Page 79 - tender-is-the-night

Their own party was overwhelmingly American and
sometimes scarcely American at all. It was themselves he
gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how
many years.
Into the dark, smoky restaurant, smelling of the rich raw
foods on the buffet, slid Nicole’s sky-blue suit like a stray
segment of the weather outside. Seeing from their eyes how
beautiful she was, she thanked them with a smile of radiant
appreciation. They were all very nice people for a while, very
courteous and all that. Then they grew tired of it and they
were funny and bitter, and finally they made a lot of plans.
They laughed at things that they would not remember clear-
ly afterward—laughed a lot and the men drank three bottles
of wine. The trio of women at the table were representa-
tive of the enormous flux of American life. Nicole was the
granddaughter of a self-made American capitalist and the
granddaughter of a Count of the House of Lippe Weissenfeld.
Mary North was the daughter of a journeyman paper-hang-
er and a descendant of President Tyler. Rosemary was from
the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother
onto the uncharted heights of Hollywood. Their point of re-
semblance to each other and their difference from so many
American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to
exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality
through men and not by opposition to them. They would
all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good
wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater
accident of finding their man or not finding him.
So Rosemary found it a pleasant party, that luncheon,

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