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By Root 1203 0

season, their own lineages and those of their friends were their only real contributions to a conversation, except for the one that went “I was in America once …” and then petered out into a series of place names, so that by making a play for me I suppose they felt they were keeping their end up. Another thing about them was the way they kept inviting you places; they invited me to a different place on an average of one every five minutes, but I discovered there were two rules governing this: first, it had to be a place you’d never been to, like “What, you’ve never seen the Blue Grotto? I must take you there on the yacht this summer”; and second, it was understood that each invitation canceled the previous one—I’ll leave you to guess what the very last one always was. It was also a great mistake to assume that in spite of all this boulevardier stuff they were really au fond homosexual—or rather I should say homosexual as we know it.

But to get back to the queer club. As Rollo led us through the long bar into the dark, highly scented night-club room, the atmosphere became electric with competition for him. He was King-Pin all right, though this fact seemed to irritate him rather than otherwise, and we were immediately shown to the choice table (on top of the piano and under the stage platform) in the crowded room.

“Faggotry here reaches almost pyrotechnical heights,” Larry whispered to me as a stream of young men ranging from ferociously grotesque to wistfully good-looking filed past to pay their respects to Rollo; some eager as young brides for us to admire their new home, some flirting so excitedly they even flirted with the women in our party by mistake. The ones I spoke to all confessed to being helplessly enraptured with the sailors at the bar, but with the desperate unreality of women admiring one another’s clothes that they wouldn’t be seen dead in.

There was a strong sea motif running through it all which surprised me at the time, though I don’t know why on earth it should. All the waiters wore striped fishermen’s jerseys, the men in uniform were mostly naval officers and sailors, and the decorations, such as they were, consisted mainly of life belts and coils of rope.

Buford Wellington, a young American, carried the sea motif further by having the face and the walk, or rather the waddle, of a seal, with fins for hands and the suggestion of web feet. He arrived at Rollo’s side flapping his flippers into Rollo’s face in a way that did nothing to improve the latter’s temper.

“Thank God you’ve come at last. Such a difficult time with that French crowd over there. I simply can’t make myself understood. Half of them think that I’m a snob——”

“How blind of them,” said Rollo.

“—and the other half that I’m an intellectual!”

“How deaf of them.”

Boofie Wellington, it seemed, was an old doormat that Rollo allowed in his presence from time to time because he did all the packing. It saved hiring a valet.

“Don’t sit down,” ordered Rollo as Boofie began to pull up a chair next to me. “I told you, you weren’t to come near me until you did something about those disgusting nails.”

I looked down at the soft white hands and noticed two or three enormously long fingernails on each of them.

Boofie sulked and sat down anyway. “I only grew them because you promised to take me to Greece. All the aristocracy in Greece wear their nails long, don’t they?” he asked the King of Lithuania, or whoever he was, who had fallen into a deep abstraction and didn’t answer.

“File them off by tomorrow or I’ll have you thrown out of the hotel,” said Rollo casually, in a tone that cut through Boofie like a knife through butter.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” pleaded Boofie to me, trying to recover. “I wonder who we have in common. Do you know Tanny Pop——”

“Nope.”

“I had an awful time in Venice last year,” he went on. “I was asked to leave. Some silly political scandal, bounced checks, and all that sort of thing. So I exiled myself in Ibiza. My dear, don’t. I stared at those goats for five months. I got goat-blindness. I had to be carried off to