“How about a show, and then the Breauville afterwards?” asked Blanche.
“You’re on,” he replied. “You’ll meet a lotta guys before you find one’s loose as I am, girlie.”
“I know—you’re a peach, Fred,” she answered, putting a note of cajoling praise in her voice.
They rode in a cab to a Broadway theater, where he purchased the best orchestra seats. The show was one of those musical revues—“The Strolling Models of 1925”—where fully endowed, and slenderly semi-chubby, chorus girls revealed everything except the extreme middle portion of their anatomies, and pranced and kicked about the stage, with a manufactured blitheness and a perfect cohesion; and where male and female dancers pounded, leapt, and whirled, like inhumanly nimble and secretly bored manikins; and where the scenes were rococo or minutely simple—multicolored Chinese scenes, Oriental harem scenes, streets on the Bowery, Russian peasant festivals; and where the music and songs were either sweetly languorous or full of a rattling, tattling sensuality. The music had a precarious charm, a charm that could not bear much reiteration but just failed to be obvious at a first hearing.
Blanche sat, transported, and sorry that she had to return to her partner between the scenes. This was the life—throwing up your head and winking an eye at all invitations, like you had a first mortgage on the earth! She envied the girls on the stage, even though she knew something of the labors and uncertainties attached to their profession. How she wished that she, too, could do something different, and get applauded for it, and lose the buried sense that often recurred to her.
After the show she went with Roper to the Club Breauville, a private hang-out off upper Broadway. The place was plastered with frescoes and decorations in gilt, red, and purple, and had a jazz-orchestra of ten men. It prided itself upon its air of gleeful informality—a spirit of natural good-fellowship—although you divined that all of the uproar was doing its best to hide the passage of money, and a less humorous sensual game. Theatrical celebrities were hailed at the tables and asked to make speeches, or give impromptu performances, and people spoke to each other without an introduction, and a stout hostess in a black and silver jet evening gown wandered among the tables and made witty remarks to everybody, and never lost her “I’m-doing-it-to-keep-you-amused” mien. As Blanche and Roper followed the head waiter to a table, the hostess, who had chemically yellowed, abundant hair, and a round, fake-babyish face, was bandying words with a group of tall, rakish men in tuxedoes.
“D’you hear the latest?” she asked. “They’re going to give all the chorines a machine and a diamond bracelet to keep them honest.”
“Rockefeller’s donating a million to the cause.”
“Pass that pipe around and we’ll all take a whiff,” answered one of the men.
“I’ll give you the needle instead—I sold the pipe to a stock-broker this morning,” she answered.