Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust [5]
While Tod mounted the steps to reach his outstretched hand, he shouted to the butler.
“Here, you black rascal! A mint julep.”
A Chinese servant came running with a Scotch and soda.
After talking to Tod for a moment, Claude started him in the direction of Alice, his wife, who was at the other end of the porch.
“Don’t run off,” he whispered. “We’re going to a sporting house.”
Alice was sitting in a wicker swing with a woman named Mrs. Joan Schwartzen. When she asked him if he was playing any tennis, Mrs. Schwartzen interrupted her.
“How silly, batting an inoffensive ball across something that ought to be used to catch fish on account of millions are starving for a bite of herring.”
“Joan’s a female tennis champ,” Alice explained.
Mrs. Schwartzen was a big girl with large hands and feet and square, bony shoulders. She had A pretty, eighteen-year-old face and a thirty-five-year-old neck that was veined and sinewy. Her deep sunburn, ruby colored with a slight blue tint, kept the contrast between her face and neck from being too startling.
“Well, I wish we were going to a brothel this minute,” she said. “I adore them.”
She turned to Tod and fluttered her eyelids.
“Don’t you, Mr. Hackett?”
“That’s right, Joan darling,” Alice answered for him. “Nothing like a bagnio to set a fellow up. Hair of the dog that bit you.”
“How dare you insult me!”
She stood up and took Tod’s arm.
“Convoy me over there.”
She pointed to the group of men with whom Claude was standing.
“For God’s sake, convoy her,” Alice said. “She thinks they’re telling dirty stories.”
Mrs. Schwartzen pushed right among them, dragging Tod after her.
“Are you talking smut?” she asked. “I adore smut.” They all laughed politely.
“No, shop,” said someone.
“I don’t believe it. I can tell from the beast in your voices. Go ahead, do say something obscene.”
This time no one laughed.
Tod tried to disengage her arm, but she kept a firm grip on it. There was a moment of awkward silence, then the man she had interrupted tried to make a fresh start.
“The picture business is too humble,” he said. “We ought to resent people like Coombes.”
“That’s right,” said another man. “Guys like that come out here, make a lot of money, grouse all the time about the place, flop on their assignments, then go back East and tell dialect stories about producers they’ve never met.”
“My God,” Mrs. Schwartzen said to Tod in a loud, stagey whisper, “they are talking shop.”
“Let’s look for the man with the drinks,” Tod said.
“No. Take me into the garden. Have you seen what’s in the swimming pool?”
She pulled him along.
The air of the garden was heavy with the odor of mimosa and honeysuckle. Through a slit in the blue serge sky poked a grained moon that looked like an enormous bone button. A little flagstone path, made narrow by its border of oleander, led to the edge of the sunken pool. On the bottom, near the deep end, he could see a heavy, black mass of some kind.
“What is it?” he asked.
She kicked a switch that was hidden at the base of a shrub and a row of submerged floodlights illuminated the green water. The thing was a dead horse, or, rather, a life-size, realistic reproduction of one. Its legs stuck up stiff and straight and it had an enormous, distended belly. Its hammerhead lay twisted to one side and from its mouth, which was set in an agonized grin, hung a heavy, black tongue.
“Isn’t it marvelous!” exclaimed Mrs. Schwartzen, clapping her hands and jumping up and down excitedly like a little girl.
“What’s it made of?”
“Then you weren’t fooled? How impolite! It’s rubber, of course. It cost lots of money.”
“But why?”
“‘To amuse. We were looking at the pool one day and somebody, Jerry Appis, I think, said that it needed a dead horse on the bottom,