Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(21)
That night, after we’d folded our togas away and gotten Miss Lockhart’s benediction, they took us to dinner, as was often the case, to a place in the neighborhood. I felt acutely aware of the passage of time.
“Alas, May is not a month that is spelled with the letter R,” said Helen, gazing at the menu with a forlorn air only partly put on.
Since we’d begun seeing them in February, we’d dined almost exclusively on her favorite: oysters Rockefeller, awash in butter and parsley, chased with plenty of Champagne at a speakeasy.
Late spring, though, almost summer, and that old guideline for safely dining on shellfish necessitated a change. Now was the season of medallions of lamb or aiguillettes of striped bass, a datum which made me, that evening, as Dickie ordered roast duck with asparagus tips au gratin for me, unaccountably sad—not because of the foodstuffs, but the change of season.
Though I could tell that Dickie’s and my couplehood was not long for this world, I ate mostly left handed, Dickie holding my right tight with affection.
Dinner was nevertheless delightful, full of bons mots from Abe and Helen. We waited on her, indulging her as always, as she got dessert. I liked sweets all right, but I never ordered them. I had a good metabolism then, but why test it? Besides, I liked to save room for my treat of choice: the cocktails we’d be off to later. Even then I could drink almost as much as the men, a capacity which wowed Abe but worried Dickie, though he tried to act as if it didn’t matter.
Helen’s confectionery weakness then was Venetian ice cream. She tucked into it with a dainty silver spoon, making her way through each melting layer with careful determination.
“One of these days I’ll whisk you away to the actual Venice, in Italy,” Abe said with admiration as Helen cleaned her plate with an efficiency that was both robust and ladylike.
“You know, Abe, I wish I’d thought of this sooner,” I said, “but we should have told Miss Lockhart that we’d like to give the money from the play to the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities.”
“Wit of the staircase, Lily,” said Abe, paying the check. “It’s all right. I don’t worry about people like her; she can’t really hurt me. Just keep it for the cause of making it easier for me to see Helen without asking anybody’s permission.”
Sometimes they took us down to Chumley’s in the West Village because Dickie knew that I scribbled poetry, and the place was popular with the drinkers in that set. I had not met with much poetic success yet, but I was flattered all the same.
That night, though, they took us to the Puncheon Club on Forty-Ninth Street in Midtown, better known as 21. We went there because it was closer, and because it had tables the size of small yachts and oceans of the best booze to be had in post–Volstead Act Manhattan.
Unprepossessing aside from a large iron gate, 21 resided in a row of brownstones. It maintained a large clientele among the Yale men in the city, including Dickie. He was pals with Jack and Charlie, the proprietors. When the eyeball behind the peephole peeped upon us there in the May dusk, we were given immediate entrance.
We had told Miss Lockhart we were off to a tea room, but instead of tea, we ordered sidecars for Abe and Helen and whiskey old-fashioneds for me. Dickie’s drink was the Barbary Coast, which contained both Scotch and gin, an admixture that caused me, silently, to question, as I often did, his taste.
“Olives?” said Dickie, passing around the small complimentary plate that came with each table.
“No thanks, but could you hand over that candied ginger?” said Helen.
Cosmopolitan—that’s what Abe and Dickie were. Debonair. Dickie especially. His suits fit him like perfect plumage, giving him the look of a man who was going places.
And he likely was, being one of those people positioned naturally, in terms of wealth and family background, to be destined for success. Yet for all that—perhaps because of all that—Dickie had few significant long-term goals. He was gifted, rather, with a joyous irresolution that made him seem to live wholly, unlike anyone else I’d yet met, in the present. Even sitting there, munching the free salted nuts that came with the cocktails as an invitation to get thirstier, his presence felt momentous. Not as in big and important, though he did fill a room, but as in one who inhabited each moment as and by a moment.
The room was warm, the thick air blown by fans. Our cocktail glasses sweated condensation, leaving rings on the table and damp on our hands. I wiped mine on Dickie’s pant leg, mostly as an excuse to touch his thigh.
There was live music, as ever and, as ever, we danced. Dickie was immaculate on the dance floor, but Abe, less polished and more improvisatory, was the better dancer. We danced to “Whispering.” To “Linger Awhile.”
“What do you say we linger a while elsewhere?” said Dickie, squeezing my waist and leading me from the dance floor.
Meaning what did I say we head back to his place and go to bed together.
“I thought you’d never ask,” I said, though he always asked, just as Abe asked Helen, and we both said yes, and would meet up back on our floor of the Women’s Christian Hotel later that night.
Dickie’s apartment wasn’t a far walk from 21, but in our tipsy haste, we took a taxi, Dickie paying. Windows down, hair gently blown, I could hardly wait to be alone in private.
One might find such wildness shocking. But people had sex even back in those days.