Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [8]
With his tightly laced spats he tapped out a rhythm and the drummer brushed it up on the snare. The bass and piano players joined in. The saxophonist listened to his partners, nodding his head to the beat. He eased in with a perky little melody that sort of cantered within the corral of the tempo. Then he began to bray as if he’d been spooked and in a flash he was over the fence.
Our neighbor looked like a tourist getting directions from a gendarme. Happening to make eye contact with me, he made a bewildered face for my benefit. I laughed and he laughed back.
—Is there a melody in there? he asked.
I edged my chair a little closer, as if I hadn’t quite heard him. I leaned at an angle five degrees less acute than the waitress had.
—What’s that?
—I was wondering if there’s a melody in there.
—It just went out for a smoke. It’ll be back in a minute. But I take it that you don’t come here for the music.
—Is it obvious? he asked with a sheepish smile. I’m actually looking for my brother. He’s the jazz fan.
From across the table I could hear Eve’s eyelashes flittering. A cashmere coat and a New Year’s date with a sibling. What more did a girl need to know?
—Would you like to join us while you wait? she asked.
—Oh. I wouldn’t want to impose.
(Now there was a word we didn’t hear every day.)
—You wouldn’t be imposing, Eve chastened.
We made a little room for him at the table and he slid up in his chair.
—Theodore Grey.
—Theodore! Eve exclaimed. Even Roosevelt went by Teddy.
Theodore laughed.
—My friends call me Tinker.
Couldn’t you just have guessed it? How the WASPs loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy. Maybe it was to hearken back to their seventeenth-century New England bootstraps—the manual trades that had made them stalwart and humble and virtuous in the eyes of their Lord. Or maybe it was just a way of politely understating their predestination to having it all.
—I’m Evelyn Ross, Evey said, taking her given name for a spin. And this is Katey Kontent.
—Katey Kontent! Wow! So are you?
—Not by a long shot.
Tinker raised his glass with a friendly smile.
—Then here’s to it in 1938.
Tinker’s brother never showed. Which worked out fine for us, because around eleven o’clock, Tinker signaled the waitress and ordered a bottle of bubbly.
—We aint got no bubbly here, Mister, she replied—decidedly colder now that he was at our table.
So he joined us in a round of gin.
Eve was in terrific form. She was telling tales about two girls in her high school who’d vied to be homecoming queen the way that Vanderbilt and Rockefeller vied to be the richest man in the world. One of the girls loosed a skunk in the house of the other the night of the senior dance. Her rival responded by dumping a load of manure on her front lawn the day of her sweet sixteen. The finale was a Sunday morning hair-pulling contest on the steps of Saint Mary’s between their mothers. Father O’Connor, who should have known better, tried to intervene and got a little scripture of his own.
Tinker was laughing so hard you got the sense that he hadn’t done it in a while. It was brightening all his God-given attributes like his smile and his eyes and the blushes on his cheeks.
—How about you, Katey? he asked after catching his breath. Where are you from?
—Katey grew up in Brooklyn, Eve volunteered—as if it was a bragging right.
—Really? What was that like?
—Well, I’m not sure we had a homecoming queen.
—You wouldn’t have gone to homecoming if there was one, Eve said. Then she leaned toward Tinker confidentially.
—Katey’s the hottest bookworm you’ll ever meet. If you took all the books that she’s read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.
—The Milky Way!
—Maybe the Moon, I conceded.
Eve offered Tinker a cigarette and he declined. But the instant her cigarette touched her lips,