Little Casino (6 page)

For heaven’s sake, it’s too soon to know. But it’s magic, tenderly. So said Claude Thornhill, Fran Warren, Dinah Washington, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan.

She wore a white, one-piece strapless bathing suit.

Complexity of the simplest things, e.g., young men and women, or this young man and this young woman.

It doesn’t matter what lake in New Jersey this was. They were all alike. It doesn’t matter what the girl’s name was. They were all lovely.

Hopatcong, Ellen, Budd, Natalie, Hiawatha, Carole.

“I’ll close my eyes and she’ll just disappear, I know it, I know it,” the idiot says. To himself, at
least.

In Caldwell

A
LTHOUGH INFORMATION, SPARSE AND
unsatisfactory as it is, has been grudgingly offered by crack journalists as to the mundane origins of a mundane summer romance that began in, of all places, a mundane bowling alley, the activities of Perry have been all but ignored, not only on that particular night (of the bowling alley), but throughout the entirety of the subsequent summer.

Questions were asked, possible witnesses canvassed, and so on. No one seems to remember Perry’s activities.

Perry was seen, as we know, in conversation with the small, dark girl, and we have been told, perhaps irrelevantly, that “later that summer, his [not Perry’s] friend, Teddy, would fall in love with [her].” Did Perry also fall in love with her? Did he tell her of
his
notions concerning the romantic light of bowling alleys? What actually
happened
to Perry that summer? For that matter, what happened to him that
night?
All the information so far granted or gathered has been filtered through a prose utterly, even slavishly subservient to the sensibilities of an embarrassingly lovestruck young man, dazed by a girl, by her smile and her perfume, and by the concomitant and irregularly recurring image of a faceless female body in what he imagines to be a crisp white uniform. Can such a prose be trusted? Was Perry angry that the small, dark girl found, if that’s the word, Teddy? And if there was such anger, did Teddy ever learn of it? Did Perry despise himself for his amorous vacillation, procrastination, shyness?

Somebody supposedly remarked to Hal, who would be killed the following summer in an automobile crash near the Delaware Water Gap, that Perry had been in Caldwell on, it was clear, the same fall afternoon that the young man, stupid with love, was picked up at the bus stop in that little town by the girl’s older sister, Helen. The small, dark-haired girl was also at the lake on that crisp, chilly weekend, but she was with two Upsala freshmen, Bob and Noah, complacent and insufferable identical twins destined for contented, more or less, lives, defined by endodontics, corporate law, and marital infidelities. She and Teddy had broken up; the young man, “our hero,” if you please, would soon break up with the girl of the bowling alley and beach and smooth tan.

But what on earth had Perry been doing in Caldwell?

He wished, for a long time afterward, that he could meet Perry again, bump into him somewhere, and explain. Explain? Explain what?

He went back to the lake years later, but he might as well have gone to Akron or Sunnyvale or Killeen. He stood outside a Radio Shack that had been the Blue Front. He stood there for an hour, smoking. Was he waiting for Perry? Maybe. Or Teddy? Or the magical girl in the white bathing suit? The bowling alley had also been torn down, and on its site was a buffet restaurant, Jack’s Pantry. Just as well.

This area of New Jersey was served by two bus lines, the DeCamp Bus Lines and the gray-and-white municipal buses of the Public Service.

It is always safe to poke fun at dentists, as the motion-picture business, in all its creative brilliance, well knows.

“Obviously, the author ‘well knows’ it, too.”

Perhaps Helen picked him up in a Chrysler station wagon: they still had wooden sides in 1948. Perhaps he made love to Helen in the back of the station wagon. Or maybe she drove them to a … maison de rendezvous.

“A maison de rendezvous? In Essex County, New Jersey?”

The beginner, bowling, looks somewhat endearing, but when shooting pool, he appears to be bumblingly incompetent, lost and abandoned and foolish. This proves that pool is a real game.

It is always safe to poke fun at bowling, as any fifth-rate stand-up comic knows. And when bowling won’t get a laugh, there’s always the toilet, humping, waitresses, and stupid girlfriends.

“It can be, kind folk, a veritable laff riot.”

If you have ever sojourned in Fort Hood, Texas, the chances are good that you whiled away many an evening in the town of Killeen.

“Your notions, Perry, concerning the romantic light of bowling alleys?”

“R equals two pi squared times em bee to the fourth power over lambda to the third power, lady.”

Costume parties

T
HE TAPIOCA WAS, LET’S ASSUME, WILDLY
sweet in his dream, and the girl was smiling a lasciviously pure smile, although her face was not quite clear. She was wearing a crisp white uniform. The touch of her hand, the firmness and warmth of her thigh against his, the weight of her body on the bed, her quick and expert hand. She held a starched napkin for him to come into. She didn’t come back the next day nor the next and then his father came and took him out of the hospital, both eyes still bandaged.

They got into his father’s Cadillac, around them an early fall clarity of sound, and a sharpness to the light wind in the trees on quiet Parkside Avenue.

In the woman’s apartment, Connie, his father called her, he guided him to a chair at the kitchen table. Connie’s voice was something like the voice of the girl in the hospital. She gave him a 7 Up and he held the cold bottle, listening to sounds of lovemaking behind a closed door, whispers and small sighs, for maybe a half-hour, but then his father said, in a very harsh voice, that he wanted the goddamned furs back, did she think that he meant for her to keep them, just a dime-a-dozen skirt like she was?

They walked down the stairs, his father holding his arm and steering him carefully. They could both hear her crying behind the apartment door, but said nothing. The furs were soft and cool against his hand. There’s no need for your mother to know we stopped off, his father said, it’s just business. The kid got confused, but she’s a smart girl, went to Manhattan Marymount to be a dietician. She’s got a crackerjack of a sister.

He thought to ask his father if she worked, maybe, part-time at the hospital, but knew that it was stupid and that she didn’t. The girl at the hospital was sweet and understood how much he wanted her to touch him. Connie was a tramp. His father dialed the radio to some dance music. The furs smelled like fresh air and perfume, they smelled like women. So you want to swing by Nathan’s for a coupla hot dogs, eagle-eye? his father said, and squeezed his thigh.

Stories of promiscuity on the part of nurses and nurses’ aides in hospitals and clinics are, of course, legion, and some are absolutely true.

“How many?”

About 2.76333%.

Then the woman in the white silk pants suit at the bar says to him, “This is really too good to be true! Aren’t you the guy who had that wonderfully surprising and gratifying sexual experience in Caledonia Hospital in Brooklyn back in 1945? Well, I’m not
that
girl, but on the other hand, look at me!” [So it wasn’t Brooklyn Eye and Ear.]

Q.
What is more boring than a costume party? And yet, here they are, “getting ready,” as the phrase has it, to go to one. He is a Filthy Capitalist, oh Jesus Christ spare us, with top hat, cigar, and bulky canvas bag adorned with a dollar sign; and his wife is a Bossy Nurse, help!, with huge horn-rimmed glasses, thick-soled shoes, and clipboard. When they get back home, he follows her into the bedroom, then holds her in his arms as tremblingly and self-revealingly as Melville’s Pierre first held Isabel. He lifts her white nylon skirt with sober passion, and she pushes her belly against him. “Oh, sweetheart, oh, sweetheart,” she says. She is terribly excited, as is he, and yet he says, looking directly into her dark eyes, “Don’t throw bouquets at me.”

This is sometimes known as
putting the kibosh on things.
It is followed by his wife’s:

“God! Let me get out of this damned uniform! How do those nurses wear these tacky things?”

All over for the nonce.

Stories of costume parties at which people actually do become other people are few and far between, but mostly true.

A.
English Department meetings at any American university or college.

To get this young wife “out of [her] damned uniform” is not at all the same thing as having her undress.

Tu-whit, tu-whoo, jug-jug, and ding-a-ding.

The libertine’s hell