The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [60]
“What’s the score, honey?” he asked his wife.
“There’s a table in the corner drinking champagne,” she said, “and the six gentlemen by the bandstand are drinking rye and water. They’ve each had four. There’re two tables of Scotch and five tables of bourbon and some beer drinkers over on the other side of the bandstand.” She counted the tables off on her fingers, still speaking in a very dainty voice. “Don’t worry,” she told her husband. “You’ll gross three hundred.”
“Where’s the convention?” he said. “There’s a convention.”
“I know,” she said. “Sheets and pillowcases. Don’t worry.”
“You got any hot garbage?” he asked a waiter who had come over to their table.
“Yes sir, yes sir,” the waiter said. “I’ve got some delicious hot garbage. I can give you coffee grounds with a little sausage grease or how about some nice lemon rinds and sawdust?”
“That sounds good,” the band leader said. “Make it lemon rinds and sawdust.” He had seemed anxious and unhappy when he came to the table but this leg-pulling with the waiter cheered him up. “You got any dishwater?” he asked.
“We got all kinds of dishwater,” the waiter said. “We got greasy dishwater and we got dishwater with stuff floating around in it and we got moth balls and wet newspaper.”
“Well, give me a little wet newspaper with my sawdust,” the band leader said, “and a glass of greasy dishwater.” Then he turned to his wife. “You going home?”
“I believe that I will,” she said daintily.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “If the convention shows I’ll be late. Nice to have met you.” He nodded to Moses and went back to the bandstand, where the other players had begun to stray in from the alley.
“Can I take you home?” Moses asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “We just have a little apartment in the neighborhood and I usually walk but I don’t think there’d be any harm in you walking me home.”
“Go?”
She got a coat from the hat-check girl and talked with the hat-check girl about a four-year-old child who was lost in the woods of Wisconsin. The child’s name was Pamela and she had been gone four days. Extensive search parties had been organized and the two women speculated with deep anxiety on whether or not little Pamla had died of exposure and starvation. When this conversation ended, Beatrice—which was her name—started down the hall, but the hat-check girl called her back and gave her a paper bag. “It’s two lipsticks and some bobby pins,” she said. Beatrice explained that the hat-check girl kept an eye on the ladies’ room and gave Beatrice whatever was left there. She seemed ashamed of the arrangement, but she recuperated in a second and took Moses’ arm.
Their place was near the Marine Room—a second-story bedroom dominated by a large cardboard wardrobe that seemed on the verge or in the process of collapse. She struggled to open one of its warped doors and exposed a magpie wardrobe—maybe a hundred dresses of all kinds. She went into the bathroom and returned, wearing a kind of mandarin coat with a dragon embroidered up the back out of threads that felt thorny to Moses’ hands. She yielded easily but when it was over she sobbed a little in the dark and asked, “Oh dear, what have we done?” Her voice was as dainty as ever. “Nobody ever likes me except in this way,” she said, “but I think it’s because I was brought up so strictly. I was brought up by this governess. Her name was Clancy. Oh, she was so strict. I was never allowed to play with other children.