TO JAKE PONSONBY’S EVIDENT DISAPPOINTMENT, DUNSCOMBE Cotswinkle was not dead.
For that matter, he was not even subdued. As the next-to-last professional, he did not take kindly to being slapped around. When he finally got the sleep out of his eyes anger took its place. I twice saw him try to backhand his wife, but both times Perkins caught his arm and pretended to be stuffing it into a coat.
Within his limited domain, Perkins’ professionalism was equal to either Cotswinkle’s or Ponsonby’s.
If anything, Ponsonby was harder to handle. The evening seemed to have taken a good deal out of him. He began to wobble, as if his legs were made of rubber, and wandered off down the hall in search of Lilah Landry.
Unfortunately, Lilah had just left with Eviste Labouchere, the small French journalist. This fact surprised no one but me.
“Lilah’s a star-fucker,” Cindy said. “Only she can’t figure out who the stars are. On the whole I find her vague.
“I think she’s got Eviste mixed up with Bernard Henri Lévy,” Cindy added. “Can you imagine?”
I couldn’t, since I had never heard of Bernard Henri Lévy. Naturally I didn’t admit it.
At that point Ponsonby wobbled back in. Seeing a tall woman, he assumed he’d found Lilah.
“My dear, they said you’d gone,” he bleated, staring upward toward Cindy’s bosom.
Cindy just laughed her vigorous laugh.
“You got the wrong lady, Jake,” she said. “Lilah went home.”
The news struck Ponsonby to the heart. “It isn’t time to leave. I haven’t left.
“Premature, so premature,” he added. “The silly girl.”
With that he turned abruptly and wobbled off in search of a lower bosom. He promptly found one, too—it belonged to the Guatemalan who was gathering up the brandy snifters. The maid was swifter of foot than he was, but he trailed forlornly after her for a while, until she lost him completely by reversing her field and darting off toward the kitchen.
“It’s my impression that this means the end of Western civilization as we know it,” he said, as he came back by.
“Gee,” I said, once he was out of earshot. “Maybe Lilah should have stuck around.”
Cindy wasn’t worried about Western civilization. “Let’s split,” she said.
The Penrose mansion was on N Street, while Cindy’s house was on Q, down the alphabet but up the hill.
It was a brisk night and we walked along briskly, in tandem with it. Cindy seemed indignant, a state that comes naturally to her.
“Pencil’s had it,” she said, after half a block.
“Why?”
“She’s always using me to entertain her B–list,” Cindy said. “That’s why.”
We continued along briskly until we were up the steps and in the doorway of her house. Cindy flung her coat on a nice French bench, not unlike the one in the Penrose hallway.
She had a tastefully appointed if slightly predictable bedroom, in which only one thing really caught my eye: a white football helmet covered with sparkles, of the sort commonly awarded homecoming queens just as they are about to be crowned. This one sat on a walnut bureau near Cindy’s windows.
“Gosh,” I said. “Were you a homecoming queen?”
She had already shucked her dress. Before answering she glanced at her watch and took it off, as she walked over to me.
“Of course,” she said. “Santa Barbara High.”
For a daydream believer like myself it was the acme of something: the boy from the little cowtown in the West, the homecoming queen from the far Pacific shore.
But for Cindy it was no big deal.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go to bed. I gotta have my sleep.”