Free Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald Page A

formidable to Rosemary, who had yet to attend a Mayfair
party in Hollywood, Dick would bring the scene within range by greeting a few
people, a sort of selection—the Divers seemed to have a large acquaintance, but
it was always as if the person had not seen them for a long, long time, and was
utterly bowled over, “Why, where do you KEEP yourselves?”—and then re-create
the unity of his own party by destroying the outsiders softly but permanently with
an ironic coup de grâce . Presently Rosemary seemed to
have known those people herself in some deplorable past, and then got on to
them, rejected them, discarded them.
    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 clearly
afterward—laughed a lot and the men drank three bottles of wine. The trio of women at the table were representative 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-hanger 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 resemblance 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, nicer in that there were
only seven people, about the limit of a good party. Perhaps, too, the fact that
she was new to their world acted as a sort of catalytic agent to precipitate
out all their old reservations about one another. After the table broke up, a
waiter directed Rosemary back into the dark hinterland of all French
restaurants, where she looked up a phone number by a dim orange bulb, and
called Franco-American Films. Sure, they had a print of “Daddy’s Girl”—it was
out for the moment, but they would run it off later in the week for her at 341
Rue des Saintes Anges —ask
for Mr. Crowder.
    The
semi-booth gave on the vestiaire and as Rosemary hung
up the receiver she heard two low voices not five feet from her on the other
side of a row of coats.
    “— So you love me?”
    “Oh, DO I !”
    It Was
Nicole—Rosemary hesitated in the door of the booth—then she heard Dick say:
    “I want
you terribly—let’s go to the hotel now.” Nicole gave a little gasping sigh. For
a moment the words conveyed nothing at all to Rosemary—but the tone did. The
vast secretiveness of it vibrated to herself.
    “I want
you.”
    “I’ll be
at the hotel at four.”
    Rosemary
stood breathless as the voices moved away. She was at first even astonished—she
had seen them in their relation to each other as people without personal
exigencies—as something cooler. Now a strong current of emotion flowed through
her, profound and unidentified. She did not know whether she was attracted or
repelled, but only that she was deeply moved. It made her feel very alone as
she went back into the restaurant, but it was touching to look in upon, and the
passionate