Virginia—white skin assumable. All his life has been large in gesture, free with money and desperately small in the drama he’s hoped from all that output. Only the money has fruited, cleverly on and on. Since the age of nineteen he’s backed plays, movies and now records; in his past with women, in and among the many actresses, painters and writers, are a dead rockstar, a live trapeze-artist, a female toreador and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography. For two early years he himself had been an actor, doing so badly that the doomedly shrewder side of himself had caught up with him. Technically he’s a “producer,” a name he loathes. When challenged however, he stammers it. What he yearns toward, and rains presents on, are those persons—to him enchanted in present heaven—who spin the web of art from their very selves. Since he himself is as male as any drake, such men as encountered he merely options or supports with monthly remittances, meanwhile participating in their stagings on film, disc or in print—and there he has excellent taste. The women he penetrates, probing for the living-doll artiste as for the marble tip of some sphinxly clitoris.
And with the women—by what she can gather from the arsenal of photos at his flat, his artistic taste has been poor, either bedazzled by their looks, or misguided by other ambience. Apparently he has a penchant for the second-rate—particularly for those who can theatricalize it. Probably the prizewinner’s been his best so far, artistically, but from her photo, signed in heavy flourish, not nearly stylish enough for the crowd of high-living artists he hangs out with. Real ones, here. Who never eat a meal at home. During her own short tenure, she’s met them in those haunts that are Day’s also; playwrights at Maude’s and Elaine’s, actors at Sardi’s or Pearl’s, or at the Blue Ribbon, just before it closed. And the Lion’s Head once, for a trio of Dixieland Jazzers in their eighties—almost as late-in-the-day for her to be there, she thinks, as for them. Lunch, for her, is the most powerful draw erotically. To stroll at noon toward a lover, or with him after, with all its side-implications of secrecy, luxe and time-stop, is European—and a flight. Lunch is also where Day meets the people he’s really going to do something with, and where she feels strangely comfortable, almost as if she’s not always going to be an amateur. It piques him to have one of his playwrights find out that she reads, and to hear a casting-director say “Why this girl has wit!”—although she’s often innocent of her own humor and can never repeat or reuse it knowingly.
Day knows about her poems—since he’ll venerate them without reading them. Also—so delicately entrepreneur is he even at lovemaking’s height—he’s found out about the journal she once kept, and intends to keep again. Though in an access of shame, she bars him from ever mentioning it.
“God, I never saw a girl blush from the hips before. You should be proud.” And maybe she is, of the blush.
That evening she has a ride with him in a scenarist’s Rolls. And at Michael’s Pub, sits at the left ear—the deaf one—of an earl who plays the harmonica. And for the first time, feeling guilt all over, like a bodystocking woven of an allergy-producing polyester, she stays the night. After that, she does this often, without alibi. Spending the morning-after hunting for marvels of dress, tarty ones, which she hangs in Day’s closet on East 79th Street, and never takes home. Though she expects he must have other women, she never sees a trace of one.
Day in bed is all confidence, a man-about-town who goes for a woman like a cowboy straight off the range. For their first meeting, she chooses with severe instinct a rustling-rosy underpetticoat, with a bodice like a girl’s in a Western, which makes his eyes glisten—though to the end she judges him unconscious of any role. Their alliance thrives
And with the women—by what she can gather from the arsenal of photos at his flat, his artistic taste has been poor, either bedazzled by their looks, or misguided by other ambience. Apparently he has a penchant for the second-rate—particularly for those who can theatricalize it. Probably the prizewinner’s been his best so far, artistically, but from her photo, signed in heavy flourish, not nearly stylish enough for the crowd of high-living artists he hangs out with. Real ones, here. Who never eat a meal at home. During her own short tenure, she’s met them in those haunts that are Day’s also; playwrights at Maude’s and Elaine’s, actors at Sardi’s or Pearl’s, or at the Blue Ribbon, just before it closed. And the Lion’s Head once, for a trio of Dixieland Jazzers in their eighties—almost as late-in-the-day for her to be there, she thinks, as for them. Lunch, for her, is the most powerful draw erotically. To stroll at noon toward a lover, or with him after, with all its side-implications of secrecy, luxe and time-stop, is European—and a flight. Lunch is also where Day meets the people he’s really going to do something with, and where she feels strangely comfortable, almost as if she’s not always going to be an amateur. It piques him to have one of his playwrights find out that she reads, and to hear a casting-director say “Why this girl has wit!”—although she’s often innocent of her own humor and can never repeat or reuse it knowingly.
Day knows about her poems—since he’ll venerate them without reading them. Also—so delicately entrepreneur is he even at lovemaking’s height—he’s found out about the journal she once kept, and intends to keep again. Though in an access of shame, she bars him from ever mentioning it.
“God, I never saw a girl blush from the hips before. You should be proud.” And maybe she is, of the blush.
That evening she has a ride with him in a scenarist’s Rolls. And at Michael’s Pub, sits at the left ear—the deaf one—of an earl who plays the harmonica. And for the first time, feeling guilt all over, like a bodystocking woven of an allergy-producing polyester, she stays the night. After that, she does this often, without alibi. Spending the morning-after hunting for marvels of dress, tarty ones, which she hangs in Day’s closet on East 79th Street, and never takes home. Though she expects he must have other women, she never sees a trace of one.
Day in bed is all confidence, a man-about-town who goes for a woman like a cowboy straight off the range. For their first meeting, she chooses with severe instinct a rustling-rosy underpetticoat, with a bodice like a girl’s in a Western, which makes his eyes glisten—though to the end she judges him unconscious of any role. Their alliance thrives
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