“WHAT’S THE SURPRISE?” Matthew asks.
Leila only winks. She’s not going to say anything about it. “Try that drink,” she says. “See if it’s any good.”
He tries it. She’s been mixing martinis for him nearly half her life, ever since her father taught her how, and Matthew’s never had the heart to tell her that she uses too much vermouth. “Excellent!” he says.
For one lightning moment, he thinks of making a flirtatious remark, “You can mix my martinis anytime,” but it sounds obscene to his mind’s ear, so he doesn’t say it — or anything else. Silence hangs in the air for a moment, and he begins to feel awkward, so he decides to go ahead and say it. “You can mix my martinis anytime,” he says, but to show that it’s a joke, merely a joke, he says it in his W. C. Fields voice. Too late, he realizes that if Leila doesn’t know who the hell W. C. Fields was, then he must seem hideously goatish making such a suggestion in such a voice. He seems to be getting deeper and deeper into trouble. Maybe he should just go home.
“So,” he says, “you’re not going to tell me anything about the surprise?”
“Nope. Can’t tell.” Shrugging, she makes a girlish display of secrecy. This shrug, with her hands clasped backward in front of her pubes, her arms stretched straight, her shoulders hunched forward, makes her breasts balloon beneath the sweater. Is she inviting me to tickle the secret out of her? His composure’s slipping.
“Are you ready, Matthew?” calls Belinda from the top of the stairs.
He takes another swallow of the drink, throws a grin at Leila. “Now I am,” he says. “Shall I close my eyes?”
“No, no. I want to make an entrance.”
So it’s clothing, Matthew thinks. A dress, probably, something daring that she wouldn’t ordinarily buy herself. Good. Great. He has often wished she would wear something slinky now and then, and this is the perfect night for it.
She steps into view at the top of the stairs wearing a white fur coat. She stands there a moment, with her hands in the pockets, striking a model’s pose, making cat’s eyes, sucking her cheeks in. Then she begins walking down the stairs, vamping.
The coat is startling. The skins are dyed mink, sewn in such a way as to create the effect of vertical stripes, white on white, and the collar and cuffs are ermine, softer and fluffier than the mink, with the slightest hint of black at the tips of the hairs. It’s a staggering, breathtaking coat.
“Wow,” says Matthew, and Leila giggles.
Belinda lets her face relax; it assumes a look that says, “Haven’t I done something silly?”
“I got it on sale,” she says. “I’m not going to tell you what it cost. I won’t even tell you what it would have cost.”
Belinda takes Matthew’s arm, and they walk down the steps. The cabdriver, who has been watching for them, gets out of the cab — it would be fair to say that he leaps out of the cab — and comes around to open the door. This has never happened to Matthew before in his life. The driver begins sweeping at the seat with his hand, and saying something in so low a voice that Matthew can’t be quite sure what it is, but it sounds to him like “’Scuse me, ’scuse me. Sorry, sorry. Dirty, dirty.” Matthew and Belinda get into the cab, astonished. They look at each other, raise their eyebrows, struggle to keep themselves from laughing.
“If he were wearing a cap,” Matthew whispers, “he would have touched it. And if he weren’t bald, he would have tugged his forelock.”
In Topical Guide 459, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing; and Language: Idioms: Tug the (One’s) Forelock from this episode.
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🎧 459: “What’s the surprise?”