby!”
Eliot referred, with no greater relevance, to soldiers and their amours in Europe, to a cabin that he owned up the Big Eagle River and that was, among his friends, in the appalling argot of the day, referred to as a “love nest.” Vestal concluded that he was trying, with all the subtlety inherent in the ice-cream business (wholesale), to get over to her the news that people were still doing it, so why not?
She wanted to choke on a mixture of finding it funny and finding it atrocious.
–-He’d never dare to hint this way if I weren’t married to a colored gentleman. Now I know Eliot’s regular approach, how he goes to work when the love-bells tinkle in that boy-sized brain…. Mr. Hansen, if you touch my wrist again, I’m going to sock you over the head with your own cocktail-shaker.
–-You know what’s funny? Borus Bugdoll would do this so much better. He’s a swine, Borus is, but he’s much more educated than this amateur barkeep; he’s lived in Harlem.