“What is?”
“Don't know!” Gordon swam over, wincing with pain, and when he gripped the boat, blood braided down his fist.
Bijou strapped on a white rubber bathing cap and pushed her hair under it as she tiptoed on the hot sand. She splashed water onto her arms and chest, and then crouched into the pool and swam overhand toward a rocking diving platform. It floated on groaning red drums that lifted and smacked down and lifted again as boys dived from the boards. Bijou climbed a ladder and dangled her legs from a diving platform carpeted with drenched rope. She removed her cap, tossed her blond hair, ignored the oglers who hung near the ladder. Her breasts ached and she wished Gordon could somehow rub them without making her crazy.
The diving platform had sloped because a crowd took up a corner, staring toward the diving tower. Bijou saw that the ferry had stopped and that its passengers had gathered at the rail under the canopy, gaping in the same direction. Four lifeguards hung on a rowboat, struggling with something, as a policeman with a gaff hook stood in the boat and Gordon clinched the anchor lock with a bandaged right hand. Gordon! Two swimmers disappeared under water, and the policeman hooked the gaff and they heaved up a black snapping turtle as large as a manhole cover and so heavy that the gaff bowed like a fishing rod. The turtle's thorny neck hooked madly about and its beak clicked as it struck at the gaff and its clawed webs snagged at whatever they could, as if they wanted to rake out an eye. Bijou's boyfriend manipulated a canvas mailbag over the turtle's head and nicked it over the turtle's horned shell. The policeman heard a woman shriek, then saw the hubbub and the astonished crowds on the ferry and diving platforms, and he kicked the turtle onto the boat's bottom and said, “Hide it. Hurry up, hide it.”
That night the exhibition palace burned so many light bulbs that signs at the gate warned visitors not to linger too close to the marquee or stare at the electrical dazzle without the green cellophane sunglasses available at the ticket booth. Limousines seeped along an asphalt cul-de-sac that was redolent with honey-suckle, violets, and dahlias, and at least forty taxicabs idled against the curb, the drivers hanging elbows out or sitting against their fenders. Gordon stood on a sidewalk imbedded with gold sparkle and laced his unbandaged fingers with Bijou's as Frankie ostentatiously paid for their admission. Then Bijou left for the powder room with her evening gown in a string-tied box, a pair of white pumps in her hand.
Frankie sauntered inside with Gordon, commenting on the sponge of the burgundy lobby carpet, the vast dance floor's uncommon polish, the vapored fragrances shot overhead from jet instruments tucked into the ceiling's scrolled molding. Bijou's two escorts selected a corner cocktail table and listened to the Butch Seaton Orchestra in sleepy, mopey solitude, without criticism or remark. Then Bijou glided down the ballroom stairs in her glamorous white gown, looking like Playland's last and best creation, Playland's finishing touch, and the men rose up like dukes.
Gordon danced with her and Frankie cut in. Frankie murmured at her ear over sodas, and Gordon asked Bijou to accom- pany him to the dance floor. The three bandied conversations during breaks, then music would start and they'd detach again. Male hands sought Bijou's hands as she sat; songs were solicited for her from the orchestra; Gordon fanned a napkin near her when it warmed.
By ten o'clock the great ballroom was jammed. Young Marines introduced themselves and danced with uneasy strangers, a sergeant danced with a hatcheck girl, some women danced with each other as the Butch Seaton Orchestra played “Undecided,” “Boo Hoo,” “Tangerine.” Bijou stood near the stage, her boyfriend's hand at her back, his thumb independently diddling her zipper as a crooner sang, “I love you, there's nothing to hide. It's better than burning inside. I love you, no use to pretend. There! I've said it again!” Sheet music turned. A man licked his saxophone reed. The crooner retreated from the microphone as woodwinds took over for a measure. A mirrored sunburst globe rotated on the ceiling, wiping light spots across a man's shoulder, a woman's face, a tasseled drape, a chair. The orchestra members wore white tuxedos with red paper roses in their lapels. Gordon's fingers gingered up Bijou's bare back to her neck, where fine blonde hairs had come undone from an ivory barrette. Bijou shivered and then gently swiveled into Gordon, not meaning to dance but moving with him when he did. His shoes nudged hers, his khaki uniform smelled of a spicy after-shave that Bijou regretted, his pressure against her body made her feel secure and loving.
The music stopped and Gordon said, “Let's ditch your cousin.”
“How mean!”
“The guy gives me the creeps.”
“Still.”
Gordon thumped his cane on the floor and weighed his hankerings. “How about if you kissed me a big sloppy one right on my ear?”
Bijou giggled. “Not here.”
“Maybe later, okay?”
Butch Seaton gripped his baton in both hands and bent into a microphone as a woman in a red evening dress with spangles on it like fish scales crossed to the microphone that the crooner was readjusting lower with a wing nut. The orchestra leader suggested, “And now, Audrey, how about Duke Ellington's soulful tune, ‘Mood Indigo'?”
Audrey seemed amenable.
Bijou asked, “I wonder where Frankie is.”
“Maybe he was mixing with his kind and somebody flushed him away.” The corporal's little joke pleased him, and he was near a guffaw when his nose began to bleed. He spattered drops on his bandaged hand and Bijou's wrist and shoe before he could slump, embarrassed, on a chair with a handkerchief pressed to his nostrils. He remarked, “This day is one for the record books, Bijou. This has been a really weird day.”
Bijou complained that she was yukky with Gordon's blood, and she slipped off to the powder room. Gordon watched her disappear among the couples on the dance floor, and then Frankie flopped down on a folding chair next to him.
“How's the schnozzola?” Frankie asked. Gordon removed the handkerchief, and Frankie peered like a vaudeville doctor. “Looks dammed up to me.” He slapped Gordon's crippled knee. “I hereby declare you in perfect h
ealth. Come on, let's drink to it.”
Frankie showed him to a gentleman's saloon, and Gordon paid for a rye whiskey and a Coca-Cola with a simoleon that had grains of sand stuck to it. The Playland glassware was, of course, unblemished with water spots.
Frankie said, “I was a radio actor in New York before the war. I'm coming back from a screen test in Hollywood. Another gangster part. That's about all I do: gunsels, crooks, schlemiels.”
“No kidding,” the corporal said. He rebandaged his right hand and sulked about his miserable afternoon.
Frankie stared at an eighteenth-century painting of a prissy hunter with two spaniels sniffing at his white leggings, a turkey strangled in his fist. “What a jerk, huh? Here I am, horning in on your girl, and I expect chitchat from you.”
“Well, don't expect me to be palsy-walsy. I'll shoot the breeze, okay. But I'm not about to be your pal just because you're Bijou's cousin from Hollywood and radio land.”
Frankie scrooched forward on his bar stool. “You oughta see things with my eyes. You take Bijou, for instance. She's a dish, a real hot patootie in anybody's book, but she ain't all she wrote, Gordo, not by a long shot. You and Bijou, you come to Playland, you dance to the music, swallow all this phonusbalonus, and you think you've experienced life to the hilt. Well, I got news for you, GI. You haven't even licked the spoon. You don't know what's out there, what's available.” Frankie slid off the bar stool and hitched up his pink pleated pants. “You want a clue, you want a little taste of the hot stuff, you call on Cousin Frankie. I gotta go to the can.”
Gordon hunched over his Coca-Cola glass and scowled down into the ice, then swiveled to call to Frankie as he left the saloon, but the schlemiel wasn't there.
Gordon was loitering in the burgundy lobby, slapping his garrison cap in his hand, when Bijou came out of the powder room. He asked, “Do you want to see the moon?”