by Jack Finney
I hadn’t told anyone, of course, and except for Jan no longer intended to. The moment I stepped out of the elevator into the fluorescent-lighted, electric-typewriter, air-conditioned busyness of Crown Zellerbach I knew I wasn’t going to try to convince anyone of what had happened last night in the dark of our old house. And at breakfast I didn’t tell Jan; it would take repeating, take talking over, and there wasn’t time. I’d tell her tonight, and—it was a hell of a story—I smiled at the thought, looking forward to it. And looking forward, it occurred to me, to seeing Jan. Remembering last night after the movie, I felt very warm and tender about Jan today, appreciating her good qualities, feeling fond of the bad ones.
My phone rang, and because I’d been thinking about her it was Jan; things work that way, and everyone knows it. After the hellos, she said, “Don’t forget the party with the Hursts tonight.”
“I know, I remembered. I’m sort of looking forward to it.”
“Me, too. It’s been a while since we’ve gone out and had some fun.”
I smiled and pulled out a lower drawer to put my feet on. “I don’t think it’s in to look forward to a cocktail party.”
“I know; especially a no-host fund raiser. Nickie, I called because I. Magnin’s is advertising a dress sale. It’s a real sale, and I do need a new party dress. Something simple. Plain black, I expect, that I’ll use forever, but—”
“Get it, then.”
“Well, I wasn’t sure we could really afford—”
“We can’t really afford food. So get the dress. I want to experience that glow of pride a man feels when his wife’s ass is pinched by every man at the party.”
“Fine, you can have first pinch. See you tonight.”
Walking home from the bus after work, looking out over the city as I climbed Buena Vista hill, I was fond of the world and of this moment, in which a boy of four or five squatting on a single roller skate came wobbling toward me unseeingly, concentrating on balance. I stepped aside, pleased with the boy and the evening ahead; I like parties of any kind, at least in anticipation.
On the porch I stopped for breath as usual, but only for a moment or so, and I climbed the inside stairs two at a time; I had to change clothes, then we had to drive across Golden Gate Bridge and on up into Marin County. At the top of the stairs I yelled, “I’m here!”
“Well, I’m in here!” Jan’s voice answered from the bathroom. She paused, then said, “I’m afraid to come out.”
“What’s that mean?” I said to the bathroom door as I passed it; I turned into our bedroom, loosening my tie.
“You’ll kill me.”
“Well, come on out and get it over with then. I’ll give you a choice of methods.” Unbuttoning my shirt, I stood watching the bathroom door just across the hall. It was slowly opening, into the bathroom, Jan out of sight behind it. It opened nearly all the way and she suddenly stepped around it and out into the hall to stand both smiling and frowning appealingly as I stared at her. I was astonished; her new dress was wild, the pattern a really dizzying whirl of color, the material dyed to look as though paint in primary colors had been flung onto it in handfuls, and it was shorter by inches than any she’d ever before owned. Actually, I realized, staring at it, the dress was cleverly done, the blobs of color artfully arranged and proportioned. But it was an eyeful, and I said, “What the hell?” I didn’t want her to think I disapproved of the party dress that, after all, she’d have to wear tonight, and I quickly added, “It looks great.” And it did, I realized then. “It really does,” I said, and she smiled at the sincerity in my voice. “I like it fine; legs like yours ought to be shown off.” For an incredible fraction of a second I caught myself comparing her legs with Marion Marsh’s, and pushed the idiotic thought away. “You really look marvelous; I may have to rescue you from sexual attack all evening long. Incidentally, if we had time—”
“We don’t.”
“Too bad. What happened to the plain black dress?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a mock wail, and walked on into the bedroom and stood looking down at her dress. “That’s what I went in to get, then I saw this, tried it on just for fun, and”—she looked up to smile and shrug—“I don’t know what got into me but I bought it. Do you really like it? You don’t at all.”
“Yeah, really.” I was pulling on a clean shirt. “But every other woman there will be invisible; they’ll lynch you. You feed Al?”
“Yes; he insisted.”
On the drive through the city toward the bridge, the top down, I told Jan what had happened last night, factually but including every detail, really trying to convey it. She listened, then we talked about it; she had questions, and I answered them. And she said she wished she’d been there. She believed me, I saw, in that she knew I wasn’t lying; that I thought what I’d told her was true. But whether it really had happened, whether it wasn’t an illusion . . . how can anyone else ever tell?
The town of Ross is old, by California standards, and it’s rich. It has enough people with enough money to give them enough power to keep it old. There are still streets too narrow for modern traffic, some of them only dirt lanes unchanged since horses drew buggies along them, and they are kept so. There are very few parking meters, not many street signs or even street lamps, a considerable absence of house numbers, and in the very heart of the town are acres of tree-covered land owned by the local Art and Garden Club that could very profitably be filled with apartment buildings and are not. Along some of the dirt lanes are enormous sprawling houses fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or more years old. They’re well preserved and kept painted; they’re spaced far apart and set well back from the roads behind high hedges or rows of trees on shrubbery- and tree-filled acreage; they and their surroundings look as they always have for decades past. I’d live in one of those houses if I could, and the party was in one of them, I was pleased to see.
It was covered with beautifully weather-grayed wood shingles, was two stories high but so large it seemed low, and lay far back from the road at the end of a long dirt driveway lined by trees. Cars were parked on both sides of the drive, and I added the Packard to one of the lines, and we walked on up the driveway toward the house. I could hear music from the house, very faint, and felt excited. I said, “What’s this party in aid of? As our British cousins have probably quit saying.”
“Some sort of day-care center. For preschool kids of working mothers. Interracial; Hazel’s on the committee.”
“Fine; means the drunker you get, the more you’re improving race relations. Which frees up the conscience considerably. Anything short of a roaring hangover and you’re a goddamned bigot.”
Approaching the wide wooden steps of a screen-enclosed old-fashioned porch that ran clear across the front of the house and around both sides, I could hear the music clearly now, piano cocktail music. We climbed the steps and walked around to one of the side porches—we could see a pair of big double doors standing open there—and began to hear the sustained conversational hum of a lot of people. Then we walked into an entrance hall paved with brick-red clay tiles and stood for a moment looking into the room into which the hall led, and I understood why the party was here.
It was an immense room, fifty or more feet in each horizontal direction, the ceiling two stories high and with skylights that could be opened by cog-and-chain apparatuses fastened to the walls. The room must have been built as a ballroom because a permanent raised platform stood directly across from the entrance we stood in. It was large enough to hold a small orchestra, though there was only a piano up there now, a grand piano in full view of the entire room played by a plump gray-haired man in a tuxedo jacket of gray cloth with a silver pattern. Eyes half closed, he sat swaying to his own slow, rippling music, holding a professional smile; just now he was tinkling out “The Way You Look To-night.” There were a hundred or more people in the room, standing in chattering smiling groups or moving slowly through the crowd or sitting along the walls on countless chairs and lar
ge old-fashioned chesterfields upholstered in faded blue or maroon velvet. Then we saw the Hursts, Hazel and Frank, making their way toward us, smiling, and we walked out into the big room to meet them.
We were introduced to a group of the Hursts’ friends and stood with them in a circle for a few minutes, and I watched the women storing complete details of Jan’s dress in the memory banks. One of the women told us about the day-care center till my eyes began glazing. Then two more couples, apparently knowing most of the others, joined the circle, and in the rush of greetings and jokes I touched Jan’s arm. “Let’s go hit the sauce for the working mothers.”
I’d seen the bar at one end of the room, several cloth-covered trestle tables pushed together end to end. Behind them, against the wall, a duplicate set of tables was the back bar. When we got there, three red-jacketed bartenders were serving six or eight people, and at one end of the bar a smiling, distinguished-looking gray-haired woman sat on a wooden folding chair, a roll of tickets and a black metal cashbox on the cloth before her. I paid for two tickets, each good, the lady told me in a cultured voice, “for any sort of drink from white wine to martini,” and I thanked her, hearing my own voice trying to sound cultured, too, then I turned to Jan to ask what she wanted.
I was puzzled by her expression: she stood staring at the back bar, her mouth hanging open slightly. The back tables were covered with bottles, a really lot of them, both opened and full. There was whiskey of every type and many brands; dozens of bottles of gin and vodka; there was wine and sherry; rows of Cokes, 7-Up, ginger ale, soda, and the like; on the floor under the tables stood stacked-up cases of still more liquor and mixes. It was an impressive display, but still—Once in a while out of excitement and exuberance Jan took it into her head, as shy people sometimes do, to clown at what I usually thought was an inappropriate moment. I thought this was one of them, and started to nudge her to cut it out, but it was too late. A bartender stood waiting, brows raised inquiringly, and Jan smiled brightly and said, “Wow! Would you look at all that hooch! Is it good stuff?”
“Come on now, Jan,” I muttered, “what do you want?”
“Well, just to start things rolling I’ll have a Bronx cocktail.”
The bartender frowned; a man down the bar was staring at us.
I muttered again. “I don’t think they serve fancy cocktails at a thing like this. Takes too much time.”
“Okay, we aim to please. I’ll have a gin buck.” Jan stared at the bartender, then shook her head in amazement. “You don’t know what that is? Where have you been! It’s just gin, ginger ale, and lime juice. Put in plenty of gin, and you can forget the lime; it’s the booze that counts!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said through my teeth, and turned to stare down the people near us. The bartender brought Jan’s drink, face almost expressionless, though he let me see a little sneer way back in his eyes. I said, “Bourbon and soda,” and put down my two tickets. I stood watching the bartender, who mixed my drink fast enough, and I took it, glad to turn away. Jan was halfway down the floor, making her way back to the Hursts. Then I saw her stop in the midst of a crowd and, throwing her head way back, toss down her drink like a thirsty longshoreman. She turned and walked back to me.
“Do it again, Big Boy,” she said, handing me her empty glass. “That’s real stuff; right off the boat!”
“Baby, you’re a laff-riot, believe me,” I said. “I know we haven’t been out much lately, but let’s try to get it out of our system, eh? Before we rejoin the Hursts and their friends? I’ll meet you there, and bring back your drink.” I made myself smile at her and turned back to the bar; goddamn, I’d looked forward to tonight!
There was a bar at each end of the room, I discovered. Walking back toward the Hursts once again, I saw Jan and Frank Hurst turn from the circle toward the other end of the room, then I saw the other bar. When I’d worked my way through the crowd, carefully carrying Jan’s full glass and my own drink, she and Frank were on their way back, Jan sipping from her new drink as she walked. She rejoined the circle, eyes sparkling, face flushed, finishing her drink, then handed me her empty glass, took the new one I’d brought, and drank off half of it. A couple of women were watching her, still eying her dress, and Jan looked at them insolently till they glanced away. She suddenly flicked a hip sideways and began snapping the fingers of her free hand. “This party’s dead on its feet,” she said. “Let’s get things moving!” She tossed off her drink and, without looking at me, held out her glass. I had to take it—I was holding three glasses now—and Jan turned from the group again.
I was as mad at Jan as I’ve ever been, I guess, and I made myself hang onto my smile and stand there, the two empty glasses down at my side inconspicuously, or so I hoped. I stood listening attentively to what one of the women was saying about the day-care center’s need for more room and equipment, refusing to turn and see where Jan was going; I knew she didn’t have any money.
The woman finished, someone replied, and I took a swallow or two from my glass, casually shifting my position a little as I did so to sneak a look after Jan. I was absolutely astounded: she was standing at the bar smiling and accepting a drink from a man, a complete stranger to her, I knew. He was bowing slightly, waggling a hand in response to her thanks. Jan raised her glass in toast to him, drank off a third of it, then turned into the crowd—not back toward our group as I’d thought for a moment, but angling off toward the other side of the room. For a few steps I could follow her dress, then it was lost in the crowd.
I didn’t know what to do. I just didn’t know. I couldn’t bring myself to embarrass either of us by obviously going into the crowd looking for her, though I wanted to. I made myself stand there, and finished my drink. Then I smiled at Hazel Hurst beside me and, gesturing with my own empty glass, said, “Can I bring you one, Hazel?” She drank very little, I knew, and when she said no, I smiled again, turned and walked toward the bar, slowly and casually, looking brightly around me, trying to suggest a man enjoying himself. I thought if I took my time about this, I might catch Jan returning to the bar and somehow get her the hell out of here.
Halfway to the bar I heard the piano abruptly stop in mid-tune during a medley of songs from musicals, heard a slight rise in the level of conversational hum, saw heads turning toward the platform. I turned, too, not knowing what I’d see, but the instant I did, it seemed to me that I’d known all my life. Up on the raised platform the pianist sat smiling politely, head bowed over the keys, listening to a woman whose head was ducked level with his as she spoke into his ear. The bulk of the piano stood between her and me, and her head was partly concealed by the pianist’s. I couldn’t actually see her, but I knew. Then, smiling broadly, Jan stood erect up there on the platform, her dress the most vivid object in the room, and as the pianist began what I knew must have been her request, she hopped up onto the piano top, legs swinging, and began to sing along with him, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” singing the words when she knew them, and “da-da, DA-da” when she didn’t.
She carried the tune well enough, her voice true though thin. And as I worked through the crowd toward her, the song—the pianist cutting it a little short—ended, and people immediately around the platform applauded, but the hands came together limply, lazily, the applause sardonic; someone mockingly called “Yay!” Jan had slid from piano to floor, her head ducking down beside the pianist’s again. He nodded, his smile rigid, and began playing “Sweet Sue” with a pronounced rapid beat.
Incredibly, Jan began to dance: knees together, feet and elbows flying, her dress a blaze of flying color. And she was good; she did it beautifully, feet flashing in perfect easy rhythm, fingers snapping, face lifted to ceiling, eyes half closed in ecstasy. It was her shoulders and arms that moved, and her legs, but from the knees down mostly. Except for the sway of her hips, her body moved very little, and she stayed in one spot. You could hear her feet shuffling, leather on wood, and it was a wild exciting dance, primitive and with a kind of innocent sexuality,
and when I’d pushed my way to the edge of the platform, all I could do was stand and stare up at Jan—angry, really furious, and at the same time with a ridiculous feeling of pride in this astonishing accomplishment.
With a flutter of notes and a chord, the pianist finished, and now most of the room applauded, this time genuinely, a dozen or more voices calling out “More!” and meaning it. Jan was bowing almost professionally; left, then right, slowly revolving to face all her audience. Turning, she saw me staring up at her, and she walked to the platform’s edge, directly before me. “Catch, Nick!” she said, revolving as she spoke to let herself fall backward off the platform into my arms, my three empty glasses exploding on the floor.
I wouldn’t let myself even think about the meaning of this, not now. My smile fixed, forever it seemed, I set Jan on her feet, slid an arm around her waist, and gripped her left wrist with my left hand. I took her right wrist in my other hand, and, keeping our hands low and out of sight, I led her—forced her, really—through the grinning still-applauding people around the platform, who stepped aside reluctantly to let us through. I’d seen a glass-paned door beside the bar at this end of the room that led onto one of the side porches and a short flight of steps to a lawn, and we moved toward it fast. We’d nearly reached it, walking along beside the bar toward it, when Jan stopped so suddenly her left wrist was yanked loose. I turned to face her, still holding the other arm, and she stuck her hand out at me, palm up. “Give me twenty dollars.”
“Outside,” I said softly, nodding eagerly, placating her. Come on outside and I’ll—”
“No.” She waggled her hand impatiently. “Here. And right now. Or I don’t move a step.”
People watching, I yanked out my wallet, found a twenty, and pushed it at her. Jan took it and—I had had to let go of her—she walked around the end of the bar past the staring gray-haired woman to the back bar. She picked up an unopened bottle of Gordon’s gin, turned and slapped the twenty down on the cloth before the woman, and—me following—walked on toward the exit smiling and blowing farewell kisses to the grinning, murmuring, incredulous room.