Read Online Assorted Prose by John Updike - Free Book Online

during the college Eastervacations. As we had hoped, the cocktail lounge, that pond of perpetual youth, brimmed with high spirits, forced laughter, and expressively exhaled smoke. The room—“room” is a weak word for a volume of space enclosed by Babylonian veils of palms, pillars, and mirrors, and vertically limited by a ceiling with a truly supernal apogee—seemed quite overheated. Every bright, smooth face we saw was flushed. Whether the room was warming the youngsters or the youngsters the room is a conundrum we were too hot to unravel. We watched a forward-looking hat precede the pink face under it across the public view; noticed large numbers of Alexanders and whiskey sours—easy transitions, both, between orange pop and gin; dodged six boys, four of whom were shaking hands and two of whom were carrying tables; savored the overheard fragment “I say he’s an Existentialist.
He
says he’s a Jesuit”; and scuttled into a nook near a table of burly youths who were bringing a great weight of attention to bear on two pretty girls with slender necks. Their conversation, as we caught it, was only slightly less confused than this transcription, here printed for its value as an American document:
    “Hello. Hello, this is Harry Belafonte.” Laughter. (All voices, unless otherwise specified, are male. We were unable to sort out the four or five boys, who looked exactly alike, though of graduated sizes, like boxes of breakfast food.)
    “Man, you’re fantastic.”
    “And he said, ‘Are you going to be a host tonight?’ I said, ‘Host tonight?’ and just looked at him.”
    “She needed a
draft
card—always what I wanted.”
    “Hello, this is Morey Amsterdam.”
    “Let’s go up to Two Hundred and Forty-second Street.”
    “Fantastic!”
    “I have a car.”
    “Stop that.”
    (The above interchange we took to be the warmup. Now they began to address the girls directly.)
    “Wouldn’t you all [inaudible]?”
    “No.” (Female voice.)
    “Waiter!
Wait-er
!”
    “Allo. Allo. This is Bridey Murphy.”
    “Hey, Les, this is good.”
    “What?”
    “Your whiskey sour.”
    “What’s
this?
” (Female voice.)
    “My
name
. What’s the matter, you don’t like it?” (Tones gruff with embarrassment.)
    “We’re calling for you if we knew where to call for you.”
    “No, she’s leaving her boy friend.” (This was the other female voice, one with a titter in every other syllable.)
    “Hey, you know where Atlas holds up the world?”
    “Maybe.” (Female.)
    “Right in front of that statue.”
    “There’s going to be fourteen boys and eight girls.”
    “Carol’s your
last
name?”
    “Ann, meet Bob, Joseph, Jack, and Lester the Fester. Ann.”
    “No, no. We’re asking you out for the
evening
.”
    “Cut it out.”
    “That’s O.K. They’re roommates.”
    “In Scranton?”
    “Don’t they dig coal in Scranton?”
    “Oh, your father’s a coal miner.”
    “Hello, this is Audie Murphy.”
    “Good old New York.”
    “You know anybody from the Philippines?”
    “This is the most honest girl at the table. You hear what she just said?”
    “Two girls from Vietnam! Please stand up, girls.” (Voice raised in mock-ceremonial manner.)
    “We are gratified to have with us two girls from the free state of Vietnam.”
    “We have a car.”
    “I’m singing my way into your heart.”
    “Come with us now to the Biltmore.” (Girlish laughter.)
    “Am
bass
ador, boy.”
    “This
is
the Biltmore, dope.”
    “We have a car parked in Kinney’s parking lot.”
    Suddenly the boys, as if harking to an ultrasonic whistle, left, marching out in single file, their stride jouncy. The girls (there seemed to be three now) made superior little noises with their tongues and teeth. The following voices are all female.
    “No, I didn’t like him
at all
.”
    “He was
très
peculiar.”
    “I like the one who sat here.”
    “This one had only one side of his collar buttoned, did you notice?”
    “No, I wasn’t