Inside, Outside, page 56
It came along midway in the first act, that point in a musical on opening night when the ice must break or the show dies. That stiff show-me audience at last melted, broke up in laughter, guffawed, clapped, and so did we. Lahr was marvellously ludicrous, scuttling in terror around the stage to evade the crazy psychiatrist. The foil who played the doctor did a superb job of gradually changing from a dignified Viennese savant to a menacing lunatic, convinced that Lahr urgently needed castration at once, brandishing glittering clashing scissors almost as big as hedge-clippers as he pursued him. I don’t know how Lahr managed the business of shinnying halfway up the proscenium, but it was a great comic surprise; and when he gibbered like a monkey from up there, and pelted the crazy doctor with coconuts, at this mad touch—not in the original Joey Mack scene; very little of this was—the Winter Garden exploded in applause, and Skip Lasser had a hit going, thanks to Harry Goldhandler. The show never reached that high point again, but it didn’t have to.
The cast party was a mob scene, all right. Peter and I found ourselves in a jostling buzz of people who all seemed to know each other, who hugged, and kissed, and shook hands, and waved, and shrieked greetings, and pushed. We saw Skip Lasser with Sugar Gansfried, and walked right up to them, but they ignored us, busy as they were greeting the mayor, and Ethel Merman, and George S. Kaufman, and other hot shots from the first ten rows center. I said to her, “Hello, Sugar,” but she looked through me and past me unseeing, her heavy long tan satin skirt bunched in one hand, her eyes glassily glittering as she hurried past me toward Governor Lehman.
Peter Quart’s redhead was in the crowd, still in a fetching 1918 garden-party costume, cartwheel hat, and garish stage makeup. Peter elbowed me. “That’s her! Christ, isn’t she something?” and started toward her. Just then a tanned lean man with well-groomed heavy gray hair, in a tuxedo with big diamond cuff links, an apparition straight out of a New Yorker advertisement for Cadillacs, came toward her through the crowd. She flung herself into his open arms, clutching at her hat. “Why, that old shitface,” snarled Peter. When we left about half an hour later, we saw them outside the stage door, getting into a chauffeured limousine. She then wore a chinchilla coat over an evening dress, and her eager laughter and her amorous roll of great eyes at the tanned grayhead strongly suggested that this was not an old married couple going home for hot cocoa and ladyfingers. “Have fun, old shitface,” sneered Peter through his teeth. As I’ve said, he was and is a poor loser.
I remember some good things about that cast party. When Bert Lahr appeared in black tie, his face pink from the towelled removal of makeup, a burst of applause greeted him. He made straight for the Goldhandlers and shook hands with them first. “Harry, you saved our ass with that hospital scene,” he said quite loudly, “and those goddamn coconuts.” He stayed beside the Goldhandlers, so that whoever came up to him—and everybody wanted to—had to greet the Goldhandlers, too. Goldhandler looked flustered and happy, and as for his wife, why, she perked up like a wilting flower put in water. If Skip Lasser was aware of any of this, he took no notice, busy as he was responding to compliments.
***
Lasser was late to his party in our suite. Everybody else had already showed up, including, to our astonishment, Leslie Howard. Lasser and Howard had become friendly in Boston, and there was talk of their doing a musical show based on Berkeley Square. Nothing came of that, but it gives you a notion of Lasser’s knack for seizing opportunities. Anyway, I went to answer the doorbell, and there he stood between two girls taller than himself. “Hi, meet Monica Carter and Bobbie Webb.”
Sugar Gansfried came trotting up to him, all in a glow. A spy at the Times had telephoned to say that the review was already being set up in type, and was a rave. I helped the blonde girl off with her coat, and Peter darted up to assist the black-haired one. I recognized the blonde from the rehearsal, but not the black-haired girl. In our foyer, they seemed less supernatural, less fallen from the stars, but make no mistake; from the outset they looked far too mature, pretty, and high-powered for me, and, I thought, for Peter Quat, too. If Leslie Howard was looking for a romance, one of these might do.
“I get the blonde!” Peter snapped, as they went off with Lasser to the living room. That was his way. When we had first moved into the apartment, he had said, “I get the two top drawers, you take the bottom ones.” Though we were now receiving equal pay, there was no doubt who was senior between us. He was still the great PDQ, I was still the humble Vicomte de Brag, and that was how the thing stood until we broke up. To a certain extent that’s how it still stands.
I cannot think of four words ever spoken to me that made a greater difference in my life. Nothing could have happened between me and Monica Carter, and Bobbie always told me that Peter repelled her with his grimacing and his ego. If Peter had picked the brunette, that would have been that. Fate spins slender threads sometimes, but I offer this as some kind of uniquely fine spiderweb stuff on which to hang crucial years of a man’s life. “I get the blonde!”
The black-haired girl stood at the window, holding a drink and looking out at the view. I remember that she wore a purple satin suit. She seemed ever so much older than me, and very quiet and on her dignity. I could see Peter on the sofa with the blonde, talking away and making her laugh. Monica Carter had magnificent legs, glorious thick wheat-colored hair piled on her head, and the kind of strong-jawed pretty face that in these days of television would have made her fortune. As for Bobbie Webb—
Am I supposed to try for a description now? She is here before me, more real than all the fleshly scurriers in the White House corridors; a haunting presence, as poignant and intense as I can bear. But okay. Black hair to her shoulders, large eyes set far apart under a broad brow, very white, very smooth skin, a snub nose and thin finely cut lips; Bobbie Webb was in fact an archetypical Irish beauty, a colleen out of the magazines. And I remember her hands, slender and white and long-fingered. But when I try to project myself back to call up my very first impression, I return to those eyes: gray-blue, huge, sparkling, very alive, with a look in them of sweetness, of an eager appetite for fun, and of femininity as powerful as all the electricity out of Boulder Dam. And this was when Bobbie Webb was not trying, when she just looked at you and talked. When she used those eyes—well, we will get to that.
The other thing I think of is her teeth, and the odd way she smiled. She seemed terribly solemn and unwilling to laugh. I was pelting her with badinage out of sheer self-consciousness, out of a sense that I was beyond my depth and had to amuse, since I could not possibly attract, such a beauty. Any wit can tell whether he is registering. I knew I was amusing her, it was in the flash of those eyes, and in the quick coming and going of her smile; but it was a compressed, controlled smile that did not show her teeth.
71
Consummation
“You will?”
She just nodded. Molly Bloom says, you will recall, “Yes yes I will Yes,” but in this real event nature did not imitate art. Just a nod. We looked in each other’s eyes, with that glittering nakedness of purpose and disclosure that comes once, and only once, at the beginning of an affair. “You fiend!” she said. “As though you ever doubted it. From the first minute!”
Bobbie Webb pushed down the black silk skirt over the most beautiful gartered thighs in the known universe, and got out of the peach mink chair with a resigned sigh, hitching one shoulder. “Give me a bathrobe or something.” I rushed and snatched Peter’s red-and-yellow silk Sulka dressing gown from a closet. By the happiest of chances, Peter was in the hospital with double pneumonia. “Mm, swanky,” she said, and with a wryly amused look she disappeared into the bedroom.
And now, while Bobbie is disrobing, let me fill you in on the events leading up to this seismic occurrence a few minutes past midnight on the first of April, 1936, in April House, three weeks and four days after she walked into my life.
***
I will spare you the poems I wrote to Bobbie and left at the Winter Garden, excruciatingly embarrassing doggerel. Nor will I trace the course of the growing intimacy between us, which the whole world can imagine, more or less. The story of me and Bobbie Webb begins only on the far side of this glorious night.
“I’m going to learn how to make gefilte fish,” said Bobbie on our third date, bringing her dainty fist down on the tiny nightclub table, “and I’m going to marry you.” I laughed and she laughed, and I forgot it; nor indeed have I thought of it again until just now, when out of the Pandora’s box of this long shut-away love, the memories come flying like bats at dusk. It was beyond conception that this stunning siren whose photograph hung in the Winter Garden lobby, who appeared on stage every night for men to goggle at, could possibly be interested in marrying a gagman of just twenty-one, Jewish at that, the pimples that had put off Mrs. Dorsi Pelkowitz barely fading from his face. As it happened, Bobbie was dead serious, and that remark about the gefilte fish was the run-up of her colors. Seeing the way I took it, she laughed, too.
And I must say that as I start to tell our story, I find that my sympathies are all with Bobbie Webb. My picture of her now is enormously different from the way I saw her then. How I convey my stereoscopic view of this female of females—one eye that of an infatuated boy, the other that of a chilly old tax lawyer, with little in common but the name Israel David Goodkind and the same social security number—is a literary dilemma beyond me, but I can only crash on.
My intentions, on the other hand, were totally unserious: not dishonorable, exactly, but romantic. I wanted to seduce Bobbie, and have that bittersweet Hemingway-Porter-Millay-Coward passion with her; poignant, delicious, magical, with a reasonably early cutoff date. It was a cardinal point with me, the legal mind functioning even then, never to utter the words, “I love you” to Bobbie—stage name Violet—Webb, though that negotiating posture in time collapsed. So you see, we entered into the thing at cross-purposes, not a wholly uncommon occurrence in young love.
As to the first step, the seduction, there was no deep disagreement. I was bent on seducing this goddess; for though I could scarcely have been denser or less experienced, instinct had arisen from my male depths, broken through my Minsker Godol inhibitions and Columbia philosophizing, and growled to me to get going and have this woman. She was giving me enough inviting signals, I would say in retrospect, to arouse a career eunuch. But that is not how I saw it then. I thought I was being shockingly daring and dashing and forward with my letters, my poems, my sweet talk, and my heavy passes at her in taxicabs, and sometimes in the front seat of Pop’s Buick, when I could borrow it. Bobbie went along with all this not only willingly, but encouragingly. If she had a game plan, as we say nowadays, it clearly included a seduction some time early on, so that she could let me see and feel how much she loved me.
Because that Bobbie Webb did love me was the key to the whole business. In Bobbie’s view, a short bittersweet amour was for the birds. She decided very quickly she wanted me for life, but it was up to me in the first instance to seduce her. For she was actually a very proper young woman, in her fashion; lived with her mother, had genteel ways, liked to go to church now and then, and often carried a good book under her arm, something like Thurber or Steinbeck. She was not going to seduce me, no way. Since she could not expect a proposal of marriage from this queer fish she had hooked, not yet, she just had to wait and leave progress up to me.
Now any sensible woman, if she levels with you, will tell you that two things are necessary for a seduction, assuming the lady in question is not dead set against it: a private place where you can lie down and do it, and a loving yet firm masculine hand to remove the lady’s pants. Bobbie was eminently sensible, and she was waiting—I can now see, with tender patience—for me to provide these simple requirements for sin. But I hadn’t a clue. I went on wooing her like mad with flowers, and ballades, and letters, and horseback riding in Central Park, and taxicab foreplay, and double-entendre talk, and passionate declarations; a little like a nearsighted boxer, maybe, who jabs and weaves and ducks and bobs all over the ring, unaware that he has already landed a lucky punch and his opponent is out cold on the canvas. I will never know what Bobbie really thought of all this. With perfect female instinct, she was forever protective of my ego; until the time came to hurt it, that is—a long way off, but hell on earth when it arrived. I now suspect that once in a while in those wooing days, when she excused herself in a restaurant or cabaret to go to the powder room, she really retired and laughed her head off in there for a bit, then returned with a straight face to be wooed some more.
I say she was protective of my ego; and as an example, how about those unforgettable words with which she yielded? Once Peter Quat was accommodating enough almost to die of pneumonia, so that he had to be rushed to the hospital, that selfsame night the thing happened, since finally I could provide at least uninterrupted privacy and a bed. “You fiend! As though you ever doubted it. From the first minute!” Fiend, mind you. I was the saddest excuse for a fiend on the island of Manhattan; and not only had I doubted it right along, I couldn’t believe my ears when she said she would. I was working her over, you see, in my inconclusively fiendish fashion, and the practical girl realized that Quat wouldn’t have pneumonia forever, that the time had come. She could also perceive, since she was getting to know me, that it would be a cold day in hell before Noël Hemingway would be so forward as to take down her pants. So she gasped that she couldn’t endure my entreaties and the touch of my hot hands any longer, that she would do anything I wanted; and she phrased it so that I was not at all a postadolescent fumbler, but a devilish Don Juan who had overcome her, sensing her weakness with my worldly wisdom from the start. Bobbie was a good and sweet thing, and female to her very neurons.
“Hi, honey.”
There she stood in the bedroom doorway, with Peter’s dressing gown dragging on the floor and the sleeves hanging below her fingertips, making a funny face at me. My first thought was how much shorter she looked. I had never seen her out of high heels. She was still a big girl, but as I went up to her and embraced her I was half a head taller; whereas until now we had been dancing and kissing almost eye to eye. There was something very appealing about this sudden diminution of Bobbie.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said.
“The hell you have,” replied the fiend, and he swept her into the bedroom to have his will of her.
***
I think I should explain how Peter Quat happened to get double pneumonia, before I proceed. Peter went to the wedding of a classmate, and there met a Dorsi Pelkowitz to end all Dorsi Pelkowitzes; a toothsome and carnally inflaming Jewish girl of medium height, ash-blonde, infernally bright, and only nineteen. Her name was Marilyn Levy. She lived in New Rochelle, her parents had a lot of money, but the main thing about this girl was her sexual charge; it could throw out electric relays in her neighborhood, so to speak, and draw down the lightning. She really was something, this Marilyn Levy; she had to be, to affect a hard-nosed cynic like Peter Quat as she did. And she was virginal and unconquerable as the snows of Kilimanjaro. Naturally.
He had gotten nowhere with Monica Carter, I should mention. They never had another date. Bobbie told me that while he amused Monica, the faces Peter made had frightened her off. Monica suspected that he was not quite sane. It may have bothered him, and heightened his vulnerability, to watch the callow Vicomte de Brag making time with a showgirl where PDQ had failed. But falling for Marilyn Levy needed no other explanation than Marilyn. You can read all about it in Deflowering Sarah, for Sarah is Marilyn to the life, except that Peter doesn’t tell the truth, which is that he had to marry her to get her; that they stayed married for five years, and that it was she who divorced him, tired of his persistent screwing of the poor little coeds in his English lit courses. Deflowering Sarah is his revenge book.
Apparently he and Marilyn quarrelled on their second date—my guess is, over an unsuccessful attempt by Peter to deflower her up there in New Rochelle—and he walked two miles to the train station, and got caught halfway in a drenching rain. In those days pneumonia was still a killer disease, and when Peter next morning awoke with the shudders, chattering his teeth, I called Dr. Quat and he came and at once took Peter off to the hospital. And that is how I came to my consummation with Bobbie Webb. It’s an ill wind, or rainstorm.
***
“My God, how beautiful you are, Bobbie!”
The bedroom was dark, but the moon shone on her breasts as she shrugged off the dressing gown, hopped into the wrong bed, Peter’s, which she had neatly made up, and pulled the blanket half over herself.
“I’m too small,” she said, “there’s not enough there.”
I already knew that that was her professional opinion of her bosom. In my early fiendish passes I had once sent a couple of rubber pads flying and bouncing all over the place, and Bobbie had been somewhat miffed and embarrassed. And maybe by Broadway standards these girlish breasts were not hefty enough; but by the God that made Bobbie and me, those breasts—lit by the moon, bared for me on my first night of love—were the prettiest, the most alluring, the most wondrous sight I had ever looked upon. To this day I think slight breasts are the sexy ones; the watermelons leave me cold, and conceivably the taste traces to that night.
We were naked in each other’s arms, messing about ecstatically but very clumsily, and not getting much of anywhere. I thought I knew all about it, but my ignorance was still beyond belief; certainly, it will be for present-day readers, for whom I understand active sex begins shortly after learning to ride a two-wheel bike, more or less. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t anxious or worried about my manhood. I was in a trance of bliss, a dazzle of heavenly sensation, embracing America the Beautiful, Bobbie Webb, the transcendent avatar of the Outside, in a flood of moonbeams in April House, in my first real act of passion.
“Darling,” she said, “I’m sorry I’m such a langeh loksh.”
