WHAT I SUPPOSED, WHEN I FINALLY SET OFF FOR GEORGETOWN, was that even a lady who owned three trendy stores might derive a faint buzz from the combination of doeskin jacket, yellow boots, albino-diamondback hatband, and Valentino hubcaps, not to mention six feet five of me.
In the event, Cindy hardly gave the combination a glance.
“It was a little over-studied,” she said later, with characteristic candor.
When I wheeled the pearly Cadillac into a parking place right in front of Schlock, Cindy was standing on the sidewalk, studying her window display, and Harris was standing in her doorway, looking this way and that.
What really impressed Cindy was that I drove straight to the parking place as if I’d known it would be there waiting for me, although it was Saturday afternoon and the rest of Georgetown was a maelstrom of frustrated parking-place seekers.
“We must be meant for one another or you wouldn’t have got that parking place,” she said, without irony, when I introduced myself.
The fact that someone meant for her had driven up in a Cadillac filled with steer horns, antelope skulls, Hopi basketry, and Mexican spurs didn’t seem to surprise her.
“What’s your sign, Tex?” she asked. Then she stepped right over and linked her arm in mine, studying our reflections in the window of her antique shop. It was as if she had decided to try out the concept—or at least the image—of us as a couple, right off the bat.
Then she led me into her store, right past Harris, who, I now realize, was engrossed in his own dilemma. An hour later, when she had dragged me off to buy a dinner jacket from a grumpy old Russian tailor, she casually informed me that the man in the doorway was her fiancé.
Cindy was one of those near-perfect physical specimens that sprout, unblemished as tulips, in certain California suburbs—Montecito, in her case. Words like “gorgeous” and “knockout” applied to her precisely. I was unprepared for such looks in an antique dealer—I guess I had expected to find one of the humorless, overeducated young ladies who populate the antiquities departments of museums and major auction houses. Antiquities seldom attract your giggling ninnies.
My first thought, on seeing Cindy, was that she was probably into mountaineering—a deduction partly based on her glowing health and partly on the fact that she had several antique alpenstocks in her window.
In fact, Cindy was into mountaineering, only the ascent she had in mind involved the sheer, ice-coated face of American society—a peak I had never so much as glimpsed, in all my driving.
For the moment she was concentrating on ascending what might be called the East Face, but there was no doubt but that hers was the large view. There was an East Face and a West Face, a crumbling pinnacle or two in the South and a few rock-spurs in the southwest, but it was essentially one mountain, broad at the bottom and narrow at the top.
All this was fascinating to me: I had never met a beautiful girl social climber before. Cindy was not reticent about her ambition, either. Reticence was right up there with patience on the list of things she didn’t have.
Looking back, I can see that it was a measure of my naiveté that I could suppose mention of Big John Flint, the trader from Ohio, would prompt a beautiful social climber to invite me to a Georgetown dinner party, even though he was, in my view, more remarkable by far than Big John Connolly, to whom I had sold a couple of Rainey oils. Among Big John Flint’s many triumphs was the discovery, in a warehouse in Poughkeepsie, of more than 100,000 pre-1925 Boy Scout knives.
I had only dropped his name because it was obvious at a glance that four-fifths of the antiques in Cindy’s store came from him. She went in heavily for overpolished American furniture, nineteenth-century tin boxes, churns, weather vanes, early tools, duck decoys, salt-glazed crocks, dining car china, and inkwells, all items Big John dispensed by the thousands.
I found out later that she bought most of her stuff from a scout in Pittsburgh, who obviously trucked it right in from Zanesville. She had never heard of Big John, and what’s more, she wasn’t particularly interested when I told her about him, the next morning in bed. Cindy was more interested in having her fill of salami and Brie.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, whacking me on the sternum with the handle of the knife.
“Because it could save you money,” I said.
She shrugged her beautiful, lightly freckled shoulders. If anything was wrong with Cindy’s body, only X-rays could have discovered what. I even liked her feet, big though they were. They looked like feet that had trod a lot of beaches and worn out numerous pairs of tennis shoes.
“How much did you pay for those duck decoys?” I asked.
“Twenty-five apiece,” she said, her boredom deepening.
“Big John sells them for eight.”
Now that the point was made, Cindy ignored it.
“If you’re just out to get Harris, you better be careful,” she said. “I’m very protective of Harris.”
This intermittent conversation forced me to acknowledge what I already knew, which is that relations with women are never simple.
The reason the conversation was intermittent was because Cindy took time out to eat the lion’s share of the salami and most of the Brie. The fact was she didn’t feed me very much, and while I was lying there watching her eat the mental me reasserted itself over the physical me. I should have got up, scrambled myself some eggs, and met the day on the level of the basic appetites, as Cindy had.
I do have the basic appetites, but unfortunately the mental me is the one with the real staying power. It will only stand aside for the basic appetites so long, and the minute it returns the trouble starts.