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.
–-I will have this out with Neil—things like this happening all because of him. I haven’t complained much, but I’ve got to go to town on the whole business. We’ve got to move away and change our name and I’d see to it that Neil never pulled the brave-Negro-pioneer junk again. And this morning I woke up confused and tried to think what crime I’d committed and then I realized that I’m married to a Negro, that I’m up against it. Oh, dear God!
Thus, while the delightful Eliot shook and tasted and babbled and smiled.
Chapter 45
Had he not known that to a great many people job-hunting was a heavier part of life than job-holding; more nervous, more humiliating and entirely unpaid.