She said, “I guess I’ll be known far and wide by tomorrow as your new mistress.”
“No. In this one case I think your reputation for stuffiness will outrun mine for vice. You’re still the wonder of South Wind, you know, for the way you held off Perry Baron. Everyone thinks you’re a religious fanatic or something.”
“How do they know I held him off?”
“Darling, at South Wind they know these things. If you and I start spending time together it’s going to arouse great interest. The battle of the Titans. Evil versus good. The irresistible force and the immovable object. Ormuzd, spirit of light, and Ahriman, prince of darkness. They’ll be placing bets.”
“Noel Ahriman,” Marjorie said.
He burst out laughing. “Gad, you make jokes, too.”
She was extremely pleased with herself. “I’ll tell you this much, old Prince of Darkness, if there’s going to be such a battle you’ll lose. There’s that much of Shirley in me and I don’t care who knows it. I’ll never have an affair with you, never. If I’m unlucky enough to fall in love with a hound like you, you’ll still have to marry me. If I’ll have you, that is. I don’t know if I ever could. There are some awful things about you.”
“Well, Sweetness and Light, you frighten me too, a little bit.”
“I’m sure I do.”
He regarded her in silence for a little while, his head to one side. “What does the name Muriel mean to you?”
“Offhand I think of a fat girl in my last Latin class. Who’s she, another Shirley?”
“Oh no. Muriel was all too real.” He took a deep drink of his brandy. “Muriel was the only reason I stayed on at Cornell. I did just enough work to keep from getting kicked out because she was in my class. A year or so older than I was.” He peered speculatively at Marjorie. “She wasn’t quite as pretty as you. Nor half as bright. She couldn’t have thought of that Noel Ahriman joke to save her life.”
“Oh, pooh, that sad pun,” said Marjorie, feeling very kindly toward Noel.
“But she had her own special charm. Tall. Very thin. Black-haired. Her name was Muriel Weissfreid. I’m sure half of Muriel’s fascination for me lay in this blue-eyed black-haired Irish look she had. Well, to synopsize, and without conceit I say it, she was as mad about me as I was about her. The necking we did was historic, it was cataclysmic, she wanted it and I was her slave, of course. For months I was a nervous wreck. I swear, much as I loved her, I grew to hate it. But necking it was and necking it remained. Anything was all right except natural sex. And one other thing. We necked in absolute silence, never discussed it, and never admitted, not to the last hour, that we were doing it or ever had done it. Those were the rules. I tried once or twice to make a joke about it but, Gad, she got angry as a tiger, and I knew if I said three more words I’d lose her. So I shut up. She was my queen, my star, what else could I do?” He drank.
“She sounds horrible,” Marjorie said.
“I organized a dance band just to make money to spend on her. I wrote term papers for her in our courses—papers that got her A’s, when my own papers got low C’s. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. Writing a good paper for her was like giving her a corsage.—Well. Came the Junior Prom. Naturally Saul and Muriel were to go together. The other fellows at school didn’t even bother to ask her. But Saul didn’t go with Muriel. Saul went stag. Muriel, you see, had met a young man during Christmas vacation, and had improved the acquaintance on weekends in New York, while our fantastic necking continued at Ithaca on week nights. It continued, so help me, until two days before the Prom, when she informed me she had invited this fellow as her escort. Marjorie, she wore blue velvet to the Prom, and the biggest diamond you have ever seen or are ever likely to see outside a museum. If she’d fallen in a river wearing that diamond she’d have been pulled down and drowned. He was a pleasant little fellow with a round head and pink cheeks, a little shorter than Muriel. His father owned a big woolen mill.
“Honestly, Marge, in my life I have never done a better imitation of Noel Coward than I did that night. I wished them joy with the most astringent elegance, and begged the favor of a last dance with her. He was really a very nice little fellow. And what the devil, he had her. They were going to be in bed together in the bridal suite of the Mauretania in two weeks, she was quitting school to marry him. He handed her over with a good-hearted, and, so help me, apologetic grin. And Muriel and Saul danced their last dance.”
“Lord,” murmured Marjorie.
“Blue velvet,” said Noel in a light amused tone, “and Muriel’s arms so thin and white, and the spring-flower smell of her hair the same as always—and that damned Rock of Gibraltar winking on my right shoulder where her left hand rested, as it always had, with a finger lightly flicking my hair.” He finished his drink and slouched back, smiling at her. “So you see, in my epic duel with Shirley she has gotten in a solid blow or two. I’m well ahead, however, and I mean to stay ahead.”
Marjorie said, “It’s a nasty picture. I recognize parts of it, I have to admit. Only parts. She was a miserable girl—”
“I know. My generic girl is named Shirley, not Muriel.”
“I’m not anything like her. You can believe me or not, as you please.”
“You mean you wouldn’t marry the fat little son of the woolen mill? Maybe not. I hope you’re never tempted.” Marjorie thought of Sandy Goldstone, and looked down at her drink. “I daresay you don’t go in for obsessive necking, at least I hope not.”
“Certainly not! As for tonight, I—” she stammered and stopped, blushing.
“Don’t elaborate, Margie, it was perfectly obvious how astounded you were. You made me feel ashamed of myself, for the first time in maybe ten years. Amazing. I thought my conscience had atrophied.”
“Oh, you’re not as black as you paint yourself.”
“I’m exactly that black. Whatever you do, don’t fool yourself about that.”
She said, “You don’t scare me. Not any more.”
“Feet of clay.”
“No, that’s all right. I’m just beginning to understand you.”
“And to feel the urge to make me worthy of myself, perhaps.”
“No. I don’t give a hang what becomes of you, why should I?”
Noel lit a cigarette, and looked out at the lake. “I had a sweet revenge, by the way, given to few in this life. When I had my first song hit, Muriel wrote me a letter saying how proud she was of me. Then, when Raining Kisses got to be such a success, here came an invitation to a party at her home in Rye, New York, an Italian Renaissance palace the woolen man had given his son for a birthday present. I went. I’d driven past the place several times, long ago, gnashing my teeth. I had no trouble finding it. Seven years had gone by. Well, Margie, it was a hell of a party. You never saw so many expensive dresses. Ah, but they were so much the young married set, so thirtyish, so fearfully hair-thinning hip-spreading loud-laughing wide-grinning thirtyish! Here a real estate man, there a chain grocery man, here a lawyer, there a doctor, here a woolen man, there a cotton man, all sleek and plump and connubial. The wives, a couple of dozen aging Shirleys. Muriel’s chin had sharpened. All the sweetness was out of the curves of her face. She was stiff and tight—tight smile, tight clothes, tight desperate gay eyes. I came there with the most beautiful girl in New York, an imbecile named Imogene something, eighteen, a raging redheaded beauty. Later married an oil man. Darling lovely Marjorie, I tell you we two bohemians walked among those thirtyish respectable people like gods. We dazzled them. Those well-fed commuting husbands hungered for Imogene and hated me. Their wives hated Imogene and hungered for the romantic-looking composer in tweeds. Oh, it was rare. Muriel took me for a walk in the garden. I would not have made a pass at her, Margie, for twenty million dollars in gold, payable in advance. I was Noel Coward again, being distantly cordial to a sweet old aunt. She batted her eyes a bit in the old way, and said she was very happy and only hoped I would settle down some day with some fine gi
rl and prove worthy of myself. She was implying that Imogene was a tramp. Which was entirely true. And—one thing that makes me feel kindly toward her, I must say—she apologized with clumsy sincerity for her somewhat crude parting words to me at the Prom seven years before.—Well. That was that. I’ll tell you, I’d been getting pretty tired of Imogene—she was a moron, truly—but the hot eyes of those husbands sort of Simonized her for me, you might say, and we were great pals for another month or so after that marvelous party. Never seen Muriel since, and don’t expect to.” The bartender brought brandy. Noel drank. “Sam’s brandy is beginning to taste pleasant. Incredible.”
Marjorie was looking coldly at him. “You really are a devil in some ways—vindictive, petty, arrogant, smug—”
He glanced toward the windows and pointed at the guests streaming across the lawn. “Here come the Jukes and Kallikaks, full of steak and beer. Let’s get the hell out when I finish this.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Who? When?”
“Muriel. At the Prom. Her parting words.”
“Oh, that. I forget.” He drank.
“What did she say, Noel?”
“Interests you that much, this dead yarn of a dead time?”
“Yes, it interests me.”
“Well, okay. Please understand, it was mainly my doing. I danced her into a corner, sat her down, and in a few sparkling and rather nasty sentences described her marriage to her as only Saul Ehrmann could. She began getting that furious cat look, but what the hell did I care? When I was all through she said something like this: ‘You’ve always been able to talk rings around me and to hurt me. You’ve hurt me now, all right. I feel sick. What you say about my marriage is all true. I’ll say one thing for Marty, though. He isn’t a cripple.’ With that, away went the blue velvet, the white arms, and the diamond.” He finished the brandy and stood. “Let’s go.”
They walked in silence up the lawn, hand in hand. When they came to the path through the bushes to the women’s cottages, she faced him. “I’m very stupid, I know, but—”
He brushed his hand gently on her cheek. “Enough talking for one night, darling. There’s the whole summer.”
“I can’t tell you how strange I feel. Dizzy, unreal—it wasn’t the brandy, I didn’t have enough—”
“Marjorie, my sweet, we’ve fallen in love with each other, that’s all. You love me. I love you. Don’t lose any sleep over it.”
Electric stings ran through her arms and legs. She put out her hand with spread fingers toward him, half reaching for him, half warding him off, a peculiar blind little gesture. He took her hand. She pulled him into the shadow of the path, and kissed him.
Chapter 16. THE RED GLASSES
Within the next couple of weeks it became a settled thing at South Wind that Marjorie was Noel Airman’s girl. During rehearsals she sat at his side, when she wasn’t working the lights or acting; she informally came to be a sort of assistant stage manager. She spent her free time with him, canoeing, dancing, playing tennis, talking endlessly.
It was a new era for Marjorie, a sunburst of love, and fun, and glory. Noel put on Pygmalion and there were no open complaints when Marjorie drew the part of Eliza. The staff people all assumed Marjorie was sleeping with the social director, and quite understood that he would want to treat her well, at least in the first few weeks of their affair.
To everybody’s surprise, she scored a hit in the show. Really failing in a part like Eliza would have been hard, but it was obvious that Marjorie’s success was not just the success of Shaw’s lines. The audience liked her. Their warm response seemed to fill her with power and sparkle, almost to add inches to her stature; after a hesitant start she sailed through the evening bravely, and at the last curtain she received an ovation very like the one after The Mikado.
It turned into a memorable night, a staff revel lasting until dawn. Greech invited them all to his charming rustic bungalow on the lake, and was moved after a while to send up to the kitchen for a case of domestic champagne. About two o’clock in the morning, when everyone was quite drunk and full of eagerness for the party to go on and on, somebody suggested that Noel play the score of his new musical comedy, Princess Jones. He tried to beg off, but there was a great clamor for it, and at last he sat at the piano and began. The noise died down; for they were theatre people, and the unfolding of a new creative work was a solemnity. They sat here and there, on the furniture and on the floor, drinking quietly as they listened. After a while their respect changed to enthusiasm, and then to excitement. Several times they broke into applause. When Noel finished—playing and singing the score took him over an hour—there was a tumult of congratulations. Marjorie thought Princess Jones was unmistakably brilliant; but, being Noel’s girl, she sat quietly, enjoying the rush of praise as much as he did, saying nothing. Wally Wronken reeled up to Noel with a highball in his hand, and actually got down on his hands and knees before him. “Salaam. You are the master, Noel. It’ll be produced in a year. It’s a sure smash. You’ll be rich and famous. I kneel to the master. Salaam.” He touched his forehead to the floor, spilling his drink.
From that night onward, she was accepted by the staff people as one of them. The sarcastic nickname she had been tagged with, “Sweetness and Light,” fell into disuse. The redheaded singer Adele, with whom Marjorie shared her bungalow, dropped her patronizing air, offered her scotch from the bottle in her suitcase, and began confiding to her all the daily twists and turns in her affair with a waiter. The office-girl actresses, now that she was sleeping with Noel (as they thought), talked more freely about their love problems in her presence, as well as about the romances of other staff members. Marjorie was astounded at the scope and complication of South Wind sex activity thus uncovered, and dismayed to think how blind she had been.
Her eyes thus opened, she began to notice among the guests, too, the clues that indicated affairs—a good-looking man continuously with a mousy or ugly girl; a woman guest dancing night after night with the same waiter or caddy; a middle-aged man and a young woman in steady company, both looking composed and making no effort to amuse each other. She pointed these things out to Noel.
“Well, goodbye to your innocence,” he said. “It was charming while it lasted. Of course you’re not really good at this yet. Eventually you can tell by the way a man’s paddling a canoe while the girl lounges, or by the way two people play a hand of bridge, or by the way they dance, or how they act on a golf course or a tennis court, or how a girl’s lipstick looks at breakfast time. I could win fortunes if anybody would bet me on such things.”
“Why, this place is alive with sex,” Marjorie said. “It seethes with it. It crawls with it. It pullulates with it. It’s horrible. It’s like Dante’s Inferno. A lot of nasty squirming writhing naked bodies.”
“Oh, come,” said Noel. They were on the porch of the social hall, sunning themselves in deck chairs. “Have another beer.”
“I mean it. My mother calls it Sodom. She’s right.”
“You’re reacting too violently, dear. There isn’t nearly as much sex here as you think. Among the staff, I grant you, being cooped up together all summer, it does get to be a bit of a barnyard. But the guests are entirely different.” He gestured at the crowds frisking on the lawn and the bathing beach, the girls in vivid swim suits, the men in brief trunks, all tanned, smiling, making a lot of noise. “The fellows do come here, of course, with the usual bachelor’s dream of seducing a pretty girl, in between tennis, golf, and sunbathing. But they don’t have much luck. The nice girls, the Shirleys, come with their tight bathing suits and bright flimsy dresses, intent on trapping a husband, and not inclined to settle for less. It’s the pigs who mainly benefit by the tension that ensues. Their hopes are low and humble. They only want some attention, and they’ll pay with their messy bodies for it. A few of the men really do break down and get interested in some nice girl. A few more, the less fussy ones, end up coupling with the pigs. That’s about it.” r />
“You’re much too callous and contemptuous about the whole thing.”
“Look, Margie, there’s one fact you’d better face. Sex exists. People not only eat, drink, and breathe, they mate. That’s how it happens that there are always more people when the old ones die off. Your viewpoint—evidently you got it from your parents—is as queer today as an Australian bushman’s. The wonder is not that there’s so much sex at South Wind, but that there’s so little of it. Most of these people get nothing more in the way of sex than a few fumbled kisses and hugs, and the handful who do go farther with it skulk and crawl in the dark as though they were committing a crime. That’s Moses for you. At a remove of forty centuries he still has these poor young Jews under control. It’s absolutely incredible.”
“What do you advocate?” Marjorie said. “Complete promiscuity?”
“I don’t advocate anything, my dear. I just go along, living my way, and not trying to make generalizations. I have a very good time. There are certain girls, Marjorie, easygoing heathens like myself, to whom sex is as simple and accessible a pleasure as a highball. They ask only that it be good, and enjoyed in good company. You’ll never understand that state of mind, so don’t try.”
After a silence she said, “I don’t know anything about your gay heathens. I don’t think a girl can go to bed with a man and forget about it. It’s against human nature—”
“It’s against your nature, Marjorie. Don’t generalize. The Eskimos exchange wives as a matter of course. A Polynesian girl your age—”
“Oh, sure enough, the Eskimos and the Polynesians,” Marjorie said. “That was bound to come up, wasn’t it? Well, you don’t live in an igloo and I’m not wearing a grass skirt, and we’re not discussing people who do, but people like ourselves.”
“Try to be consistent, old girl. Though I appreciate that it’s an effort. You said human nature. They’re human.”