Algren at Sea Read Free Page B

foundation garment, sweetheart?” I made bold to ask.

    â€œWhy do you ask, awful boy?”
    â€œBecause it’s raking the hell off my sternum, awful girl.”
    â€œIt’s a foundation garment alright,” she chuckled merrily—“a Guggenheim Foundation garment—Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!” and in an access of womanly passion she grasped me to her change belt.
    I extricated myself from her grip and filled two long-stemmed glasses with imported manzanilla, taking care not to spill a drop.
    â€œThere is one question I have to ask, sweetheart,” I told her seriously.
    â€œYou have only to ask.”
    â€œDid Ethiopia finally get free?”
    â€œThey must have. They now belong to us.”
    â€œThen here is to Haile Selassie,” I proposed, clinking my glass against hers although she was nowhere near it.
    â€œThe Lion of Judah!” Rapietta responded, seizing her glass and flinging the contents full in my face.
    Taking me upon her lap, the changeful creature dried my face on her doeskin bag while reproaching me for not keeping my knees together when she had sat upon mine. As her fingers kept trailing the catch of my change purse, I had to shift position now and again.
    Yet in trading a cabin-class hallway for a first-class stateroom on a first-class ocean, I could not help but feel I must have outwitted somebody.
    â€œI feel I’ve made a shrewd move for a layman,” I assured my friend and legal counsel, Rapietta Greensponge, Decorous Public Defender.
    â€œSon,” Rapietta confided in me, “you are all layman.”
    So much for World War II.
    Â 
    If all that was needed for a successful Bon Voyage party was one clever move, I’d already made it by buying a gallon of sauterne for $2.98, putting it under the soda recharger until it fizzed, and then pouring it into bottles labeled “Mumm’s.” Because if there was one thing I wanted my New York friends to have, it was the aura of success. I didn’t wish them success itself—in fact, I longed passionately for the total ruin of them one by one—but I did want to arrange some sort of aura for them.
    â€œHow does a hack like that manage to serve champagne at all hours?” my New York friends often marvel. My Chicago friends don’t bother with that. They just say, “Where’d you get the cheap wine?” and toss the remains of their drink in the sink. So much for bobsledding at Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

    My next move was to snip whiskey ads of Scotsmen playing bagpipes and glue them onto old root-beer bottles, into which I poured the contents of a curious brew distilled on Amsterdam Avenue to which nobody has yet given a name, probably because it has to be got down without fooling around or it won’t go down at all. Labeling these “The Best Scotch Procurable” would, I hoped, raise the fascinating issue of where one might purchase the best scotch that is unprocurable; thus providing even inarticulate guests with a topic of conversation.
    Rapietta arrived first, as might have been expected, with the excuse that she had news so good it couldn’t wait.
    â€œI am as much for good news as your next client,” I reproached her, “but couldn’t it have waited till you’d finished dressing?”
    â€œJust because a person’s girdle snags on her navel is no sign a person isn’t well dressed,” Rapietta pointed out.
    â€œA flimsy alibi,” I had to tell her, for she is the only counselor in the jurisdiction of New York State with a dollar-shaped navel.
    â€œAny jury that has eyes in its head,” she began, but I cut her off. “I know, I know,” I told her quickly. I just didn’t want to go through that blind-judge routine again.
    New York was sharpening me up, as the reader may have noticed.
    What the SS Meyer Davis could do for me remained to be seen.
    â€œWhat I want to know is how much we’re going to wipe