so people could admire, could dig. Why not? Accidental art had great vogue that year.
Winsome wasn't there when the party began, and didn't show up at all that night. Nor any night after that. He'd had another fight with Mafia in the afternoon, over playing tapes of McClintic Sphere's group in the parlor while she was trying to create in the bedroom.
'If you ever tried to create,' she yelled, 'instead of live off what other people create, you'd understand.'
'Who creates,' Winsome said. 'Your editor, publisher? Without them, girl, you would be nowhere.'
'Anywhere you are, old sweet, is nowhere.' Winsome gave it up and left her to scream at Fang. He had to step over three sleeping bodies on the way out. Which one was Pig Bodine? They were all covered by blankets. Like the old pea-and-nutshell dodge. Did it make any difference? She'd have company.
He headed downtown and after a while had wandered by the V-Note. Inside were stacked tables and the bartender watching a ball game on TV. Two fat Siamese kittens played on the piano, one outside chasing up and down the keyboard, one inside, clawing at the strings. It didn't sound like much.
'Roon.'
'Man, I need a change of luck, no racial slur intended.'
'Get a divorce.' McClintic appeared in a foul mood. 'Roon, let's go to Lenox. I can't last the weekend. Don't tell me any woman trouble. I got enough for both of us.'
'Why not. Out to the boondocks. Green hills. Well people.'
'Come on. There is a little girl I have to get out of this town before she flips from the heat. Or whatever it is.'
It took them a while. They drank beer till sunset and then headed up to Winsome's where they swapped the Triumph for a black Buick. 'It looks like a staff car for the Mafia,' said McClintic. 'Whoops.'
'Ha, ha,' replied Winsome. They continued uptown along the nighttime Hudson, veering finally right into Harlem. And there began working their way in to Matilda Winthrop's, bar by bar.
Not long after, they were arguing like undergraduates over who was the most juiced, gathering hostile stares which had less to do with color than with an inherent quality of conservatism which neighborhood bars possess, and bars where how much you can drink is a test of manhood do not.
They arrived at Matilda's well past midnight. The old lady, hearing Winsome's rebel accent, talked only to McClintic. Ruby came downstairs and McClintic introduced them.
Crash, shrieks, deep-chested laughter from topside. Matilda ran out of the room screaming.
'Sylvia, Ruby's friend, is busy tonight,' McClintic said.
Winsome was charming. 'You young folks just take it easy,' he said. 'Old Uncle Roony will drive you anywhere you want, won't look in the rear view mirror, won't be anything but the kindly old chauffeur he is.'
Which cheered McClintic up. There being a certain strained politeness in the way Ruby held his arm. Winsome could see how McClintic was daft to get out in the country.
More noise from upstairs, louder this time. 'McClintic,' Matilda yelled.
'I must go play bouncer,' he told Roony. 'Back in five.'
Which left only Roony and Ruby in the parlor.
'I know a girl I can take along,' said he, 'I suppose, her name is Rachel Owlglass, who lives on 112th.'
Ruby fiddled with the catches on her overnight bag. 'Your wife wouldn't like that too much. Why don't McClintic and I just go up in the Triumph. You shouldn't go to that trouble.'
'My wife,' angry all at once, 'is a fucking Fascist, I think you should know that.'
'But if you brought along -'
'All I want to do is go now somewhere out of town, away from New York, away to where things you expect to happen do happen. Didn't they ever use to? You're still young enough. It's still that way for kids, isn't it?'
'I'm not that young,' she whispered. 'Please Roony, be easy.'
'Girl, if it isn't Lenox it will be someplace. Further east, Walden Pond, ha ha. No. No, that's public beach now where slobs from Boston who'd be at Revere Beach except for too many other slobs like themselves already there crowding them out, these slobs sit on the rocks around Walden Pond belching, drinking beer they've cleverly smuggled in past the guards, checking the young stuff, hating their wives, their evil-smelling kids who urinate in the water on the sly . . . Where? Where in Massachusetts. Where in the country.'
'Stay home.'
'No. If only to see how bad Lenox is.'
'Baby, baby,' she sang soft, absent: 'Have you heard,/ Did you know/ There ain't no dope in Lenox.'
'How did you do it.'
'Burnt cork, she told him. 'Like a minstrel show.'
'No,' he started across the room away from her. 'You didn't use anything. Didn't have to. No makeup. Mafia, you know, thinks you're German. I thought you were Puerto Rican before Rachel told me. Is that what you are, something we can look at and see whatever we want? Protective coloration?'
'I have read books,' said Paola, 'and listen, Roony, nobody knows what a Maltese is. The Maltese think they're a pure race
