Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [49]
Eve blinked like she’d been thinking of something else.
—What’s that?
—I say the girl was lucky you were there.
Eve looked at me a little surprised.
—Luck had nothing to do with it, Sis. I followed the bastard to the pantry.
Suddenly, I had an image of Eve prowling the halls of WASP New York, potato masher in hand, occasionally leaping from the shadows to put all manner of boorish behavior in its place.
—You know what? I said, with renewed conviction.
—What?
—You’re the bestest.
When it was nearly eight and the champagne bottle was stuffed upside down in the ice bucket, I pointed out that Eve had better get going. She looked at the empty bottle a little forlornly.
—You’re probably right, she said.
She reached for her new clutch and signaled the waiter in the same motion, the way that Tinker would have. She took out an envelope that was filled with brand-new twenty-dollar bills.
—No, I said. It’s on me, birthday girl.
—Okay. But on the twenty-fourth, I get to return the favor.
—That would be great.
She stood up and for a moment I could see her in all her glory. With the dress falling gracefully from her shoulders and the red clutch in her hand she looked like a full-length portrait by John Singer Sargent.
—Till doomsday, she reminded me.
—Till doomsday.
As I was waiting for the waiter to bring the check, I wandered over to the display cases in the middle of the room. To someone with knowledge of such things, perhaps the gun case was an impressive showing of rare firearms. But to the inexperienced eye it just seemed shabby. The guns looked like they’d been dug up from the banks of the Mississippi while at the bottom of the case Civil War bullets sat in a pile like deer droppings.
The butterfly display was easier on the eyes, but it too evidenced a certain amateurishness. The insects were pinned on the felt in such a way that you could only see the topside of their wings. But if you know anything about butterflies, you know that the two sides of their wings can be dramatically different. If the top is an opalescent blue, the underside can be a brownish gray with ocher spots. The sharp contrast provides butterflies with a material evolutionary advantage, because when their wings are open they can attract a mate, while when their wings are closed they can disappear on the trunk of a tree.
It’s a bit of a cliché to refer to someone as a chameleon: a person who can change his colors from environment to environment. In fact, not one in a million can do that. But there are tens of thousands of butterflies: men and women like Eve with two dramatically different colorings—one which serves to attract and the other which serves to camouflage—and which can be switched at the instant with a flit of the wings.
By the time the check came, the champagne was catching up with me.
I gathered my bag and set my sights on the door.
The brunette in the suit walked past me toward the bathrooms. She gave me the cold unfriendly stare of an old enemy at an unpopular peace. Wasn’t that just perfect, I thought. How little imagination and courage we show in our hatreds. If we earn fifty cents an hour, we admire the rich and pity the poor, and we reserve the full force of our venom for those who make a penny more or a penny less. That’s why there isn’t a revolution every ten years. I stuck out my tongue at her retroactively and wove toward the door trying to look from behind like a movie star on a train.
At the top of the staircase, the steps suddenly looked narrow and steep. It was a little like the view from the top of a roller coaster. I had to take off my heels and cling to the banister.
As I descended with a shoulder to the wall, I realized that the photographs lining the stairwell were pictures of the Endurance frozen in the Antarctic. I stopped to look at one of them more closely. In it, the riggings on the ship had been cleared of their sails. Food and other necessities had been unpacked onto the ice. I wagged a finger at Commander Shackleton reminding him that it was his own damn