The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  “Now, that was love,” says George, “and there has never been anything like it. I don’t know what happens to it. Unless it’s Monday. Monday sort of happens to it in New York.”

  Chapter 19

  The Woman Who Has Everything

  IT IS A very odd, nice, fey thing. Helene can sit over here with her nylon shanks sunk in the sofa, the downy billows, and watch Jamie over there on one knee, with his back turned, fooling with a paw-foot chair. It’s only Jamie, an interior decorator. But all right! he has a beautiful small of the back. Helene has an urge to pick him up by the waist like a … vase. This is a marvelous apartment, on 57th Street practically on Sutton Place. In fact, Helene—well, Helene is a girl who, except for a husband, has everything.

  Helene was divorced three years ago. Even so! she is only twenty-five. She went to Smith. She has money, both a great deal of alimony and her own trust fund. She is beautiful. Her face—sort of a hood of thick black hair cut Sassoon fashion with two huge eyes opened within like … morning glories—her face is seen in Vogue, Town & Country, practically all the New York newspapers, modeling fashions, but with her name always in the caption, which is known as “social” modeling. She is trim, strong, lithe, she exercises. She has only one child. Only one child—she doesn’t even mean to think that way, Kurt Jr. is three years old and beautiful.

  Helene also has Jamie, who is her interior decorator. Here is Jamie down on one knee adjusting the detachable ebony ball under the paw-foot of one of his own chairs. He designed it. Everyone sees Jamie’s furniture. Oh, did Jamie do your apartment? It is exotic but simple. You know? Black and white, a modern paw-foot, if you can imagine that, removable ebony balls—

  Oh, what the hell is going on? Suddenly she feels hopeless. There are at least ten girls in New York whom she knows who are just like her: divorced, and young; divorced, and beautiful; divorced, and quite well off, really; divorced, and invited to every party and every this and that that one cares to be invited to; divorced, and written about in the columns by Joe Dever and everyone; divorced, a woman who has everything and, like the other ten, whose names she can tick off just like that, because she knows their cases forward and backward, great American baronial names, some of them, and she, and all of them, are utterly … utterly, utterly unable to get another husband in New York.

  Of course she has tried! A great deal of good will has gone into it, hers and her friends’. The J———s invited her to dinner and set the whole thing up for no other reason than for her to meet their favorite among all the eligible young men of New York. He was beautiful, he was one of the youngest bank vice-presidents in New York, a bona-fide vice-president in this case, and a great Bermuda Racer. They talked about his strenuous life among the Wall Street studs. They talked about the things her friends had been pumping her conversation full of—Jasper Johns, nouvelle vague, the bogus esthetics of fashion photographers. They grimaced, mugged, smiled, picked over crab meat—and there was no “chemistry” about it all. And he took her back to East 57th Street and they stepped into an elevator with a lot of scrolly wood and a little elevator man with piping all over his uniform and the moment the door closed on them, there was practically a sound like steam in the brain that told them both, this is, yes, rather impossible; let me out.

  Two weeks later the D———s invited her to dinner and Mrs. D——— met her practically as she stepped off the elevator and told her very excitedly, very confidentially, “Helene, we’ve put you next to absolutely our favorite young man in New York”—who, of course, was Bermuda Racer. Everybody’s favorite. This time they just smiled, grimaced, mugged, turned the other way answering imaginary questions from the other side and picked over the melon prosciutto.

  Maddening! These so-called men in New York! After a while Bermuda Racer began to look good, in retrospect. One could forget “chemistry” in time. Helene’s liaisons kept falling into the same pattern; all these pampered, cautious, finicky, timid … vague, maddening men who wind their watches before they make love. Suddenly it would have almost been better not to be the woman who had everything. Then she could have married the stable boy, who, in New York, is usually an actor. Helene is in a … set whose single men are not boys. They are absorbed in careers. They don’t hang around the Limelight Café with nothing more on their minds than getting New York lovelies down onto the downy billows. Somehow they don’t need wives. They can find women when they need them, for decoration, for company, or for the downy billows, for whatever, for they are everywhere, in lavish, high-buffed plenitude.

  Very ironic! It is as if Helene can see herself and all the other divorced women-with-everything in New York this afternoon, at this very moment, frozen, congealed, this afternoon, every afternoon, in a little belt of territory that runs from east to west between 46th and 72nd Streets in Manhattan. They are all there with absolutely nothing to do but make themselves irresistibly attractive to the men of New York. They are in Mr. Kenneth’s, the hairdresser’s, on East 54th Street, in a room hung with cloth like a huge Paisley tent or something, and a somehow Oriental woman pads in and announces, “Now let us go to the shampoo room,” in the most hushed and reverent voice, as if to say, “We are doing something very creative here.” Yet coiffures, even four hours’ worth at Mr. Kenneth’s, begin to seem like merely the basic process for the Woman Who Has Everything. There is so much more that must be done today, so much more has been learned. The eternal search for better eyelashes! Off to Deirdre’s or some such place, on Madison Avenue—moth-cut eyelashes? square-cut eyelashes? mink eyelashes? really, mink eyelashes are a joke, too heavy, and one’s lids … sweat; pure sweet saline eyelid perspiration. Or off to somewhere for the perfect Patti-nail application, $25 for both hands, $2.50 a finger, false fingernails—but where? Saks? Bergdorf’s? Or is one to listen to some girl who comes back and says the only perfect Patti-nail place is the Beverly Hills Hotel. Or off to Kounovsky’s Gym for Exercise—one means, this is 1965 and one must face, now, the fact that chocolate base and chalk can only do so much for the skin; namely, nothing; cover it. The important thing is what happens to the skin, that purple light business at Don Lee’s Hair Specialist Studio, well, that is what it is about. And at Kounovsky’s Gym one goes into the cloak room and checks clothes labels for a while and, eventually, runs into some girl who has found a new place, saying, this is my last time here, I’ve found a place where you really have to take a shower afterwards. Still—Kounovsky’s. And Bene’s, breaking down the water globules in the skin—and here they are all out doing nothing every day but making themselves incomparably, esoterically, smashingly lovely—for men who don’t seem to look anyway. Incredible! Arrogant! impossible men of this city, career-clutched, selfish and drained.

  So Helene sits morosely in the downy billows watching Mr. Jamie adjust an ebony ball on a paw-foot chair. Jamie is her interior decorator, but even before that, he had become her Token Fag, three years ago, as soon as she was divorced. She needed him. A woman is divorced in New York and for a certain period she is radioactive or something. No man wants to go near. She has to cool off from all that psychic toxin of the divorce. Eventually, people begin asking her for dinner or whatever, but who is going to escort her? She is radioactive. The Token Fag will escort her. He is a token man, a counter to let the game go on and everything. She can walk in with him, into anybody’s coy-elegant, beveled-mirror great hall on East 73rd Street, and no one is going to start talking about her new liaison. There is no liaison except for a sort no one seems to understand. Jamie is comfortable, he is no threat. The old business is not going to start up again. This has nothing to do with sex. Sex! The sexual aggression was the only kind that didn’t really have that old business, the eternal antagonisms, clashes of ego, fights for “freedom” from marriage one day and for supremacy the next, the eternal piling the load on the scapegoat. Helene’s last scene with Kurt—Helene can tell one about that, all this improbable, ridiculous stuff in front of the movers. They had just been separated. This was lon
g before the afternoon plane ride to El Paso and the taxi ride across the line to Juárez and the old black Mexican judge who flipped, very interested, through a new and quite ornate—arty—deck of Tarot cards under his desk the whole time. They had just separated—they were separating this particular evening. One does separate. One stands out in the living room in the midst of incredible heaps of cartons and duffel bags, and Kurt stands there telling his movers what to pick up.

  “I don’t mean to be picayune, Helene, but it isn’t exactly picayune. You didn’t put the Simpson tureen out here,” and he starts fluttering his hand.

  “The Morgetsons gave that to—they’re friends of my parents.”

  “That isn’t even the point, Helene. This is something we agreed on.”

  “You know as well as I do—”

  Kurt makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger, the “O.K.” sign, and thrusts it toward Helene as if he is about to say, Right, and in that very moment he says:

  “Wrong!”

  Oh, for godsake. Sal Mineo, or whoever it was. Somebody told Kurt once that “Sal Mineo and his set” are always putting each other on with his O.K. sign—then saying, “Wrong!”—and Kurt was so impressed with the Sal Mineo humor of it. Just like right now, standing out amid the packing cartons, with a couple of fat movers … lounging, watching. Kurt has to stand there with his hands on his hips and his thatchy head soaking up perspiration, wearing a cable-stitch tennis sweater and Topsiders. His moving clothes. He has to wear this corny thing, a cable-knit tennis sweater, about $42, because he is going to pick up a couple of boxes and his precious hi-fi tubes or whatever it is. They do something to these tall ironsides at Hotchkiss or some place and they never get over it. Glowering in his $42 White Shoe physical exertion sweater—the old business.

  Kurt Jr. is out of bed, waddling into the living room and all he sees is Daddy, wonderful, thatchy Daddy. Children, to be honest, have no intuition, no insight.

  “These men don’t want to sit there and listen to you recite your parents’ friends,” says Kurt.

  But they do, Kurt. They are seated, as you say yourself. Placid, reedy fat rises up around their chins like mashed potatoes. They sit on the arms of Helene’s chairs and enjoy it, watching two wealthy young fools coming apart at the seams. Kurt Jr. apparently thinks everything Daddy says is so funny; he comes on, waddling in, chuckling, giggling, Daddy! The movers think Kurt Jr. is so funny—a Baby!—and they slosh around, chuckling in their jowls. Good spirits, and so obscene, all of it.

  Jamie was at least an end to the old business. Most of them, Helene, all these divorcées who have everything, soon move into a second stage. Old friends of theirs, of Helene and Kurt—you know? Helene and Kurt, the Young Couple? Helene and Kurt here, Helene and Kurt there—old friends of theirs, of Kurt’s, really, start taking Helene out. Fine, fat simple-minded waste of time. What do they want? It is not sex. It is nothing like that old Redbook warning to divorcées, that he, Mr. Not Quite Right, will say, She was married, so it is a safe bet she will play on the downy billows. In fact, practically nothing is sex madness with men in Helene’s set in New York. Would that the Lord God of Hotchkiss, St. Paul’s and Woodberry Forest would let them go mad as randy old goats—one wishes He would. Not for the sex but the madness. One longs to see them go berserk just once, sweating, puling, writhing, rolling the eyeballs around, bloating up the tongue like a black roast gizzard—anything but this … vague coolness, super-cool interest. Anyway, these old friends come around and their eyes breathe at her like gills out of the aquarium, such as that dear dappled terrier from Sullivan & Cromwell whom Kurt used to wangle invitations for, over and over. He did something on the Cotton Exchange. The Cotton Exchange! He came around with his gilly eyes breathing at her, wondering, beside himself with this strange delight of Kurt’s Wife being now available for him to speculate over and breathe his gilly look at. Sweet! One day Douglas, well, Douglas is another story, but one day Douglas invited everyone to a champagne picnic in Central Park for Memorial Day, all these bottles of champagne in Skotch Koolers, huge blue and yellow woven baskets full of salmon and smoked turkey and Southside Virginia ham sandwiches prepared by André Surmain of Lutéce. Kurt’s poor old dappled terrier friend from the Cotton Exchange arrived in a correct, “informal,” one understands, long-sleeved polo shirt from someplace, Chipp or something, with the creases popped up in straight lines and a sheen on it. Obviously he had gone out and bought the correct thing for this champagne picnic. Poor thing! But Helene kept on going out with him. Old Terrier never made a pass. Never! He always left at 1 A.M., or whenever, with a great, wet look of rice-pudding adoration. But he was easy, none of the old business.

  A terrible lesson! Soon Helene was identified with this placid Cotton Exchange lawyer, who still breathed unsaid longings at her through his gills. She didn’t care about that. The problem was with other men. In New York there are no Other Men. Men in New York have no … confidence, whatsoever. They see a girl with a man four or five times, and she is his. They will not move in. Happy ever after! Helene and Terrier! Stupid! New York men would not dream of trying to break up a romance or even a relationship. That would take confidence. It would take interest. Interest—my god, some kind of sustained interest is too much to ask.

  That is why it was so absolutely marvelous when Helene saw Porfirio Rubirosa again at C———’s. She hadn’t seen him for a year, but he immediately remembered and began pouring absolutely marvelous hot labial looks all over her from across the room and then came over, threading through the rubber jowls, and said:

  “Helene, how do you do it! Last year, the white lace. This year, the yellow—you are … wonderful, what is the expression? One hundred per cent wonderful!”

  And the crazy thing is, one—Helene—knows he means it because he doesn’t mean it. Is that too crazy? You are a woman, he is a man. He would break up this stupid Cotton Exchange Terrier universe just to have you. Well, he didn’t, but he would. Does one know what Helene means?

  WHY SHOULD HELENE have to end up in these ridiculous drunk evenings with Davenport? Davenport is not a serious person. Davenport practically enters with orange banners waving, announcing that he will never get married. He is like a tepezquintle boar who runs, rut-boar, all night, and if they put him in the pen, he dies, of pure childish pique. He stops breathing until the middle of his face turns blue. Dear Davenport! One morning—too much!—they overslept and Helene woke to Kurt’s Nanny rattling in through the drop lock and had to make Davenport get up, skulk around, get dressed and sneak out when Nanny was in the kitchen. But little Kurt, with his idiot grin, saw him, coming out of the room. Davenport was, of course, still mugging, pantomiming great stealth, tiptoeing and rubber-legging around, but Kurt Jr.—incredible! what do three-year-old children think about?—he cries out, “Daddy!” Davenport is slightly shocked himself, for once, but Helene has this horrible mixed agony. She realizes right away that what has really hit her is not the cry—Daddy!—but the fact that it might bring Nanny running to see Davenport sidewinding across the wall-to-wall like a trench-coat gigolo or something.

  No more Davenport! Short nights with Pierre. Pierre was a Frenchman who had come to the United States and grown wealthy from the mining industry in South America or some such thing. South America! he used to say. The slums of the United States! Helene used to rather like that. But Pierre used to wind his watch before he went to bed. A very beautiful watch. At parties, at dinner, anywhere, Pierre always grew suddenly … vague, switching off, floating away like a glider plane. He even grew vague in the downy billows. Now he is there, now he isn’t. Pierre may be French but now he is thoroughly New York. In New York a man does not have to devote himself to a woman, or think about her or even pay attention to her. He can … glide at will. It is a man’s town, because there are not fifty, not one hundred, not one thousand, beautiful, attractive, available women in New York, but thousands of these nubile wonders, honed, lacquered, buffed, polished—Good Lord, the spoiled, pa
mpered worthlessness of New York men in this situation. Helene can even see the process and understand it. Why should a talented, a wealthy, even a reasonably good-looking and congenial, cultivated man in New York even feel the need for marriage? Unlike Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or practically anywhere else in America, single men are not shut out of social life in New York. Just the opposite. They are terribly desirable. They are invited everywhere. A mature man’s social life inevitably flags a bit in New York after his marriage. A single man, if he has anything going for him, is not going to get lonely in New York. What does he need a wife for? What does a man need children for in New York? Well, Helene doesn’t mean to even think that. Of course, every man has a natural desire for a son, just as she has a natural desire for a son, she loves Kurt Jr., he is a beautiful boy.