MAURY:(Still considering his own last observation) I remember.
ANTHONY: It’s true. Natural born fetich-worshipper. Take art —
MAURY: Let’s order. He’ll be —
ANTHONY: Sure. Let’s order. I told him —
MAURY: Here he comes. Look — he’s going to bump that waiter. (He lifts his finger as a signal — lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly claw.) Here y’are, Caramel.
A NEW VOICE: (Fiercely) Hello, Maury. Hello, Anthony Comstock Patch.
How is old Adam’s grandson? Débutantes still after you, eh?
In person RICHARD CARAMEL is short and fair — he is to be bald at thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes — one of them startlingly clear, the other opaque as a muddy pool — and a bulging brow like a funny-paper baby. He bulges in other places — his paunch bulges, prophetically, his words have an air of bulging from his mouth, even his dinner coat pockets bulge, as though from contamination, with a dog-eared collection of time-tables, programmes, and miscellaneous scraps — on these he takes his notes with great screwings up of his unmatched yellow eyes and motions of silence with his disengaged left hand.
When he reaches the table he shakes hands with ANTHONY and MAURY. He is one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with people whom they have seen an hour before.
ANTHONY: Hello, Caramel. Glad you’re here. We needed a comic relief.
MAURY: You’re late. Been racing the postman down the block? We’ve been clawing over your character.
DICK: (Fixing ANTHONY eagerly with the bright eye) What’d you say? Tell me and I’ll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of Part One this afternoon.
MAURY: Noble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach.
DICK: I don’t doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour talking about liquor.
ANTHONY: We never pass out, my beardless boy.
MAURY: We never go home with ladies we meet when we’re lit.
ANTHONY: All in our parties are characterized by a certain haughty distinction.
DICK: The particularly silly sort who boast about being “tanks”! Trouble is you’re both in the eighteenth century. School of the Old English Squire. Drink quietly until you roll under the table. Never have a good time. Oh, no, that isn’t done at all.
ANTHONY: This from Chapter Six, I’ll bet.
DICK: Going to the theatre?
MAURY: Yes. We intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over of life’s problems. The thing is tersely called “The Woman.” I presume that she will “pay.”
ANTHONY: My God! Is that what it is? Let’s go to the Follies again.
MAURY: I’m tired of it. I’ve seen it three times. (To DICK:) The first time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we came back we entered the wrong theatre.
ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought were in our seats.
DICK: (As though talking to himself) I think — that when I’ve done another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I’ll do a musical comedy.
MAURY: I know — with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about “Dear old Pinafore.” And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
DICK: (Pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.
MAURY: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.
ANTHONY: In other words, Dick, you’re playing before a grand stand peopled with ghosts.
MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.
ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I’d feel that it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.
DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that sophistic rot?
ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.
MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals — Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don’t complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.
(Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost for all time.)
NIGHT
Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at a price, obtained seats for a new musical comedy called “High Jinks.” In the foyer of the theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night crowd come in. There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and furs; there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze and red and shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of many women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept men — most of all there was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as tonight it poured its glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter….
After the play they parted — Maury was going to a dance at Sherry’s,. Anthony homeward and to bed.
He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square, which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin — too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully, swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting alone in a closed taxicab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.
Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances. They were dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable; their turned over collars were notched at the Adam’s apple; they wore gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles.
Passed a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times Square — explained them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be impartially interested, waved her head here and there like a piece of wind-worried old orange-peel. Anthony heard a snatch of their conversation:
“There’s the Astor, mama!”
“Look! See the chariot race sign — —”
“There’s where we were to-day. No, there!”
“Good gracious! …”
“You should worry and grow thin like a dime.” He recognized the current witticism of the year as it issued stridently from one of the pairs at his elbow.
“And I says to him, I says — —”
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath — and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light — light dividing like pearls — forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.
He turned thankfully down the hush