3
The party was in a jolly roar. A surpassingly noisy business was going on at the far end of the lobby. Two sailors held a long stick parallel to the ground, and a line of guests, sailors, and Kinjans were dancing under it face upward, or trying to. This "limbo" had been in progress for some time, for the stick was low, and most of the white people who attempted to wriggle under, with knees bent and spines arched backWard, were sprawling one by one on their backsides, each time raising fresh bawls of mirth. The Kinjans were undulating beneath the pole without trouble, and two of the sailors also edged under, less fluidly than the natives but with practiced speed. The star of the antic, however, was certainly Delphine. Her dress, a tight beige linen sheath, allowed little room for the necessary knee work. The swinging chick solved this difficulty, when her turn came, by sliding her skirt up on her hips; and as she went inching under the stick, head and body thrown back, legs bent double at the knee and spread apart, she displayed to one and all her naked thighs clear up to their natural junction, imperfectly veiled by a wisp of pink nylon. She passed the barrier to a cheer, and shook down her skirt, only to raise it again in a minute or so to repeat the performance under the lowered stick. The sailors and guests, of course, were goggling and applauding, the women hardly less than the men. But the Kinjans glanced uneasily at each other, and mostly averted, their eyes from Delphine's free show.
It was a new sensation for Norman Paperman to be ashamed of the white race. Whatever one might say of the Kinjans-and he had already endured much from their taciturn primitiveness and odd ways-their modesty was austere. The one Negro girl left in the limbo line, a Reef waitress, was thrusting her full orange cotton skirt far down between her thighs as she took her turn; moreover, as Delphine made another pass, Norman saw this girl wrinkle her nose, whisper something to a Negro boy, who was the best dancer of the lot, and walk off with him.
Norman went to the punch bowl and drank three glasses, one after the other. All at once, returning from Iris's cottage to the rollicking party, he had been hit hard by loneliness, by homesickness, by certainty that his ownership of this grotesque hotel in the Caribbean, where a crowd of strangers were jigging, writhing, haw-hawing, and guzzling to crude music, was an insanity. Norman Paperman had in his time taken part in many a steamy brawl, and had seen much lewder displays than Delphine's. Unmistakably, he knew now that that part of his life was over. He was as disgusted by the chick, almost, as if he were his own synagogue-going father; and this knowledge threw a chill of evening on his once jocund Broadway spirit.
But the champagne worked. His mood hovered in blue gloom for a few minutes, while he looked at the cavorting, sweaty dancers and thought of the vanity of all things, the frailness and brevity of human existence, and such liverish profundities. Then, slowly but definitely, the world-or at least the lobby of the Gull Reef Club-began to assume a brighter hue. Paperman drank some more, and-why, there was the good old world again, looking quite all right. In fact, this was a hell of a party, and Paperman regretted that the limbo was finished, and that Delphine was now doing only a mild twist with the red-nosed bachelor, to a most inexpert whumping of the steel drums. He was restored to a normal, even hearty, interest in a display of her underwear, but alas, the moment was gone. He gulped another glass for good measure, and asked one of his waitresses to dance.
His memories of what happened after that were unclear. He did a lot of dancing, and drank a lot of champagne, and said a great many enormously funny things, because everybody he talked to kept laughing and laughing, and he was continuously laughing too. This was the first time since his purchase of the Club, he realized, that he was having any fun at all. The party was a marvelous idea, he decided, and he'd have a champagne party in the lobby once a week, water shortage or no. He danced with Reena Sanders, and while he couldn't remember anything he said, the governor's exotic lady laughed so hard she could scarcely keep time to the music. At one point, he was dancing the meringue with Hassim, in the center of a ring of clapping and cheering merrymakers, and the effete Turk in his orange slacks, far from being offensive, struck him as a killingly amusing parody of a fat lady. There was even another limbo after a while, and he got into line and fell flat on his back the first time he tried to go under the pole, which caused a new climax of hilarity. Delphine generously showed her underpants time and again, with the roguish zest of a little girl playing Doctor, and some of the less appetizing women guests were emboldened to imitate her; and so all was laughter, champagne, jokes, shouting, and voyeur delights, when the tarpaulin tore loose.
It was a total surprise. One moment there was the limbo, and a gay joking crowd; the next moment a writhing brown wall sailed across the lobby, battering down in its path musicians, steel drums, guests, chairs, and both punch tables in a bedlam of shrieks, clatters, yells, and the crashings of overthrown glass. The huge canvas fetched up against the opposite wall and collapsed, still flapping and tumbling about, and the wind and warm rain of a tropical thunderstorm came boiling into the lobby, through the hole that had once been a wall, and through the chaos and ruin of the old dining room. All of Akers' building materials -the windows, the door frames, the plywood panels, the washstands, the crates of tiles, the Venetian blinds-lay in toppled, tangled, sodden heaps. Some crates had burst open. There appeared to be forty toilet seats scattered about, and a thousand brass doorknobs, and crisscrossing in all directions were unrolled fluttering yards and yards of streaked soggy red-and-silver wallpaper. The wind, coming in gusts of perhaps thirty miles an hour, clattered the aluminum blinds, careened the ply. wood panels, and pelted the victims of the tarpaulin in the lobby-who were picking themselves up and dazedly staring around-with flying rain, green leaves, paper scraps, and wet excelsior.
The destruction and the mess went almost unnoticed at first, because the tarpaulin, piled up against the far wall and trailing halfway across the lobby, was continuing to writhe in a peculiar way not ascribable to the wind. There were several lumps working under it, and the lumps were making muffled, discontented sounds.
Church, the sailors, and Paperman went to the rescue, and after much hauling and heaving of the incredibly heavy, soaking brown canvas, they liberated three guests, including the red-nosed bachelor and the Yonkers schoolteacher, who was laughing and crying at once. Then the tarpaulin began to work again and out crawled a very small sailor in filthy wet whites. On his hands and knees, peering around with a glassy smile, he said in a young Southern voice, "Jesus, Ah never did see such a wing-ding. Is the bar still open?"
This brought a shout of laughter from most of the guests. They had drunk enough to regard mishaps and destruction as funny. Norman, who had been laughing almost without cease since the tarpaulin's brief mad flight, was inspired to yell, "You bet it's open! Everybody into the bar! All drinks on the house, from now till dawn!"
With a cheer and a rush, the entire party went funnelling into the bar, musicians, guests, waitresses, sailors; Mrs. Sanders too, arm-in-arm with Paperman and Hassim, the three of them bawling in raucous song,
"Carnival is very sweet Please Don't stop de carnival-"
Church tactfully closed the doors on the lobby and the old dining room: on the crumpled tarpaulin, the overturned furniture, the broken glass glinting from every tile of the wet slippery floor, the piled-up tangled wreckage of unused building materials; on the wind, still coming in gusts to knock and slide things around; and on his red-lettered sign -Champagne Si, Agua No-swimming in mid-lobby in a puddle of blown-in rain.
"Carnival is very sweet Please Don't stop de carnival," sang Paperman, and the Turkish homosexual, and the black governor's lady, as the door closed on them.
It rained all night, and the water level in the cistern kept rising. Norman was not thinking about such matters. Mine host was having a good time at last.
4
He did not in the least recall going to bed, but obviously he had, since he woke up in bed; in his own bed, on the second floor, under the slanting ceiling of hyperthyroid roses. He woke with what presented itself at once as the worst headache of his life, a headache like a big object with many razor-sharp edges inside his skull; with a filthy taste in his mouth; with a terrible quick pounding of his heart; with a scary numbness running all down his left arm to cold trembling fingers; and with a general sinking sense of ill-being, compared to which death seemed no great threat. He had a champagne hangover. He knew, he had known for thirty years, that this was the worst of all hangovers; what on earth had possessed him to drink all that mediocre champagne doctored and made deadlier with grenadine and sugar? The very memory of that taste drove a wave of nausea through him.
He sat up with an awful moan, his head in a whirl, his eyes throbbing in pain from the white sunshine at the window. The knocking on the door came again, louder and more urgent. He now realized that he had been awakened not by his own physical misery, but by the usual reveille of the Gull Reef Club, knuckles on the door rapping out the alarm.
"Who-ah, who is it? Wha' is it?"
"Sheila, suh. I does have to talk to you, suh. I wery sorry to hoross you, suh."
"Give me two minutes."
A hair of the dog was the only thing at such a time, medical theory and warnings notwithstanding. Norman staggered to the bathroom and choked down a tumbler of tap water and scotch with one of the mighty oval yellow pills which Henny took to fend off migraine, and which, he had accidentally discovered long ago, acted for him as a sure head-clearer for about four hours, at a cost of perhaps twenty-four hours of the shakes. He knew, from the very sound of Sheila's knuckles on the door, that this morning would require an alert mind and a strong heart. Ye gods, that pink slop he had drunk by the gallon! He brushed his hair and his teeth, flushed his mouth violently with full-strength mouthwash, and dizzily opened the door.
The leading bulletin in the cook's evil tidings was that all six chambermaids had quit. Amaranthe had sent this word by Virgil; no explanation. Insatiable demands for water had been coming from all the rooms since seven in the morning. It was ten now, Millard was half-dead with running up and down the stairs, Virgil was helping him, and still the guests were in an angry uproar and some were starting to check out. It had been impossible to do anything about the party wreckage as yet; the lobby and the old dining room still looked, as Sheila put it, "like Noah's flood done go troo de hotel." Immigration had telephoned three times. There was a cable from New York, requesting an eighteen-hundred-dollar check for the Tilson party provisions before they would ship anything. That, Sheila said, was about all.
"Sheila, I badly need food," Paperman said, clutching his brow. "Make me-make me a mushroom omelet. Right away."
"Yassuh. De maids does be de serious ting, dey ain' no maids to get in Kinja. I tink dey does be concern for Esm,."
"Can't the dining-room waitresses make the beds, just for today?"
"No suh, de union dey does be very strick about dat."
The upheaval in the lobby was so appalling that Norman hurried through with averted eyes to the dining terrace. Many guests were still at breakfast, a glum, silent, red-eyed lot. Iris Tramm sat in the slant sunshine of a far corner table, in a blue silk shirt with large gold polka dots, and tailored white shorts, looking fresh and radiant; or perhaps she only appeared so to Paperman, through the kindly screen of his dark glasses, and the glow of the scotch and the yellow pill, which were commencing their work of uplift. Meadows sat beside her, tightly leashed to a table leg, and she was giving him bacon scraps.
"Don't say it," she greeted Norman as he approached. "No dogs allowed on the dining terrace. We're just leaving. I sneaked him in because it's his birthday."
"Don't go." He fell in the chair opposite her, with a groan. "I need company."
"I can imagine. What on earth hit the lobby last night?"
"Just let me eat something. Then I'll talk." Paperman rested his face in his hands.
"You didn't go to the Thousand Steps, did you? I woke up worrying about you."
"The Thousand Steps? No. God knows I should have."
His mushroom omelet came. The sun was warm and comforting on his back, and the whiskey and the pill took firm hold as soon as he had eaten a few bites. He began to feel much better. It wouldn't last, he knew, but the relief was wonderful. While he was recounting the misadventures of the night and the morning, Church appeared, rather gray in the face, and told him that a fourth couple had just checked out. "I tried carrying water up for a while, sir, but so many of them are in the bar, trying to get over last night-"
"Stay in the bar, Church. Sweat it out till I find Esm,. I'm going from here to the Thousand Steps. Once she comes back the others will."
Church gnawed his lower lip, and pulled at his beard. "Sir, I'm afraid you'll be wasting your time. I think she's disappeared into the brush. She always said she would. I'll get at the lobby as soon as I can, I know it's a mess." The bartender shook his head, and walked off scratching his beard.
Iris untied the dog from the table. "Just let me put Meadows away. I'll do the rooms."
