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the remote patience of a horse, and a little Mexican gal, cute as a button, hefty across the hips and shoulders, who appeared among us from time to time to pass little items of melted cheese.
    As the alcohol worked on them I could begin to smell more and more of the tension. I didn’t know what was up,but Wilma seemed both too gay and too smug, and everyone else too miserable.
    I finally had a chance before dinner to cut Steve Winsan out of the herd. I got him aside and said, “What goes, Steve? What the hell is up? Why all the sniping going on in all directions?”
    He shook his head sadly. “Lucky boy,” he said. “A nice safe clean job. Lucky boy.”
    “What
is
up? Is it a state secret?”
    “I’m just sore enough to tell you, Pappy. I lose one client, I figure on picking up another. Our Wilma lives big. Old Randy, the watchdog, has been nibbling on her very gingerly about personal expenses. There’s a tax matter pending. She put too many cookies in this layout. She’s living too high. She’s a client on a personal basis, you know. Not through the company. Randy thinks I should be cut off at the pockets. And he wants her to drop Muscle Boy as an expensive luxury, which means cutting me off there, because she has been paying the PR shot on Muscle Boy, the shot that made him a big wheel in the gallery world. I handle Judy, too. She’s got Judy up here to put the blocks to her. She promised Judy next year’s show but didn’t put it in writing, and at the same time told Jolly Boy Dorn to dig up something else for fall. He hasn’t found anything and Randy whispers to me that she’s lifting the account and putting it in another agency. Which Dorn damn well suspects. And don’t think he won’t put up a battle. Don’t think I’m not going to do battle too, my friend. I need a good lever. With same I will pry hell out of Randy and get him to tell Wilma dahling that she better keep me on. My God, if I lose allthree, it’s better than six hundred a week that Stephan Winsan Associates stop getting. If I wasn’t half tight I wouldn’t be telling you all this, Pappy. You sure she’s not about to cut your throat too?”
    “You make me wonder.”
    “There’s one more wheel within a wheel too, Pappy. She tells our Randy that, as her tame and captive business manager, he should not have permitted her current expenses to get into such a state. The poor jerk. He begs and pleads and she ignores him, then she turns around and blames him because she didn’t listen to him. She’s got him so jumpy if you went up behind him and snapped your fingers he’d jump out of his shoes. This is going to be a gay, gay week end. Keep your guard up.”
    I tried to follow his advice. Steve’s briefing clarified the tension. I could watch the focal points. Judy was overly casual. Wallace Dorn became more British than Churchill. Randy Hess had the severe shakes. Noel acted as though she wished she were somewhere else. Steve was quarrelsome. As my Mavis got drunker, her imitation of Wilma began to border on parody. And you could almost hear Wilma purr. I half expected her to sit on the floor and start cleaning her shoulder with her tongue. We ate abundantly of the highly spiced Mexican food prepared by the doom-faced Rosalita, served by José, her brother, and Amparo, the cutie. It was semibuffet, with each of us filling our plates the first time and with Amparo trotting about with the hot casseroles providing refills. I saw Gilman Hayes sitting on the floor in a shadowy corner and saw the exceedingly primitive caress he conferred on Amparo when she leaned close to serve him. Her only reaction was a bit of excess hip sway whenshe moved away from him. The stolid
mestiza
face did not change expression. Later I saw José watching Gilman Hayes with an equal lack of expression. I did not think I would care to be looked at in precisely that way.
    After dinner there was the softness of the good music in the big lounge, and all the world