flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the
hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the
gleaming, dark concrete.
My secret hope of spending the
afternoon alone in Central Park died in the glass eggbeater of Ladies} Day revolving
doors. I found myself spewed out through the warm rain and into the dim,
throbbing cave of a cab, together with Betsy and Hilda and Emily Ann Offenbach,
a prim little girl with a bun of red hair and a husband and three children in
Teaneck, New Jersey.
The movie was very poor. It
starred a nice blond girl who looked like June Allyson but was really somebody
else, and a sexy black-haired girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was
also somebody else, and two big, broad-shouldered boneheads with names like
Rick and Gil.
It was a football romance and it
was in Technicolor.
I hate Technicolor. Everybody in
a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new
scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or
very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every
direction.
Most of the action in this
picture took place in the football stands, with the two girls waving and
cheering in smart suits with orange chrysanthemums the size of cabbages on their
lapels, or in a ballroom, where the girls swooped across the floor with their
dates, in dresses like something out of Gone With the Wind, and then
sneaked off into the powder room to say nasty intense things to each other.
Finally I could see the nice
girl was going to end up with the nice football hero and the sexy girl was
going to end up with nobody, because the man named Gil had only wanted a
mistress and not a wife all along and was now packing off to Europe on a single
ticket.
At about this point I began to
feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the
same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the
back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid
moonbrains.
I felt in terrible danger of
puking. I didn’t know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomachache or
all that caviar I had eaten.
“I’m going back to the hotel,” I
whispered to Betsy through the half-dark.
Betsy was staring at the screen
with deadly concentration. “Don’t you fee good?” she whispered, barely moving
her lips.
“No,” I said. ‘I feel like
hell.”
“So do I, I’ll come back
with you.”
We slipped out of our seats and
said Excuse me Excuse me Excuse me down the length of our row, while the people
grumbled and hissed and shifted their rain boots and umbrellas to let us pass,
and I stepped on as many feet as I could because it took my mind off this
enormous desire to puke that was ballooning up in front of me so fast I
couldn’t see round it.
The remains of a tepid rain were
still sifting down when we stepped out into the street.
Betsy looked a fright. The bloom
was gone from her cheeks and her drained face floated in front of me, green and
sweating. We fell into one of those yellow checkered cabs that are always
waiting at the curb when you are trying to decide whether or not you want a
taxi, and by the time we reached the hotel I had puked once and Betsy had puked
twice.
The cab driver took the corners
with such momentum that we were thrown together first on one side of the back
seat
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