The Loving Couple Read online

"I said no thank you."

  "Well, maybe my little girl dance with Pappa, hein?" Manfred had offered jovially.

  "No thank you, Manfred. I said I didn't want to dance. In fact, I think I'll be going."

  "Going?" Toby had said brightly. "Going where?"

  "No place. Just going." Besame had risen to her feet.

  "Well, baby, in that case, you come out with us. We all go someplace get a big dinner," Manfred had cried, beaming at her from the leopard couch at the side. "Then we go someplace to dance—maybe you like El Morocco? Here Sonny-boy, telephone the little lady tell her come in town and join us, hein? We all make big party."

  "I—I'm sorry, Manfred," John had stammered, "but my wife . . . that is I . . . we rather . . ."

  "What Sonny-boy means, Manny," Toby had roared, splashing liquor into his glass, "is that he and that beautiful, frigid, hunk of ice he married have . . ."

  "Toby!"

  "Na, na, na, Tony-boy. Mustn't talk like that! A very beautiful sweet little lady, that girl. I like her. She bring me Sonny-boy and . . ." Popescu's loyal little speech had been interrupted by Toby's lurching off in search of a bathroom.

  "Look," Besame had said, "I'm sorry. I've got to go."

  "Wait," he had said, without quite knowing why, "I'm coming with you."

  Of course there had been quite an altercation in the Popescus' Moroccan-style foyer. Lillian had emerged, amazing in gold lamé, and pled with them to go dancing. She had become teary and accused her little girl of no longer loving her; then she had accused him of indifference. Toby, back from the bathroom, had joined in. Finally the elevator door had slid open and they were mercifully alone and away.

  Before he could adjust his brain to thinking again, they were standing in the ornate lobby of the building. "Well, goodbye," Besame said, holding out her hand. "I wish I could say it's been a lovely afternoon. Unfortunately, it hasn't been—not through any fault of yours."

  "Listen," he said abruptly, "please don't go. Come out and have a drink with me."

  "No thank you. Going out with other women's husbands isn't exactly in my line."

  "I didn't mean that kind of going out. I asked you to have a drink with me. I want to talk to you about your work."

  "Oh come now. I may be only twenty-two, but I've heard that line . . ."

  "Damn it, don't be so smart and cute! I'm hardly dumb enough to try to seduce my boss's daughter . . ."

  "Stepdaughter, please," she said.

  "Stepdaughter, then. Besides, my wife and I are separated."

  "Oh? Well in that case . . ."

  "Will you come, Besame? I mean, Miss Bessamer?"

  "In that case, I will. But just one question."

  "What's that?" he asked.

  "Just what would you do if the boss's daughter tried to seduce you?"

  Five

  He had no idea how he and Besame happened to end up at Chandelier, except that Chandelier was next door to the little restaurant where they had dined and he'd told her all about his new play.

  Now he wished that they'd gone on to some other place. Chandelier had very definite memories for him. It was the first New York nightclub he had ever been in. That was fifteen years ago and the place had been firmly established even then. "Chandelier" was practically the password of the Bacchus Club and an evening there with a dreamy-eyed blonde had been the aim of every kid at college, rich and poor alike—and he had been among the poorest. It had been strictly formal in those prewar days; certainly black tie and preferably white. Prices were stiff then—a two-fifty cover charge on Saturday nights; bar whiskey at eighty cents a shot; beer at fifty cents a bottle and Coca-cola at seventy-five. (Everything was now exactly double, except Coca-cola which had rigidly maintained its same old, reasonable depression price, but was still discouraged by the Chandelier waiters.)

  He had always been afraid that he wouldn't be allowed in or that his money would run out and he'd be humiliated in front of his date and have to call the Bacchus Club for bail. Chandelier was that impressive. It had had the wholesome chic of the St. Regis Roof or the Rainbow Room and you could take nice young girls there because their mothers simply felt that they wouldn't get into any trouble—as long as they got home by one, and no later—what with its nightly Big Apple, its contests for singing debutantes, its conga chain. No dormitory room in the East was considered complete without its Chandelier matchbooks and swizzle sticks and ashtrays and menus.

  He had been equally awed by the prices; the luster of the patrons; the names of the diseuses (late lamented charmers like Helen Morgan and Elsie Houston); and the daring, old world conservatism of the decor (dark blue walls, red divans and, hanging above the circular dance floor, the overpowering chandelier that gave the place not only its sole illumination, but its name).

  Chandelier had changed hands a dozen times in its twenty-five years, but nothing else had changed. Today it looked old and dusty and shabbily pretentious. Just as old and dusty and shabbily pretentious as John himself felt. The place was threadbare and absolutely dirty, yet it was still thronged with people who were impressed, just as he had once been, by its elderly style, and by others who still felt a sentimental attachment to the place, as though it were an old tweed coat, worn out but too good to throw away.

  Nothing had changed. The grizzled, ill-natured old bartender was still on duty in the outside room, still snarling and snapping at customers, still padding the checks, still being called Charlie with great affection by those who hadn't been to Chandelier often enough to loathe him.

  There was still the bronze easel on which was mounted an elaborately retouched photograph of the current entertainer, and the following message in flowing script:

  Chandelier

  presents with great pride

  the American debut

  of

  MLLE. CHOU-CHOU LA GRUE

  The Sensation of Paris

  Singing Twice Nightly

  Yes, the French imports, more often than not unheard-of in their native land, were all the rage now. And they were cheaper to hire, as well.

  He could hear the thump-thump-thump of the orchestra from the inner sanctum and he knew it was the same old bunch that had been playing there when he was in college and, indeed, playing the same old show tunes that were the standard stand-bys of the so-called "society" band.

  But there was a difference. The same old headwaiter, who had terrified him in his poor days, now gave him and Besame a quick scrutiny, bowed much lower then necessary and started issuing instructions to have a table set up next to the dance floor.

  "Oh, please no," Besame said.

  "No. Look," he said to the headwaiter, "thanks, but no thanks. We really don't want a ringside table—just something small back in a corner and out of the line of fire."

  The headwaiter looked hurt. Perhaps it was because his kind-hearted gesture had been spurned. Perhaps it was because he liked to have the frugal East Side gentry prominently displayed to the expense-account customers, who were paying, after all, to see Society at play. Or perhaps it was because the unfortunate term "line of fire" reminded him of the fatal shooting here twenty years ago, of a gangland celebrity who was certainly no gentleman, before the place had achieved its reputation as a kind of finishing school for the daughters of the genteel. Cursing silently in Greek, he escorted them to a divan table between a party from Lubbock, Texas, and a costume jewelry buyer from Akron who kept telling her costume jewelry manufacturer escort that Chandelier was much more refined than the Latin Quarter.

  How funny, John thought, that back in the days when Chandelier spelled glamor, opulence and the high life, he would have given his right arm if the staff had set up a special table for him. But the staff wouldn't have done it if he'd surrendered both arms. While today, when they were willing to do anything for him and asked only his continued patronage and a small tip, he really wanted to sit back at the kind of dim corner table to which he had been relegated as a kid.

  "A penny for your thoughts,"
Besame said quietly.

  "Dirt cheap," he said lamely and he was pleased that this un-witticism hadn't brought forth a tinkling cascade of stagey laughter. He liked Besame and he was delighted that he had pegged her all wrong when first they met. She had even come, gradually, to look like a different, individual girl instead of the run-of-the-mill aspiring actress.

  The waiter put their drinks deferentially onto the table now and left. Left them flat, he felt. After the business of pouring Scotch and mixing the drinks, after the lifted glass, the customary "Cheers!" and after the first sip, the conversation seemed to die of a long, wasting illness.

  Peering through the gloom of Chandelier, he saw all the familiar Saturday night sights and wondered again how it had ever been possible for him to like this place. There was the inevitable family-reunion table—a dozen uncomfortable looking people ranging in age from seven to seventy and all trying desperately to be very, very gay; to have their host's money's worth. A little girl of seven, quite plain in her ruffled pink tulle party dress and modified harlequin glasses, was performing an off-beat one-step with a gnarled old man who was not only old enough to be her grandfather, but who was her grandfather.

  "Show Gramps how to do the cha-cha, Darlene," voices called from the anniversary table. Darlene, unmindful of the fact that the orchestra was playing a waltz, happily obliged, throwing Gramps into a quandary. The table roared with laughter, browning gardenia corsages heaving on the bosoms of the women. A good time was being had by all—nearly as much fun as they could have had in the living room back home in Jackson Heights.

  There was a birthday table. It was always somebody's birthday at Chandelier. If the party was sufficiently august, the orchestra would even sing and play "Happy Birthday to You." This party was not. They looked like the kind of people who read confession magazines. The women had all too obviously spent the later afternoon at inexpensive establishments called things like Bea's Salon de Beauts or Al and Irraa's Vanitee Shoppe. Their hair clung to their skulls in rigidly lacquered waves and ringlets, their set faces proclaimed the Complimentary Hollywood Glamour Makeup thrown in free with each shampoo and wave. Girdled, cinched, laced and padded beneath bright acetate dresses known as "Cocktail Gowns," they were like iridescent May flies, freed for a brief moment from the diaper pails, pressure cookers and easy time payments of the vast New Jersey housing development that formed their common chrysalis.

  But the world into which they had flown with high spirits and higher hopes had proved to be a cold and terrifying place, expensive, austere and disappointing. Sitting sedately around the ruins of a cake—most of its message, "Happy Birthday Marge from The Gang at Hemlock Park" could still be deciphered—the lady May flies, overdressed, overfed, overawed, smiled cautiously and uncomfortably and wished that their six hours of worldly life might soon end. As for the May flies' husbands, they were mystified and a little terrified by their unexpectedly decorous and decorative mates; just as mystified and terrified as they were by Chandelier, its trappings, staff and clientele. None of the men at the birthday table had shone quite as brilliantly as he was accustomed to shining back in the modest purlieus of Hemlock Park. The Aggressive Go-Getter—fearless in the face of school board, police force and zoning laws of Northern New Jersey—had been too cowed by the headwaiter to protest the inferior table. The Perfect Scream—always the life of every party back across the Hudson—had yet to tell a joke, propose a side-splitting toast or do his locally famous impersonation of Liberace. The Sophisticate—a college graduate who had been stationed in Paris for nearly a year and, who subscribed to Esquire—had been so undone by the sommelier and the wine list as to stammer and slur tragically when ordering the "pretentious little Alsatian vin blanc" to accompany the sweetbreads and capon sous cloche. The resultant 1931 red burgundy had been vile and almost opaque with sedimentation, but at least it had been old. Too mortified to protest, the Sophisticate had pronounced it merveilleux, tres bon, magnifique and not even the Aggressive Go-Getter had had the spirit to remark that the wine was neither Alsatian nor blanc. Stoically they drank of the cup.

  Now the husbands were bolstering themselves with hard liquor—rye and gingerale for all but the Sophisticate, who had recovered sufficiently to insist on Scotch and Perrier Water (fifty cents extra the Aggressive Go-Getter noted silently). It would be a vast relief for all concerned to listen to this French singer—acclaimed as merveilleux, tres bon and magnifique by the Sophisticate, who felt that he ought to have heard of her—pay their ransom and return to their baby-sitters in Hemlock Park, New Jersey.

  Two young people, obviously just married, sat at a table recently cleared of everything except an overflowing ashtray. Embarrassed, uncomfortable, over-spent and drained of small talk, they wanted to go but knew that they should stay, if only to tell the folks back in Scranton that they had dined at Chandelier and heard the famous Chou-Chou la Grue on their New York honeymoon.

  A pair of college kids remained doggedly on the dance floor, casting surreptitious glances back toward their tiny divan table where a furious waiter and a check were impatiently waiting. The kids had coasted since eight on two beers and a Tom Collins. Now they hoped to glide through the ten o'clock show. The waiter shared no such hope. Bigger spenders were already waiting for tables and at Chandelier turnover was everything.

  Suddenly John called the waiter.

  "Yes, sir?"

  "You see those two kids on the edge of the dance floor?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir?" the waiter said with a somewhat puzzled air, but ready to pounce.

  "Send two more of whatever they've been drinking to their table and put it on my bill, please," he said.

  "Yes, sir!” the waiter said, all smiles and beams, and darted away. The college kids had been recalled from exile. With any luck, they could nurse their drinks right through the midnight show.

  All of these people—and dozens more like them scattered around the room—were the ones who didn't belong at Chandelier; the ones who would come this one time and be too humiliated ever to return again, although they wouldn't admit it under torture.

  His glance fell now upon the people who did belong at Chandelier. They made, if anything, an even less inspiring sight.

  A number of tables were occupied by May-and-December couplings. There were fun-loving old gentlemen in their sixties boyishly cavorting with chemical blondes who could easily have been their daughters. The girls with their soft curves and hard eyes all looked enough alike to be sisters and they were of a genre usually described by the tabloids as Starlets or Models. They dressed almost identically. They walked with their bosoms and bottoms thrust out too far and as though their shoes were too tight, which they were. They were capable of just three facial expressions apiece: sympathetic interest ("Ethel is a fine woman but she just don't understand me . . ."); hysterical glee (". . . and then this traveling salesman says—I hope you don't mind a slightly off-colored story, baby . . ."); and, when unobserved, stupid, stony sullenness.

  The gentlemen could look back on this evening, through coronary thromboses, slight strokes and hardening of the arteries, as one last, wonderful fling with that cute trick in New York. Their girls could look forward from this evening to one or two thousand evenings just like it, then to wrinkles and crow's feet, a visit to the gynecologist or a visit from the vice squad. But there were better things to look forward to for the moment: Hollywood; a rich marriage; the green satin strapless at the Wilma Shop; a kindly old partner for the night—"Lookee here, baby, I gotta little girl just your age. Here's Betty Lou's photo, but it don't really do her justice. She's kinda squinting in the sun . . "—who would be normal and dull and gentle and grateful and generous to a fault. Yes, tonight would be all right. "Oh, honey, lemme write down that killing joke about the hunter and the bear. I never can remember a joke."

  There were far fewer older women with young men, but they, too, were at Chandelier this evening, grateful for the concealment of flesh and hair in the dim light, eager—but not
too obviously so—to return to their rose-lit parlors for ". . . one last little drink and a bit of mood music . . ." with their polite, resigned and rather bored youthful escorts. ("You're so lean and muscular, Jimmy, I'd love to paint you sometime.") Haughty with nice old cab drivers and doormen, vicious to their maids, these women were like aspic in the long, lean hands of the handsome boys who offered their services in exchange for a tailor-made suit, a silk brocade robe, half a dozen ghastly ties or, possibly, a two-week trip to the warmer climes before the Big Scene—the tears, the accusations, the renunciation or denunciation—took place.

  And then there were the really social people. At a table on the edge of the floor, for example, there was . . .

  "Aren't you listening to me?" Besame said.

  "Uh, what? I beg your pardon." Now he was flustered and suspected that he had been very rude.

  "I said, Did you know that young couple you sent the drinks to?"

  "Oh. No. Never saw them before in my life."

  "But then . . . then why did you want to send drinks to their table?"

  "Well, I guess because . . . Well, to tell you the truth, I really don't know. I just felt like sending the poor kids a drink, that's all."

  "You're very sweet."

  "What?"

  "I said, you're very sweet."

  "Oh, come off it, Besame."

  "You might even be sweet enough to ask me to dance. Mother tells me you're wonderful."

  "Why . . . well, sure," he blurted. "I didn't think you liked to dance. This afternoon you said . . ."

  "I'd like to dance—with you,'' Besame said.

  They made their way through the closely packed tables to the even more closely packed dance floor. He stood a little tensely, a little ridiculously, at first, making himself too tall, too erect, as though he were facing a prospective employer.

  "My, but aren't you towering?" Besame murmured and slid into his arms.

  Then he relaxed, fell in with the music—a waltz by Rodgers and Hart called "Lover," which he dimly connected with an early talking picture starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette Mac-Donald. He danced well. Besame's mother had all too often assured him of that. Tonight, with a partner who was thirty years younger and thirty pounds lighter and thirty drinks soberer than Mrs. Popescu, he danced even better.