The Loving Couple Read online

  Customers table-hopped, called out greetings from across the room—whether you knew them or not—and the Hollywood actress who'd added so much to the debacle of last night's television show had thrown her arms dramatically around John, kissed him and asked him how her performance had been, just as he was getting around to telling Toby the true facts of his marital troubles.

  And even Toby had been something of a disappointment as the sympathetic listener. He'd given an impression of detachment, disinterest and sometimes complete absence. If he'd said anything, it was always some offhand comment like "Oh, well," or "There are other dames" or "Shouldn't we have another drink? You know, kind of drown your sorrows."

  He wondered now if Toby had sensed that his wife disliked him and if he disliked her in return. The pervasive feeling of animosity between Mary and Toby had always made him edgy. He had forever wanted the people he loved to love each other, too. Now he didn't love her at all, but he still felt a little unsporting to be discussing her with someone who seemed—if not out and out unfriendly—a little too indifferent. After all, this was a big problem and it was his. Maybe Toby was better for gay conversation while some quack like that psychoanalyst his sister-in-law was always going to might have made a better audience.

  "Compliments of Josef, M'sieur," the captain said, landing two vast balloons of cognac on the table before them. The ritual of the brandy on the house was reserved exclusively for the charge account patrons, probably on the theory that the cash customers had got so used to paying and paying that it would be wrong to disrupt the habit pattern.

  John hated brandy almost as much as he hated Josef. "Thank you, Etienne, and please thank Josef for me," he said.

  ". . . anyhow this dame in Calcutta—her father was the maha-rajah of something—was giving me the eye, so I played it close and pretty soon this card comes over asking me to join her party. Just like that. And I mean she was really built like a brick . . ."

  It suddenly occurred to him that he wasn't listening to Toby's amatory triumphs any more than Toby had listened to his defeat.

  He leaned forward politely, smiled and murmured "Mm-hmm."

  ". . . anyhow ten o'clock comes and she gives me one of those looks that says 'Let's go upstairs," so I said, 'Let's go upstairs.' Well . . . Hey! Speaking of getting the eye from a table across the room," he lowered his voice portentously, "there's a dame over there—really a dish—who's been giving me the once-over for about the last hour. She's looking over here again."

  "Where?" he said, glancing cautiously to the left and to the right. The restaurant was almost empty by now.

  "No. Directly behind you. She's sitting with two other dames—real dogs. Can't you see her? She's really been giving me the . . ."

  "Not having an eye in the nape of my neck, Toby, I . . ."

  "Well, here, look in the mirror behind me. The other two look like a couple of typewriter jockeys out on a spree, but this little brunette job . . . And she's been staring over here like . . ."

  He sat up quite straight in his chair, almost lifting himself off the seat and peered into the mirrored wall behind Toby. The first thing he saw was the thinning crown of Toby's head. The second sight to meet his gaze was that of three women sitting at the table for one, right next to the pantry door. They were all secretaries at Popescu Pulse-Beat Eternal Watch. He sat down again. "They're all typewriter jockeys on a spree, Toby," he said. "The 'dish' happens to be my secretary. Would you like to meet her?" Without waiting for an answer, he wheeled around in his chair. "Hi!" he called gaily, almost hysterically. "Come and have a drink with us!"

  There was a pretty confusion at the opposite table—an embarrassed giggling, a bustling, a lot of whispered "Oh, we shouldn't . . . No, we cant . . . Oh, let's . . . Just one little drink." Then the three got up and advanced reticently, jostling one another delicately,

  Etienne took in the situation with a practiced and impassive eye. While Rococo had little interest in the morals of its clientele off the premises, pick-ups were discouraged in the dining room, unless those involved were very illustrious. The classes were never encouraged to mingle. And these girlies were strictly from the wrong boroughs of Greater New York.

  Etienne looked at this trio again. It was the same old story—the budget-shop dresses, the dyed fur pieces, the beady little hats clamped onto their temples. Yet this customer was a gentleman. Etienne had served him before—served him and the beautiful wife lie obviously adored. "Hello, Miss Lacey," Etienne heard him say. "How are you Miss Schmidt, Miss Koosis?" Etienne sighed with relief. They knew one another. It was going to be perfectly all right. Deferentially, Etienne hurried to draw up extra chairs at the table.

  "Well, ladies," John said with bright inanity, "sit down. I'd like you to meet my old college roommate, Toby Wentworth. Miss Lacey, Miss Schmidt, Miss Koosis, this is Mr. Wentworth."

  "Well, Miss, uh, Lacey," Toby said, inching over on the banquette to make room for her, "I hoped we'd meet. I felt, when I saw you looking over in this direction so often, that perhaps we were destined to . . ."

  "Oh, yes," Miss Lacey said, beaming at Toby, "I've been trying to catch his eye for hours."

  Toby reddened and there was a brief, awkward pause. Then John took over.

  "Well, let's see now," he roared brightly, rubbing his hands together for no reason at all, "what'll it be? Miss Lacey works for me, Toby, poor girl and . . ."

  "Oh, he's the most wonderful boss a person could ever have, Mr. Wentworth!"

  ". . . and Miss Schmidt is really up with the top brass. She's Mr. Popescu's girl Friday. And Miss Koosis . . ."

  "Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Miss Schmidt said.

  ". . . Miss Koosis is in, um, in . . ."

  "Possonnel," Miss Koosis said.

  "Yes, that's right, Miss Koosis does the hiring and the firing at dear old Popescu Pulse-Beat E . . ."

  "Oh, brother!" Miss Koosis said.

  "Maybe you've got some odd job for a guy like me, Miss Whoosis," Toby said, smiling up at her with his notorious blue-eyed boyish grin. The eyes were a trifle bloodshot by now.

  "Dig him!" Miss Koosis screamed.

  "G'wan, hire 'im, Lucille, honey," Miss Schmidt said. "He's cute!" At this there was a great burst of hilarity from the ladies.

  "Honestly," Miss Lacey said, wiping her eyes, "Pearl's just a scream! She ought to be on television or something." He looked at his secretary again. He'd never noticed how very pretty she was. "What'll it be, Bernice—I mean Miss Lacey?"

  "Oh, dear, I don't think I should have anything more. We had two cocktails while we were waiting to be seated and . . ."

  "Oh, come on, now, Bernice," Toby said, a little slurringly. "You're among friends."

  "Sure, honey," Miss Schmidt said, her rimless glasses glittering from behind her nose veil, "have a little somethingue. Mamma's along. She'll look out for you. I'll have a daakery, myself."

  "One daiquiri, Etienne," John said animatedly, "and for Miss Koosis—surely you'll have a . . ."

  "Well, all reet," Miss Koosis said. "Lemme have anothah Jack Rose."

  Toby gagged. "And a Jack Rose, Etienne. Miss Lacey?"

  "Well, maybe I'll have a brandy like you and Mr. Wentworth," she said with a shy little smile.

  "And three brandies, please." Then he turned to his secretary. "Do you eat here often?"

  "Oh, no! But Pearl and Lucille and I pick a famous restaurant—a kind of gourmet place—every Saturday. You know, a place like this, where all the celebrities go. Like last week we went to the Le Valois and we've been to Vwah-zan and Sardi's and the Barberry Room—oh, we always do it. It's more fun if you've got someone else with you."

  "Three musketeers, eh Bernice?" Miss Schmidt said. "Oh, here's the refills!" That brought down the house.

  "Isn't Pearl a panic?" Bernice asked him. "Honestly, when I first came to Popescu's I was just a green kid out of business school and I was so scared that . . ."

  "Scared? You mean you were afraid of me?" he asked. Sh
e'd been the first secretary he'd ever hired and he had been terrified of her.

  "Oh, I was scared silly. Here you were a big, important executive with a beautiful wife and always going out to places like this with big movie stars and I . . . Well, Pearl just took me under her wing—Pearl and Lucille. I don't know what I'd of done without them."

  The thought of a pretty little thing like Bernice spending her free time with a pair of crones like Miss Schmidt and Miss Koosis depressed him.

  "I always love a riss-kay story, Mr. Wentworth!" Miss Schmidt screamed.

  "Wha' hoppened?" Miss Koosis said. Miss Koosis, it seemed to him, was a walking compendium of all the catch phrases of the past decade. Terms like "Hubba, hubba, hubba," and "I've got news for you" seemed to comprise her entire fund of small talk.

  Miss Schmidt and Miss Koosis (he felt that he should call them Pearl and Lucille, although the very notion shocked him quite as much as that of calling his own mother by name) were well embarked upon old maidenhood. Having failed at Woman's First Function, they had triumphed at Woman's Second Function—typing and shorthand. Lacking looks, taste and intelligence, they had been more successful than they could have reasonably expected to be. Now they had reached their zenith. They had their little apartments and their fur pieces, they could eat at places like Rococo once a week, they were the queen bees of the ladies' room at the office and they could be just a trifle scornful of the girls half their age who had quit work to marry.

  No, John said to himself, there's nothing of the incipient spinster about Bernice Lacey. He looked at her carefully across the table. Why had he never noticed the wonderful dark hair, the liquid dark eyes? "Um, tell me, Miss Lacey," he said, "do you live here in town?"

  "Oh, no, my folks are dead . . "

  That was good.

  ". . . and I live with my married sister in Astoria."

  That was bad.

  "Nice, Astoria," he said. He had only the vaguest idea of where it was.

  "It's very pretty. My brother-in-law owns his own home."

  "That's nice," he said.

  "But it's such a long trip on the subway, that I've been thinking about taking a place right here in New York and . . ."

  He thought fleetingly of Bernice Lacey in a snug little flat, like the one he had had in the East Sixties before the move to Riveredge. It would be pink or pale blue and he would pay the rent ever so discreetly and she would be waiting there for him when he left the office and . . .

  ". . . and so Pearl, that's Miss Schmidt, said why don't we take a place together . . ."

  The bubble burst. The picture of Bernice living with that garrulous old crow was not a pleasant one to put into focus. He shuddered at the very thought of a sweet little thing like Bernice being enmeshed in the web of Miss Schmidt—a captive, forever, to Miss Schmidt's vulgar sallies, her antique witticisms, her pig-ignorant opinions.

  "I don't mind if a joke's dirty, Mr. Wentworth, as long as it's funny,” Miss Schmidt was saying. John looked at her with ill-concealed distaste as she crooked her little finger, took an elegant sip of her drink and produced a soft, furtive little belch. "Like I always say to Mr. P—that's Mr. Popescu, my employer; it's a for-run name—I always say there's nothingue like a sensa yuma. Now, for eggzampul, do you watch Jackie Gleason on tee-vee?"

  Oh no, Never. A sweet girl like Bernice just couldn't get mixed up with a common old frump like Miss Schmidt. He'd never had a mistress—couldn't afford one—but he wondered if Bernice might not do. Then he wondered just how one went about setting up such an arrangement. One just didn't say something like: "Miss Lacey, your shorthand and typing and filing are wonderful. I think you're beautiful. Will you be my mistress?"

  He suddenly became conscious of the pressure of many knees beneath the table. It was pleasant, but since the table was a small one and there were ten knees under it, it was difficult to tell just whose were touching his. Then he glanced at Toby's face across the table. There were the unmistakable signs of distress, distaste and disdain as Miss Schmidt continued with her tortuous description of the long and apparently side-splitting sketch she'd seen on her television set the night before.

  He felt himself getting as desperate as Toby looked and also drunker than Toby looked. Anesthesia was indicated. "Etienne," he called suddenly, "another round, please."

  "Oh, please, I can't!" Bernice said.

  "Hubba, hubba, hubba!" Miss Koosis said.

  "Don't be sil, Bernice, honey," Miss Schmidt said, probing delicately at her bicuspids with her little finger. "With two gentlemen like this to see us to the subway, who minds being under the alfluence of incohol?"

  "Isn't Pearl a perfect riot!" Bernice said, her wonderful eyes glowing with pleasure. "Al-fluence of in-cohol! Have you ever heard that before?"

  "Only about ten thousand times," Toby muttered beneath his breath. Then he turned a little lurchingly toward Bernice. "Listen, beautiful . . ." Toby began.

  John felt just a little apprehensive. He hoped Toby wasn't getting too potted to behave himself and he thought with a touch of irritation that even if Toby was his best friend, Bernice was still his secretary. It was a matter of squatter's rights.

  Bernice looked across the table at him with a glance that was a trifle frightened and questioning. He wanted to leap into the conversation—break it up. Poor little kid. But Miss Schmidt had fixed him with her glassy gaze, her shark's smile.

  ". . . talk about double in-ten-dree, Groucho Marx comes on the other night with this couple from—I don't know where they come from, some place like East Jesus, Nebrasker, if you'll parm my being sac-ree-lidge-us. Well, anyhoo, he says to this girl—quite a cute dish—he says . . ."

  A torrent of relief swept over him as he saw Etienne approaching with the tray of drinks. At least that would quiet Miss Schmidt for a blessed moment so that he could return his attentions to Bernice.

  "'. . . double beds!' Um-majin! Right over television with milliums of people listeningue. Oh, I hope you don't mind an noff-color story, but Groucho's got such a suttle sensa yuma that . . . Eeeeeeeeeeeeeow!”

  With a jungle scream, Miss Schmidt ended her anecdote and leapt to her feet, exerting such force that the table and the tray of drinks crashed to the floor. Even Etienne was almost overturned.

  "Miss Schm . . ."

  "Oh, my God," Toby groaned. "I got the wrong leg!"

  "Wha' hoppened?" Miss Koosis said.

  And then Miss Schmidt was confronting John like a wounded panther, her spectacles blazing. "Of all the dirty, low-down mashers I ever seen in my life!" she screamed.

  "Miss Schmidt," he said, "I didn't . . ."

  "Don't tell me what chew did. I oughta know. An' don't think I ain't goingue to report this to Mr. Popescu. You an' yer . . .”

  "But, Miss Schm . . ."

  "Donchew Miss Schmidt me. I seen your kind before, don't think I haven't. You men all think that if you buy a party a cocktail you got the right to . . ."

  "Miss Schmidt, I didn't lay a hand on . . ."

  "Oh, pipe down, Grandma . . ." Toby began.

  "Toby, please . . ."

  "An' you, too," Miss Schmidt bellowed, wheeling on Toby. "Yer all alike." As Miss Schmidt's diatribe increased in volume and scope, he noticed an interested audience gathering. Even if the place was practically deserted by now, it was amazing what a sizable crowd could be summoned by the outrage of a virgin of nearly fifty.

  "Please, madame," Etienne said, approaching her with a flourish of his napkin.

  "Take yer hands offa me, you lousy . . ." She raised her purse menacingly at Etienne. The purse flew open, its contents thumping and clattering every which way.

  "Oh!" Bernice cried. "Oh!" And then she burst into tears.

  At that moment Josef arrived. "Out!" he said. "Get out and stay out!"

  "Listen, Josef," John said. "I can explain everything. There was just a . . ."

  "I run a decent place, M'sieu', I don't want . . ."

  "You run a decent place!" Toby roar
ed. "Why, you lousy dago-racketeer, all you run is a . . ."

  "Toby!" he shouted.

  Bernice stood up, tears streaming down her face. "I've—I've never been so insulted in my life! Here I thought you were a gentleman and . . ." She broke down briefly. "Well, just let me t-tell you, I won't be in Monday or ever. Poor Pearl! Come on Pearl," she said, stepping over the upset table. "Lucille, come on. We'll take Pearl home."

  "But, Bernice . . . I mean, Miss Lacey . . ." It was too late. They had marched out to the street. A second later John and Toby found themselves propelled also to the street.

  "I've been thrown out of better places than this, you stinking wop bandit," Toby yelled back toward the door. Toby was laughing. Toby was having the time of his life. But wasn't Toby getting just a little, well, elderly for college-boy larks like this?

  Four

  In his embarrassment, his confusion and his drunkenness, he lurched out into the street almost in the nick of time to be knocked flat by New York's most outstandingly vulgar automobile.

  There was an ear-splitting screech of brakes and he was jerked out of the path of the monster by Toby just as a shrill feminine voice screamed "Well, of all people!"

  "Oh, my God," he groaned, "out of a million cars in New York, I have to pick my boss's!"

  Like everything Mr. and Mrs. Manfred Popescu owned, the car was expensive. Like everything Mr. and Mrs. Manfred Popescu owned, the car was unique. And like everything Mr, and Mrs. Manfred Popescu owned, there was little fear that anyone else would want to copy it.

  The Popescu vehicle was a brand new, custom-built Cadillac town car, one foot lower and two feet longer than any other Cadillac in America. It was pitch black with gold trim instead of chromium. The interior was upholstered in black persian lamb and fitted with a bar, writing desk, radio, telephone, television (color) and a solid gold Popescu Pulse-Beat Eternal Chronometer which gave the time in the major capitals of the world, the date, the phases of the moon and tolled every quarter of an hour in either Westminster or Whittington chimes. The controls were manned by a chauffeur and a footman who wore white linen dusters in the summer and black livery with persian lamb collars in the winter. Mrs. Popescu thought it was divine.