Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [84]
All happiness is religious, I have to think sometimes.
Leen said he would talk to us one by one in his library. “Mrs. Graham didn’t tell me about your backgrounds, what your special interests might be—so you’re just going to have to tell me about yourselves.” He said for Ubriaco to come into the library first, and asked the rest of us to wait in the living room. “Is there anything my butler can bring you to drink?” he said.
Clewes didn’t want anything. Edel asked for a beer. I, still hoping to blow the dream wide open, ordered a pousse-café, a rainbow-colored drink that I had never seen, but which I had studied while earning my Doctor of Mixology degree. A heavy liqueur was put into the bottom of the glass, then a lighter one of a different color was carefully spooned in on top of that, and then a lighter one still on top of that, and on and on, with each bright layer undisturbed by the one above or below.
Leen was impressed with my order. He repeated it, to make sure he had heard it right.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” I said. It was no more trouble, surely, than building a full-rigged ship model in a bottle, say.
“No problem!” said Leen. This, I would learn, was a favorite expression of his. He told the butler to give me a pousse-café without further ado.
He and Ubriaco went into the library, and the rest of us entered the living room, which had a swimming pool. I had never seen a living room with a swimming pool before. I had heard of such a thing, of course, but hearing of and actually seeing that much water in a living room are two very different things.
I knelt by the pool and swirled my hand in the water, curious about the temperature, which was soupy. When I withdrew my hand and considered its wetness, I had to admit to myself that the wet was undreamlike. My hand was really wet and would remain so for some time, unless I did something about it.
All this was really going on. As I stood, the butler arrived with my pousse-café.
Outrageous behavior was not the answer. I was going to have to start paying attention again. “Thank you,” I said to the butler.
“You’re welcome, sir,” he replied.
Clewes and Edel were seated at one end of a couch about half a block long. I joined them, wanting their appreciation for how sedate I had become.
They were continuing to speculate as to when Mrs. Graham might have caught them behaving so virtuously.
Clewes mourned that he had not had many opportunities to be virtuous, selling advertising matchbooks and calendars from door to door. “About the best I can do is let a building custodian tell me his war stories,” he said. He remembered a custodian in the Flatiron Building who claimed to have been the first American to cross the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, during World War Two. The capture of this bridge had been an immense event, allowing the Allied Armies to pour at high speed disguised as a man, though. “I sometimes think that the custodian could have been Mrs. Jack Graham, though.
Israel Edel supposed that Mrs. Graham could be disguised as a man, though. “I sometimes think that about half our customers at the Arapahoe are transvestites,” he said.
The possibility of Mrs. Graham’s being a transvestite would be brought up again soon, and most startlingly, by Arpad Leen.
Meanwhile, though, Clewes got back on the subject of World War Two. He got personal about it. He said that he and I, when we were wartime bureaucrats, had only imagined that we had something to do with defeats and victories. “The war was won by fighters, Walter. All the rest was dreams.”
It was his opinion that all the memoirs written about that war by civilians were swindles, pretenses that the war had been won by talkers and writers and socialites, when it could only have been won by fighters.
A telephone rang in the foyer. The butler came in to say that the call was for Clewes, who could take it on