532
PARTISAN REVIEW
ists on her walls) pimps and pushers (those who had proved the
most talented of her childhood companions), musicians, a labor leader
(yes, there was one) and a banker. It had taken her months but a
lawyer who was a friend had induced him to come, and Cam found
enough in common to draw him back-her ideas about the per–
sonality of those investors with some credit rating whom an exurban
bank, proud of its personal touch, might allow to kite a check for
twenty-four hours so intrigued the banker as
aI
merger of psychological
nuance with fiduciary practice that he returned once or twice. Yes,
there was a horde: movie stars who left early, promoters, producers,
occasional professional athletes, surgeons, psychiatrists, councillors,
pot-heads (discreet to be sure), hoodlums (who could contain them–
selves), college girls, poetesses . . . the apocryphal story was of her
middle-aged Irish elevator operator who became so used to her odd
visitors that even a plump Episcopalian prep school instructor, wear–
ing his go-to-New-York homburg, hand in hand with a sloe-eyed
Arab boy who looked like an untamed pet on the prowl from the
Casbah gave the elevator man no pause: only a brace of bull-dykers
ever did him in-a famous actress in a sailor's peajacket and a gar–
gantuan blonde in pink mink went up together sipping away from
long platinum cigarette holders at sticks of Turkish hashish until the
smell of sugar and death made the elevator operator so high with
the smoke of contact that he was as stone on the return down, and
for the first time in thirteen years he dug into the hanging of
his
cage and floated it on loverly skill to the lobby with the awesome an–
ticipatory joy of the first lunar explorer to kiss the tail of his rocket
onto the acned skin of the moon.
So, there it was, the home of Cara Beauchamp, a ten-room co–
operative apartment and circus overlooking the East River of the
Fifties, with a collection of guests almost every Saturday night whose
intellectual and physical connections were accelerating Time, and
weighting the charge of future acceleration. No wonder that Cara
gave it up for a month each year and disappeared into Provincetown
where she had nothing more than a few close friends and entertainers
to visit out the nights in Marion Faye'S private church. Yes, she
needed her
schule
as she called it, and she liked the surf-soothing
hurdy-gurdy of this fishing town so poorly considered for even her
social purposes that hardly anyone she knew was found there.
