By the time we reached Wakeham, Jay-Jay’s accumulation of liquor was getting the better of his head and he ceased to remain mild in his love-making. I remember distinctly that the change was a terrible shock to me at the time and resulted in a wrestling match which assumed such proportions that the chauffeur so far forgot himself as to imitate Lot’s wife. We weren’t on speaking terms when we reached our house, and I didn’t hear his apologies (nor any word from him at all) for a fortnight or more. I was momentarily furious—I couldn’t imagine what the man expected of a girl like me.
Parties of this sort were a regular feature of the program for a year or more, but there were other features, also. We attended Bohemian studio parties which were more usually than not complete washouts from my point of view and led me to ask Jay-Jay why, with so many well-known and interesting people on his list of acquaintances, he persisted in messing himself up by associating with this deluded drivel of humanity. He just laughed and replied that “variety is still the spice of life—there’s a time and place for everything, including dizzy artists.”
After one of these garret endurance contests, I told him that he should have brought Leon instead of me, “because Leon would have reveled in this stuff.” I had heard so much utter blah about “expressing one’s soul” that I contemplated resolving never to dance again except on a ballroom floor. All this divine artistry stuff always has given me anatomical discomfort and there never was anyone interesting in those crowds of hairy-jawed winebibbers. They all talked and acted as if they knew better but preferred to be asinine, and to increase my disgust Jay-Jay invariably went to such places when he was in a drinking mood, which meant that I was in for a scrap before we got home.
If there’s one thing I couldn’t relish it was a man forever putting on a whisky flush, but I refrained from objecting too strenuously, because, after all, I was only seventeen and I had an idea that perhaps that was the way you were supposed to act when you’re twenty-seven. I know that I frequently consoled myself with the thought that if I were a man, just for a night, I’d go out and deliberately drink Jay-Jay under the table, or even a chair. I used to imagine how enjoyable such a feat would be, and also how much good it might have done my gay courtier. I knew it would do my heart immense good.
You can see that there were at least nine out of ten traits of Jay-Jay’s character of which I disapproved. He was everything that I didn’t desire in a man. He was terribly vain. He acted as if, just because his father was prominent in the show business, he himself was something very special and deserved respect from everyone. He was neither brilliant nor exceptional in any way and I doubt if he had ever done a single thing worth mentioning, except play around with a telephone directory full of girls. Still he thought the world was his private oyster and that every girl was receptive.
Of course, you can easily see how he got that way. He was used to having girls make a lot of him because they thought he could and would help them to a stage career. However, that phase of the matter meant absolutely nothing to me. I refused to make a hand-shaker of myself, even for Art’s sake—which refusal prompted Aunt Elinor to observe, “I sometimes wonder whether you and Art are really suited, Leona.” And I replied that the wondering was mutual.
But in spite of all his faults and his damnable self-assurance in regard to my capitulation (“eventually, why not now”) I continued to play around with Jay-Jay. With all his shortcomings, he continued to be ardent and attentive—and a virtue like that naturally takes precedence in the mind of any girl in my position. As long as he wanted to keep up the chase, I was willing to be chased. There was a very clear distinction, according to my precocious maidenly philosophy, between girls who let themselves be pursued and those who allowed themselves to be apprehended: the same distinction, I have since learned, exists in every young girl’s head, with certain slight concessions to individual circumstances. I was at that age: the age when you think you have living and loving figured out on a blue print.
My education went forward by leaps and bounds under the guidance of Jay-Jay and his friends and I must have changed considerably in a very short time, because Aunt Elinor soon got into the habit of remarking upon the fact that my language wasn’t all that it should be and that I used it to express ideas which I certainly never thought up under her roof. I must admit that Jay-Jay had a broadening influence upon me: he introduced me to risqué anecdotes and bedroom ballads; I heard all the conventional off-color jokes that are in existence and a few that were quite unconventionally original; I became sophisticated in a certain way, after discovering that when some man tried to tell you that “every bowlegged girl is pleasure bent” or some other such bit of drivel, he was not necessarily insulting you by the very act of telling you such things; I became so wise that I could listen unblushingly to even such a story as the one about the good wife who assaulted the minister for saying, “There is no balm in Gilead” and explained her resentment by declaring, “’Tain’t Gil’s fault nohow. Nuther of us wants brats to bother with!”
I was still a tomboy at heart but my outlook had changed considerably; or rather, I had begun to be resigned to the fate of being a girl. I had the feeling most of the time that I might as well make the best of it—and Jay-Jay happened to be the best at the moment.
But to show what influence will do to a person: I even harbored hopes of taking Aunt Elinor on one of our parties for the sole purpose of getting her plastered—just for something to do that would be different. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the certainty that if she ever saw how disgustingly unsteady her “choice” could be, that would be the end of my affair with Jay-Jay, because her Puritan prudishness would override any momentary ambitions as a matchmaker.