ELL ME,” SAID CORINNE, “who was your very first love and how old were you and was she like me? Tell me.”ELL ME,” SAID CORINNE, “who was your very first love and how old were you and was she like me? Tell me.”
“Of my awakening?” pondered Dennis. “It must have been Minnie. Yes, by Jove, it was Minnie. I was twelve.”
“Then you lived in Yonkers,” said Corinne with satisfaction at her fine memory.
“I hadn’t moved to Yonkers yet,” corrected Dennis. “My mother was still alive so we were in Terre Haute. Anyway all the older boys talked about Minnie with a knowing leer. My chum—Cliff Riley was his name by the way and now he’s a big judge in Washington or maybe that was his older brother Chester; that’s right, Clifford never turned out very well. Anyway my chum Cliff and I were devoured with lust and a dreadful curiosity about sex which never seemed to get us anywhere. We tagged along with the judge who was of course only fifteen or so at that time but anyway he did know Minnie, and how. Cliff and I nearly went crazy wondering about Minnie. Cliff was eleven and we both were small for our age and cursed with short pants, a big handicap in luring women to your rooms. As a matter of fact, we were about the two most lureless lads in the whole damn town.”
“It can’t be true, darling,” said Corinne.
She sipped at her strawberry soda, making a funny little noise through the straw which appeared to please her mightily for when the straw broke down under its musical burden she took two fresh ones and began a note higher on her piping, a simple enough pleasure after all for Empire State Tower visitors which they were, though Dennis for his part preferred to accompany the view with a perfectly noiseless coca-cola. Clouds as white as if the sky was baby-blue instead of black swam softly about them, stars were below and above, glittering through the plumes of the moon, listening for compliments from the Tower visitors.
“Are you going to put this story in a book?” interrupted Corinne suspiciously. “If you are, don’t tell it to me now. I hate having things tried out on me. Let’s just talk instead.”
“Hush,” suggested Dennis. “Grampa is reminiscing. Yes, it was Minnie who awakened me. Cliff and I had heard about this boy and that boy taking Minnie out behind the church, for in this town the boys were cads and told. Cliff and I, frustrated by our short pants, just hung around looking wise and snickering evilly at the older fellows’ fun.”
“With me it was my music teacher,” said Corinne. “He was forever teaching me To a Wild Rose.”
“Interesting,” said Dennis. “So finally Cliff and I decided that we had to find out and two small boys were just as good as one big one, so we waited together for Minnie to come along one day. She was about six feet tall but our taste hadn’t formed yet and anyway she was all there was to be had. Pretty soon Minnie came down the street. Cliff and I—”
“The judge and you,” said Corinne.
“No, that was Chester and another kettle of fish. Cliff and I clutched each other and stepped boldly out in front of her. She stared at us, not realizing at first our plan. ‘Hello, Minnie,’ we said together, giving her a big leer, ‘how about it?’ With that she picked us up by the scruffs of our necks and knocked our heads together. That was my first big experience and that was sex in Terre Haute.”
“The music teacher wasn’t so terribly handsome, it was just that he was the only man in school,” answered Corinne. They walked out on the terrace and eighty-six stories below them the city night spread out in a garden of golden lights; trucks, trains, ferryboats crawled soundlessly in and out of the island puzzle. They sat down on the steel bench, their arms about each other. “All the girls at Miss Roman’s were crazy about him, but he fell for me, he really did; as I look back on it now I realize he was pretty crazy about me—considering that he was over thirty and I was only thirteen. We called him Ducky.”
“Ducky, hmm,” said Dennis. “Very refreshing.”
“I started on To a Wild Rose in September and I couldn’t play it by June,” said Corinne. “I still can’t play it. Ducky would just talk to me and once he snatched my hands and kissed them madly. He would stare at me with great burning eyes in the mirror over the pipe organ—he played for the chapel service, see—and I was the first girl in the procession and coming down the chapel aisles I would see him staring at me in the mirror and I’d get the giggles, really, right in the middle of Crown Him the King of Kings.”
Dennis kissed her.
“Poor old Cliff never got anywhere, it was always his brother,” he said. “Chester was the big shot of the Riley family, he had push and another thing he was a very steady boy. Worked nights in the telegraph tower as an operator to get money to go to Notre Dame while Cliff and I were wasting our time on Minnie.”
“Getting your heads cracked,” said Corinne. “Darling, do you ever see that Beverly girl you used to run around with before me?”
“I’ve told you a million times I never see her any more,” Dennis, exasperated, exclaimed. “I promised you I’d give her up, didn’t I? You don’t think a man of my caliber would go back on his promise, do you?”
He was aggrieved. Corinne moved away from him as a little boy in plaid plus fours ran away from his father and dropped a coin in the telescope in front of them. Then, as the machine recklessly ticked off the precious minutes, he spent his dime in staring at the couple on the bench with scientific concentration.
“I know you promised. I was just asking if you ever saw her.”
“What can you do with a woman who won’t trust you?” Dennis invited the sky and the curious little boy to make answer. “Anyway she lives in London now, so how could I see her?”
“That’s the only reason men ever keep promises like that,” observed Corinne. “The girl has either moved away or died.”
“I’m afraid there’s something in that, Honeysugar,” agreed Dennis politely. “Vows of abstinence are valid only when supported by a major inconvenience, biological or geographical. Old saw.”
“Thank you,” said Corinne. “I’m crazy about you, Old Saw-master. You’re so attractive to me. I suppose any other woman would wonder what I saw in you. If your book is a success you’ll start cruising around again, won’t you, dear? Society women will take you up.”
“Let those society women just try to get me, let them just try,” boasted Dennis.
“Some of them aren’t so bad-looking,” Corinne said jealously. “They all wear triple-A size seven and have bad knees but they do have plenty of teeth. I’ll bet you fall for them. You’ll get white pants and a hat with a front and back to it and you’ll run around with next year’s debutantes.”
“Only for material,” said Dennis with the quiet smirk of conquest already on his face. “A literary man has to go a great many places and do a lot of queer, often disagreeable things for his material, my dear. It’s the artist’s cross. I’ll have to endure all those rotogravure beauties just to learn a few society songs and dances, something for my notes.”
“I’m going to write, too, Dennis. I really am,” said Corinne.
Dennis looked uneasy.
“Not those sad little glad-I’m-sorry poems that women always write when they’re nervous?” he asked.
“You know I can’t rhyme things,” said Corinne. “No, this is little prosies, little glad-I-see-things-quaintly ones. I sold one already to the Manhattanite. I didn’t want to tell you while you’re so wrapped up in your own success, your book coming out tomorrow and all that.”
“You sold a story? No!”
“It was easy.” Corinne waved her cigarette. “I studied their style. It’s just a trick. Olive and I figured it out. You take an Uncle Wiggly story and change the animals to quaint old bachelors or dear old ladies who economize. You use very tiny words and all the adverbs you can use are ‘rather’ and ‘quite’ and ‘very’ and ‘really.’ ”
“How did your story go?” inquired Dennis, still impressed and thinking of Phil boasting all over the club of his wife’s artistic triumph.
“I took ‘Sticky-toes the Tree-Toad was really quite cross,’ ” said Corinne. “I changed it to ‘Mr. Wootle, the funny old bachelor, was really quite cross’ and so on.”
“Damn clever,” said Dennis, astonished.
“Olive is working on Buddy Bear,” Corinne added. “It begins ‘Buddy Bear and Mrs. Bear hadn’t been asked to Tawny Tiger’s birthday party. Buddy Bear did not mind so very much but Mrs. Bear really felt quite cross.’ Olive changed it to ‘Mr. and Mrs. Wuppins had not been asked to the Major’s birthday party which made—’ ”
“I get it, I get it,” interrupted Dennis hastily. “I still think writing is a man’s work.”
“I suppose you’re afraid it will make me a little horsey,” said Corinne scornfully. She jumped up and walked over to the stone balustrade, leaned her face on her clasped hands and sighed. New York twinkled far off into Van Cortlandt Park, spangled skyscrapers piled up softly against the darkness, tinseled parks were neatly boxed and ribboned with gold like Christmas presents waiting to be opened. Sounds of traffic dissolved in distance, all clangor sifted through space into a whispering silence, it held a secret, and when letters flamed triumphantly in the sky you felt, ah, that was the secret, this at last was it, this special telegram to God—Sunshine Biscuits. On and off it went, Eat Sunshine Biscuits, the message of the city.
“Darling,” said Corinne.