IN New York City, too, the shining new year of 1938 was being welcomed. The taxicabs were bumper to bumper in the wet streets, their horns swelling and roaring, as though they were all some newly invented species of tin-and-glass animal, penned in the dark stone and concrete. In the middle of the city, trapped in the glare of the advertising signs, like prisoners caught by the warden's floodlights in the moment of attempted flight, a million people, clamped together, rolled slowly and aimlessly, in pale tides, uptown and downtown. The electric sign that jittered nervously around the Times building announced to the merrymakers below that a storm had destroyed seven lives in the Mid-West, that Madrid had been shelled twelve times at the turn of the year, which, conveniently for the readers of the Times, came several hours earlier to Madrid than it did to the city of New York.
The celebrants themselves, pushing lava-like and inexorable through the paper slush underfoot, threw confetti at each other, laden with the million germs of the city's streets, blew horns to tell the world that they were happy and unafraid, shouted hoarse greetings with thin good-nature that would not last till morning. They had come from the fogs of England for this, the green mists of Ireland, the sandhills of Syria and Iraq, from the pogrom-haunted ghettoes of Poland and Russia, from the vineyards of Italy and the cod-banks off Norway, and from every other island, city and continent on the face of the earth. Later, they had come from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and East St. Louis and Texarkana, and from towns called Bimiji and Jaffrey and Spirit, and they all looked as though they had never had enough sun or enough sleep; they all looked as though their clothes had originally been bought for other people; they all looked as though they had been thrown into this cold, asphalt cage for someone else's holiday, not their own; they all looked as though deep in their bones they understood that winter would last for ever, and that, despite the horns and the laughter and the shuffling, religious promenade, they knew that 1938 would be worse than the year before it.
Michael Whitacre pushed his way through the crowds. He felt himself smiling mechanically and hypocritically at people as they jostled him. He was late, and he couldn't get a taxi, and he hadn't been able to avoid staying and having some drinks in one of the dressing-rooms. The hurried gulping had left his head buzzing and his stomach burning.
The theatre had been wild. There had been a noisy, uninterested audience and an understudy had filled in the grandmother's part because Patricia Ferry had shown up too drunk to go on, and Michael had had a trying night keeping everything going. He was the stage manager for Late Spring and it had a cast of thirty-seven, with three children who always got. colds, and five sets that had to be changed in twenty seconds. At the end of a night like this all he wanted to do was to go home and sleep. But there was this damned party over on 67th Street, and Laura was there. Anyway, nobody ever just went to sleep on New Year's Eve.
I must get a home in the country, he thought as he walked briskly, his shoes making a soft tapping on the cement, a little inexpensive place not far from the city, six, seven thousand, maybe, you could swing a loan, where I can get away for a few days at a time, where it's quiet and you can see all the stars at night and where you can go to sleep at eight o'clock when you feel like it. I must do it, he thought, I mustn't just think about it.
He got a glimpse of himself in a dimly lit shop window. He looked shadowy and unreal in the reflection, but, as usual, he was annoyed with what he saw. Self-consciously he straightened his shoulders. I must remember not to slouch, he thought, and I must lose fifteen pounds. I look like a fat grocer.
He refused a taxi that stopped next to him, as he crossed at a corner. Exercise, he thought, and no drinking for at least a month. That's what does it. The drinking. Beer, martinis, have another. And the way your head felt in the morning. You weren't good for anything until noon and by that time you were out to lunch and there you were with a glass in your hand again. This was the beginning of a new year, a wonderful time to go on the wagon. It would be a good test of character. Tonight, at the party. Unobtrusively. Just not drinking. And in the house in the country no liquor closet at all. He felt much better now, resolved and powerful, although his dress trousers still felt uncomfortably tight as he strode past the rich windows towards 67th Street.
When he came into the crowded room, it was just past twelve. People were singing and embracing and that girl who passed out at all the parties was doing it again in the corner. Whitacre saw his wife in the crowd kissing a little man who looked like Hollywood. Somebody put a drink in his hand and a tall girl spilled some potato salad on his shoulder and said, "Excellent salad." She brushed vaguely at his lapel with a long, exquisite hand with crimson nails an inch and a half in length. Katherine came over with enough bosom showing to power a frigate in a mild breeze and said, "Mike, darling." She kissed him behind the ear, and said, "What are you doing tonight?" Michael said, "My wife arrived yesterday from the Coast." And Katherine said, "Ooops. Sorry. Happy New Year."
Michael lifted his glass and drank half of its contents. It seemed to be Scotch into which someone had poured lemon soda. Tomorrow, he thought, will be time enough for the wagon. After all, he had had three already, so this night was lost anyhow. Michael waited until he saw his wife finish kissing the bald little man, who wore a swooping Russian cavalryman's moustache.
Michael made his way across the room and came up behind his wife. She was holding the little man's hand, and saying, "Don't tell anyone, Harry, but the script stinks."
"You know me, Laura," the bald man said. "Do I ever tell anyone?"
"Happy New Year, darling." Michael kissed Laura's cheek.
Laura turned round, still holding the bald man's hand. She smiled. Even with the din of celebration all around her, and the drunks and commotion, there was tenderness and melting, that lovely welcome that always surprised and shook Michael, no matter how many times he saw it. She put up her free arm and drew Michael closer to her to kiss him. There was a single, hesitating moment when his cheek was next to hers, before she kissed him, when he could sense her sniffing inquisitively. He felt himself grow stolid and sullen, even as they kissed. She always does it, he thought. New Year, old year, makes no difference.
"I doused myself, before leaving the theatre," he said, pulling away and standing straight, "with two bottles of Chanel Number 5."
He saw Laura's eyelids quiver a little, hurt. "Don't be mean to me," she said, "in 1938. Why're you so late?"
"I stopped and had a couple."
"With whom?" The suspicious, pinched look that always came over Laura's face when she questioned him corrupted its usual delicate, candid expression.
"Some of the boys," he said.
"That's all?" Her voice was light and playful, in the accepted tone in which you quizzed your husband in public in her circle.
"No," said Michael. "I forgot to tell you. There were six Polynesian dancing girls with walnuts in their navels, but we left them at the Stork."
"Isn't he funny?" Laura said to the bald man. "Isn't he terribly funny?"
"This is getting domestic," the bald man said. "This is when I leave. When it gets domestic." He waved his fingers at the Whitacres. "Love you, Laura, darling," he said, and burrowed into the crowd.
"I have a great idea," Laura said. "Let's not be mean to wives tonight."
Michael drained his drink, and put the glass down. "Who's the moustache?" he asked.
"Oh, Harry?"
"The one you were kissing."
"Harry. I've known him for years. He's always at parties." Laura touched her hair tenderly. "Here. On the Coast. I don't know what he does. Maybe he's an agent. He came over and said he thought I was enchanting in my last picture."
"Did he really say enchanting?"
"Uhuh."
"Is that how they talk in Hollywood these days?"
"I guess so." She was smiling at him, but her eyes flicked back and forth, looking over the room, as they always did everywhere but in their own home. "How did you think I was in my last picture?"
"Enchanting," Michael said. "Let's get a drink."
Laura stood up and took his arm and rubbed her cheek softly against his shoulder and said, "Glad I'm here?" and Michael grinned and said, "Enchanted." They both chuckled as they went towards the bar, side by side, through the mass of people in the centre of the room.
The bar was in the next room, under an abstract painting of what was probably a woman with three magenta breasts, seated on a parallelogram.
Wallace Arney was there, greying and puffy, holding a teacup in his hand. He was flanked by a squat, powerful man in a blue-serge suit who looked as though he had been out in the weather for ten winters in a row. There were two girls, with flat, pretty faces and models' bony, ungirdled hips, who were drinking whisky straight.
"Did he make a pass at you?" Michael heard one of the girls saying as he came up.
"No," the other girl said, shaking her sleek, blonde hair.
"Why not?" the first girl asked.
"At the moment," the blonde girl said, "he's a Yogi."
Both girls stared reflectively at their glasses, then drained them and walked off together, stately and graceful as two panthers in the jungle.
"Did you hear that?" Michael asked Laura.
"Yes." Laura was laughing.
Michael asked the man behind the bar for two Scotches and smiled at Arney, who was the author of Late Spring. Arney merely continued to stare directly ahead of him, saying nothing, from time to time lifting the teacup to his lips, in an elegant, shaky gesture.
"Out," said the man in the blue-serge suit. "Out on his feet. The referee ought to stop the bout to spare him further punishment."
Arney looked around him, grinning and furtive, and pushed his teacup and saucer towards the man behind the bar. "Please," he said, "more tea."
The bartender filled his cup with rye and Arney peered around him once more before accepting it. "Hello, Whitacre," he said. "Mrs Whitacre. You won't tell Felice, will you?"
"No, Wallace," Michael said. "I won't tell."
"Thank God," Arney said. "She won't let me have even a beer." His voice, hoarse and whisky-riddled, wavered in self-pity. "Not even a beer. Can you imagine that? That's why I carry a teacup. From a distance of three feet, who can tell the difference? After all," he said defiantly, sipping from the cup, "I'm a grown man. She wants me to write another play." Now he was aggrieved. "Just because she's the wife of my producer she feels she has a right to throw a glass right out of my hand. Humiliating. A man my age should not be humiliated like that." He turned vaguely to the man in the blue-serge suit. "Mr Parrish here drinks like a fish and nobody humiliates him. Everybody says, isn't it touching how Felice devotes herself to that drunken Wallace Arney? It doesn't touch me. Mr Parrish and I know why she does it. Don't we, Mr Parrish?"
"Sure, Pal," said the man in the blue suit.
"Economics. Like everything else." Arney waved his cup suddenly, splashing whisky on Michael's sleeve. "Mr Parrish is a Communist and he knows. The basis of all human action. Greed. Naked greed. If they didn't think they could get another play out of me, they wouldn't care if I lived in a distillery." Looking at Laura he said: "Your wife is very pretty. Very pretty indeed. I've heard her spoken of here tonight in glowing terms." He leered at Michael knowingly. "Glowing terms. She has several old friends among the assembled guests here tonight. Haven't you, Mrs Whitacre?"
"Yes," said Laura.
"Everybody has several old friends among the assembled guests," Arney said. "That's the way parties are these days. Modern society. A nest of snakes, hibernating for the winter, everybody wrapped around everybody else. Maybe that'll be the theme of my next play. Except I won't write it." He drank deeply. "Marvellous tea. Don't tell Felice." Michael took Laura's arm and started to leave. "Don't go, Whitacre," Arney said. "I know I'm boring you, but don't go. I want to talk to you. What do you want to talk about? Want to talk about Art?"
"Some other time," Michael said.
"I understand you're a very serious young man," Arney said doggedly. "Let's talk about Art. How did my play go tonight?"
"All right," said Michael.
"No," said Arney, "I won't talk about my play. I said Art and I know what you think of my play. Everybody in New York knows what you think about my play. You shoot your mouth off too goddamn much and if it was up to me I'd fire you. I am being friendly at the moment, but I'd fire you."
"Listen, Pal…" the man in the blue-serge suit began.
"You talk to him," Arney said to Parrish. "He's a Communist, too. That's why I'm not profound enough for him. All you have to do to be profound these days is pay fifteen cents a week for the New Masses." He put his arm around Parrish lovingly. "This is the kind of Communist I like, Whitacre," he said. "Mr Parrish, Mr Sunburned Parrish. He got sunburned in sunny Spain. He went to Spain and he got shot at in Madrid and he's going back to Spain and he's going to get killed there. Aren't you, Mr Parrish?"
"Sure, Pal," Parrish said.
"That's the kind of Communist I like," Arney said loudly.
"Mr Parrish is here to get some money and some volunteers to go back and get shot with him in sunny Spain. Instead of being so goddamn profound at these fairy parties in New York, Whitacre, why don't you go be profound in Spain with Mr Parrish?"
"If you don't keep quiet," Michael started to say, but a tall, white-haired woman with a regal, dark face swept between him and Arney and calmly and without a word knocked the teacup out of Arney's hand. It broke on the floor in a small, china tinkle. Arney looked at her angrily for a moment, then grinned sheepishly, ducking his head, looking shiftily at the floor.
"Hello, Felice," he said.
"Get away from the bar," Felice said.
"Just drinking a little tea," Arney said. He turned and shuffled off, fat and ageing, his grey hair lank and sweating against his large head.
"Mr Arney does not drink," Felice said to the bartender.
"Yes, Ma'am," said the bartender.
"Christ," said Felice to Michael, "I could kill him. He's driving me crazy. And fundamentally he's such a sweet man."
"A darling man," Michael said.
"Was he awful?" Felice asked anxiously.
"Darling," Michael said.
"Nobody'll invite him any place any more and everyone ducks him…" Felice said.
"I can't imagine why," said Michael.
"Even so," said Felice sadly, "it's awful for him. He sits in his room brooding, telling everyone who'll listen to him that he's a has-been. I thought this would be good for him and I could keep an eye on him." She shrugged, looking after Arney's rumpled, retreating figure. "Some men ought to have their hands cut off at the wrist when they reach for their first drink." She picked up her skirts in a courtly, old-fashioned gesture, and went off after the playwright in a rustle of taffeta.
"I think," Michael said, "I could stand a drink."
"Me, too," said Laura.
"Pal," said Mr Parrish.
They stood silently at the bar, watching the bartender fill their glasses.
"The abuse of alcohol," Mr Parrish said in a solemn, preacher-like voice, as he reached for his glass, "is the one thing that puts Man above the animal."
They all laughed and Michael raised his glass to Mr Parrish before he drank.
"To Madrid," Parrish said, in an offhand, everyday way, and Laura said, "To Madrid," in a hushed, breathy voice. Michael hesitated, feeling the old uneasiness, before he, too, said, "To Madrid."
They drank.
"When did you get back?" Michael asked. He felt uncomfortable, talking about it.
"Four days ago," Parrish said. He lifted the glass to his lips again. "You have very good liquor in this country," he said, grinning. He drank steadily, refilling his glass every five minutes, getting a little redder as time went by, but showing no other effects.
"When did you leave Spain?" Michael asked.
"Two weeks ago."
Two weeks ago, Michael thought, on the frozen roads, with the cold rifles and the makeshift uniforms and the planes overhead and the new graves. And now he's standing here in a blue suit like a truck-driver at his own wedding, rattling the ice cubes in his drink, with people talking about the last picture they made and what the critics said and what the doctor thought about the baby's habit of sleeping with his fists in his eyes, and a man with a guitar singing fake Southern ballads in the corner of the room in the heavy-carpeted, crowded, rich apartment eleven storeys up in the unmarked, secure building, with a view of the Park through the tall windows, and the magenta girl with three breasts over the bar. And in a little while he would go down to the docks on the river that you could see from the windows and get on a boat and start back. And there were no marks on him of what he had been through, no hints in the good-natured, clumsy way in which he behaved of what was ahead of him.
"… money is the important thing," Parrish was saying to Laura, "and political pressure. We can get plenty of guys who want to fight. But the British Government's impounded all the Loyalist gold in London, and Washington 's really helping Franco. We have to sneak our fellows in, and it takes bribing and passage money and stuff, like that. So one day we were in the line outside University City, and it was cold, sweet God, it would freeze the nipples off a whale's belly, and they came to me and they said, 'Parrish, me lad, you're just wasting ammunition here anyway, and we haven't seen you hit a Fascist yet. So we decided, you're an eloquent lying son-of-a-bitch, go back to the States and tell some big, juicy, heartbreaking stories about the heroes of the immortal International Brigade in the front line of the fight against the Fascists. And come back here with your pockets loaded.' So I get up at meetings and just let my imagination ramble, green and free. Before you know it, the people are dying with emotion and generosity, and what with the dough rolling in and all the girls, I think maybe I have found my true profession in the fight for liberty." He grinned, his brilliantly even false teeth shining happily in his face, and he pushed his empty glass towards the bartender. "Want to hear some bloody tales of the horrible war for freedom in tortured Spain?"
"No," said Michael, "not with that introduction."
"The truth," Parrish said, suddenly sober and unsmiling, "the truth is not for the likes of these." He swung round and surveyed the room. For the first time, Michael could sense, in the cold, harsh, measuring eyes, something of what Parrish had been through. "The men running, the young boys that came five thousand miles suddenly surprised that they are actually dying, there, right there, themselves, with a bullet in their own sweet bellies. The French, stinking up the border and accepting bribes to let men walk on bleeding feet through the Pyrenees in the middle of the winter. The crooks and fourflushers and smart operators everywhere. On the docks. In the offices. Right up in battalion and company, right up next to you on the front line. The nice boys who see their pals get it and suddenly say, 'I must have made a mistake. This is different from the way it looked at Dartmouth.'"
A little, plump, forty-year-old woman in a school-girlish pink dress came up to the bar and took Laura's arm. "Laura, darling," she said, "I've been looking for you. It's your turn."
"Oh," Laura said, turning to the blonde woman, "I'm sorry if I kept you waiting, but Mr Parrish was so interesting." Michael winced a little as Laura said "interesting". Mr Parrish merely smiled at both women with an even, impartial lust.
"I'll be back in a few minutes," Laura told Michael. "Cynthia's been reading fortunes for the women and she's going to do mine now."
"See," Parrish said loudly, "if there's a forty-year-old Irishman with false teeth in your trouble."
"I'll ask," Laura said, laughing, and went off arm in arm with the fortune-teller. Michael watched her as she walked through the room, in her straight-backed, delicately sensual way, and caught two other men watching her, too. One was Donald Wade, a tall, pleasant-looking man, and the other was a man called Talbot, and they were both what Laura described as "ex-beaux" of hers. They seemed constantly to be invited to the same parties as the Whitacres. The term ex-beau was one which Michael sometimes puzzled over uneasily. What it really meant, he was sure, was that Laura had had affairs with them, and wanted Michael to believe that she no longer had anything to do with them. He was suddenly annoyed at the whole situation, although at the moment, turning it over in his mind, there didn't seem to be very much to do about it.
"When are you going back?" Michael asked.
Parrish looked around him, his blunt, open face taking on a ludicrous expression of guile. "Hard to say, Pal," he whispered. "Not wise to say. The State Department, you know… Has its Fascist spies everywhere. As it is, I've forfeited my American citizenship, technically, by enlisting under the colours of a foreign power. Keep it to yourself, Pal, but I'd say a month, month and a half…"
"Are you going back alone?"
"Don't think so, Pal. Taking a nice little group of lads back with me." Parrish smiled benevolently. "The International Brigade is a wide-open, growing concern." Parrish glanced at Michael reflectively and Michael felt that the Irishman was measuring him, questioning in his own mind what Michael was doing there, in his fancy suit in this fancy apartment, why Michael wasn't at a machine-gun this night instead of a bar.
"You looking at me?" Michael asked.
"No, Pal." Parrish wiped his cheek.
"Do you take my money?" Michael asked harshly.
"I'll take money," Parrish grinned, "from the holy hand of Pope Pius himself."
Michael got out his wallet. He had just been paid, and he still had some money left over from his bonus. He put it all in Parish's hand. It amounted to seventy-five dollars.
"See you later," Michael said. "I'm going to circulate."
"Sure, Pal." Parrish nodded coolly at him. "Thanks for the dough."
"Stuff it, Pal," Michael said.
"Sure, Pal." Parrish turned back to his drink, his wide, square shoulders a blue-serge bulwark in the froth of bare shoulders and satin lapels around him.
Michael walked slowly across the room towards a group in the corner. Long before he got there, he could see Louise looking at him, smiling tentatively at him. Louise was what Laura probably would call an "old girl" of his, except that, really, they had never stopped. Louise was married by now, too, but somehow, from time to time, for shorter or longer periods, she and Michael continued as lovers. There was a moral judgment to be made there some day, Michael felt. But Louise was one of the prettiest girls in New York, small, dark and clever-looking, and she was warm and undemanding. In a way she was dearer to him than his wife. Sometimes, lying next to each other on winter afternoons in a borrowed apartment, Louise would sigh, staring up at the ceiling, and say, "Isn't this wonderful? I suppose some day we ought to give it up." But neither she nor Michael took it seriously.
She was standing now next to Donald Wade. For a second, Michael got an unpleasant vision of the complexity of life, but it vanished as he kissed her and said, "Happy New Year."
He shook hands gravely with Wade, wondering, as always, why men thought they had to be so cordial to their wives' ex-lovers.
"Hello," Louise said. "Haven't seen you in a long time. You look very nice in your pretty suit. Where's Mrs Whitacre?"
"Having her fortune told," Michael said. "The past isn't bad enough. She's got to have the future to worry about, too. Where's your husband?"
"I don't know." Louise waved vaguely and smiled at him in the serious private manner she reserved for him. "Around."
Wade bowed a little and moved off. Louise looked after him.
"Didn't he used to go with Laura?" she asked.
"Don't be a cat," Michael said.
"Just wanted to know."
"The room," Michael said, "is loaded with guys who used to go with Laura." He surveyed the guests with sudden dissatisfaction. Wade, Talbot, and now another one had come in, a lanky actor by the name of Moran who had been in one of Laura's pictures. Their names had been linked in a gossip column in Hollywood and Laura had called New York early one morning to reassure Michael that it had been an official studio party, etc. etc…
"The room," Louise said, looking at him obliquely, "is full of girls who used to go around with you. Or maybe 'used to' isn't exactly what I mean."
"Parties these days," Michael said, "are getting too crowded. I'm not coming to them any more. Isn't there some place you and I can go and sit and hold hands quietly?"
"We can try," Louise said, and took his arm and led him down the hallway through the groups of guests, towards the rear of the apartment. Louise opened a door and looked in. The room was dark and she motioned Michael to follow. They tiptoed in, closed the door carefully behind them and sank on to a small couch. After the bright lights in the other rooms, Michael couldn't see anything here for a moment. He closed his eyes luxuriously, feeling Louise snuggle close to him, lean over and softly kiss his cheek.
"Now," she said, "isn't that better?"
The rest of the evening was confused in Michael's mind. Later on he didn't remember whether he had made a date with Louise for Tuesday afternoon or not, or whether Laura had told him that the fortune-teller had predicted they were going to be divorced or not. But he remembered seeing Arney appear at the other end of the room, smiling a little, whisky dribbling down from his mouth on his chin. Arney, with his head slightly to one side, as though his neck was stiff, came walking, quite steadily, through the room, ignoring the other guests who were standing there, and came up next to Michael. He stood there, wavering for a moment, in front of the tall french window, then threw open the window and started to step out. His coat caught on a lamp. He stopped to disentangle it, and started out again. Michael watched him and knew that he should rush over and grab him. He felt himself starting to move sluggishly, his arms and legs dream-like and light, although he knew that if he didn't move faster the playwright would be through the window and falling eleven storeys before he could reach him.
Michael heard the quick scuff of shoes behind him. A man leaped past him and took the playwright in his arms. The two figures teetered dangerously on the edge, with the reflection of the night lights of New York a heavy red neon glow on the clouds outside. The window was slammed shut by someone else and they were safe. Then Michael saw that it was Parrish, who had been half-way across the room at the bar, who had come past him to save the playwright.
Laura was in Michael's arms, hiding her eyes, weeping. He was annoyed at her for being so useless and so demanding at a moment like that, and he was glad he could be annoyed at her because it kept him from thinking about how he had failed, although he knew he wouldn't be able to avoid thinking about it later. He wanted to go home, but Laura said she was hungry, and somehow they were in a crowd of people and somebody had a car and everybody sat on everybody else's lap and he was relieved when they drew up to the big, garish restaurant on Madison Avenue and he could get out of the crowded car.
They sat down in a shrill, orange room with paintings of Indians for some reason all over the walls, and inexperienced waiters, hastily pressed into emergency service, stumbling erratically among the loud, still-celebrating diners. Michael felt drunk, his eyelids drooping with wooden insistence over his eyes. He didn't talk because he felt himself stuttering when he tried. He stared around him, his mouth curled in what he thought was lordly scorn for the world around him. Louise was at the table, he suddenly noticed, with her husband. And Wade, he noticed, sitting next to Louise, holding her hand. Michael's head began to clear and ache at the same time. He ordered a hamburger and a bottle of beer.
This is disgraceful, he thought heavily, disgraceful. Ex-girls, ex-beaux, ex-nothing. Was it Tuesday afternoon he was to meet Louise, or Wednesday? And what afternoon was Wade to meet Laura? A nest of snakes hibernating for the winter, Arney had said. He was a silly, broken man, Arney, but he wasn't wrong there. There was no honour to this life, no form… Martinis, beer, brandy, Scotch, have another, and everything disappeared in a blur of alcohol – decency, fidelity, courage, decision. Parrish had to be the one to jump across the room. Automatically. Danger, therefore jump. Michael had been right there, next to the window, and he had hardly moved, a small indecisive shuffling – no more. There he'd stood, too fat, too much liquor, too many attachments, a wife who was practically a stranger, darting in from Hollywood for a week at a time, full of that talk, doing God knows what with how many other men on those balmy, orange-scented, California evenings, while he frittered away the years of his youth, drifting with the easy tide of the theatre, making a little money, being content, never making the bold move… He was thirty years old and this was 1938. Unless he wanted to be driven to the same window as Arney, he had better take hold.
He got up and mumbled, "Excuse me," and started through the crowded restaurant towards the men's room. Take hold, he said to himself, take hold. Divorce Laura, live a rigorous, ascetic life, live as he had when he was twenty, just ten years ago, when things were clear and honourable, and when you faced a new year, you weren't sick with yourself for the one just passed.
He went down the steps to the men's room. It would start right here. He'd soak his head with ice-cold water for ten minutes. The pale sweat would be washed off, the flush would die from his cheeks, his hair would be cool and in order on his head, he would look out across the new year with clearer eyes… He opened the door to the men's room, and went to the washbowls and looked at himself with loathing in the mirror, at the slack face, the conniving eyes, the weak, indecisive mouth. He remembered how he had looked at twenty. Tough, thin, alive, uncompromising… That face was still there, he felt, buried beneath the unpleasant face reflected in the mirror. He would quarry his old face out from the unsightly outcroppings of the years between.
He ducked his head and splashed the icy water on his eyelids and cheeks. He dried himself, his skin tingling pleasantly. Refreshed, he walked soberly up the steps to rejoin the others at the big table in the centre of the noisy room.