I WAS FRANKLY SHOCKED. I HAD EATEN AT A NUMBER OF tables where it was customary to set the plates under the table for the dogs, but never at one where the dogs were put on the table and given a go at the plates.
In view of the reaction of the ladies beside me, I’m inclined to think it’s not a common thing, even in Georgetown. They snapped to attention and looked around them happily, as if they had received an unexpected benediction.
“Now that is an upper-class thing!” one whispered to the other.
Both of them sighed, in a refreshed way. Apparently the burden of years of middle-classness, if not worse, had suddenly been lifted.
The dogs were so delighted to be on the table that they frolicked for a moment, rolling around, mewling, and even briefly simulating copulation.
Fortunately for everyone’s digestion, Wog-ers and Gog-ers were long past consummating anything. After a brief hump they shook themselves and stared myopically around the table. Then they trotted across the table as confidently as two black imps.
Just as the congressman from Michigan belatedly reached for his knife and fork, Wog-ers and Gog-ers spotted his chicken and made a beeline for it. The congressman happened to glance down, to see what he was eating, and saw a sight that would have unnerved Douglas MacArthur.
Wog-ers and Gog-ers were by this time ripping their way through a cold but toothsome chicken breast. Thanks to certain genetic drawbacks, such as blunt noses and tiny teeth, they were making a sloppy job of it. Both of them had their front teeth in the congressman’s plate and were slinging drippings this way and that as they tried to tear a few filaments of chicken loose from the bone.
When I described the scene to Boog, the next day, he rolled on the floor and laughed until froth came out of his mouth.
“That gutless little piss-ant,” he said. “I hope he swallert his tongue. He can talk more and say less than any man I ever met, unless it was Everett Dirksen.”
Jake Ponsonby was making an effort to keep himself awake. He was doodling what appeared to be Latin hexameters on his shirt cuff.
Old Cotswinkle, meanwhile, had suddenly discovered that there was a girl sitting next to him—namely Cindy—and he was staring fixedly at her bosom.
Lilah Landry was employing her Georgia gift of gab for the benefit of an elderly Britisher who seemed to have recently unplugged his life support system. He was either dead or pretending to be, a fact that made no difference to Lilah. She continued to talk rapidly and smile dizzily in his direction.
For perhaps a minute the party seemed to lose what little motion it had. Few conversed, no one got up, the servants held themselves in abeyance, and the water in the finger bowls slowly grew cold. At the head of the table Senator Penrose was talking quietly about Mr. Jefferson—to hear him one would have thought that Mr. Jefferson had been to dinner the night before.
The congressman from Michigan recognized at once that his food was a lost cause, and attempted to put a dignified face on the matter.
Unfortunately, the congressman didn’t have a dignified face. He had a weak, selfish face, on which the only thing writ large was self-esteem. Though bug-eyed with embarrassment, he had survived fourteen terms in the House, so when Cunny Cotswinkle glanced over to see if the pugs had finished picking his chicken breast he actually smiled—a shit-eating grin to end all shit-eating grins.
“I love dawgs,” he said.