Figente? For heaven's sake, the man Clem told her about and gave her a letter to! Imagine Clem in a place like this. Men in evening dress wore yellow flowers, sashes, or turbans. Women in gold or yellow beaded and spangled dresses, yellow flowers. Golden lighted fountain, sallow faces. The Negro band looked good. Only Negroes can wear yellow. A nightgowned Negro triplet was putting something gold on her.
"No, no," Figente said in a voice that wobbled high, "not you, my dear, you are the goddess we worship, Aphrodite, since, regrettably, you cannot be Adonis."
He led her to a kind of double throne, sitting on a chair next to hers on the dais. The yellow satin cushions felt smooth through Mother's beaded dress. Men stumbled up and drank to her, and she had some champagne too. It was bubbly and good and she didn't mind the old women of at least twenty-five and even thirty who looked daggers at her and turned to say something mean. Poor things, didn't they know they were too old for so much makeup? She thought dizzily she was being the Toast of the Town, except everyone was drunk. She recognized two people. Tessie Soler the star, to impress Lyle Bigelow, held her orange head high like all leading ladies and turned profile when she took a stagey puff from her long jade cigarette holder. There was her lover, Beman, the high-class producer. His face was red and his neck bulged over his tight high collar. He must eat too much. Figente looked bored. Maybe she ought to be nice to him and say something.
"I've heard of you but I'll bet you can't guess where."
He glanced at her warily, saying with marked disinterest, "I don't think I shall try."
He wasn't polite, and the snatches of conversation between the milling dancers who all seemed to know each other made her feel an outsider too.
"In Nebraska, from a friend of yours, an artist, Clem Brush."
Relieved, he pretended not to know him. Inoffensive fellow but dull.
"He said you were an artist too—is that some of your work?"
Figente looked at his new Picasso in honor of which he had had repapered this drawing-room gallery in nigger brown and sofas re-upholstered in black moire, and engaged Negro footmen for the evening. It was a pity not to be able to insist as he could have before the war that his guests wear Moroccan dress to blend with the décor. But you couldn't insist in New York today, especially
