It was not a long play and it was set in Connecticut in a large, well-furnished suburban house with an inexhaustible liquor cabinet. In my time plays that were set in Connecticut in large, well-furnished suburban houses had had three acts and there was, I could remember, a lot of small talk that took place between the big talk, and I was gratified to see that at least that hadn’t changed. There was possibly, now, more than in my time, more big talk. Or, if one wished to put it a little differently, the small talk was more loaded. Anyway, the play was about contemporary unhappiness.

The play seemed to be saying that we were unhappy, not only in Connecticut, but by inference in any large well-furnished suburban house, because something in the way we lived now prevented us from living lives that resulted in a felt happiness. We did our best: and our best was all wrong. We grew old but not wise. We weren’t really very nice people. We did not know why we were what we were but the suspicion was allowed that it was because of some contamination in the American air. The play did not end unhappily but one couldn’t say it had ended happily either. It hardly seemed to end at all. It simply exhausted its own uneasy questions. I went out of the theatre. It had rained while I had been at the play and the police wore their big raincoats. I stood for a moment against the window of a pancake eating-place and watched the crowd go by. I watched a redheaded girl in green ski-pants and brown leather boots carrying a hat-box go by. An old woman muttering to herself. A hooker. A Negro in a beret. A Negro in a blue parka. An elderly Negro in overalls and carrying a pail and chewing a cigar and wearing a window cleaner’s harness. A girl with heavy calves encased in black boots. They went by. I didn’t want to go back to the hotel yet. I started to walk in the light drizzle. I thought of my wife. I was pleased that I was able to think of it now and I did not cringe. I could look at it. I could see his hand going under the sweater and unhooking the brassiere and I did not cringe. I could look at it. There was hope for me yet. All I needed was a touch-up artist and double my wheat germ and cut down on the cigarettes. Something could be salvaged after all. I felt good enough to even think that it might be fun to go into one of the discothèques and have a drink at the bar by myself and see what they looked like. I didn’t have a wife to check in with at precisely midnight in Des Moines. Or anywhere else.

I went downstairs and there was the bar and there was the discothèque. The girls who did the dancing were on a small platform elevated above the main dance floor. The lights were dim below and bright above. There were linked gold chains suspended from the ceiling supporting the platform on which the girls danced. It resembled a cage. At the Beni-Bashi in Tokyo the girls waited inside a bamboo cage. You looked into the cage and beckoned the girl you liked. You had dinner and danced with her, or you had drinks and danced with her. At the Cherry Club the girls sat on divans and there wasn’t any dancing. I suddenly remembered the name of a girl at the Cherry Club. Noriko. She shaved. She was completely shaved. Absolutely smooth. The music in the discothèque was loud and the beat was heavy. The girls bumped it a little or ground it a little and their sequins winked and their tassels tossed. It was all very jungly. Broadway jungly. Tab-collar jungly.