Russell in His Girl Friday ; and, of course, Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not , where Bacall delivers her famous zinger: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
“The America the women and men in those black-and-white movies staked out between them seems so different from the here and now,” she said, nostalgic for a time and country she never lived in.
“Different how?” he asked.
“Well, for starters, they meant something very different by adult entertainment. Movies today star cartoons. The culture’s been totally infantilized.”
Outside the bar, the thunderstorm that had made catching a cab impossible continued to rumble. Neither of them had an umbrella. His first sight of her face had been through the spattered glass panels of the revolving door she’d entered just before he did—both of them ducking out of the downpour into the hotel bar.
The bartender wore livery—white jacket, maroon bow tie. Behind the mahogany bar, a two-story slab of cobalt mirror reflected bolts of spring lightning. Three empty barstools away, her reflection sat sipping a flute of champagne. Instead of a beer, he ordered a martini, not a drink he ever drank alone, and between flashes of lightning sneaked glances at her until their eyes met in the mirror. She seemed about to smile before glancing down at the glass she was raising to her lips. It gave him the nerve to try starting a conversation.
Excuse me , he might say, I couldn’t help noticing that you celebrate rain, too. That had the advantage of being true—he’d always loved the smell of rain—but as an ice-breaker, true or not, it sounded fake and nearly as precious as it would be to recite what he recalled from a poem about rain:
It’s raining women’s voices as if they’d died even in memory,
and it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life …
He didn’t want the rain to let up.
What if he turned and said: I was just sitting here thinking how I’d be willing to bet that in every life there must be at least one instance when fate came disguised as weather.
“No umbrella, either?” he asked her. “I wonder if that makes us optimists?”
“Actually, I left mine on the train coming in,” she said. “The hotel loans them out but I didn’t think to take one. I’m not sure what that makes me. Distracted, maybe.”
“The train from where?” he asked, rather than “Distracted by what?”
By last call they’d returned to the subject of umbrellas. She’d begun to touch him lightly, reflexively, as one might to make a point, while recounting the story of how, on her ninth birthday, when she asked her mother for a clear plastic umbrella so that she could watch the raindrops fall, her mother told her, “Clair, dear, you don’t pay enough attention to where you’re going as is, let alone without staring up into the clouds.”
They were tipsy and laughing as they left the bar, not through the revolving door, but by a side exit that opened onto the hotel lobby.
And later in her room, maybe what she had actually asked was “Do you always leave your watch on?” That was a completely different kind of question—not banter. That was a question about history.
The watch was from the thirties, with a Deco rose-gold face and a genuine alligator band complete with a tiny rose-gold buckle. Despite her nostalgia for that era, it obviously had not occurred to her that such a watch could have played a supporting role in one of those movies she loved: Cary Grant might have worn it to check if Katharine Hepburn was running predictably late. It was the kind of vintage watch that people assume must have a family history, otherwise why would one go through the trouble of winding it each morning? He’d been asked more than once if the watch had a sentimental value—if it had been passed down to him from his father or maybe his grandfather. When she asked if he was leaving it on, he
“The America the women and men in those black-and-white movies staked out between them seems so different from the here and now,” she said, nostalgic for a time and country she never lived in.
“Different how?” he asked.
“Well, for starters, they meant something very different by adult entertainment. Movies today star cartoons. The culture’s been totally infantilized.”
Outside the bar, the thunderstorm that had made catching a cab impossible continued to rumble. Neither of them had an umbrella. His first sight of her face had been through the spattered glass panels of the revolving door she’d entered just before he did—both of them ducking out of the downpour into the hotel bar.
The bartender wore livery—white jacket, maroon bow tie. Behind the mahogany bar, a two-story slab of cobalt mirror reflected bolts of spring lightning. Three empty barstools away, her reflection sat sipping a flute of champagne. Instead of a beer, he ordered a martini, not a drink he ever drank alone, and between flashes of lightning sneaked glances at her until their eyes met in the mirror. She seemed about to smile before glancing down at the glass she was raising to her lips. It gave him the nerve to try starting a conversation.
Excuse me , he might say, I couldn’t help noticing that you celebrate rain, too. That had the advantage of being true—he’d always loved the smell of rain—but as an ice-breaker, true or not, it sounded fake and nearly as precious as it would be to recite what he recalled from a poem about rain:
It’s raining women’s voices as if they’d died even in memory,
and it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life …
He didn’t want the rain to let up.
What if he turned and said: I was just sitting here thinking how I’d be willing to bet that in every life there must be at least one instance when fate came disguised as weather.
“No umbrella, either?” he asked her. “I wonder if that makes us optimists?”
“Actually, I left mine on the train coming in,” she said. “The hotel loans them out but I didn’t think to take one. I’m not sure what that makes me. Distracted, maybe.”
“The train from where?” he asked, rather than “Distracted by what?”
By last call they’d returned to the subject of umbrellas. She’d begun to touch him lightly, reflexively, as one might to make a point, while recounting the story of how, on her ninth birthday, when she asked her mother for a clear plastic umbrella so that she could watch the raindrops fall, her mother told her, “Clair, dear, you don’t pay enough attention to where you’re going as is, let alone without staring up into the clouds.”
They were tipsy and laughing as they left the bar, not through the revolving door, but by a side exit that opened onto the hotel lobby.
And later in her room, maybe what she had actually asked was “Do you always leave your watch on?” That was a completely different kind of question—not banter. That was a question about history.
The watch was from the thirties, with a Deco rose-gold face and a genuine alligator band complete with a tiny rose-gold buckle. Despite her nostalgia for that era, it obviously had not occurred to her that such a watch could have played a supporting role in one of those movies she loved: Cary Grant might have worn it to check if Katharine Hepburn was running predictably late. It was the kind of vintage watch that people assume must have a family history, otherwise why would one go through the trouble of winding it each morning? He’d been asked more than once if the watch had a sentimental value—if it had been passed down to him from his father or maybe his grandfather. When she asked if he was leaving it on, he
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