PALE VIRGINS SHROUDED IN SNOW
85
she was guarded by four guys from the show, one on each side and
one fore and one aft, as if they still had hopes and figured that a
girl who floats around like that is going to meet up with some pretty
tough propositioning as soon as she steps onto dry land, but the
minute they saw the way she looked at Lippy and the way Lippy
looked,
the four of them blew. She never went home again, and
she never went back to the show. That was for Lippy. I've never
doped it out to this day how Lippy squared it with her mother or
with the cops, but that was in another country. Possibly they do
these things better in Williamsburg. Anyway, she was Lippy's girl
for two years and then that was that, and Lippy, who had lost all
his enjoyments save an occasional bounce and the bottle, fled from
them who onetime did him seek and had to look for an inland
occupation. He went into a place that said "Employment Agency"
two flights up, but Lippy in his trance walked three, right into this
gold-buying outfit 1 told you about, and the next thing he knew he
was establishing an all-time record bringing 'em rings and gold
teeth, until a year later he joined the Marines. What happened to
him
since 1 don't know, because 1 lost touch with Lippy and the old
stamping ground, but some day I'll bunk into him some place and
he'll
ask
me for a light.
"I think that even the great Charles Saunders Santiago Peirce
got his doctrine of Tychistic Agapism, or love and chance, right out
of the bottle, and the crystal ball clouds over when you ask it, please,
how Lippy came to be buying gold or you to sit here staring or
those girls down there to be offering their tender little lettuces to the
cold March air."
Mr. Ennis looked away from Scotty as soon as he stopped, and
Scotty, glancing down at the models again, thought rather dejectedly
that you might as well talk to the wall as try to get a rise out of Ennis,
though perhaps it was mostly because his sad stories turned out to be
funny, and the funny ones sad.
The models were still stretched out in the beach chairs, shivering
between pictures, then, when the photographer was ready to shoot,
holding still in their lazy poses and producing their wide, white smiles.
The gray, fleeing clouds, grown thicker now, moved slowly across the
face of the sun and for a few minutes no sunlight at all fell onto
the terrace. The models got up, stiff-legged, to fetch their coats and
lying down on the beach chairs again held the coats over themselves
