The Beautiful & Damned (Musaicum Must Classics). F. Scott Fitzgerald

They have made sure that the place has three qualifications: it is cheap; it imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness the glittering antics of the great cafes in the theatre district; and — this, above all, important — it is a place where they can “take a nice girl,” which means, of course, that every one has become equally harmless, timid, and uninteresting through lack of money and imagination.

      There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid, overworked people with hyphenated occupations: bookkeepers, ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all, clerks — clerks of the express, of the mail, of the grocery, of the brokerage, of the bank. With them are their giggling, over-gestured, pathetically pretentious women, who grow fat with them, bear them too many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of drudgery and broken hopes.

      They name these brummagem cabarets after Pullman cars. The “Marathon”! Not for them the salacious similes borrowed from the cafés of Paris! This is where their docile patrons bring their “nice women,” whose starved fancies are only too willing to believe that the scene is comparatively gay and joyous, and even faintly immoral. This is life! Who cares for the morrow?

      Abandoned people!

      Anthony and Gloria, seated, looked about them. At the next table a party of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and a girl, who were evidently late — and the manner of the girl was a study in national sociology. She was meeting some new men — and she was pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending and by words and by the scarcely perceptible motionings of her eyelids that she belonged to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do, that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined — she wore a last year’s hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and palpably artificial than herself.

      Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the impression that she was only condescendingly present. For me, her eyes said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with belittling laughter and semi-apologetics.

      — And the other women passionately poured out the impression that though they were in the crowd they were not of it. This was not the sort of place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was near by and convenient — every party in the restaurant poured out that impression … who knew? They were forever changing class, all of them — the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men striking suddenly a magnificent opulence: a sufficiently preposterous advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone. Meanwhile, they met here to eat, closing their eyes to the economy displayed in infrequent changings of tablecloths, in the casualness of the cabaret performers, most of all in the colloquial carelessness and familiarity of the waiters. One was sure that these waiters were not impressed by their patrons. One expected that presently they would sit at the tables …

      “Do you object to this?” inquired Anthony.

      Gloria’s face warmed and for the first time that evening she smiled.

      “I love it,” she said frankly. It was impossible to doubt her. Her gray eyes roved here and there, drowsing, idle or alert, on each group, passing to the next with unconcealed enjoyment, and to Anthony were made plain the different values of her profile, the wonderfully alive expressions of her mouth, and the authentic distinction of face and form and manner that made her like a single flower amidst a collection of cheap bric-à-brac. At her happiness, a gorgeous sentiment welled into his eyes, choked him up, set his nerves a-tingle, and filled his throat with husky and vibrant emotion. There was a hush upon the room. The careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor — and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained tablecloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea….

      Then the illusion snapped like a nest of threads; the room grouped itself around him, voices, faces, movement; the garish shimmer of the lights overhead became real, became portentous; breath began, the slow respiration that she and he took in time with this docile hundred, the rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meaningless play and interplay and tossing and reiterating of word and phrase — all these wrenched his senses open to the suffocating pressure of life — and then her voice came at him, cool as the suspended dream he had left behind.

      “I belong here,” she murmured, “I’m like these people.”

      For an instant this seemed a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her entrancement had increased — her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year’s mellowest fox-trot:

      “Something — goes

       Ring-a-ting-a-ling-a-ling

       Right in-your ear—”

      Again she spoke, from the centre of this pervasive illusion of her own.. It amazed him. It was like blasphemy from the mouth of a child.

      “I’m like they are — like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the music of that orchestra.”

      “You’re a young idiot!” he insisted wildly. She shook her blond head.

      “No, I’m not. I am like them…. You ought to see…. You don’t know me.” She hesitated and her eyes came back to him, rested abruptly on his, as though surprised at the last to see him there. “I’ve got a streak of what you’d call cheapness. I don’t know where I get it but it’s — oh, things like this and bright colors and gaudy vulgarity. I seem to belong here. These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I’m this because of this or that because of that.”

      — Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her, to set her down now, as she was, as, as with each relentless second she could never be again.

      “What were you thinking?” she asked.

      “Just that I’m not a realist,” he said, and then: “No, only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving.”

      Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance — that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it — then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.