PULL DOWN VANITY!
(Continued from page 370)
they were obviously nearly the same age. "Don't you think he's an old
darling, Mr. Amsterdam?"
"He does
not,"
Fenton said emphatically, "and neither do you, you
old crow."
"Really!" Demby cried, quite shocked, but trying to pat his wave
into place nonchalantly.
"He's drunk, just drunk, you know," Miss Manfred assured him,
"isn't he, Mr. Amsterdam?"
I didn't trouble to answer, and she went on, reaching over to,
strike me a sharp blow just above the heart with two purple fingernails,
"But
you,
Mr. Amsterdam, we've been hearing about you! You're a
legend
on this campus, a real legend-the Errol Flynn of the Little
Magazines they call you-and all in five days, too. What do you
do
to all those girls? And you a father of eight children-or is it nine,
Mr. Amsterdam?"
"He's awful big, boy," Fenton had gone on, ignoring her-and
pretending to peer into the dark at Hank, "awful big! Why don't you
settle for a cold shower?" Impressed with his own wit, he began to
chuckle. "A nice cold shower!"
The odd part of it all was that up until that point, I had done
nothing to justify the myth of myself as a Don Juan-nothing at all
beyond my initial lie, and my submission to an admiration I had not
realized I was courting. Twice after our evenings of talk and beer, I
had walked home with one girl or another who had wanted to be
kissed by a poet, and I had kissed her, feeling an utter fool on that
campus full of couples each recapitulating that childish embrace. It
was as if I were reliving my youth, not the one, of course, that I had
actually lived at City College in the years of the Depression, but a youth
I might have had in another, a realer, a gentile America.
"He's a bouncer in the toughest joint in town, Milton. Maybe you
played basketball at City College, son-but he'll ..."
His voice trailed away incomprehensibly as Judith came toward
us shyly out of the knot of students. I had never until that moment
thought seriously of making her; her feeling for me had seemed too
public and abstract to end in a real embrace, the feeling of a small girl
for a movie actor or a handsome priest, an aspect of a legend. But as
her shoulder brushed mine, actual flesh against flesh, I could feel desire
mount in me, and for a moment I rested one hand gently on her ass.
