84
PARTISAN REVIEW
"O.K.,"
said Scotty,
"O.K.,
you saw the dead horse in the bath–
tub first.
O.K.
Who are your friends?"
"Just look," said Mr. Ennis. "Just look at them there."
"Jesus," said Scotty, looking down at the three models in the
chill wavering undersea light, offering their long, lovely bodies to
the camera's eye," "Jesus Christ. What are they selling now?"
"Girls," said Mr. Ennis.
"All right," said Scotty, disgustedly, "bleed. But what the hell
are we, the Mayo brothers? Can you tap? Can you imitate three
Hawaiians playing the guitar? Would yOll rather be keeping Bill
Craig out of jail for not curbing himself? Would you rather be up
at Columbia, lecturing not on art, God forbid, but on metallurgy in
the time of Donne? Did I ever tell you how Lippy got a job buying
gold from the housewives of Brooklyn?
"He was broken up badly when his Nola gurgled and sank, and,
brother, there was a loss to humanity. I love the human face and I
love the human body and I do not believe that I have ever seen a
more lovesome thing than Nola Krinsky, not since she drowned in
eight feet of water at Coney Island these eleven years past. She
would have made these cookies," he said, pointing down to the
terrace, "look like mannequins in Macy's window because she
moved as if she had the bones of a bird, with no more thought of how
you saw her, and she had the long, narrow waist and the tangerine
tits and the golden hair framing a little face with ivory curves and
wide green eyes that no one has seen since Aphrodite came laughing
out of the foam of the sea. And Lippy saw her there at the Legion
dance, chewing gum with her girl friends in a corner, shy because
she w.as only fourteen and felt that her job was silly. Lippy took
her out on the floor without saying a word and did the big apple
until Auld Lang Syne when he took her back to her mother who'd
been sitting on the stoop of a brownstone in Williamsburg with a
watch in her hand, wondering if it was going to be all right, since
ten. But Lippy figured let
his
mother worry, and the next time he was
off duty at the beach he went out to the Fair, past those fantastical
statues, whipped cream bronzed over, and came to the Dream of
Venus where sure enough he found Nola Krinsky floating in a
tank of water surrounded by rubber cows and things and wearing
nothing but a G-string so the world could admire what God had
wrought. When Nola came out the side door at two that morning,
