“Not my head, anyways,” he said, smiling. “D’you know, I’m really gone about you. It took two years to turn the trick—little Joe hates to be caught, he does—but ’f I’m not in love with you now, it’s so close, I can feel the breath on my neck. Why don’t you hook up with me and let me have you meet the right people and push you along? You’re not in love with me now, but you like me pretty well at that, don’t you?”
“I do,” she answered, “but I want to find out first whether you really mean all of this, and whether you’re really int’rested in the same things I am. You mustn’t be angry at this. It’s a serious thing to me, and I want to be sure. Besides, ’f you do care for me, why can’t you help me even ’f we are just friends?”
“Of course I will,” he responded, with an easy heartiness. “It’s not like a business transaction to me.”
If she became more and more dependent upon his assistance, she couldn’t hold out forever.... They departed from the cabaret, after another highball, and went to the apartment of his friend, Jack Donovan. Donovan was a sturdy man of forty, whose five-feet-eleven were supported by flat feet and buttressed by the girth of a paunch. His head was one-quarter bald and his black hair was wetly combed down, and the oval of his face, rising from an almost double chin, was a morbid calculation, as though he were weary of his stage-laughs and smiles, and wondering what in the devil was so funny about life, anyway, except that people liked to pay money to be joshed into believing that it was. He did a monologue in vaudeville—one of those acts in which a portly “Senator Callahan,” in a frock coat and a high hat, cracks jokes about the events and foibles and personages of the day, with many a crudely ironical fling at grafting officials and high prices and prohibition, with lower puns and slapstick harangues against the prevailing immodesty of feminine attire—“They’d wear ’em two feet above the knees if they weren’t afraid it would completely discourage a guy.” He greeted Joe with an off-hand amiability, and looked at Blanche, after the introduction, with a side-long intentness. Joe knew how to pick ’em, all right—she wasn’t a doll-baby but she had class to her.
The two front parlors of the apartment had an ebony baby-grand piano, and Louis Sixteenth furniture picked up at auctions and standing beside the squat, varnished products of Grand Rapids—an oak sideboard with large, glass knobs and an oak settee. Some bottles and other accessories were on the sideboard, and Donovan returned to his interrupted task of making a round of cocktails. The other guests had already arrived—the two chorus girls mentioned by Campbell, and another woman whose occupation might not have desired a public announcement, and two business men who dabbled in liquor-selling on the side.
One of the chorus girls, Flo Kennedy, looked like the wax clothes dummy that can be observed in shop-windows, and hardly showed much more animation, except that when she spoke, the figure became slightly more crude and less aloof. Her round face was inhumanly symmetrical below her dark-brown hair, and its expression was, well, a no-trespassing sign, over the composed expectation of masculine advances. She wore a short-skirted thing of terra-cotta silk and cream lace, and flesh-colored stockings rolled just below the knees, and black pumps. Her companion, Grace Henderson, was a short, slender, Jewish girl in a jauntily plain black gown, with bobbed, blondined hair and a mincing, sensuous glisten on her face—pretty in spite of the tell-tale curve at the end of her nose. The third woman, Madge Gowan, was silent and dark, with a half-ugly, long face, whose shapely cheeks and chin partly diminished the opposite effect, and a fully curved, strong body.
One of the business men, Sol Kossler, a Jew in his early forties, was roly-poly and half bald, with a jowled, broad-nosed face on which smug and sentimental confidences were twined—one of those merchants who succeed more through luck than because of hard shrewdness—while the other, Al Simmonds, was robust but not stout and had a shock of wavy black hair, and the depressed face of a man who knew that he was hoodwinking himself, in his life and thoughts, but could not spy any other recourse. In their neatly pressed and creased gray suits, both of the men looked as though their objective were the immaculate erasure of individuality.
The conversation reverberated with continual laughter. The men expected each other to utter wise-cracks, and digs at each other’s weaknesses, and humorous tales, and each one was constantly egging the other on to self-surpassing retorts. The women were not expected to do much except listen, and laugh or smile at the right places, and join in the intervals of more placid gossip about theatrical people, and indicate a sexual responsiveness without becoming demonstrative (sex would have been boresome to all of them without the assumption of gayly parrying uncertainties, even though they knew in advance what the night’s outcome would be, pro or con).
To Blanche, they were an emptily hilarious lot, out for the usual things that men and women wanted from each other, and merely laughing and idling on the way to them—not at all interested in the big, serious things of which she had had a revealing glimpse—but they were funny at times, and it was pleasant to be a young woman patently desired by men, and the chance to be amused and self-forgetful for one night was not to be sneezed at. She joined in the repartee between Kossler and Donovan.
“I hear you sold some shirts to Mayor Kelly the other day,” Donovan said. “One more vote shot to hell.”