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Page 25.

Chapter 12

Feeling bad about Mr. Le Car, Jon sat beside Andy in the Seven Winds Bar in Milford as they sipped beer. They had sounded the side streets of Milford through the early evening hours, until word had filtered somehow among the gray wood houses that there would be girls at the Seven Winds Bar.

Two young girls attached themselves. Andy went off to dance with Jane, the taller of the two. The bar thundered with loud rock music and the slap of ice being thrown into glasses by busy bartenders. It wasn’t the sort of place where you ordered something fancy like a Rusty Nail or a Dubonnet on the rocks.

Jane’s friend Alice was a slender young chick in blue corduroys pants and a double-knit sleeveless pink jersey that left her brown arms and shoulders exposed and barely veiled her heroically forward-pointing breasts. She was Liberty Leading the Masses in the famous painting of revolutionary France by Eugène Delacroix.

Alice and Jane were from Fairfield County. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods?” Jon asked.

Alice, with long auburn hair carefully washed and falling in a frilly tease over her brown shoulders, was all smiles and white teeth. “We just happened drive this way.” Her attitude was guarded; her smile hovering very white against dark velvet skin in a black light glowing around the bar. Jon saw that Andy, on the dance floor, was having a struggle getting his arms fully around bodacious Jane. He wondered if they could each be much over seventeen.

“Do you often drive east this way?” Jon asked, conscious of the hundred jealous looks fastened upon Alice, who preened with adolescent queenliness.

“I just happened to get the Mercedes from my dad to go shopping,” Alice said, smiling through braces.

“You don’t get the Mercedes very often?” Jon asked indirectly, unprepared to indulge in a long and vague exchange of credentials.

A tall, muscular fellow hefting a beer bottle and wearing a stylish BVD shirt elbowed in close, casting lingering looks over the pale skin of young Alice.

Jon sipped intently at the beer on the bar before him, ignoring the wiry arms that rippled discreet warnings in his direction.

Alice turned glowing eyes upward and without apology departed in the sinuous embrace of one Marc, or was it Mark or even Marx? Seeing under ever-attentive brows the departure of Alice, Jane impulsively untangled herself from Andy’s embrace and swooned in the direction taken by Marx and Alice.

“Bitches!” Andy remarked, finding his abandoned beer bottle and embracing it with clenched fingers.

Jon was thinking about Charles Egeny. “Say,” he said, “I think I’ll hand-carry my manuscript to New York.”

“What are you talking about?” grumbled Andy.

“Nothing,” Jon said. “Just talking to myself.”

The music inside the Seven Winds grew louder. The air-conditioned atmosphere, filled with sweat and beer, grew more intense at the dance performed by Marx and Alice in a corner. Her milk-coffee skin and glowing face.

Someday, somewhere, someone, those breasts…

“Let’s split, Andy.”