The cabbie stared at her with frank admiration and she didn't mind. She didn't mind at all. You couldn't consider it fresh. It was more like—more like homage. It was her due.
The cabbie's expected question: "where to, lady?" was replaced by a polite, "Madam?"
On impulse, Jeanne-Marie named the city's most fashionable cocktail and supper club, the Black Flamingo. Then she settled back in the cushions, relaxing. Traffic was heavy and the cabbie stole several admiring glances in the rear-view mirror, but still they made incredible time, as if all the other drivers knew that Jeanne-Marie had twenty-four hours of glorious adventure ahead of her and wanted to embark on it at once.
All the traffic made way for Jeanne-Marie. Naturally it did.
Homage was paid Jeanne-Marie at the Black Flamingo too. There she was ushered across the crowded floor and given a ringside table near the cocktail hour pianist. The sweet, seductive music he played, the dimness within the Black Flamingo, the almost abstract pattern of flamingos in motion on the walls, the cigarette haze, the constant humming buzz of cocktail chatter, the first cocktail—a gibson—Jeanne-Marie ordered, all combined for an effect of drowsiness, of time suspension, which Jeanne-Marie had never experienced before.
Then the conversational buzz receded, like a tide ebbing. Jeanne-Marie blinked. Most of the crowd was gone. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that two hours had passed, looked at the small round surface of her table with the Black Flamingo placemat and saw three cocktail glasses, all empty. Soon, Jeanne-Marie realized with a growing sense of disappointment, the before-theater crowd would bring the tide flowing back to the Black Flamingo again. But her disappointment stemmed from the fact that nothing had happened to her and it was now almost seven o'clock. Oh, she had been stared at, admired, ogled even—but what beautiful girl wouldn't be? It was not that Jeanne-Marie had taken her twenty-four hours of beauty for granted. Rather, it was not beauty—certainly not beauty alone—she had wished for. And it wasn't sex-appeal, either, she told herself. Jeanne-Marie loved her husband and had experienced no lewd, day-dreaming fantasies about a secret lover who would sweep her off her proverbial feet. But Jeanne-Marie had waited, with a mixture of patience and passion, all her life—for something to happen. Something out of the ordinary. Something thrilling, as far removed from the pattern of her humdrum day-to-day existence as—as the spiral nebula in Andromeda.
But, Jeanne-Marie told herself, I don't seem to attract adventure—not even when I'm beautiful. Would she then have to spend all the rest of her life waiting, waiting for that sudden knocking at the door, for the face of the unknown to make itself thrillingly known?
She sighed and ordered another drink. She sipped it slowly, and sipped it, she knew, as if she spent much time sipping cocktails. Naturally, Mary-Jean's consumption of cocktails had been limited—generally to one a year, and that on the day of her wedding anniversary. But an ability to drink cocktails in a sophisticated manner seemed to go with the new body—with Jeanne-Marie.