Little Casino

Costume parties

THE TAPIOCA WAS, LET’S ASSUME, WILDLY sweet in his dream, and the girl was smiling a lasciviously pure smile, although her face was not quite clear. She was wearing a crisp white uniform. The touch of her hand, the firmness and warmth of her thigh against his, the weight of her body on the bed, her quick and expert hand. She held a starched napkin for him to come into. She didn’t come back the next day nor the next and then his father came and took him out of the hospital, both eyes still bandaged.

They got into his father’s Cadillac, around them an early fall clarity of sound, and a sharpness to the light wind in the trees on quiet Parkside Avenue.

In the woman’s apartment, Connie, his father called her, he guided him to a chair at the kitchen table. Connie’s voice was something like the voice of the girl in the hospital. She gave him a 7 Up and he held the cold bottle, listening to sounds of lovemaking behind a closed door, whispers and small sighs, for maybe a half-hour, but then his father said, in a very harsh voice, that he wanted the goddamned furs back, did she think that he meant for her to keep them, just a dime-a-dozen skirt like she was?

They walked down the stairs, his father holding his arm and steering him carefully. They could both hear her crying behind the apartment door, but said nothing. The furs were soft and cool against his hand. There’s no need for your mother to know we stopped off, his father said, it’s just business. The kid got confused, but she’s a smart girl, went to Manhattan Marymount to be a dietician. She’s got a crackerjack of a sister.

He thought to ask his father if she worked, maybe, part-time at the hospital, but knew that it was stupid and that she didn’t. The girl at the hospital was sweet and understood how much he wanted her to touch him. Connie was a tramp. His father dialed the radio to some dance music. The furs smelled like fresh air and perfume, they smelled like women. So you want to swing by Nathan’s for a coupla hot dogs, eagle-eye? his father said, and squeezed his thigh.

Stories of promiscuity on the part of nurses and nurses’ aides in hospitals and clinics are, of course, legion, and some are absolutely true.

“How many?”

About 2.76333 %.

Then the woman in the white silk pants suit at the bar says to him, “This is really too good to be true! Aren’t you the guy who had that wonderfully surprising and gratifying sexual experience in Caledonia Hospital in Brooklyn back in 1945? Well, I’m not that girl, but on the other hand, look at me!” [So it wasn’t Brooklyn Eye and Ear.]

Q. What is more boring than a costume party? And yet, here they are, “getting ready,” as the phrase has it, to go to one. He is a Filthy Capitalist, oh Jesus Christ spare us, with top hat, cigar, and bulky canvas bag adorned with a dollar sign; and his wife is a Bossy Nurse, help! with huge horn-rimmed glasses, thick-soled shoes, and clipboard. When they get back home, he follows her into the bedroom, then holds her in his arms as tremblingly and self-revealingly as Melville’s Pierre first held Isabel. He lifts her white nylon skirt with sober passion, and she pushes her belly against him. “Oh, sweetheart, oh, sweetheart,” she says. She is terribly excited, as is he, and yet he says, looking directly into her dark eyes, “Don’t throw bouquets at me.”

This is sometimes known as putting the kibosh on things. It is followed by his wife’s:

“God! Let me get out of this damned uniform! How do those nurses wear these tacky things?”

All over for the nonce.

Stories of costume parties at which people actually do become other people are few and far between, but mostly true.

A. English Department meetings at any American university or college.

To get this young wife “out of [her] damned uniform” is not at all the same thing as having her undress.

Tu-whit, tu-whoo, jug-jug, and ding-a-ding.