"My chef?" Oblivia said. "Why that's an outrage. Much as I like the woman I won't have her sleeping with my help."
Khaki allowed herself a trace of a smile. "Not your chef," she said. "Jean-Luc Godard."
Since neither of them was paying any attention to me I edged away. I wanted to try and have a word with John C. V. Ponsonby, who was still holding his position in the comer, staring hypnotically at an ugly green drape.
However, I was a little slow: A tall, aquiline young man in impeccable pinstripes reached Ponsonby just before I did.
"Hello, Jake," he said. "I've been in Riyadh. That place is really shaping up."
This piece of information made absolutely no impression on Ponsonby. Thinking, perhaps, that he was hard of hearing, the young man repeated it. Ponsonby continued to stare at the drape. Having taken two called strikes, the young man gave up and edged off into the crowd.
The reason I wanted to speak to Ponsonby was because I happened to know that he was the world's foremost collector of truncheons and it so happened that I had an excessively rare truncheon, one of the very few Ponsonby did not possess,
"Mr. Ponsonby," I said, "are you still buying truncheons?"
The word "truncheon" penetrated his hypnosis more effectively than the word "Riyadh." The film over his eyes quickly burned away. He turned his head and looked at me with marked distaste.
"Why are you here?" he asked. "This is an eminently civilized occasion."
"I just came here to sell you a truncheon," I said. It was more or less true.
"That in itself is reprehensible," he said. "This is a social occasion. If you are a tradesman you should apply to me at my home."
"I like to deal catch as catch can," I said.
"Then deal with someone else," he said.
"Well," I said, "I have one of the Luddite truncheons."
That gave him pause. In fact, he seemed to find it a real pisser. If he had had my Luddite truncheon in his hand at the time I think he would have bashed me with it.
In fact, Luddite truncheons were originally used to bash the Luddite rioters—their rarity is a result of the fact that many of them were used for firewood, in the grim aftermath of the Luddite riots.
I had not really taken the time to delve deeply into the matter, but I did know that Luddite truncheons belonged to that small class of objects, the true rara avis, for which all scouts continually search: cire-perdue Lalique, rosethrow whimsies. Sung vases, and great historical artifacts such as the boots of Billy the Kid.
"I believe you are lying," John Ponsonby said. "No Luddite truncheon has changed hands in this country since 1946. There are, in fact, only two in this country, one in the Metropolitan Museum, where it doesn't belong, and the other in Boston, in a private collection."
"You're well informed up to a point," I said. "The one in Boston changed hands last year. I bought it. It's in my car."
Ponsonby, who looked somewhat like a frog, also looked like he'd just swallowed one. A person he didn't like had just informed him that he had missed out on one of the rarest truncheons in the world—a truncheon he had probably been plotting to get since 1946.
"Am I to understand that you have bought the Eberstadt truncheon?" he said. "That in itself is an outrage. Who are you?"
"Just a scout," I said.
The fact that, in defiance of all appropriateness, the Eberstadt truncheon had come to me rather than him, had left him too dazed for speech.
"But I knew Woodrow Eberstadt," he said, almost plaintively. "We went to the same school. I knew his wife, Lou Lou. I sent Lou Lou flowers once. I think it was when Woodrow died. They knew of my interest in the truncheon. Lou Lou knew, I'm sure. It is very distressing. She might have given it to me. I'm sure I sent her flowers once."
In fact, Mrs. Eberstadt had told the antique dealer she sold the truncheon to that she would have it carved into toothpicks rather than sell it to Ponsonby, since he had pestered her and her husband about it for thirty years.
"Regrettably, Lou Lou had a will of her own," Ponsonby said, with a sigh. "There was talk when she married Woodrow. No one was in favor of the match, as I recall. I always felt Woodrow lacked judgment, an opinion that has now been borne out."
Before my eyes, Ponsonby's spirits began to droop. The thought of his old schoolmate's lack of judgment weighed on him visibly.
"I'm afraid this means the end of Western civilization as we know it," he said, turning away.
For no good reason, unexpectedly, I began to get my Harbor City feeling. What was I doing in a room full of blue suits and Empire furniture with Harbor City slightly less than a continent away?
While I was mentally calculating the most satisfying route across America, Felix, the buffalo dog, reappeared. He stood about ten feet away, looking at me through his hair.
At that point the little butler who should have been a blackjack dealer in Elko came and called us in to dinner.
Chapter III
As I was walking into the dining room a small and somewhat sinister maid presented me with a seating chart. Evidently I was supposed to take a little sticker of some sort, which would legitimize my seat, but before I could do this Lilah Landry walked down the hall and walked up, took my arm, and walked right on into the dining room with me. She wore a dramatic black dress and was in very high color. "You're by me." she said. "And if you aren't we'll just switch the place cards and pretend the help made a mistake."
That sounded like serious mischief, to me. Cindy had been at pains to explain that the reason Oblivia prevailed, season after season, as the hostess with the mostess, was because of the brilliance of her seatings. According to Cindy, her seatings were masterpieces, in which age and beauty, brains and egos, pomp and pomposity were blended as delicately as flavors in a sauce.
As it turned out, I was seated between Lilah and Oblivia anyway—Lilah didn't even have to change the place cards.
As I was arranging my napkin I had a chance to look around me, and it struck me that Lilah, Cindy, and Cunny Cotswinkle all shared one remarkable attribute, which was the ability to arrive at a dinner party looking like they had just arisen from the happiest of fucks. Somehow they got their blood up for the occasion.
With Lilah glowing on one side of me it was hard for me to be properly attentive to my hostess, who did not glow and gave no evidence that she even had any blood.
"So worried about you," she said to Lilah, who had evidently arrived just in time to sweep into the dining room. "Not like you to be so tardy."
"Shoot, I wasn't late," Lilah said. "I didn't even miss the soup."
At that very moment servants were slipping soup bowls in front of us. The bowls contained a thin green film, evidently a minute serving of soup of some kind.
George Psalmanazar, who was seated just across from me, was quick to note the minuteness of the amount. He got one good spoonful, but had to scrape the bowl to get even a half spoonful by way of a second bite.
"What is this supposed to mean?" he asked, glaring at Oblivia. "Cuisine minceur? Cuisine infinitesimal if you ask me.
George had turned quite red in the face, as if he had just received a personal insult. He grabbed his knife and fork and stared at the door to the kitchen, as if he expected to see a huge beefsteak arrive at any minute.
Oblivia Brown was not impressed by his color. She sipped a drop or two of her soup before replying. Various of our tablemates were trying to figure out how to get a spoonful of soup without indecorously tipping their bowls.
"So testy," Oblivia said, looking at George.
"Well, goddamn, Oblivia," George said. "People have to eat."
"But you are the champion of the Third World, George," Oblivia said. "You do write constantly about world hunger. So much starvation to worry about, one is not sure where it may break out next."
"It's going to break out in fuckin’ Georgetown if this is all we get to eat," George said.
"So sorry," Oblivia said. "But it was your principle that guided me, of
course. Not every day I get a man of the people at my table. The rest of us tend to get complacent. I feel sure we would be quite capable of stuffing ourselves with wasteful delicacies if we didn't have you to uplift us. We might sit here eating like pigs while five million Cambodians starve. That was the figure, wasn't it? You quoted it just this morning."
"Listen, Oblivia, cut it out," George said. "Nobody is impressed with your sarcasm."
"Well, I was," Lilah said.
"Excuse me, Lilah, but you're not exactly the hardest sell in town," George said. "A complete sentence impresses you."
George did not seem to be a favorite of the ladies. Both Lilah and Cunny Cotswinkle were watching him alertly, their heads cocked slightly to one side. I got the sense that they were lying in wait for their victim.
"Are you calling me dumb?" Lilah said, after a moment.
"Well, if I get nasty, blame it on Oblivia," George said. "She knows better than to starve me."
"A man of the people?" Cunny said, catching Oblivia's phrase as if it had been a high lob that had hung in the air all this time. "Which people?"
"Any people except you rich snobs," George said.
"So foul, when he's like this," Oblivia said.
The maids slipped in like cats and removed the soup bowls. A set of slightly taller maids, who may well have been bred for that very purpose, came in and began to fill the wine glasses. As soon as one sloshed a little wine in George's glass he picked it up, swirled the wine around with a deft little flick of his wrist, smelled it, and shook his head in resignation.
"You and your California wines," he said, giving Oblivia a look of disgust. "It's a comment on Washington."
"So particular," Oblivia said. "But then you live in the Adams-Morgan. So lucky. I believe they have real life over in the Adams-Morgan."
"It's not the Adams-Morgan," George said. "I hate people who call it the Adams-Morgan. It's just Adams-Morgan."
"Oh," Lilah said. "It's like Albany, in London. If you say the Albany people know you don't belong there."
"George knows so much about wine," Oblivia said to Cunny.
"Oh, vino," Cunny said absently, as if nothing could be more boring than a man who knew a lot about wine.
"That's right," Lilah said. "How many bottles you got now, George?"
"None of your business," George said.
"Not nice to hoard, George," Oblivia said.
"I've heard you have six thousand bottles," Lilah said.
"That's strange," George said. "I've heard you've had six thousand boyfriends. I wonder how these rumors start."
"Newspapers," Cunny said. "All the terrible things are invented by newspapers. Look at vat they say about me. Dese affairs I have with the President. Whose business is dat?"
The table digested that in silence for a moment. At least it was something to digest. So far the tall maids with the wine had not been followed by any short maids with food.
"But George is a famous columnist," Lilah said. "He writes for hundreds of newspapers himself."
"Now, now," George said. "Only 146, and most of them hate every word I write. They don't want the truth, in this country."
"Who are you to talk?" Lilah said. "You won't even 'fess up to owning six thousand bottles of wine."
"So trenchant," Oblivia said. "He could sell his wine and buy rice for the Cambodians."
George sighed. "Remarks like that appall me," he said. "What they reveal is that you have understood nothing about the geopolitical realities."
At that point the maids poured in, carrying our entrees. These consisted of the breasts of some very small bird, floating in a lemony sauce.
Disregarding etiquette entirely, George stabbed his bird with a fork, picked it up whole, and ate it in about two bites, while the ladies watched in their alert but patient way.
"Down in Georgia we cut our food," Lilah said, cutting herself off a delicate slice.
George scarcely looked up. "Down in Georgia everything is so overcooked it must be like cutting cinders," he said.
"It didn't stop you from eating like a pig when you were there," Lilah said.
"My body is like a little motor," George said. "It must have fuel, even if the fuel is overcooked. Besides, eating overcooked food is better than talking to your relatives. Your relatives are a bunch of redneck facists."
"So critical," Oblivia said. "Hard to travel with."
"Going to Georgia is not traveling," George said. "Anyway, your relatives are no better. A bunch of wimpy snobs. They seem to think the Garden of Eden was just west of Philadelphia."
My Harbor City feeling was getting stronger. Also, I would have liked a hamburger. If the women at the table wanted to tear George apart, that was fine with me. I was trying to remember if I had read any of his columns. If they appeared in 146 newspapers it would have been hard to miss them, but somehow I seemed to have missed them.
"I don't suppose anyone here has read 'my Monday column, have they?" George asked, letting his eyes do a slow pan around the table.
"So hard to tell them apart," Oblivia said.
"Anyway, why do we have to?" Lilah asked. "We all know what you think. We all oughta be in jail, that's what you think, just because we're fun-lovin' Americans."
"Fun-loving Americans?" George said. "Do you mean that seriously? Do you think of yourself as a fun-loving American?"
"Why, yeah," Lilah said. "I believe in fun. So did my momma and daddy. I enjoy fun. Ain't that's what life's for?"
"No wonder America's in trouble," George said, twirling his fork.
"Well, don't sound so happy about it," Lilah said. "You are an American, George, even if you were born in Detroit."
"If you were in Russia they would shoot you," Cunny said. "How would you like dat?"
"He wouldn't like it because he's a sissy," Lilah said. "Down in Georgia he was afraid to say anything because he thought my brothers would beat him up. They might have, too. All he did was talk communism."
"Your brothers are rabble," George said. "And if you don't stop talking about Georgia I'm going to throw up, although I didn't eat anything worth vomiting. You'll all have to watch a case of the dry heaves."
Oblivia's eyes sparkled with hate for a moment. "So contentious," she said. "Don't know why I ask you."
"That's easy," George said. "You ask me because I have a first-rate mind. Not too many of those bopping around Washington. You hate my guts but you can't afford to leave me off your guest list. At least when I'm here Jake has someone to talk to in the rare moments when he's awake."
"Yes, but your precious mind doesn't entirely make up for your deficiencies in other quarters," Lilah said, with unusual crispness. She gave George the kind of look that in itself constitutes a sexual insult.
"While your brain was swelling up the rest of you was shrinking," she added, neatly driving home her point just as the maids whisked away our plates and brought in the salad.
Chapter IV
At that precise point in the dinner party, while the maids were carrying out bowls full of lemony sauce and carrying in a few leaves of endive on crystal salad plates, I stopped listening to the women snipe at George Psalmanazar and slipped into a road revery. In this particular road revery I seemed to be crossing the high plateau of northern Arizona, going west out of Flagstaff. It was a clear day, with a few high white clouds, brilliant sunlight, and nothing to see along the road except an occasional Indian boy sitting on a rock.
Usually in my road reveries I turn up not too far from one of my favorite bargain barns, so that, added to the pleasure of imagining myself on the road, I get the little tickle of anticipation that precedes a chance to buy something.
I have such reveries all the time, and they are not just wispy daydreams. Most of them are so intense that they create little gaps in my life. Since most of them hit me when Pm involved in social situations—such as Oblivia Brown's dinner party—my memories of social situations contain many gaps. In effect, I blank out, and later have no memory
of what may have taken place at the party I was at when the revery began.
Fortunately I seem to have a sort of automatic pilot that moves me along fairly smoothly at such times—it even prompts me to make appropriate sounds to hosts and hostesses, so that I seldom disgrace myself, even in the midst of a very long revery.
Something of this nature seems to have happened to me at Oblivia's party. While I was dreaming myself in Arizona I somehow became popular with a number of ladies. When the revery petered out, instead of finding myself somewhere around Kingman, Arizona, I was standing on a sidewalk in an unfamiliar part of Washington. Cindy, Lilah, and Khaki were with me, and we were all watching George Psalmanazar yell at a very drunk black man.
I don't snap out of my reveries instantly—I sort of fade in, like a television set warming up. As my focus improved I saw that the black man was standing there quietly taking a leak against a telephone pole.
"Button up, man, button up!” George yelled, but his yelling had no effect. The man went on pissing. In fact, once I got the scene in focus, his pissing came to seem like a remarkable performance. He seemed to go on at full flush for about five minutes. At one point George went so far as to shake his arm, which only caused the stream of urine to miss the pole for a second or two. It splashed against a Volkswagen that happened to be parked very close to the curb.
The three women were watching all this happen in bemused silence. It was clear that the sight of a man taking a leak didn't bother them, nor did George's efforts to get him to button up impress them.
George eventually gave up. "He won't button up," he said. The man had slowed a little, but he was far from through.
"Isn't that interesting," Lilah said. "I never saw anything like that happen before."
"This is a ghetto, Lilah," George said.
"It is not," Khaki said. "This is a perfectly nice neighborhood."
"Well, it's more of a ghetto than Georgetown," George insisted, opening his door.
Cindy was silent and seemed a little detached.
"Do you think that man was a rapist?" Lilah asked, once we got inside.