The headwaiter used to watch us eat while he sipped a gin-and-orange bitters. He had the voluptuously flared nose of something like a newly designed airplane. His attitude was the kind that used to scare the Sabine women.
Sethos looked with tolerant superiority at his twelve-dollar shoes. “You will be a great success in Beverly Hills.”
“One hopes,” said the headwaiter. He looked like Hamlet, but talked like Schopenhauer. “The fattened calf never loved the prodigal son, huh?”
We agreed and went on deck to smoke some cigars and to see if Sethos knew any of the girls from other crossings; his morals had limits but not in the right places. Tourists, he said, clutched at life as if their girdles were slipping. Sex is like the opium habit, he explained: it takes a hard cure.
I regret to say he always ended the trip with something that looked as if it had been netted in the Gulf Stream.
I shall never forget the day America came leaping across the far bend of the horizon, first a scribble of mist, then a smudge of land and after that the shapes of buildings and rocks, all aglow in the salt reek of the turning tide off the Kill von Kull. And even Brooklyn on the lee shore looked good.
It also looked as if I had escaped the vegetable pots for good, but as we came up the Narrows the steward saw me and grabbed me. “So, that's what happens to our third vegetable cook. You'll go back to France in the brig.”
“I'm a fighting American,” I said (we had been drinking late, to finish off the bottles in the band rooms before docking; remember, this was during the speakeasy days). “You can't take me below without bloodshed.”
“Ah, so you want to be dragged back to France for taking money without working. Prepare yourself for trouble.”
I saw nothing to do but go back to the kitchen and wonder if I were going to be locked up and sent back to France. I had learned in France that the American Embassy or the State Department didn't do much for anyone who didn't have a letter from the president of General Motors or a healthy connection with a New York department store buyer.
In the kitchen there was trouble. A rich American countess (from Kansas City) had sent down for a fruit salad in aspic, and had sent down her own aspic, and the damn thing wouldn't jell! The chefs stood around cursing America, good food, and the habits of Kansas City (which they thought was in Kansas).
“And now you!” shouted my chef at me. “Not enough, we have to find you!”
“What's the trouble?”
“Your damned American aspics!”
I looked at the little box they threw at me. “Oh, Jello. You don't make it like the other aspics. Get me some boiling water.”
And I made them a fruit salad, and when the boat pulled in the countess was serving her friends fruit salad Kansas City and I was being checked off the boat by a customs officer who didn't trust my Picasso drawings and insisted they weren't art… so I said they were wallpaper for a speakeasy and he let me through. The first thing I did after getting a hotel room was to write a letter to the Jello people…
Sethos came over, smelling like a rose garden; he had a date later. “Ah, you are home now.”
“Yes, it looks pretty good. I used to worry over it.”
“All ultimate conclusions are worthless. Live, don't think.”
“Thanks.”
“We pay to be admired and take pay to admire others. But Stevie, it's different here. It's a big place, this America. It's not for me, but you, you fit?”
“I think so… if Europe hasn't spoiled me.”
“To forget, one must at a certain time practice constant recollection. Well, I must go. I have found a tomato, as you Americans call a girl.”
“Do we?”
But he was gone, so I called up a girl I knew in the Village, who kept a collie on a pekinese income, and when we got off the bus at Riverside and I looked across at the advertising signs on the Jersey side, I knew I was home. I bowed twice to the Jello sign.
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