The Lacuna
Page 115

“That one over there has got clocks on his socks. I’ll lay a fiver on it. Go over and ask him to raise up his pants leg.”
“I don’t know what that means. Clocks on his socks.”
“It means,” he leaned forward, sotto voce, “the car he left with the valet has a fox tail attached to the antenna. Hubba hubba. You don’t know these college boys. I can see them in the dark.” Sloe gin was not fast enough for Tommy today, so we drank “Seabreezes,” a concoction he’d explained to the bartender. Complicated instructions for what amounted to gin and orange juice.
“Over there, the couple. Parisians, a jasper and his zazz girl, très vout-o-reenee.”
“Really.” There was no learning Tommy’s language, I’d given up on trying.
“In Paris I can always pick out the Americans like anything, ping, ping!” One eye closed, he feigned using a pistol. “A Frenchman’s like this”—he pulled his shoulders toward his ears—“like someone’s put ice down his collar. And a Brit’s just the opposite, shoulders back. ‘I say, a spot of ice down the old neck! Not a problem, by Jove.’”
“And the American?”
Tommy flung himself back in his chair, knees spread wide, hands clasped behind his golden head, vowels flat: “‘Ice, what’s the big idea? I take mine straight up.’”
And the Mexican: I carried the ice here on my back, I chopped it with a machete, and probably it still isn’t right. Tommy lifted two fingers to signal the next round.
“No more for me,” I said. “I’m nursing a ridiculous hope that I’m still going to get some work done this evening. Coca-Cola, please.”
The waiter nodded. Every waiter in the place was dark-skinned, and all the guests white. It felt like an occupied zone after ceasefire, two distinct factions inhabiting the same place: the one tribe relaxed and garrulous, draped unguarded on the chairs in colorful clothes, while the other stood wordless in starched coats, white collars sharp against black skin. In Mexico when we served a table it was normally the guests in starched collars, the servants in floral tapestries.
Tommy informed me that Coca-Cola sells fifty million bottles a day.
“Who are you, Elmo Roper?”
“It’s enough to float a battleship. I mean, literally it is, if you think about it. The French National Assembly just voted to nix Coca-Cola, no buy no sell, anywhere in their empire. What’s the static?”
“Maybe they don’t want it poured down their backs.”
“You’re going home and working tonight?” His eyes are so pale and clear, his whole complexion really, he seems to give off light rather than absorb it. Moths must fly into his flame and perish gladly.
“I can stay the afternoon. But I’m so near the end of the book. It’s hard to think of much else.”
“Oh, Jack will be a dull boy.”
“Or my meat will go to gristle, if my stenographer is to be believed.”
He leaned forward, pinched the flesh of my upper arm, clucked his tongue. Then fell back in his chair. He had a way of looking tossed around, like one half of a prizefight. “And what’s the buzz on your cooper?”
I pondered this. “I give up.”
“Your moving picture.”
“Oh. I’m not sure. The Hollywood winds blow hot and cold.”
“Listen, I could sell it. Make your picture the talk of the season.”
“I thought you wanted a look at Robert Taylor. Now you’re selling him?”
“Cat, you don’t listen to me. I am going to be an ad man. I interviewed with a firm last week.”
“I do listen. You’re going to sell presidential candidates. You know what, they need you right now. All four of them.”
“You said it! Four men running, and not one winner I can see. Lord and butler, spare me that cold cut Tom Dewey and his toothbrush moustache.”
“You may not be spared. The newspapers say it’s already over. With the Democrats split three ways, Dewey’s just waiting to be confirmed. The editorial this morning said Truman’s cabinet should resign now and get out of the way.”
“It can’t be. Dewey doesn’t even look like a proper Republican. He looks like a magazine salesman.”
“Some salesman, he’s not even campaigning. ‘America the Beautiful’ is not exactly a platform. I suppose he doesn’t want to lower himself to Truman’s level, it would show lack of confidence.”
Tommy put his face in his hands. “Not Tom Dewey the toothbrush moustache! Please not that mug in all the photos for the next four years.”
“Would you rather look at Strom Thurmond for four years?”
“What a drizzle bag.”
A stout woman in a scant bandeau and espadrilles minced across the terrace. In Mexico she would have been a beauty of a certain type, but not here, I gathered. Tommy’s eyes tracked her too dramatically, like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush.
“Maybe Scarlett O’Hara will come out and stump for Strom,” I suggested. “And Rhett Butler, whistling Dixiecrat to call out the segregationists.”
Tom looked up, eyes wide. “Now that is a campaign image. You’ve got the gift! And on the other team, Henry Wallace as the Pied Piper, with the liberals skipping off behind him.”
“Poor Truman, he’s got nobody left. I read he’s asked a dozen men to run as his vice president, and they all turned him down. Do you think that’s true?”
“He can’t get reelected, why should they waste the time?”
A young couple slid into the next table, inciting Tom to announce: “Hardware and headlights, call the nabs.” The fellow was an Adonis, more or less Tommy in a younger model. The girl wore a tennis dress and diamond bracelets.
“My stenographer went out to see Truman at his whistle stop here, just a couple of weeks ago. She’s League of Women Voters. So there’s one he can count on.”
“Oh, gee. Little man with high voice makes barnyard jokes from back of train.”
“She said he turned out quite a crowd.”
“Natch. The first thing he’s accomplished in the last two years.”
“That’s not fair. The Republicans kill every one of his bills in Congress. They can’t be bothered with the minimum wage or housing starts, they’re all crowding into the communism hearings to see Alger Hiss charged with espionage.”