The Loving Couple Page 25

  "Don't be infantile, Fred," she said. "Dr. Needles is right when he says that America is producing a race of boy-men. He feels that . . .

  Well, you just couldn't win with Alice. Angry because he'd asked her to dance, she'd have been furious if he hadn't. Fred thought, rather miserably, that if he ever had liked dancing, which was doubtful, he had never liked dancing with Alice, who was taller than he was and inclined to do the leading. And he especially didn't like dancing with Alice when she was pregnant. It made him feel like a canoe towing the Queen Mary into port.

  In fact, Fred decided, he didn't even like Alice and he probably never had. Yet they had been married for just fifteen years. Exactly fifteen years and two hours ago (Santa Barbara time) Alice, a jaundiced Amazon in the candle-lit chapel, had dragged her poor old father down the aisle, pronounced a few words in her stentorian whinny, and then dragged her poor young husband back up the aisle, secure forever in the belief that she was more intelligent, more intellectual, more desirable than any other woman in the world.

  And for fifteen years—save for a blessed six months' respite at sea with the Navy, until Alice pulled enough strings to drag him back as a gunnery instructor at Columbia—Fred had been loving, honoring and obeying Alice. That was especially odd since Alice, always the modern bride, had issued instructions for "obey" to be stricken from the marriage service.

  There had been fifteen years of commuting to Wall Street, of eating Alice's meals, paying Alice's bills, siring Alice's children, if and when Alice wanted children. Fifteen years of Planned Parenthood and the League of Women Voters and the Committee for Political Awareness and the American Association of University Women and the Mothers' Childhood Development Group and the Parent-Teachers' Association. Fifteen years of Alice's psychoanalytical claptrap, of Alice's never-ending, ever-changing theories. There had been fifteen years of the Mayo Diet, the HauseT Diet, the Salt-Free Diet, the Alexander Method, the Mensendieck System. And now Dr. Needles, who terrified him as an intellect, unnerved him as an informer and disgusted him as a charlatan, had been brought into Fred's life, at twenty-five dollars an hour.

  Fred almost envied his sister-in-law's husband. There was a man who had just walked out on his wife, and his wife was a living saint—as well as a sweet little thing—compared to her sister, Alice. Fred wondered how it would be just to walk out on Alice. But terms like brute, cad, bounder, deserter and unnatural father crowded the wild notion out of his head. No, at forty-two it was too late to walk out. He should have done his walking out fifteen years and two hours ago. He should never have walked in.

  Fred was startled from his musings by a dull thump on the table. There sat a magnum of champagne and four glasses.

  "What's that?" Alice asked the waiter.

  "Champagne, madame," the waiter said with the patience of the mother of a retarded child. "Mumm's."

  "I didn't order it," Alice said indignantly.

  "In fact, Alice," Fred said a little testily, "nobody has ordered anything. Not even I."

  "It was sent to you by the party on the other side of the dance floor," the waiter said with a nod to the north. "They sent this card."

  Scrawled on a card was:

  Happy anniversary!

  Jack and Adele Hennessey

  "Oh, those awful climbers! I'm sure they trailed us here," Alice said, taking the trouble to lower her voice somewhat. "What shall I do?"

  "I think you'd better thank them Alice," Fred said patiently.

  "But we can't accept this, Fred," Alice fumed. "I mean, after all, the Hennesseys are simply not the kind of people we go with. They're very rude and vulgar."

  "I think it would be very rude and vulgar not to accept it, Alice," Fred said. "They only meant to do something nice. Thank you," he said to the waiter, dismissing him.

  "Well, really . . ." Alice fumed. She liked surprises even less than she liked the Hennesseys and being caught unawares like this unsettled her. "Where are they sitting, Fred?" she hissed. "You know I can't see that far in this light without my glasses."

  "Directly opposite," Fred said.

  Through a clearing on the dance floor, Alice bobbed her feathers majestically and cast a vague, myopic smile into space.

  "Hi, neighbors!" Jack Hennessey shouted.

  "You look as cute as a doll, Mrs. Marshall!" Adele shrieked. Alice shuddered and continued leering automatically at a couple from Nyack two tables to the left of Adele Hennessey. "An' I want you two—an' the Martins, too—to come over and meet two of my favorite people."

  Then the dancers swirled in between them and Alice was blissfully cut off from her benefactors. She wondered what Chandelier was coming to, admitting people like the Hennesseys.

  "Ooooh!" Beth Martin cried, returning ponderously to the table. "Champagne."

  "Ssssay!" her husband called out heartily, with a fine show of teeth, "and a whole magnum of it!"

  "Oh! Oh, yes," Alice said grandly. "I thought—that is, we thought—a little celebration."

  "Go on, Fletch," Fran groaned, "slip the bandit a fin so we don't have to sit out in Siberia. I want to see Bibi Bidet, or whatever the hell she calls herself."

  "Chou-Chou la Grue, Fran," Mary said gently.

  His face a study in sorrow, Fletcher tipped the headwaiter and they were led to a table on the edge of the dance floor.

  "Dark as a nigger's pocket in here," Fran said, sweeping her mink coat around her. The gesture knocked over two drinks and completely enveloped the head and shoulders of a buyer from Marshall Fields.

  "Say, listen, Madam," a man said rising and knocking his chair over.

  "Drunks!" Fran boomed. "That's what I hate about these places: you never see anyone but a bunch of drunks!"

  The party made its way to a table marked "Reserved."

  They seated themselves decorously and Fletch murmured something about beer.

  "Hell no," Fran said to the waiter, "just bring a bottle of Haig and Haig Pinch, some ice, four glasses and a pitcher of water and put 'em on the middle of the table. That'll save us having to call you every time we need something. Oh, and bring me a pack of Parliaments—I guess you'd better make it two—and a caviar sandwich on pumpernickel. That's all."

  Fletcher turned pale.

  "Would you like to dance?" Randy said to Mary.

  "Yes. Yes, I'd love to," she said. She could always tell about a man—or thought she always could—by the way he danced. If he bumbled and stumbled he would undoubtedly be a bumbling and stumbling person. If he pawed her, he'd probably be one of those pawing, groping men who felt that nothing pleased a woman quite so much as having her thigh pinched black and blue. If he danced too fancily, too slickly—well, that was a bad sign, too. She had adored dancing with her own husband before he was her husband and even during the years when he was. But recently all of his terpsichorean energies had been spent steering Mrs. Popescu around the floor in the sweet service of Mammon, while—and for the same reason—she had been pawed under the tablecloth by the president of Popescu Pulse-Beat Eternal Non-Magnetic Watches.

  Now she was in Randy's arms on the dance floor and it was perfectly fine. He held her tightly, but not uncomfortably close—just close enough so that she could feel his muscular thighs against her own, his large hand supporting her back. His sense of rhythm was good and at one point she felt his lips brush against her ear. Not as though it were done on purpose, but almost as though it were an accident.

  She closed her eyes and melted into his arms. It was just heavenly having a beau again—someone to help her forget the mistake of her marriage, and especially someone as heavenly as this heavenly Randolph Carter Lee.

  He spun her gently at the edge of the floor and through the noise of the orchestra and the chatter of the crowd, she heard a familiar voice say something that sounded like "Awk!"

  She opened her eyes and, seated at the table directly below her, she looked squarely into the equine face of her sister Alice, squinting nearsightedly through the darkness.

&n
bsp; She closed her eyes—tight—and felt herself spinning away again. As they danced away she could hear Alice's strident voice saying "Fred, I could swear I saw . . ." Then the music swelled again.

  As soon as she dared, she opened her eyes again. She was only vaguely conscious of the band's tried and true rendition of "Lover." Good Lord, she thought, either I've had too much to drink or that was Alice—and Fred—and of course Beth and Whitney Martin at the anniversary party we were supposed to come to tonight. I've simply got to get out of here.

  "Hello, sweetie!" a voice shrilled. It was Adele Hennessey sitting at a table with Jack Hennessey and another couple. "Having fun at Alice's anniversary?"

  Again Randy whirled her out of eye-and-earshot.

  She closed her eyes and buried her head in Randy's shoulder. Oh, no, no, no! she thought. This is too dreadful! One innocent dance with a new man and it's like those stories about drowning people who see their whole lives go by in review. First Alice and Fred and then the Hennesseys. She halfway expected to see Mother and Daddy and Heavenly Rest and the headmistress at Baldwin School rise up to haunt her.

  It's drink, she decided. I'll just keep my eyes closed good and tight and count to ten. Then when I open them, all these people will be gone. One. Two. Three. Still in waltz time, the Chandelier band bleated out with "My Foolish Heart" in its original 1943 arrangement. She spun deliriously in Randy's arms. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Now, everything will be perfectly fine. Ten.

  She opened her eyes and stared squarely into the eyes of her husband.

  Eight

  "Fran," Mary gasped, thrusting her way back to the table. "I've got to talk to you. Seriously. Alone" she added gazing into Fletch's glassy eyes. "Could you come up to the Powder Room with me?"

  "Sure, why not?" Fran said thickly. "I've gotta go sooner or later anyhow." Fran groped for her shoes under the table and got up unsteadily. "Keep an eye on my coat, Fletch," Fran said. Then she announced to the room at large: "With the kind of people they let into this dump, you can never tell who might take it!" Casting a bloodshot, but scathing, eye upon the party at the next table—an elderly couple with two Catholic priests—Fran started off in the general direction of the kitchen.

  "No, Fran," she said miserably. "Please! It's this way!"

  "Okay, okay," Fran said. "Keep your pants on."

  Randy sat down at the table with Fletch, quite mystified and unusually ill at ease. "Heh-heh, crowded here tonight, isn't it?"

  "Wha' shay?" Fletch said, focusing stonily upon his guest. Pepe la Pucha y la Orquestra Sudamericana del Cafe Chandelier had just taken over the bandstand with a vengeance. Five wizened old Mexicans, Pepe la Pucha's boys made up for their lack of size and youth by a sheer, exuberant volume that put the Vienna Philharmonic to shame. A flash of hair oil, a flutter of dusty ruffled sleeves, a shrill "Ole!" and the Orquestra Sudamericana was off with its deafening repertoire of mambos, merengues, baiaos, boleros and cha-cha-chas that nearly removed the top of Randy's head. With a long, loud run on the piano, the wailing blare of a muted trumpet, the clanging of a marimba and assorted thumpings, rattlings and scratchings of an artillery of unidentifiable instruments, Pepe and the boys shattered the comparative quiet of the room.

  "I said," Randy began again, cupping his hands, "it's crowded . . ."

  "Mi acuesto pensando en ti . . ." Pepe bleated into the microphone.

  "Cha cha cha!" Pepe's boys bellowed from behind him, thumping, rattling and scratching with all their might.

  "Goddam pack of greasers!" Fletch growled. Then very slowly his head sank down onto the ash-strewn tablecloth.

  "Um, excuse me," Randy said rising and hastened toward the peace and quiet of the Men's Room downstairs.

  The aisle was so crowded with last-minute customers and drinks coming in before the ten o'clock show—"Service is discontinued during the Mlle. la Grue's Chansons" the menus all read—that Randy cut across the dance floor, where only an intrepid few were braving the torrid rhythms of the Orquestra Sudamericana He collided with a couple wriggling across the floor.

  "Me llama la Habana!" Pepe la Pucha shouted.

  "Rrrrrrrrrum-ba!" Pepe's boys shrieked.

  Randy got off the floor in a hurry and decided that the easiest way to cross the room was by squeezing around past the undesirable tables for two along the side wall. His progress was better than fair. He had just slithered between the mink stole of an older woman who kept crooning, "Oh, Jimmy, I adore the way you cha-cha,” and the back of a chair whose occupant was saying, "Aw, c'mawn, honey, let's go back to the room."

  "Please do," Randy muttered, wedged firmly in the traffic.

  "Oh, let's just stay to hear the French sing-ger. After all, it's our honeymoon!"

  Free again, Randy inched past a table where two callow kids were sipping a Tom Collins and a beer very slowly. Another Tom Collins and another bottle of Budweiser also sat on the minuscule table. How do all those people fit at one table? Randy wondered.

  The going was easier now. Still moving crabwise, Randy picked up speed. The next thing he knew, he had collided with an empty chair in the darkness. The chair toppled over and so did Randy.

  "Excuse me," he said like the true Virginia gentleman. "I'm awfully sorry, I . . ."

  Getting deftly up from the floor, all charming smiles and apologies, Randy found himself face to face with Besame Bessamer, seated alone at the table.

  Neither was capable of speech.

  Being up and faster on his feet, Randy was at an advantage. The field ahead was clear and Randy virtually shot towards the stairway leading to the Men's Room.

  Mary half pushed, half pulled Fran up the creaking carpeted stairs to a tiny mezzanine decorated with peeling crimson and two Italianate doors. One marked "Powder Room," the other "No Admittance" in florid script.

  "For God's sake don't tear the clothes off my back," Fran growled, yanking herself free. "I can walk!" With that, Fran walked through the door marked "No Admittance" to reveal the boys of Chandelier's North American band in undershirts and paper dickies, seated around a poker table, while one, more conscientious, pumped spit out of his trombone.

  "Sorry, fellahs," Fran said and lurched out, bringing with her a pungent melange of odors made up of smoke, sweat, rye, beer and an odd scent like burning tea.

  "In here, Fran," Mary cried, "and please hurry. I've got to talk to you."

  "Okay, okay," Fran said, letting herself be propelled through the door marked "Powder Room."

  The shrill gabble of female voices swirled and bellied around her. Listening to the cacophony, glancing with terror at the over-upholstered furniture, the dusty tufted walls, she felt for just a second that she was in some kind of padded cell out of Poe or Kafka. The place was glutted with females, each one louder than the other, save for a fattish older woman who had passed out on the sofa and moaned with dulcet profanity at her daughter who was being alternately stern and solicitous. From the toilets in the room beyond came the sound of someone being very sick and a scolding voice that kept saying: "I told you what'd happen, Lucy—all those Manhattans and then frog's legs and wine!"

  "Oh, pleeeeeze, just get out of here. Ohhhhh!"

  "Listen, Fran," Mary began . . .

  "If you ladies would kinely carry on your conversation some-wheres elst except the only available doorway, I should like to rejoin my excort," a hard-eyed blonde said, wriggling past them in a visible aura of Tabu.

  "Tramp!" Fran growled.

  "Slob!" the blonde snapped and minced out, bosom and rear protruding.

  "Fran, listen . . ."

  "Jesus, let me sit down for a minute. This has been a rough night," Fran groaned.

  "But, Fran, listen he's . . ."

  Two older women from the South brushed by them. One was saying: "S'Ah told that sales cluck at Bug-doafs, Ah said: 'Ah don't want a red mink oh a white mink oh a blee-ew mink. Jus' show me a play-yun old mink cull-lud mink . . .' 'Skyewze me."

  "Fran sit here at the dressing ta
ble and let me tell you . . .”

  "The light's too bright," Fran said, slumping to a stool.

  "But, Fran, I tell you he's here!"

  The woman on the couch moaned softly again.

  "Mother," the girl said, "you've got to pull yourself together."

  "Ahhh, go uff' yuhself . . . fat ole bish . . ."

  "Mother?'

  "Fran, what am I going to do?" she cried, grasping Fran's heavy upper arm.

  "Ouch!" Fran said. "Leggo. Who's here?"

  Down the long length of the dressing table two youngish women were cautiously touching up lips that didn't look quite like their own while a third, her tight skirt hoisted unbecomingly, was straightening her stockings. They did not typify the regular Chandelier customer. The three were overdressed in sleazy chemical satins and taffetas that fairly shouted Bargain Basement—dresses designed for pure dazzlement and a couple of wearings before their elaborate ornaments wilted and drooped, their skimpy seams burst, their cheap zippers jammed and their vivid colors faded from butterfly to moth.

  "Just imagine! Six dollars for a little dabba sweetbreads!"

  "I didn't think that wine was very good, dijoo?"

  "Damn, I gotta run! I juss put these on tanight, too."

  "Lissen, kids," one of the girls at the dressing table said, "dontcha think I outa comb it out? I know Walter doesn't like it this way—all stiff-like an' tight ta my head."

  "Ohhh, Jesuz," the woman on the sofa moaned.

  "You've only yourself to blame, Mother," her daughter said primly.

  "Oh, Marge, leave it that way just fer tonight. That's the way Mr. Rudy set it. Din't he say all the stars were wearing their hair like that?"

  "Y-yess, but if Walter doesn't like it—an' I can always tell if he doesn't . . ."

  "Oh, Marge, don't comb it out. Leave it like that. It's yer birthday."

  "Whyn't you just shave the whole Goddamned thing off, sister?" Fran snarled. She leaned heavily onto the dressing table, her long red hair swinging over one half-closed eye.