The Heat of the Sun

master over the revels. Through many a season, the world’s elite descended upon
his latest lair. Imagine New York that night of the Blood Red Ball: the limousines rolling down Park Avenue towards that great tower topped with his palazzo! What cargoes they disgorge: gentlemen
in top hats and vampiric capes; girls with spindly arms and swinging beads; Rubenesque women in boas and feathery hats, all of them in red, all of them masked. Behind those masks hide many famous
faces, the titled, the rich, the merely notorious, mingling promiscuously: Mr Cole Porter, the Aga Khan, Miss Elsa Maxwell, Miss Greta Garbo, the Duke of Verdura, Mr Duke Ellington, Mayor Jimmy
Walker, Miss Nancy Cunard, Mr Al Capone, Mr Al Jolson, Mr Newton Orchid, the Chester Beckers and the Ripley Snells, Mr Theodore Dreiser, Prince Frederick Leopold.
    Gliding in a limousine with Kate Pinkerton, as if towards my destiny, I shivered once, though the car was warm.
    ‘I trust,’ she said airily, ‘you’ve been developing your craft.’
    ‘I’ve given up poetry,’ I replied. ‘I’m writing a novel.’
    ‘Oh?’ She sounded curious, but asked no more. I was glad and disappointed. My novel was called Telemachus, Stay . It would be nothing if not contemporary. The action, set in
Manhattan over one Fourth of July, was to begin with a lengthy prologue (‘Overture’, I liked to say), which I imagined weaving like a sinuous jazz tune through streets of squalor and
splendour, from Park Avenue penthouses to Harlem dives, Garment District sweatshops to Woolworth Building offices, alternating between hard, ‘objective’ presentation of the city and
sudden vertiginous descents into the consciousness of this or that character, most of them the merest passers-by. What followed, in so far as I had worked it out, was to be an account of a
dissolute young man called Eugene Telemachus and the various pointless things he did to fill up his day. I saw the book as a commentary on the post-war world. It would be nine hundred pages long,
with each chapter written in a different experimental style.
    I studied Kate Pinkerton. She had explained no more about the purpose of the evening, but there was no more to explain. Trouble would be here. And we were here to save him.
    Floodlights lit the vast apartment block. Under the canopied entranceway braziers burned on either side of a broad vermilion carpet. A servant, materializing from behind the flames, assisted us
from the car; Yamadori’s men wore black, but had hidden their faces behind maroon lacquered masks. Snow had fallen earlier, and the slushy sidewalk gleamed with reflected fire. Kate Pinkerton
took my arm, and with a surge of pride I led her into the marble lobby. Her costume was an eighteenth-century gown with enormous hoopskirts; mine, which she had sent to me, the chequered garb of a
harlequin. Our masks: a jewelled shield for the lady’s eyes; for me, a shell of skull-like porcelain that fitted with eerie precision over the top half of my face. Skywards we swept in an art
nouveau elevator. Kate Pinkerton’s breasts, powdered whitely, swelled out from her beaded bodice. I loved her.
    As we entered the palazzo, the swooning tones of a full orchestra, reeling its way through a Strauss waltz, encircled us in silky skeins. Like a dazzled page by his lady’s side, I entered
the first of many salons where robed and furred nobility once bowed in stately conference. Within gilded walls emblazoned with frescoes, against mighty canvases by Titian and Veronese, guests
garbed in every variety of red clustered in elegant groups or revolved, with many a whirl of tailcoat and gown, in the roseate twilight of red-globed chandeliers. Through an archway I glimpsed the
broad imperial staircase I had seen before, stately in its thrust of marble and gold: a stairway to the stars.
    ‘Tell Prince Yamadori’ – Kate Pinkerton clutched a servant’s sleeve – ‘that the senator’s wife has arrived.’
    Masked revellers surrounded us. To my left stood a group of long-legged girls, each in burgundy high heels, damask stockings and a skirt the colour of cherries, stretched across her thighs; one
sported a ruby cigarette-holder, into which she had fixed a strawberry-coloured cocktail cigarette. To my right a squat elderly gentleman, cheeks alarmingly rouged, squired a carrot-haired young
man in obscenely tight shorts, cerise in shade; there were carmine leotards, carnelian capes, a fuchsia bridal gown