Lenore, however, did not want to look at the priority magazine. She did not want to look at the overweight (or, rarely, underweight) wives of the Sister Cities’ socially elite. There they were, with Aubrey’s pastel kimonos covering underthings picked up in Paris, with their hair wet and nasty, with creams on their faces, with shampoo girls and manicurists working over them like operating-room nurses, with tongues a-clatter in a persistent effort to abet their own status at the expense of other reputations, with cigarette smoke curling through their jewel-weary fingers, with Aubrey’s special recordings playing an interminable litany of baritone mush and Aubrey’s special perfume making the air like a brothel or perhaps a harem.
Lenore wanted to look beyond it all, out the windows. She could do it by scrunching lower than the attendant liked and by rolling her eyes up toward her forehead. She could see, then, the blue sky patches and a big, unopened snow-bag moving in overhead, against which rose the sides and tops of half a dozen of the nearest skyscrapers—a winter vignette of the Green Prairie sky line. It was the blue, diminishing bits of sky she wanted to see. For they, somewhat like her own freedom and self-respect, were being closed up and eradicated; overcast, was the word. Yet she had a sense, haunting, unhappy, hypnagogic as the drier’s hum, that everything was happening because she willed it so, that by some different magic of her own mind she could break the dark spell of her days, perhaps even push back the invading snow clouds.
The drier was a head noise like, she thought, things people hear on the verge of nervous breakdown. The sound, she knew, was steady but it seemed to have changing cadences and various volumes; it was her head, her hearing, her own nerves that perceived unevenly. Low on the horizon, between buildings, the remaining blue sky looked moonstone pale; high up, it was cobalt, like a bluebird’s back. This, she thought, was a true distinction and not fancied.
“Francine,” she called, wondering what Lizzie, what Edna or Dot had been francophized for the sake of swank, “my nails are dry enough for the last coat. And I’m in a hurry.”
Francine came obediently, sat down docilely.
The new cocktail frock had come up from the Grand Salon de Couture on the second floor. Lenore’s mink coat would conceal it while she finished shopping and until, at five thirty or thereabouts, she drove under the canopy of the Ritz-Hadley for Thelma Emerson’s party.
Everybody would be there. Kit would be there. Nobody would be there.
She fidgeted in the chair. She had a headache. It would grow worse, she knew, in the floors below and the stores beyond, while she jousted with people-onslaught around the counters, in the aisles. Then, worse still, over at the Hadley, under the lush dim lights, where the women would look at the women to see what they’d done to themselves this time and the men would look at the women just to see. They’d dance in too-crowded places, there and elsewhere. One martini, two martinis, three martinis away from now the headache would not be a pain but merely a sense of stiff places in the brain, waiting for tomorrow morning. She’d have lost a glove and a handkerchief, borrowed Kit’s after using up her Kleenexes, had her lipstick mistletoe-smeared by anybody, and got her shoes wet somewhere between car and curb: a glamour girl in a Christmas-scented night eroded by the exigencies of her good time.
She almost wanted to cry and she wouldn’t have wept in Aubrey’s for the million dollars she would soon doubtless have, many times over. She wouldn’t have wept anywhere. Wasn’t she, right here, making the bed, herself, that she would lie in?
The feelings of confusion, the sense of trapped helplessness, that came over her every day were girlish feelings, maidenly sensations, no doubt. She almost regretted that she did not have her mother’s acceptance of the flesh, her mother’s near-welcome of love’s lesser uses. Then Kit, and all Kit meant—to Lenore, to Lenore’s family—would never seem a Galahad, of course; but Galahad would seem instead just another man, no different from the Beast that woke up Beauty, or a clown. To Netta, males were like that: commodities; humanity-in-pants. But to Lenore, one male remained stubbornly other.