Photo-Illustration by Noé Sendas for The New Yorker

November. Cold outside. It was warm inside, and the big combination played twelve wonderful records without stopping. Seven people were dancing, three couples and Marcel. Midnight.

It was Marcel’s apartment, and he was a fairy. Nobody else was unusual in that regard. But Marcel was a fairy and he had inserted a “de la” in his name—Marcel de la Smith was how he had been known for a long time on his cards. He had once called himself Marcel de la Smythe, but his friends had been so tickled at this addition of a “y” and an “e” (“Aw, you still ain’t nothing but old Smith!”) that Marcel had dropped the Smythe affectation, keeping merely the “de la” as an indication of French Creole origin, although he had never been near New Orleans. He was from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and although he had a good nature, he did not really relish being made fun of on certain scores.

It was Marcel’s apartment, and seven people were dancing. Six were colored and one was white. Marcel himself was colored, a muddy brown and not good-looking. It was he who danced alone. His dancing was too fanciful to be masculine and too grotesque to be feminine. But everything that he did was like that, so it was very easy to tell that he was a fairy. He did not mind dancing alone, because, although the party was at his house, it was not his party. Marcel often gave parties to make money. He sold drinks and rented rooms—even to mixed couples, which many housemen in Harlem did not do. Perhaps that was why there was one white person dancing to the big mahogany combination dropping its twelve wonderful records.

The reason I say “perhaps” about the white girl is that I do not know the ultimate “why” of anything. I know all about that girl except “why.” “Why” is the very mystery. In fact, “why” is the final wonder called God.

Joan was a very attractive girl. Anyone could see that she was not a tramp. And the slight, young, golden-skinned boy with whom she danced was attractive, too, in a tennis-playing intellectual way. Until Claude brought her, the white girl had never been to Harlem. Now, however, she had been uptown a dozen times. But this was the first time that Claude had brought her to an apartment where they rented rooms to couples.

In the cold coming wintertime, it is good to be very close to someone who is warm. And to be wrapped in warm wonderful music, danceable but boppish, spiked with modern chords and flatted fifths, and to be away from home, where the big library, even with the fireplace glowing, looks cold and too full of knowledge, and the bedroom is lonesome, although Mademoiselle has photographed it, and there is nobody interesting to drink with, although there is plenty to drink in the liquor cabinet, and it is better to be in Claude’s arms in Harlem, wonderful colored boy the color of caramel-custard pie or a ginger-ale highball who makes you feel warm deep down inside and is sweet like pie, too.

“You-all stop dancing on a dime,” Marcel said.

The other couples laughed and the laughter bounced, like very hard rubber balls, around the room, not like tennis balls but like solid hard rubber balls, and Marcel laughed, too. Marcel’s laughter was like a painter’s ground cloth that protects the furniture and anything else under a ceiling being painted. Marcel’s laughter somehow cleared the air of evil and left only the music and the seven people dancing, including himself.

One of the men was a very dark, very handsome hard-rubber-ball man of indefinite age, maybe young, maybe fifty, but too dark to tell. (I know that he was thirty-eight.) The woman with whom he was dancing was the color of green tea in an off-white cup. He liked her. She did not like him. Marcel liked him. He did not and could not like Marcel.

The other couple was just there. Had you been there yourself, you would not have paid them much attention. Some people are like that, like chairs in a room, taken for granted but not noticed, except when one wants to sit down. Nobody wanted anything from the other couple, because they had nothing to give. Marcel did not even press them to buy a round of drinks, discreetly, as he did the others when it was time to change the twelve records.

The big handsome dark fellow had set up the house twice. Claude said, “It’s on me this time, Marcellus.”

Joan lifted her cheek along his coat lapel as the first of twelve new records dropped and Marcel went into his spick-and-span kitchen for the drinks.

The drinks! Social workers say there are more liquor stores in Harlem in proportion to its area than in any other part of Manhattan. I don’t know. Certainly little house parties for profit, such as Marcel conducted, help keep the liquor stores way out of the red. Marcel carried many a bottle of whiskey into his elevator and up to the fifth floor, where, from his kitchen window, if you stuck your head out, you could see Riverside Drive and sometimes the warships in the Hudson. But warships did not make Marcel think of sailors. He was an old fairy who had lost interest in uniforms. In fact, his interest now was money. That was why he gave parties primarily for people who did not touch his heart.

Could it have been the records, the new records for dancing, with their off rhythms and their odd chords? Could it have been the music?

Marcel came into the living room and put the drinks down on a long table. Then, leaving a door open on purpose, he went into the bedroom and turned on a soft pretty light on a bedside table. The light sent a golden sheen over the silken coverlet and sparkled on the rich deep hairs of the Bokhara rug, which had come from a very exclusive auction disposing of the furnishings of a great Long Island estate. Nobody could accuse Marcel of lacking good taste.

But maybe it was the music. Otherwise, why did the laughter ring out again, louder than the music, and bounce, like a dozen hard rubber balls, around the room after 2 a.m., when usually his guests knew better than to be that noisy? And why did Marcel’s laughter stop being a ground cloth and start bouncing like a rubber ball, too, and a very hard one at that? Who knows why anything?

But this is what happened: the tall dark fellow said, “I don’t have enough money,” to the woman with whom he was dancing.

Before she could reply, the white girl said, “Oh, but I do.”

The “Oh, but” identified her as having been around at least a little in Harlem, and therefore the laughter bounced like rubber balls. Claude looked startled. The tea-colored woman looked mean. The tall dark fellow said, “I been wanting to dance with that girl all evening. Come here!” Joan went. At that moment, a new record began to play.

It was a Dizzy Gillespie record, and what it said without words summed up the situation pretty well. It was not that room but the world in that room that was in the record. The music was uranium, and those seven people, had they been super-duper spies, could not have known more about atomic energy—that is, its reason for being a mighty way of dying, “Oh, but I do” being a component.

That made both of the colored women very angry. The one whom nobody noticed stopped still, grabbed the man by his lapels, and said, “Sit down, you clown!”

He sat down. ♦