New York Nocturne Read Online Free PDF Page A

it, reached inside, and pulled out a small square box of shiny golden cardboard, about six by six inches, tied with glossy black ribbon. He crossed the floor and handed it to me.
    â€œWhat is it?” I asked him, taking it.
    â€œOpen it.”
    Inside, lying amid whispering white tissue paper, was an extravagant velvety orchid corsage, creamy yellow and brilliant scarlet against a feathery spray of green.
    I looked up at him.
    He said, “Is it all right?”
    No one had ever given me an orchid before. Along the rims of my eyes I felt the faint sting of a swelling gratitude. “It’s gorgeous,” I told him. I cleared my throat, which had unaccountably gone a bit croupy. “It’s really beautiful.”
    I looked away and blinked, once, twice, three times, very quickly.
    â€œGood,” he said heartily. Perhaps too heartily—perhaps my gratitude had made him as self-conscious as his generosity had made me. “Good,” he said again. He picked up his drink and finished it.
    I braved a look upward. He grinned down at me, heartily. “Shall we get ready?”
    Forty-five minutes later, we were in a taxi, heading south along Fifth Avenue.
    With the dress, I wore a black silk jacket and a black velvet cloche I had bought only two days before at Wanamaker’s on lower Broadway. The orchid was pinned to the jacket’s front.
    John was, as usual, magnificent. He wore a single-breasted midnight-blue dinner jacket with peaked satin lapels, matching trousers, a softly pleated white shirt, a black silk bow tie, a red silk cummerbund, black silk socks, and black patent-leather formal pumps with grosgrain ribbon bows. He wore all this, as he wore everything, with an effortless ease and sophistication. Several years would pass before I met someone—the dancer Fred Astaire—who appeared as casually comfortable in formal wear.
    We ate dinner at a speakeasy called Chumley’s, which had a discreet entrance in a small courtyard on Barrow Street. John told me that the place also had an inconspicuous exit at 86 Bedford Street. On the rare occasions that federal agents conducted a raid, the waiters advised the customers to “eighty-six it,” and then all of them—customers and waiters alike—went merrily scrambling out that back door. The speakeasy, John said, was famous now, and so was the catch phrase—waiters in other restaurants, all over the city, were using it among themselves. Whenever a particular menu item was no longer available, that item was said to be “eighty-sixed.”
    It was a cozy bohemian place: sawdust and peanut shells on the floor, wooden walls lined with framed photographs and drawings, banners of blue cigarette smoke slowly streaming beneath the low wooden ceiling. Like most of the bars and cafés in the Village, it held a mixed crowd: intense young students in rumpled suits and wire-rimmed Lenin glasses; bearded men in long conspiratorial overcoats; handsome young couples, fingers locked together as they huddled over the tiny tables and inhaled from the same two cubic inches of air.
    John ordered the sautéed filet of sole, and I ordered the grilled steak.
    We were halfway through dinner when a woman suddenly appeared at our table. John stood up, laying his napkin on the table. Several times during the past week, while we were eating, people had approached him and asked for a moment of his time. But until now, all of these had been men and, so he told me, clients.
    â€œDaphne,” he said. It seemed to me that he was deliberately keeping his voice neutral.
    She was one of those beautiful women absolutely certain of the effects she had on the people around her. (It is the certainty, of course, as much as the beauty that creates the effect.) She looked to be perhaps thirty-five years old, and although only five feet and two or three inches tall, she was slender and perfectly proportioned.
    Until she arrived, I had been extremely