The Loving Couple Page 9

  The pianist and guiding spirit of the doughty Chandelier band—a middle-aged roué affectionately known as Sonny—began singing in his hesitant, husky tenor, his toupee glistening in the rose spotlight.

  "Luv-verr when nime ne-err yew

  An' die he-err yew

  Speak my name

  Soffly in my year yew

  Breathe a flame . . ."

  "Ouch!" Besame said.

  "What's the matter?"

  "It sounds so painful. Having a flame breathed into your ear, I mean."

  "I never thought of it quite that way," John said and began to laugh.

  "But, Fred," a strident voice came ringing from the sidelines, "he's here, too. Just look at him, if you please, out with another woman!"

  The laughter died on John's lips. The voice could only be that of Alice Marshall, his wife's sister. He stared unbelievingly in the direction of the voice. Sure enough, there was Alice looking like an outraged mother eagle in her feathered hat, clutching at her reluctant husband with one claw and groping for her spectacles with the other. "Fred, aren't you going to stop him?" Alice cawed.

  "Please, dear," Mr. Marshall begged.

  Aghast, John danced Besame, somewhat out of step, into the thick of the crowd. It was in this state of shock that he remembered dimly that today marked the fifteenth year of poor Fred Marshall's bondage to Alice. Naturally they were out celebrating.

  "What's your hurry?" Besame asked.

  His flight across the dance floor was stopped only by one of the ringside tables. He hit the table hard, bruising his thigh badly.

  "I—I'm awfully sorry," he blurted, "I lost my balance and . . ."

  "Hello, sweetie," a brassy voice said. It was Adele Hennessey.

  "Why, why Adele . . ."

  "Howdy, neighbor!" Jack Hennessey said in his club car baritone. "C'mown over an' bring the missus. Bring yer whole party—the whole fam damily!" he added, eying Besame appreciatively.

  "Oh, please do, honey," Adele said. "I want for you an' your wife—an' yer other friends, too, of course—to meet my two favorite people, Dan an' Peggy Slattery. Maybe you could join our table, doll."

  "Well, thanks," he began, "but I'm afraid that my wife isn't . . ."

  Undaunted, Adele Hennessey plunged on. "Peg, these are our best neighbors. She's just a living doll an' their house is the one you saw. We tried to give you a ring this aft, but there wasn't any answer."

  "Here, I'll get her," Jack Hennessey said, rising from the crowded table. "Just you show me where's your table an' I'll . . ."

  "Gee, I'm—I'm sorry, but I seem to be holding up traffic," John said in a sweat of anguish. "So long." With Besame in his arms he stumbled away just as he heard Adele saying to one of her favorite people, "She's very small an' kinda put-teet an' they have this darling house that's all done in Regent . . ."

  Glancing across the dance floor he could see his sister-in-law Alice plainly—just as plainly as she could see him. She had her glasses on now and while he couldn't hear what she was saying to her long-suffering husband, he could easily imagine both its content and volume.

  He was only half aware of the baleful, doe-like brown stare of Beth Martin as she danced by, cumbersome in her brown maternity dress, and of the slightly horrified look in the flash of Whitney Martin's tortoiseshell glasses as he piloted Beth across the floor.

  "Good evening," Whitney said in a tone which, while pleasant, implied that it was addressed to a cad, a bounder, a card sharp, a receiver of stolen goods and someone who was certainly no gentleman.

  "You certainly are popular," Besame said with an ill-concealed air of amusement.

  "Popular? I'm being plagued—pursued!"

  The orchestra now began another elderly waltz, something about a Foolish Heart which John associated somehow dimly with his lieutenant's uniform and Mary Martin and a show that was almost as hard to get into as Oklahoma. Pursued, that's it.

  Yes. Either all of Riveredge was spying on him or else he was becoming a first class paranoiac. His hands were soaked with perspiration and he whirled like a dervish with Besame in his arms.

  But there was no place to whirl to. On one side of the floor sat the Hennesseys with their guests, ready to pounce. On the opposite side of the floor was Alice Marshall, ready to spring. He could even catch snatches of Alice's conversation as it rose in both pitch and dudgeon. "What kind of a man do you . . . break my baby sister's heart . . . cast aside like an old shoe . . . basic sense of insecurity . . . Don Juan complex . . .”

  The room went unpleasantly around and around, the chandelier above his head swirling at crazy angles. He had to get out of this place if he could only find a means of egress that wouldn't involve meeting the whole Riveredge Grounds Committee.

  "You're making me terribly dizzy," Besame said a little miserably.

  He kept right on spinning.

  "I said," Besame repeated, "that you're making me quite dizzy."

  "Wh-what?"

  "I said Stop!"

  "Oh!"

  Gradually his speed slackened until he and Besame were at a standstill. His head reeled so badly that he had to close his eyes for a moment.

  "Really!" Besame said, "I thought you were trying to kill me."

  "What?" he said. Then he opened his eyes and stared directly into the horrified face of his wife.

  Six

  Flabbergasted, he almost fell headlong down the steep flight of steps leading to the Men's Room. He hoped, but without much conviction, that through some automatic sense of decorum he had managed to lead Besame off the dance floor and back to their table; that he had summoned up sufficient words or gestures to excuse himself for a moment; and that he hadn't trampled any women or children to death while getting out.

  The Men's Room—its door was erroneously marked "Gentlemen"—was dankly contained in the rumbling bowels of Chandelier, along with the inadequate ventilating system, the ice machine, the serving pantry, the food checker, the dishwashing apparatus, the dirty linen, the waiters' locker room, the garbage and a small but costly cache of narcotics available to only the very best customers. That part of the basement which the male patrons saw looked sanitary enough, but the more intuitive could sense rather than see and hear the fetid dripping of pipes, the scratching of rats, the scurrying of vermin through the catacombs beyond. Try as they would, neither the management nor the Creco Deodorizing Air Purifiers could quite dispel the vague hint of sewer gas, festering food and soiled underclothing that hung pervasively on the stale air of this unlovely quarter.

  Chandelier aimed for class, but like those less pretentious establishments that labelled their rest room doors Ladies-Gents; Pointers-Setters; Little Boys-Little Girls, Chandelier also suffered a lapse of taste when it came to being able to divorce humor from elimination. True, there were no obscenities, telephone numbers or improbable drawings hastily pencilled on the Men's Room walls—well, at least the porter scoured them off every morning.

  Instead, Chandelier imported its naughtiness from Eighteenth-Century France in the form of four hand-tinted engravings in which plump peasant girls and powdered court gentlemen of astonishing proportions were engaged in—and presumably enjoying—various amorous exercises of a most contortionistic nature. Extravagantly framed and matted and bolted into the walls (petty thievery was not entirely unknown at Chandelier), one pornographic engraving hung over each urinal. Also above each urinal was a carefully focussed magnifying mirror. Apparently the mirrors and the curiosa formed an unbeatable combination, for no evening went by without at least ten newcomers to Chandelier wiping tears of mirth from their eyes and chortling: "Say, that is clever!"

  The large chunk of ice in the bottom of each urinal, merely in the interests of fresher air, also brought on a couple of dozen on-the-rocks witticisms every night.

  Oh, it was a laugh riot down there!

  Otherwise the room was tricked out in whatever Crane and Company, the color consultant and the management felt were essential to masculine co
mfort. Crane and Company had supplied the four urinals, two toilets and four wash basins. The color consultant had supplied a grimy shade of gray-blue for the walls—"It's restful. Men like it."—and a deep navy for the ceiling—"It's masculine. It'll cover those ugly pipes." Unfortunately the wall color was not restful nor did men like it; the navy paint was not masculine nor did it conceal the Gordian knots of pipes and valves that meandered tortuously across the ceiling.

  But no one ever went there to admire the decor, anyhow. The management supplied the four pictures, the mirrors, some disinfectant, a few combs and hair brushes which no one in his right mind would think of using, various brands of aspirin, antacids, mouthwashes, stomachics, laxatives and hair tonics and a little gnome of a toilet attendant to dispense them. The management further supplied a battered chair for the attendant to sit on. The attendant supplied a whisk broom and a shoe cloth as well as selective line of more personal manly requirements for sale at three times the going drug-store price.

  But John had come down here for none of these things. He wanted privacy. There wasn't much privacy here in the Men's Room, but it was considerably quieter than upstairs and there was almost no chance of running head-on into his wife again.

  In a corner two college punks, dressed more for the campus than a New York supper club, were uneasily adding up the contents of their combined wallets.

  A big butter-and-egg man, too convulsed to be quite able to do up his fly, kept saying through paroxysms of laughter, "Say, Ed, that is clever! I gotta tell the boys back at the Athulletic Club about this place."

  His friend, Ed, a bigger butter-and-egg man, casually pushing back his cuticles with a towel, said with just a hint of world weariness, "Oh, yeah, I come here pracktuckly every time I hit Noo York."

  An unseen reveler was having a bad time of it in one of the toilets.

  "Don't talk to me about no rupture," the attendant said belligerently while, on tiptoe, he swept imaginary lint from a customer's shoulders. "Sixteen, going on semteen years now I had this rupture. A double one. A real beaut. Yuh know what I fin'y done about it? I sent off to this-here place in Kansas City specializes in ruptures. They don't do nothing else, see, just ruptures. They gimme this brace, see, an' right away I think . . ."

  John supported himself weakly against one of the wash basins and looked grimly at his face reflected above the unused bottles of Kreml and Brylcreem, Vitalis and Lucky Tiger. He was a little disappointed to notice that his hair had not suddenly turned white, that his face—though somewhat flushed—didn't look any older than it had that morning. He realized that these reactions were corny in fiction and if they ever happened in real life they were newsworthy enough to hit the front pages. But still he had the dramatist's feeling for the dramatic and felt that it was regrettable that he couldn't have changed into a haggard and broken old man during one moment of shock.

  So this was how it was, the innocent Wellesley virgin whom he'd carried off from the decorating department of B. Altman's, had turned out to be about as virtuous as, say, Fran Hollister. The naive young lady of good background whom he had taught the facts of life and love—taught her every blessed thing he had learned from a dozen or so more or less successful encounters and two careful readings of Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique—had learned her lessons all too well.

  And to think that on the very night of the break-up of their marriage she would be indifferent enough, wanton enough, brazen enough to be out in public with another man and dancing! He didn't know exactly what he had expected her to he doing or where he had expected her to be, but not waltzing at Chandelier.

  Well, it certainly hadn't taken her long to get over the blow. Just about twelve hours ago she'd been screaming at him like a fishwife, ordering him out of the house and out of her life forever. Now here she was, as sweet as pie, her eyes closed blissfully in the arms of another man. Good God, she'd probably been seeing him on the sly since—well, since who knows when. Had she lain warm and fragrant in her lover's bed whispering and giggling, confiding her husband's inadequacies to this other man? Had she rigged the whole fight this morning just to be shut of her husband and free to go straight to the arms of her lover?

  It was shocking, that's what it was. Disgusting!

  What a sap he had been! This was the girl whose chastity he had respected; the girl to whom he had paid the highest compliment of all, that of making her his wife; the girl for whose creature comfort he had hammered out stories and plays and sketches and scripts. (Well, to do her justice, she'd kept on working, first at Altman's and then at Mrs. Updike's, right up until the baby was evident.) This was the girl for whom he'd traded his happy, catch-as-catch-can way of life for the edgy security of a big job with Popescu just so that she could have a fancy house in Riveredge, a car, a maid, a yellow nursery and grass and trees for the baby's well being. How would he even be sure now that the baby was his? Well, it's a wise father.

  Thinking back a bit more rationally, he decided that the baby undoubtedly had been his unless she had managed a wild, sweet coupling with Gerald Updike atop a pile of chintz samples. No, such a picture taxed even his fertile imagination.

  Ah, he saw it all clearly now. Of course she had been faithful to him when she had had to be; when money was scarce, when she was busy working, when he had been around the apartment every day battering away at his typewriter. Yes, she had almost certainly been faithful then. But when they had moved out to Riveredge, when she was free of her job and of financial worries, then she had taken a lover or many lovers. A small, distinct voice of reason now told him that it was quite difficult to play the seductress when six months pregnant. He dropped that theory.

  No, it was after she lost the baby that she had turned from him. It was then, when bored and idle and comparatively rich, that she had given him her goodbye Judas kiss each morning and prepared herself and his bed for the arrival of her stealthy swain. But who? Who could the man—or men—be? Only a legal holiday or a severe hangover kept any of the male population of Riveredge off the commuters' train from Monday through Friday and not even the most casual of the Riveredge husbands got into his office a minute later than ten-fifteen. So it couldn't be a neighbor who had turned him into a cuckold.

  He wondered now, incredulously, if she could possibly be like those lonely, frustrated matrons one occasionally heard about—the delivery boys' delight. A quick kiss for the postman, a tussle with the television-repair man, a grope for the grocer boy. The Fran Hollister sort of thing where any interested passing male was fair game. Maybe she'd even shared Speed, the Riveredge lifeguard, with Mrs. Hollister.

  He tried hard to envision his wife writhing and panting in the arms of any of the local tradespeople. It was an improbable picture at best. He had seen the postman on his rounds almost every day, a kindly, garrulous old codger always anxious to talk about his sinuses and to show snapshots of his grandchildren, but unwilling to get out of his Chevrolet even for a registered letter, let alone mere adultery. The television man was a crabbed misogynist with four teeth missing in front and a breath like the Cloaca Maxima, so surly to the housewives of Riveredge that half of them refused to deal with him. Of course that could just be a pose. No. It was not the TV man. As for the grocery boy, he was fifteen, backward and ravaged with acne. Nor did it seem likely, even if she had found one of these improbable seducers attractive, that she could have managed much of an assignation, what with a religious fanatic like Heavenly Rest under foot with her constant psalm singing and predictions of the Armageddon.

  Speed, the lifeguard, was a vague possibility. At least he was handsome in a grunt-and-groan muscle magazine sort of way, but too stupid to do much more than swim the length of the Riveredge pool underwater, and just barely bright enough to come up for air. Besides, he was Fran Hollister's—or so rumor had it—and anyhow, Speed had drained the pool, packed up his barbells and diaper bathing trunks and departed on Labor Day.

  No, the man she was with tonight was no errand boy; not in a pla
ce like this wearing a suit like that. Nonetheless, a lover there was.

  "It isn't that I give a damn," he whispered to his angry face in the mirror. "It's her life. Let her lead it or mislead it anyway she wants to. But the idea of showing up in a public place with some guy on the very day she . . ."

  The Men's Room door opened behind him and he found himself staring at the well-tailored reflection of The Other Man.

  Hypnotized, he stood motionless at the mirror and gazed at The Other Man. He had a pictorial mind, heightened further by work in television. He had seen this man only for a second on the dim dance floor upstairs, but he had formed a picture of him that time would never erase. Of course this was The Other Man. He could have picked him out of a room of thousands of men. Now in the brightly lighted Men's Room, he could see him even better.

  The Other Man was damned good looking. There was no getting around that. But they were the good looks of a gentleman and not those of a model or an actor. For a brief moment he was almost relieved that she had chosen a man who was respectable and presentable instead of a racetrack tout or a garage mechanic or one of these grimy quasi-bohemians living in the artists' colony up the Hudson from Riveredge. He wondered quickly whether this was vanity for himself, of affection for her. Then he let the whole thing drop.

  No, The Other Man seemed a gent, all right. About his own age, possibly a year or two younger, better looking and far better preserved. The Other Man acted a little tense, as well he might in a situation like this. He wondered whether she'd managed to tell The Other Man that her husband was also among the merrymakers at Chandelier that evening. Probably not. She had seemed pretty stunned, too.