Bee’s Knees Chassis

The compliment came across the floor at the Cufflink Club at twenty past eleven, three-quarters drunk and entirely honest, the way the worst things usually arrive.

“What a chassis on that one. My God.”

He said it to his friend, but he said it loud, the way men of a certain income said things in those years, as though volume were a form of taste. Her husband heard it. So did she. So did the orchestra, which did not stop playing, because the orchestra at the Cufflink Club had been instructed, in 1923, never to stop playing for anything short of fire.

She was wearing the bronze. She had been wearing the bronze all season, because the bronze did what the bronze did, and she was twenty-eight years old and had recently begun to understand that the bronze would not do it forever. Her husband was forty-one, and rich, and had been her husband for six years, and had loved her for two of them.

She set down her drink. It was the new thing — pisco that had sat with oolong until it tasted faintly of a temple, pineapple cut with merlot until the pineapple gave up, caramel laid over the top like a confession. The foam broke against her lip and left a small white crescent there, which she did not wipe away, because she knew what it looked like.

She crossed the floor. The orchestra played on. Her husband watched her go the way a man watches his own carriage roll, slowly, toward a wall.

She did not slap the man who had spoken. She put one gloved hand against the lapel of his dinner jacket, leaned up — he was tall, and she was wearing the bronze, and the lean was the entire point — and kissed him on the mouth, slowly, the way one kisses someone in a doorway one does not intend to leave through.

When she stepped back, the foam was on his mouth as well.

Her husband, across the room, raised his glass an inch. It was the smallest gesture in the room and the loudest. The man who had been kissed did not understand it. He thought he had won something. He had not. He had been included.

By two the three of them were at the same table, ordering a fourth round, the caramel going gluey at the bottom of the glasses, the merlot rising up through the pineapple like a bruise coming through skin. They were not speaking of what had happened. They were speaking of a horse her husband owned, and of a yacht the other man’s father had bought him, and of a woman in Newport whom none of them had slept with but all of them claimed, smilingly, to have considered.

The bronze had begun to feel heavy on her shoulders. She did not say so.

It would happen again the following Friday. It would happen at the Plaza, and at the Stork, and at a house in Oyster Bay one wet weekend in September. It would happen, eventually, with a different man each time, and then with two men at once, and then, in 1927, with a girl, which her husband did not raise his glass to but did not, finally, prevent.

It would happen for years.

The orchestra at the Cufflink Club closed in 1931, when nobody could afford to be appraised loudly anymore. By then her husband was dead — quietly, in a bath, of an unspecified Tuesday — and she was thirty-six, and the bronze hung in a wardrobe in a smaller apartment, and she had begun, at last, to wipe her mouth.

This was the 1920s. People knew when to make a scene and when to drink instead. She had simply, for a while, known how to do both at the same time.