The Loving Couple Page 18

  "Listen, Fran," she began unsteadily, "I'm terribly sorry but we . . ." Suddenly this house, the kitchen, the ants, the broken coffee maker crowded in on her. She wanted to get away from the place and from him and from Alice's imminent intrusion. She wanted to think about something new, to talk to somebody who knew something about striking out alone. Fran Hollister had shed husbands by every known means short of mariticide. Fran was exciting and experienced and, she felt, very, very wicked. Fran liked her—Fran was even pursuing her. Why not spend the afternoon looking at a smashed-up marriage through the hardened eyes of Riveredge's reigning menace? She'd play the whole thing gaily and she'd play it with Fran.

  “I’m terribly sorry," she repeated, "but we're not, um, available in pairs any longer. He's . . . that is, I've left him."

  There was a sound of ulp at the end of the line. Then a pause. "You've what?"

  "I've left him. Getting Reno-vated"—that was clever, light, brittle, Fran—"or some such arrangement. We haven't worked out the incidental details."

  "I . . . can't . . . believe it," Fran said levelly. "Of all the people in the world. My God, The Loving Couple!"

  "Well, don't look for him under my bed," she said with a hysterical little laugh. Fran laughed too, in her deep throaty bellow. That made Mary a little uneasy. She just wondered whether Fran had ever given him the glad-eye, or vice-versa. Not that she actually cared. Not any more.

  "Well, come right over, little girl and drown your sorrows. I know a marvelous lawyer who . . . Or can I pick you up, if you're stranded in the house."

  "Oh, no. No, I seem to have custody of the car." She drew a deep breath. "Listen, Fran, just let me get dressed. I don't think I'll be going in to Lisa's party, but I would like to have lunch with you. I'll be over just as soon as I can throw something on." No use giving Fran a chance to back out. "And Fran, let's make it dutch."

  "Wonderful," Fran said.

  Three

  Fran Hollister hung up the telephone, fell back onto her unmade bed and emitted a long, low whistle. "What do you know," she said aloud. "What do you know!" Another woman would have telephoned a friend immediately to spread the bad news. Not Fran. Fran had no friends. Fran's acquaintances were divided, by Fran, into three general categories: Men; Climbers; and Enemies. In addition, Fran had a very small sort of Honor Roll of Individuals labeled Good Guys. The Honor Roll was populated by a highly nomadic few. You could get on and off Fran's Honor Roll within the space of an hour, depending on Fran's mood. This preferred list usually consisted of whichever man Fran planned to take as her next lover; anyone who was as rich as Fran was and hadn't done anything to warrant classification among Enemies; a couple of people she didn't know personally, but admired for some reason or other (this could be a night club comedian or an axe killer or a delivery boy or a cop); and sometimes one other woman.

  Fran reached out for her cigarette and her drink. So another redskin had bitten the dust! She thought—only very tentatively—of him, now that he was unencumbered, so to speak. Only a month ago John had caught her eye at the Riveredge swimming pool. She'd never seen him without clothes on before and she was not unimpressed, to this very day, by the well muscled back, the curve of his chest, his lean hips in the tartan trunks. It was a nice body and it was a gentleman's body. She'd seen him at the very moment when she was so sick of Speed, the Riveredge lifeguard, that she could spit. Speed. He was well named! Well, Speed had been okay for a summer's romp. But he was gone now. He'd taken his fuzzy yellow crew cut and his forty-eight chest and his twenty-eight waist and his eighteen I.Q. down to some third rate hotel in Florida where he could thrill all the career girls on winter vacations. And Fran had had the devil's own time getting rid of Speed, at that. You couldn't just tick off someone of Speed's class the way you could a gentleman. No, Speed had to blubber and weep and talk about love and honor and marriage and all that. Married to Speed! Imagine!

  So old tartan trunks was coming onto the open market at last! Fran moistened her lips and took a sip of her drink. Well, Fran wouldn't think about it just now. Besides, his wife—who was on Fran's Good Guy list—was going to have lunch with her at any moment. Fran would hear all about it—and all about him—soon enough.

  Fran got off the bed and stretched. It was quite a stretch. Fran stood just six feet tall in her heels. She picked up a hairbrush and ran it through her long red bob. Then she went into the bathroom.

  Fran Hollister had been born at Riveredge and she still lived there. Riveredge had been her family's estate. When Fran sold the place off to turn into a fashionable club-development, she had retained the guest cottage as her own—her own and Mr. Holliister's. Fran had divorced Mr. Hollister six months ago and she was very firm about the regularity of his alimony payments to her. In her own name Fran possessed what the tabloids estimated to be somewhere between twelve and forty million dollars. (In truth, it was only eleven million.)

  Fran was thirty years old, and for exactly half her life she had been awesomely regarded as sex, sin and seduction on the hoof.

  Before then she had been a gangling, gawky, ill-tempered child with freckles, bristling brows and carrot red head. She had been dragged snarling and spitting to dancing classes, kicking out at her governess, the teacher and her unwilling partners with bare, bony, bruised legs. She was equally unpopular with boys and girls, accepted only because her family was so very, very rich. But at fifteen something had happened. Fran had turned into a man trap—tall and fierce and exotic looking. She had been amazed at first by the change in her and in the boys she met at junior dances, but she had soon taken their adulation as her due. Possessed of enormous wealth, impeccable social connections and an undying hatred of people, Fran had set out to live life on her own terms.

  Fran had been married three times with plenty of amatory activity before, after and during. First she had eloped, at seventeen, with a West Point cadet. The marriage was annulled, but not without great expense, greater publicity, the cadet's expulsion from the Academy and the certification of Fran's none-too-stable mother. Her next venture was also patriotic. That husband had been an Air Force flyer of such humble origins that Fran never forgot it. Nor could Fran forget the blessed wave of relief she felt when a Naval ensign of her acquaintance crept out of Fran's bed to receive the telegram announcing that her second husband had been shot down over Berlin. Lastly she had married Hollister, a man of such superior lineage that Fran never forgave it. He had endured Fran for four years, until the third time he discovered her under a willow tree with a man—always the same tree; never the same man—and permitted her to divorce him on grounds of extreme mental cruelty.

  Fran wandered back to her bedroom humming a tune she connected vaguely with an old Rodgers and Hart show. She was thoroughly tone deaf. She let her grease-spotted dressing gown fall to the floor, and walked across it. At the closet door she stared at the full-length reflection of her naked body with indifferent approval. It was a large body and there were twenty pounds more of it than there had been fifteen years ago at Fran's first blossoming. She might also have profited from a shampoo and a bit of conscientious deforestation under her arms. None of this worried Fran. She had perfect confidence in everything concerned with herself. She opened the closet and took out the first dress her hand touched.

  Changing styles meant nothing to Fran. She had always worn the Glamour Girl uniform of the year she came out. She had fewer than a dozen dresses and they all looked alike—black and tight and cut as low as the law would allow. They were seldom, if ever, cleaned and when one wore out she got another as much like it as possible. Her hair hung to her shoulder blades in a thick, coarse auburn mane. It was cut annually. Every so often, Fran would begin feeling conscientious, go off to Rubinstein's for the works, but most of the time she felt perfectly satisfied with the way she looked.

  She wriggled into her black dress and pulled up the zipper. It was too tight and she was conscious of a split seam under one arm, but she was sure no one would notice. There was a s
pot on the bosom—a drink, she supposed. She rubbed at it ineffectually. The dress was wool and Fran was conscious of its itching, so she stepped into a pair of pants which were conveniently lying on the floor. Then she thrust her large, bare feet into a pair of black suede pumps.

  She trudged over to her dressing table, dabbed on brown lipstick, splashed herself with Shalimar, put on her pearls and three diamond bracelets. Then she picked up her shiny old suede purse, dragged her mink coat across the rug and clomped down the stairs.

  Never quite in fashion and never quite out, Fran really didn't give much of a damn. Her dirty, thirty-dollar dresses, her slightly hirsute legs, so freckled that stockings were—or so Fran thought—unnecessary, her run-over suede pumps were quite good enough when set off with forty-thousand dollars' worth of ice and a ten-grand mink coat. And, to do her justice, Fran was not without a kind of raffish high style if you took only a quick glance.

  Fran flung her mink coat over the newel post and surveyed her jiggery-pokery living room complacently. It was just as she'd left it last night, the empty glasses, the dying pom-poms, the oddly assorted bits of old family furniture in wrinkled new Sears Roebuck slipcovers. There was a rattling at the front door and the sound of a key being inserted. Then there was a succession of chilling noises. It was the cleaning woman. Fran nodded coolly in her direction and pointed to the ice bucket. The woman made another noise and shuffled off toward the kitchen.

  Fran kept no servants. She had hired a procession of maids after her divorce but it hadn't worked. The first three had walked out, outraged beyond words by Fran's way of life. The last had tried to blackmail her. Now Fran had the ideal set-up. A feebleminded deaf mute came from the village every day—well after the time when any overnight guest had taken his leave—to clean the house and change Fran's bed. Fran paid her fifty cents an hour and the woman was gurglingly grateful for this, the only employment opportunity open to her. The arrangement worked out splendidly for both of them.

  There was a thump and clatter of ice cubes from the kitchen and the woman scuttled back, put the ice bucket on the bar, bobbed and nodded and shot off to the kitchen once more. Fran mixed herself another drink and sat down on the sofa to await her guest while aimlessly drawing a round little face in the thin film of dust on the coffee table.

  Mary had never been so nervous in her life. She was actually trembling when she stopped the car in front of Fran's house. She glanced quickly at her face in the rearview mirror and was thankful that it hadn't changed for the worse since she looked at it Eve minutes ago. "Throw something on" indeed! She had bathed and dressed with all the care of a mannequin at a Paris opening. She had new everything on underneath and all of it real silk—no synthetics. Then she had put on the new little wool of a color that was so subtle it defied description—so soft and simple and elegant that it whispered one million dollars. It was, a dress which she had bought to save for some really special occasion. Well, what could be more special than the occasion of shucking off a husband and having lunch with a creature as fabulous as Fran Hollister?

  She had known Fran, only slightly, when she was in boarding school. She had been just fourteen, Fran sixteen. To her Fran had been the epitome of the Older Woman. Two years' difference had meant a lot then and still did. She would always think of Fran as perfect centuries older. Besides, Fran was worldly even then. Fran had already been kicked out of Foxcroft, St. Timothy's and Miss Walker's—all far grander establishments than the Baldwin School, where she and Alice had been sent. Fran's tenure at Baldwin had been short (she was expelled for smoking, sneaking out and having rum in her room) but so sensational as to have made a lasting impression.

  Naturally Mary had never tried to use boarding school as a wedge into Fran's really exclusive circle. In fact, she'd hardly done more than say hello to Fran at the swimming pool and at parties. She'd always been too afraid of her to say much more.

  She readjusted the new furs. Mary had been a little doubtful about putting them on. They reminded her of the baby and of him. But they were perfect with this dress and she had decided to wear them just this once and then leave them behind when she moved out. She gave the furs a tender little pat, drew her doeskin gloves on a trifle tighter and marched briskly up the flagstone walk to drink in the splendors of Fran and Fran's house.

  "Welcome to the fold," Fran said, giving a quick approving glance to her guest, the dress, the furs, the glistening car beyond. There must be money there somewhere, Fran thought. His? Hers? People without money made Fran uneasy. She always felt that they were after hers.

  "Th-thank you," she said to Fran. "It's nice to be here."

  "Come in and we'll have a drink," Fran said, leading the way into her living room. She'd better go easy at first, Fran thought. A lot of these girls take divorce so seriously. God, when she thought of all that weeping and wailing down in St. Thomas . . . "Sit down. What'll it be, Scotch, bourbon, rye?"

  "Bourbon, I think, please."

  "How?" Fran asked, gulping down the rest of the drink she had just mixed for herself.

  "Why . . . on the rocks, please."

  Fran sauntered over to the bar and mixed two strong drinks. Fran always bought case lots of unheard-of whiskies—there was a rye that tasted of wet straw, a Scotch labelled Loch Grymm which reminded one of creosote, and a bourbon that was pure mange cure. Blends all, and inexpensive. These were for the very few guests she chose to entertain. Fran always mixed her own drink with Haig and Haig Pinchbottle. "Here's how," Fran said. "To hell with all men!"

  "To hell with all men," she echoed after Fran. The mixture in the squat ten cent store glass she held was the color of Coca-Cola and it tasted like nothing in this world.

  "Well," Fran said, fixing her with a dark glitter, "now tell Mother all about it." Fran had no curiosity about other women and so many of her own attachments had broken up that she wasn't much interested in the whys and wherefores of other romantic disasters. Yet, from what she'd seen of him, he didn't seem to be the sort Fran would kick out of the hay without very good reasons. Fran wanted to know what they were well in advance—just in case.

  "There isn't anything to tell," Mary said with a brave little smile in Fran's general direction. "It's just finished."

  Fran was a little disappointed and yet she was pleased. She hated women who blubbered about their troubles. Yes, Fran thought, she's a pretty good guy at that. "Just get sick of him?" Fran asked tentatively. If there was anything wrong with him like bad breath or impotency or a penchant for the boys Fran might as well find it out before wasting a second. You could never tell by looking. Speed had been overpoweringly handsome, and what a washout he'd been.

  Mary stared at Fran. "Sick of him?" she wondered. Could you ever get sick of the little private jokes, the secret language, the telepathic response you'd built up with someone for more than five years? No you couldn't just get sick of something like that. But when the person you'd loved and trusted and shared your life and your bed with shattered all of those good things by turning into a raging, vile-mouthed, insulting brute, well . . .

  She took a little gulp of her drink and felt it burning and sizzling all the way down to her stomach. It gave her a kind of Dutch courage. "Incompatibility is the term, I believe . . . darling." There, now she was back to the worldly routine that was right for Fran. It made her more comfortable. "For about a year now we haven't been exactly like Darby and Joan. Nothing you can put your finger on—if that's the sort of thing you want to put your finger on. Hahaha! But . . ." Her voice trailed off and she took another sip of her drink. No, there hadn't been anything definite during the past year; just a sort of growing apart, a general malaise in their marriage. "It's just that I find him a perfect beast!" There, now she'd said it. That was everything in a nutshell. She took another gulp from the glass and discovered it tasted a good deal better.

  "Do tell?" Fran murmured. Fran liked perfect beasts of men. She'd known several perfect beasts—or alleged perfect beasts—and she'd never failed to tr
im one down to size yet. "He always struck me as one of those real Gentlemen of the Old School. Of course I've only barely met him," she added hastily.

  "Gentleman! Ha!" Mary snorted bitterly. "How would you like it if . . . Oh, well, skip it. I won't bore you with my problems. We probably ought to be getting on to lunch anyhow."

  Fran had the notion that she wouldn't be bored one bit and that she'd simply love it if . . . "No hurry for lunch. Here, let me sweeten your cup." She masterfully took the half-filled glass and poured cheap bourbon into it right up to the brim. "You need a little something to steady your nerves." She saw that her guest looked perfectly aghast at the drink she'd poured. Quickly Fran modified her tone. "Oh, don't tell me about these men. Hollister practically ruined my life, what with his morbid drinking, his fancy women, his incessant demands on me to . . ."

  "Your husband—I mean, your ex-husband? Why, I simply can't believe it. I . . ." Mary had heard some rather perplexing stories about the dog's life which Fran had made Mr. Hollister lead; stories that had not been without a certain salacious value. But then a lot of women who didn't really know Fran well had been only too eager to gossip about her when she was going through a crisis. "I mean he seemed such a kind, gentle sort of . . ."

  Well, Fran had to admit that perhaps she had gone too far. She turned her back and almost sniggered as she poured a healthy jolt of Haig and Haig into her own glass. The picture of Mr. Hollister as the surly drunkard, the chaser, the sadistic satyr was a rare one! Poor, feckless Hollister with his stuffy relatives, his interest in Henry James, his always urging her to stay home, to read, to have children. "Those gentle types are always the worst," Fran said darkly. "You know what they say about still water running deep—and dirty. Now, just get it off your chest. Unburden yourself. My, how I would have liked to have had an old friend to talk to me when I was going through . . ." She was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Cursing silently Fran marched upstairs to take the call there. Fran didn't like to talk on the telephone in front of an audience. You never knew who or what it might be.