Party Girl

Certainly, blanchard thought, this was worth looking at twice. Something not exactly routine, he thought coolly, watching the girl over the rim of his glass, beginning to drift through the crowd toward her. It was a routine cocktail party, a publisher's affair swirling with routine types. And Blanchard hated being bored.

She was indeed a pretty girl. Probably a model, he thought. There were plenty of them around and they showed up in the damnedest places. Her make-up suggested it: a skillful job that minimized the slight collision of the bone outline with the exquisite features. She was partly turned away from Blanchard, talking to a tweedy man, just at the right angle so that the could see her fine blue eyes without being in her direct line of vision. Her hands and feet were fine too, always a matter of satisfaction to Blanchard who by now had decided that if she were a model it could only be in some specialty. Her legs were not long enough, and there was nothing of the clotheshorse's gauntness about her hips.

At the moment she turned, cleanly intercepting Blanchard's stare, but instead of letting her eyes slide over him or perhaps showing some conventional annoyance, she smiled. It was a nice break for Blanchard and he took it with finesse. He smiled back at her in the manner of a man seeing an acquaintance but reluctant to interrupt, and the tweedy man, taking all this in, said: "Hello, there... " and let it hang, cordially enough.

Blanchard moved in. "Blanchard," he said. "Tod Blanchard."

"Of course," the tweedy man said.

"Glad you came along, Blanchard. Saves me from being utterly rude to our friend, here. I must dash," he said to the girl. "My wife will be in a lather."

So there it was, all clear. Blanchard felt the first pulse of excitement.

"I thought you were somebody I knew," the girl said. "You looked familiar, standing there."

"I made the same mistake," Blanchard said.

"Well – – " the girl said. And then she surprised him. "Well it's all right now," she said.

"Yes," he said, "it's all right now. What are you drinking?"

"Oh my goodness," she said, "too much, I'm afraid. I always do at these things."

"Everybody does," Blanchard said. She had light brown hair that was not bleached but perhaps rinsed a little, and arranged prettily and without fuss. Her gown was tastefully sexy. There was nothing about her that Blanchard couldn't approve of, and the clincher was the way she smelled. Blanchard had a sharp nose that could override any subtlety or disguise of perfume. He breathed deeply, and shivered.

"... but it was a manhattan," the girl said.

Blanchard couldn't see a waiter and he didn't look hard, seeing opportunity instead. He said, putting a good deal of hesitancy and deference into his manner: "I've scarcely touched this one – – " lifting his glass, not exactly offering it to her.

"Why," she said, and Blanchard noted the beat, and then the fallaway. "Why," she said, "thank you very much," and took it.

A small gain, a mere thread of intimacy, but Blanchard was satisfied. He talked with her, not pushing anything, not needing to push anything. Her self-assurance and her aura of innocence blended piquantly. Her name was Marian Voorhees, she was an associate editor on some women's book, and Blanchard was delighted with her.

Of course she was not a girl who would be ignored, or who would have arrived here unescorted. Three or four crewcuts gathered around, and then a couple of actors and their women. Blanchard, again using the manner of hesitancy and deference, suggested that perhaps he was keeping her from her friends.

"Oh no," she said, not protesting it, just making it a fact. She laid her hand lightly on his sleeve.

"Come on, Marian," one of the actors said. "You said you wanted us to help you show these boys the town."

"Did I?" the girl said. "Well – – " She introduced Blanchard around in the swift and nearly anonymous way of such meetings. "Why don't you come with us?" She said, her hand still on his arm.

"Well," Blanchard said, "I promised myself to get out some work tonight..."

"Please," Marian Voorhees said.

For a long time afterward Blanchard wondered if it was because she knew that most of these people were half tight and that the party would soon start flying apart, or whether she really wanted him. At the moment he was mainly aware of the beautiful controllability of the situation and he went down in the elevator with them feeling the crush of her hip and shoulder against him like a promise.

The party, with more girls somehow included, straggled to a Fifth Avenue bar, one of those bright. tinselly places like the inside of an expensive chocolate box, and they sat at tables; and before the first drink was gone things had begun to break up. It was just a matter of sitting them all out and being careful to nurse one drink.

Now the party was certainly flying apart. They were quarreling and forgetting it, making plans to eat somewhere and forgetting that too. They were beginning to forget each other and straggle off in pairs and foursomes, and for Blanchard there was only one hitch.

One of the crewcuts had attached himself to them and after a few minutes of hovering he said: "Marian, you promised – – "

"No," the girl said, very kindly, very gently. "I didn't promise, Frank. I said maybe."

"You promised," crewcut said. He was very big and his skin was healthy. He was probably a football player; and Blanchard could see his shoulders jerking under his jacket.

"Look, darling," the girl said, "I told my brother I'd entertain you and your friends, and I have. You should be thinking of getting back to school now. You can't graduate playing around in New York, you know." She sounded motherly.

"Listen," the crewcut said. He had slumped into a chair but now he stood up. He was really tremendous and he was working himself up to something.

All his attention was on Blanchard now.

"You – – "he said.

Blanchard stood up too, smiling slightly, playing it with care. He looked levelly at the crewcut and then held out his hand. "Good-bye, Frank," he said, still smiling.

Frank almost shook hands, and then snatched his own away. He was turning pale. "Marian," he said, looking at the girl, looking as though he might start crying.

"Good-bye, Frank," she said.

Frank's feet tangled with the legs of a chair as he edged away. The chair upset and he rushed out of the bar. Blanchard sat down. He was alone with Marian Voorhees.

"I was afraid of that," she said.

Blanchard looked at her.

"It's unfair," Marian Voorhees said.

"You try to be nice to some boy and suddenly you're – you're an older woman, or something."

Blanchard felt vague relief. "Never mind," he said, "he'll be boasting about knowing you before he's off the train."

"I suppose so," the girl said sadly.

"Let's cheer up." Blanchard said.

"Let's be glad we're not that young."

He signalled the waiter for his check.

"Let's get out of here," he said. "This is no place."

"I used to think this was New York," Marian Voorhees said. She looked around the bright room. "Places like this. I still do, in a way."

She was pretty young herself, Blanchard decided, and he decided to take her to a French restaurant in the East Fifties. The noise level wasn't too high, and he knew the food would be good.

The red checked tablecloth in the French place threw up marvelous light in her face, but she was still somber.

"Let's talk about you," Blanchard said.

He ordered drinks.

He could see that she felt better right away. They were all the same in that respect, the ones that came from God-knew-where and struck for recognition in New York: they all had an enduring interest in themselves. Career girls, Blanchard thought, watching her lovely face and the play of her fine hands, thinking of the calix of her hips, listening to her talk.

Marian Voorhees had been in New York for less than a year, and she came from a small city in Ohio. She had served what had amounted to an apprenticeship in her home town with a minor publisher and when she came to New York she found it to be a saleable experience. There was comfortable money in her family.

The pieces all fitted neatly, accounting for her flashes of naivete that contrasted so oddly with her self-possessed air; for the way she wore her clothes, for the restrained elegance that is almost but never quite achieved by the ones who have to claw their way up from the bottom. Blanchard congratulated himself; and cautioned himself.

Her apartment was in one of the good converted brownstones. Blanchard left the taxi ticking at the curb, something that could always be counted on to excite a little pique. "Well," he said.

Marian Voorhees was fishing for her key. "Very pleasant," Blanchard said.

"My lucky night, tonight."

"I'm glad you think so," she said. She fitted the key into the lock and then turned toward him. It was a moment that demanded extreme control.

Blanchard kissed her, putting abso (continued overleaf) Party Girl (continued from page 28) lutely nothing into it except an amused appreciativeness of the privilege; and he got it back the same way. His next gesture could easily have been an accident of the dark, of stumbling slightly on the steps, a loss and recovery of balance that could have been just that, or highly informative.

He drew a blank. He was beginning to tremble and his heart was up and pounding in the top of his chest. Blanchard's control was slipping badly but he knew now that this was no time to push things.

He moved back and down a step. "I'll call you tomorrow," he said. He couldn't stop it. "Tomorrow night, maybe?"

"No," she said. "Not tomorrow. Not tomorrow night."

"I see," Blanchard said. He thought of the drunk actors and the crewcuts, and Football Frank's bullish infatuation. "Well," Blanchard said, "happy to have been of service."

"Oh please," the girl said. "Don't be like that."

"Like what?" Blanchard said.

"Cruel," Marian Voorhees said. "Don't be cruel." She looked down at him, her eyes luminous from the street lights. "Cruel," she said, "like everybody else."

Blanchard laughed, feeling suddenly better. What the hell, he thought, you can't score every time. "All right," he said. He touched her hand, briefly. "All right," he said.

"That's better," she said. "Now you're being nice again."

"Yes," he said. "Well, good-bye."

"I didn't mean--" she said. "I mean, about not calling me--"

She was losing her poise, and a woman without poise made Blanchard uncomfortable. "I know," he said, seeing the cue, deliberately taking it in reverse value. "I know," Blanchard said, quite courteously. quite gravely, "and that's perfectly all right, too."

Perfectly all right, my friend, he thought in the cab. but good-bye, absolutely. You asked out and I let you out, you somehow having a quality that appealed to my better nature. Then you asked back in, just a little way in again, and that's no dice. You are a very subtle teaser and I think, thought Blanchard, that you are probably a virgin. Or, more probably, and in view of your style, one of these half-virgins that hang on to it and hang on to it...

All right, he thought, just skip it. And never mind the sour grapes. You're a big boy now, Blanchard: and if you let yourself get hard up that's strictly your own fault. So just skip this Marian Voorhees; and throw out the old hook again if that's the way you feel. Just, the next time, make sure you land one that knows the rules.

Blanchard slept badly that night. He slept badly for several nights. He was known as a rising television writer and he was ambitious; and he hated anything that diverted him from his ambitions. He had always chosen his partners of the bed with deliberateness, and with considerable care to avoid entanglements or sentiment. Blanchard considered self-effacement a highly desirable quality in women: it annoyed him to find that the slightest relaxation of his mind invited a most poignant remembrance of Marian Voorhees.

He thought of her at the damnedest times and his mental picture was always as he had first seen her, leaning back against some piece of furniture that Blanchard could never identify in his mind, leaning back slightly, her bottom pressed against this piece of furniture, pivoting a little at the hips while she talked so that the material of her skirt moved in gentle consonance with the flare of her hip and lay shadowed in the line of her legs.

Blanchard was annoyed but he was also amused at himself. There was, he thought, only one way to settle this: it was not until after he had dined with and slept with an acquiescent and very attractive studio secretary that he knew nothing was settled at all and never would be settled until he had possessed Marian Voorhees.

"I don't know," she said on the telephone. "I just don't know. Tod." In an indefinable way she sounded worried.

"Listen," he said, "we had a fine time together, didn't we?"

"Oh yes," she said.

"Well what's wrong with an encore?"

"I don't know," she said again.

"Look," Blanchard said, very carefully, "I'm absolutely harmless. I assure you of it. Look," he said into her silence, "I'll admit it – I made a mistake that night."

"Did you?" she said, her voice now sad and gentle.

"Of course," Blanchard said. He was frowning and the telephone was getting wet in his hand: but perhaps this was the lead he was looking for. Keep talking, he thought. Keep making her answer. But even so, he astonished himself by saying: "Look, Marian, no funny stuff. And that's a promise."

"Well," she said. "All right."

So there she was again, at last, and this time there were no drunk actors, no crewcuts, and no infatuated boy. And this time the tablecloth was white but the way the light went up into her face was just as marvelous. She had been just as marvelous, too, walking ahead of him through the tables, wearing a black dress that certainly was not cut to cling or be revealing; and all naked, all golden naked, thought Blanchard, beneath.

Of course it was going to have to be a campaign, a careful search for the key to her surrender. With her, there could never be any of the easy mutuality that had been the condition of his ordered life; and his awareness of abandoning this condition gave Blanchard a pleasant feeling of generosity. Lifting his brimming cocktail glass, he saluted Marian Voorhees. "Here's to time," he said. "Time to burn."

She laughed, and then she used one of those naive, or old-fashioned, phrases. "Young-man-in-a-hurry." she said.

" 'Time's winged chariot,' " Blanchard said.

"Well," she said. "I've been looking at my television. You have a clever way with words, and you certainly do produce a lot of them."

People often complimented Blanchard on his work, and sometimes criticized him. Now he narrowed his attention, sharply, knowing that this girl had intended neither.

"I was just wondering," she said, "what you were doing at a publisher's cocktail party. Perhaps," she said, "you want to slow down. Perhaps you want to write something enduring."

Blanchard felt the reassurance of familiar ground. "Why." he said, "do women always want something enduring?"

He watched her hands, her fingers delicately stroking the wet stem of her glass, her eyes downcast; and it came to him that she was amused by his tenuous gambit. "All right," he said. "I guess I'd like to write a book. Who the hell doesn't want to write a book?"

Their laughter was together. "Even me," Marian Voorhees said. "I want to write a book, too. But I never will. Will you write a book for me, Tod?"

• • •

In the matter of progress, Blanchard thought several weeks later, very little could be said. He had bade her many good nights at her door, and then inside the apartment. She had, in fact, got into the habit of making him a nightcap; and Blanchard, aware of being implicity on trust, was increasingly aware of the confusion of his original aims. He was also increasingly and agonizingly aware of Marian Voorhees as a woman.

Some kind of breakdown was inevitable; and it came after an evening when Blanchard was sure she had been happy with him. He followed her into the apartment and they were both laughing and exhilarated and when she turned he took her face between his hands and kissed her laughing open mouth.

Her resistance was furious and Blanchard, stepping back, took a slap in the (continued on page 50) Party Girl(continued from page 30) face that was no token reproof. She might, he thought, have a broken wrist out of it. She had begun to cry, in a terrible, abandoned way, but Blanchard knew she would take no comfort, no reassurance from him now. He picked up his hat and coat and stood by the door, rattling the knob. But Marian Voorhees kept right on crying: and it was time for Blanchard to go.

• • •

He was severely shocked the next morning, when she telephoned him. In the night, he had acknowledged her lost to him.

"Tod," she said. "What are you doing?"

"I don't know," he said. "Ruing, 1 guess."

"I can't stand my office," she said. "Will you take me somewhere this afternoon and get me drunk?"

"What?" he said.

"Well 1 want a drink," she said. "And I want it with you."

She was waiting for him when he went into the bar. She was at a table, arrang ing a little tableau before her of purse and gloves and lighter and cigarettes. She was very tense. The waiter, who knew them, put down two manhattans and she drank hers quickly.

"Ask him for another one," she said.

"Listen––" Blanchard said.

"I'm not going to get drunk on you." she said. "Not very drunk, anyway. I just want to unwind. Is it all right with you if I unwind?"

"Yes," Blanchard said. "Certainly."

Presently she said: "Light me a cigarette, Tod. Talk to me."

"I'm all out of talk," Blanchard said. "I've talked too much."

"No," she said. She laughed, unexpectedly, her tongue coral and provocative: and Blanchard averted his eyes. "You haven't said much, I suppose," she said, "but you haven't talked too much, either."

"You're generous," Blanchard said. She was drinking her third manhatlan.

"Tod,'' she said, not laughing any more, her voice mournful. "Tod. what's a woman worth?"

"What?" he said.

"Don't you know either?" she said and the mourn fulness in her voice now had a lost quality. She put her hand on his arm. "All men––" she said; and then she shook her head. "Tod," she said, "I'm not the woman you think me. Not at all."

Blanchard had a pretty good idea of what was coming and he tried to stop it, feeling pity for her. He did not know why these girls emancipated from small cities always had to confess the man they'd left behind, but they always did. Blanchard supposed he should have seen the picture, seen the pattern, long since.

"Let's get out of here," he said. "Come on, Marian," he said with real tenderness. "I want you out of here."

"It's the wrong place, isn't it?" she said. "Take me home, darling. Take me home."

Blanchard knew where things were in the apartment and he mixed her the drink she asked for as soon as they got in. "The last one," she said. "I'm not going to get drunk on you, I promised. I guess I was a little drunk but I'm sober now."

She was possibly either, but she was certainly in a state. She had thrown her white gloves on the coffee table and now she picked up one and began twisting it. Then she sat down, abruptly. "You've got to know," she said.

So it was coming anyway. Blanchard thought; and he didn't want to hear it. "Who the hell am I to know?" he said. "Don't crawl," he said. "Don't crawl for one––"

But she was beyond his reach. Her hands were now strangling the glove. "William Guthrie." she said. "How's that for a name for your first lover? I called him Bill, naturally," she said, "and naturally I was going to quit school for him and I was going to make my family recognize him." She twisted her head and looked up at Blanchard with a curious blankness. "None of that was necessary," she said. "It turned out that I was just a — receptacle."

Blanchard sat down beside her. "Listen," he said, "and believe me. It happens to everybody. Believe me," he said, wanting to clear it up and away, reaching for something jocular and yet serious that would dismiss it. "Every woman." Blanchard said, "has a son of a bitch in her life somewhere, sometime."

"Don't you care?" she said.

"I care if it hurts you," he said, meaning it.

Her look was pure gratitude. Blanchard took her hands into his own, stilling them and warming them; and presently this stillness and warmth began to pulse back at him from her. Blanchard's heart started to hammer.

"Listen," he said, the campaign and the meticulous plans and the techniques all to hell now, "I love you. 1 love you, Marian. I love you."

Everything was thundering down between them now and she clung fiercely to him. "You love me," she said wildly. "You love me and what about Jackson?"

"Bill," he said gently. "William Guthrie, remember?"

"William Guthrie, Arthur Jackson, McNair Speed, in that order," she said, her back arching as she leaned away from him, only her hands still left in fierce embrace. "After that. Tom, Dick, Harry — in practically any order or change of order you please. And Frank," she said, now sitting up and taking her hands from his. "Football Frank, as you called him. My first, my only really conscious, charity case."

Blanchard stared at her.

"In a diminishing way, " Marian Voor-hces said, "I always thought I meant something. There was that hope, anyway," she said: and Blanchard was again touched by the mourning in her voice.

"Well," Blanrhard said, knowing he had to say something, "you've had bad luck. Anybody can have bad luck. You've just had too many sons of bitches in your life, that's all," Blanchard said.

"Thanks for naming them for me," she said. "It's funny, isn't it, but I never could say bad words."

"I've got a good stock of them," he said.

"You'd better go home now," she said. "I love you, Tod," she said. "You are my love, but you'd better go home now."

"I love you," Blanchard said.

"It was from the first with me," she said. "From the very first moment," she said. "Can't you see," she said helplessly, beginning to cry a little, "can't you see why you should go?"

"No," Blanchard said. "No."

He kissed her and of course she was ready for it now, having herself turned the key to her surrender. She was very ready for it: and she twisted, straining upward against him. the coral of her open mouth no longer any provocation, but the beginning of fulfillment They clung together so until something under her dress snapped and some part of her underwear began to tear silkily. As though this were a signal, she pulled away from him and ran into her bedroom. Blanchard could hear her tearing at her clothes.

So here was possession, all right, Blanchard thought as he looked down at her on the bed. She was even more marvelous to look at than he had expected. But then, a great many things had exceeded his expectations lately. A great many things.

There was just one little matter, Blanchard thought. He was curiously cool, but undoubtedly the long waiting had something to do with that. The thing was, he thought, touching her first and then feeling her coming liquidly into his arms, he definitely did not want to be the next in a long line of sons of bitches.

Blanchard wondered if he could settle for last.