Hob Broun - Odditorium

“Spot of trouble?”

“My house burned down,” Sara said gravely. “Guess I left the bacon on too long.”

A large chunk of money was handed over to her within two hours and Sara alternately wept and apologized for being so sentimental. They spent the remainder of the morning shopping for clothes, lingered over a lunch of lobster salad and cappuccino, and touched down at Logan Airport at dusk. A freshman gofer of Pierce’s decked out in chauffeur’s livery was there to meet them and, in a long black limousine equipped with stereo and wet bar, to transport them to an all-stops-pulled welcome home party already in progress.

The following day Pierce invited Christo’s suggestions as to how he might best demonstrate his gratitude.

“I could use a job.”

The exam period preceding spring vacation was but a few days away. Christo was given a car, detailed instructions on how to find five area campuses, a promise of liberal commissions, and a shopping bag full of amphetamines.

“Sweet and soft as butter, that sister of yours.” Christo held the stem of his empty glass like a cigarette between middle and index fingers. “I can still see her in that sea-blue gown with the tassels at the waist and the whole room levitating when she’d walk through.”

“That party—” Pierce thumped his elbows on the table. “That party cost me over two grand.”

“Commerce has made you vulgar, you shithead.” Fractured little smile, head going ruefully from side to side. “I’ve got only one regret from that whole thing. One large regret.”

“Let’s have it then. By all means.”

“I never slept with her.”

“I don’t know about that, jazzbo.” Pierce squinted at him and the lamplight was harsh on his yellow, ruling-class hair. “From what she says in her letters, the only type of sex Sara enjoys is with herself.”

“You’ve got a real close family, Pierce. That’s nice.” He stood, stretched, moved toward the spiral stairs. “But I’m glad I never did.”

Pierce spread his arms on the table, seeming to embrace the whole of its dark surface. “You going to retrieve your friend?”

“Nah, let her float awhile. But I ought to get us a hotel.”

“Do that anytime.” Pierce waved dismissingly. “The kind of hotels you like are never full. It’s early, for Christ’s sake. Stick around and I’ll tell you about my book, we’ll maybe shoot some dice or something.”

“Look, man, I’ve been on the road a long—”

“But it’s early. More gimlets?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, more gimlets. You shithead.”

THE TELEPHONE WAS RINGING in Room 31 of the Kenilworth Hotel (Transients Welcome). From a thick and muggy sleep Tildy ascended through those first turbid layers of consciousness as in a bubble of gas. She became instantly aware of phlegm dangling like a cord of taffy in her throat, raw from the forty some-odd cigarettes she’d smoked the night before. She forced open her eyes and, bit by bit, pegged her location. Christo. New York. Scumbag hotel. It was impossible to gauge the time of day because the windows were painted the same bile yellow as the walls. Good morning, Naked City, and thanks for everything.

She lifted the receiver and Christo’s voice rasped in her ear.

“Hiya, bunny. Ready to roll?”

Her lips moved silently against the holes in the plastic mouthpiece. She belched at him, whispered, “Where are you?”

“Seventy-ninth and Lexington. Been hiking around since eight o’clock. I tried to wake you for breakfast but you kicked me.”

“’M sorry.”

“Don’t worry. I kicked you back. You all right?”

“Feel like dough. A big tub of rancid bread dough.”

“Okay, okay. Get yourself in the shower and let it run awhile. Brush your teeth, run a little sandpaper over your face and get into some clothes. You’ll be meeting me in one hour outside the Planned Parenthood Thrift Shop at Seventy-fourth and Third. There’s doings on for tonight and we need to make some preparations.”

“Why?”

“Seventy-fourth and Third. Southeast corner.” And he hung up.

After retching in the shower, Tildy felt much better. She dosed her dehydrated system with two cans of orange pop from the lobby vending machine and tried to sharpen the focus of her eyes over the morning headlines: a Long Island building contractor had been accused of engaging in deviant sex with members of his scout troop; an off-duty transit cop had shot a Dutch tourist in a dispute over a parking space.

The man at the desk gave her a couple of cigarettes for the road. He spoke just enough English to tell her how to get crosstown but in the 77th Street station she went up the stairs to walk in an adverse northerly direction for several blocks before realizing her mistake.

She arrived at the appointed corner a half hour late. Christo took pains to mime his annoyance, flinging the butt of his hotdog at her as she advanced shading her eyes.

“I thought you’d maybe gone back to sleep.”

“Who can sleep with all this excitement?”

“Don’t get snotty.”

“So I’m here. What’s the project?”

Christo reported that he and Pierce had drawn up tentative plans for a joint business venture, something that would move him out of the man-Friday class. “He’s finally going to steer me onto something ripe, the bastard. A bit of the long green. After all this time.” An evening of revelry had been scheduled to celebrate their new partnership.

“Congratulations. I hope you’ll both be very happy, but did I really have to come all this way to hear about it?”

“Right now we’re looking for uniforms.”

“Uniforms?”

“The Canteen has a very strict dress code.”

The Canteen, he went on to explain, was the nightclub sensation of the nouveau hip nation, a “private” pleasure facility with an exclusivity that hardened Manhattan smarties had not yet fully decoded. Housed in an enormous structure occupying half a block on lower Tenth Avenue (it had been in previous incarnations a furniture warehouse, a television studio, and — briefly — a performance space for the Theatre of Last Resort, a dramaturgic cabal following the teachings of the structural anthropologist Claude Fantomas), the Canteen had with great expense and lavish attention to detail been made into a flyboy’s furlough wet dream of flash and high times circa 1944. In order to have any chance of being admitted, it was necessary to be decked out in scrupulously authentic period costume. Tennis champs and teevee luminaries with their own line of hair-care products had been turned away for reasons of unsuitable clothing. The management discouraged the patronage of celebs anyway. The Canteen was a place to get away from all that, where status licked the boots of style; no amount of juice, no carefully accrued influences and interfaces of the social powerplant could prevail if one was not “aw-reet” and in the swing with the Swing.

“Marvelous,” Tildy grumbled. “I came a thousand miles to play dress-ups.”

“Hey, you’re welcome to sit around the hotel all night doing crossword puzzles.”

The thrift shop aisles were jammed with women on safari for bargains — not that there were any bargains to be had. The shop’s volunteer staff, young debs unable to land a situation on the museum/gallery circuit and marking time until that photographic expedition to Ecuador could be finalized (“Daddy knows someone at National Geographic ”), certainly knew the value of things: three-figure price tags on art deco cocktail sets; dinner gowns with designer labels intact at twice the cost of Orchard Street knockoffs; even crayon-defaced editions of Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins were a dollar and up. But money spent to good effect, when you were helping to defuse the population bomb.