The Loving Couple

by Patrick Dennis

  "Fran, dear!" Lisa shrieked, embracing her as well. "Isn't this divine! I bought every stitch of it in Rhodes when Brad and I were there this summer. We adored Greece and . . ."

  "It makes you look like the Colossus of Rhodes," Fran said. "Fletch get here yet?"

  "Oh, Fran! You're just awful!" Lisa giggled. "Yes, he's in there somewhere," she gestured vaguely toward a mass of human bodies,, "talking to the most interesting girl from the U.N. He . . ."

  "Thanks," Fran said. "Where'll I leave my coat—someplace where it won't get swiped."

  "Fran!" Lisa burst into peals of giggles. "You're so original!"

  Mary had known Lisa Randall ever since the day they had both entered college and never for a moment in the ensuing ten years had she doubted that Lisa was the damnedest fool ever to walk on God's green earth.

  Born plain Elizabeth Dempster to an oldish insurance executive and his fading wife in Evanston, Illinois, Lisa had passed a placid girlhood tagging along happily with Mummy to the St. Luke's Guild, Le Cercle François and the Thursday Series at Orchestra Hall. Mummy's friends all agreed that Lisa was a lovely girl—but then change-of-life babies always are exceptional. Docile and sunny by nature, Lisa accepted life among the haute bourgeoisie without question or complaint, and she never once paused to consider that Evanston might possibly not be The World. Never, that is, until the day Mummy said, "Harvey, I think an Eastern college for Elizabeth."

  Lisa's dormant genius for experimentation burst into full flower in the Massachusetts air. Mary had watched her alter her name from Elizabeth to Bette, to Bettye, to B.T., to Liz, to Lizette, to Lisa. Her penmanship changed often and radically.

  Her infrequent letters home, written as they were in white ink on black paper, green ink on red paper, gold ink on silver paper, quite terrified Mummy—what Mummy could read of them. (Daddy's eyesight had all but given out.) Mummy had been so worried, in fact, that she conspired with a distant Boston cousin to sound out Lisa/Elizabeth over tea and send back a frank report.

  A week later the cousin had written—in blue ink on white paper—to say that she had found Lisa to be rather eccentric and somewhat affected, but in no wise dangerous. The cousin had felt it kinder to omit mention of Lisa's blue nail enamel, her abstract jewelry, her harlequin britches and the faintly pinko Indonesian exchange student whom Lisa had brought, uninvited and totally unexpected, along with Mary to the Boston tea party.

  Mummy had told Mary, though, that summers in the staid bosom of the family would disabuse Lisa of her fancies. But Mummy hadn't reckoned with Lisa's own summer plans. Her college summers were spent as exotically and as far away from Evanston as possible, culminating in Lisa's leadership of an interracial student's hiking trip across the Scandinavian peninsula, where the boys and girls not only serenaded Sibelius, but got bugs in a Finnish bath house.

  Nor did the college boys whom Mummy dispatched help. Nice young men from nice old families, they preferred Mary, finding Lisa to be just too extraordinary, while Lisa found them just too ordinary- Lisa's taste in college beaux ran to Eastern philosophy majors, poets, atonal musicians, foreign students—preferably equipped with native costumes and folk songs—and anyone who had suffered intensely. Mary could never understand it.

  Her junior year in Paris finished what Massachusetts had only begun to do for Lisa. Briefly back in Evanston for Daddy's funeral, she stunned Le Cercle Français with her command of Left Bank slang, her existentialist philosophy and her apache costumes. It was some months before Lisa was able to understand English once again and she moaned a good deal more about the loss of mon Paris than mon père.

  And at commencement, when Mummy, still in semi-mourning, came all the way East just to drive Lisa back to Evanston, did Lisa choose to make a comfortable home with Mummy? Indeed she did not! She went straight to a horrid cold-water flat in Greenwich Village to live as exotically as possible on the salary she received from a gallery that sold mobiles.

  Mummy had told Mary all along that if Lisa were at least a brilliant student or a talented artist there might have been some excuse for her, well, oddness. But Lisa had little capacity for study and even less for art. All of her boundless energies were directed straight toward the unique. Mummy was sick about it and she only rallied when it looked, at last, as though Lisa had come to her senses.

  Lisa got married with Mary as her sole attendant. She got married not to a sculptor or a radical or an atheist or a foreigner. She got married to Bradford Randall, a young man of good New York family who had inherited a lot of money and would come into still more. Lisa's mother smiled benignly. Le Cercle Français smiled benignly. The St. Luke's Guild smiled benignly. They were even able to forgive the bronze lamé sari which Lisa had chosen as a wedding dress—and at St. Lukes! But they all smiled too benignly and too soon. They had neglected to notice just one thing: Brad was twice as inane as Lisa.

  After a brief honeymoon in Provincetown, Lisa was back in Greenwich Village, raring to discover the new, the exotic—and with Brad on hand to help her. Mummy passed on, sadly and quietly, just three months before Lisa's only child, little Sebastian, was born.

  "Run into the living room, Mary darling," Lisa said, giving her a sisterly little squeeze. "It's absolutely teeming with tons and tons of the most divine new people—and you'll love the way Brad and I have done it over. Nothing like it in New York."

  The statement covered a good deal—it took care of Lisa's entire way of life. Lisa was a born collector. She collected hobbies, causes, costumes, art, literature, music, furniture, people—anything that was new and different. Beards and sandals were the norm at Lisa's; far more common than business suits and striped ties. Artists who never painted (or painted very badly), writers who never wrote (or, at least, who had never been read), were a constant source of joy to Lisa, just as long as they were sufficiently dirty, quarrelsome, unbalanced or dull to make something of a splash among her old, conservative friends. And, loyal as she was, Lisa simply could not endure normal people—except at her parties.

  When Lisa entertained she needed an audience, for herself as well as for her mammoth cast of performers. And it was then that a hard core of prosaic but broadminded uptown friends became essential. These were the people to whom Lisa could turn, with the air of ringmaster, games-mistress and impresario and say: "I know you'll adore meeting Nadja. She's broken away from the Graham group and she's now working on a very symbolical ballet based on the writings of Donald Webster Cory. Completely revolutionary, darling." Nadja would then be produced, sullen and brooding, wearing a soiled surplice of her own design and some heavy modern jewelry, ditto.

  And it would more than likely be the only time Nadja ever was produced. A lack of funds, dissension among the dancers, a row with the composer or the attempted suicide of Nadja's colored lover's Japanese wife would postpone indefinitely the birth of the completely revolutionary ballet.

  But Lisa didn't care, just as long as she had enough new Interesting People to fill up her freshly redecorated living room and stun her conservative friends whenever she chose to throw a party. As a matter of fact, when Lisa gave a party, it was not so much an entertainment as it was a vernissage. Her cocktail parties had but one express purpose: they were planned to show off a new collection—a newer and more outlandish Lisa in a newer and more outlandish setting, surrounded by newer and more outlandish people.

  All Lisa really had to do was decide on her own latest personality, get the house finished—in six years of marriage Lisa's living room had gone through twelve distinct periods—send out cards to four or five hundred Interesting People, call the turbaned Goanese bartender she'd located through the Personals Columns in the Saturday Review and let fly.

  As Lisa propelled her into the hot, thronged room—this time decorated in the Venetian manner with a trompe l’oeil mural of the Grand Canal painted on a wall which had recently been stark, white brick—she thought how very right Fran was about Lisa. Both Lisa and Brad. They were silly and precious and pretentio
us; difficult to get to and rarely worth the trip. So were their parties. Mary realized, quite calmly, that she should feel nothing but irritation, indignation or indifference for anyone as fraudulent as Lisa. But in spite of Lisa's self-conscious posing and play-acting, she had never lost her one, basic, endearing quality; Lisa was, today, the same warm, foolish, goodnatured cow she had been on the day she left Evanston. Somehow Mary couldn't help loving her for it.

  "Now, darling," Lisa said, gesticulating toward several hundred massed bodies, "I think you know everyone."

  She didn't and she felt again that cold, clutching feeling in her stomach of being lost and alone at a party,

  "But you haven't met our guest of honor, Pericles Insofaras. He's the most divine tenor in the world. He's going to be singing—in Greek—with an experimental opera group I'm interested in. We've taken an old carriage house—or car-barn, I guess you'd call it—over on Third Avenue and we're doing it up in amphitheatre fashion. Of course, Pericles wants to sing at the Met. Met, Met, Met! That's all the English he knows. Here, darling, do let me introduce you to him and do be sweet to him. He nat-rully doesn't speak a word of English."

  "But if he doesn't know any English, Lisa . . ." she began wretchedly.

  "Here he is, darling!" Lisa dragged her to a corner of the room where a strange man stood in miserable loneliness. He was short, slight and dark. His eyebrows marched militantly across his forehead, joined forces at the bridge of his nose and went single file half the way down it. In his hairy hand he held a hot martini which he obviously detested.

  "Pericles!" Lisa cried.

  He beamed at her enthusiastically, displaying fifteen enormous white teeth and a much larger gold one.

  “Pericles,” Lisa trilled. “Θέλω νὰ σᾰς συστήσω σε μιὰ παλιὰ καλὴ μου φίλη καὶ how-you-say room mate at Wellesley, κολλέγιο. Oh, and let me get you another martini, Pericles. I mean, ἀφησὲ με νὰ σου δώσω ἂλλο ένα ποτηράκι, poor boy. Τό cocktail σον θὰ ἒχῃ ξεσταθῃ. Isn't it divine the way Brad and I've mastered Greek? We just had six lessons at the Berlitz school and I was absolutely at home with all the natives when we were there," Lisa said in an elaborate aside. "Now do be sweet to him. Pericles! As I was saying, ᾽εδῶ ἡ καλὴ μον φιλη from Wellesley, Mass-a-chew-setts, Mis. . . ."

  She was interrupted by her breathless husband, got-up apparently as a Rhodian brigand. (Lisa had a good deal of influence over Brad's wardrobe.)

  "Lisa," Brad panted, "the Lipsky-Gottschalks are here. I've been looking everywhere for you. They can't stay a minute. They're flying back to Majorca tonight." He took a deep breath. "Ah, Pericles, πῶς τὰ περνᾰς καλέ μον φίλε I'll be back in just a minute. Um . . . ξὰ γνρίσω ᾽αμέσως" With that he dashed away.

  "Oh, darling, I've got to rush and see the Lipsky-Gottschalks. He's the wire sculptor, you know. We went across Lesbos together on burros. Do take good care of Pericles!" Ah! ça va, mes amis!" Lisa shrieked in the direction of a soiled looking couple and waddled away through the crowd.

  Mary had once read the Iliad or the Odyssey—she couldn't remember quite which—in translation, but it had done little to prepare her for cocktail conversation with a Greek tenor who spoke no English. "Uh, you like Me-tro-po-li-tan Op-purr-ah?" she said tentatively.

  “Ορίστε!” Mr. Insofaras said.

  "What?"

  “Ορίστε!”

  "Oh, dear."

  Just then, Suzette, Lisa's treasure of a maid from Martinique, passed between them, bearing a tray of canapés on her woolly head. Seizing this golden opportunity, she turned and fled into a knot of people.

  "Honey bunch!"

  She was immediately the unwilling recipient of a delicate embrace and a chaste kiss on both cheeks. It was Gerald Updike.

  "Oh, Gerry!" she gasped. "It's you!"

  "Darling, where have you been!" Gerald cried. "Ronny! Mother! Would you just come see what I've found—little Miss Mary Miles Minter fresh in from suburbia! And don't you look a lamb, pet! Heavenly hat! Whose? Walter Florell?"

  "No, Gerry, just a hat shop out near Riveredge," she stammered. "It is new. And it's awfully good to see you again. Is your mother here? And Ronny?"

  "Of course, darling. Did you think we'd dream of missing one of Lisa's unveilings? We didn't do this room—ça va sans dire—and we all begged that silly bitch of a Lisa not to plaster the Grand Canal all over one wall, especially when we've still got thirty running feet of the most heavenly old French paper at the shop. I said, 'Lisa-belle, listen to Uncle Gerald and . . .' "

  "Darling!" Mrs. Updike boomed, and embraced her. Mrs. Updike and her son, Gerald, were dressed almost identically—both had narrow black suits and gray crewcuts, tinged ever so slightly with blue. With Mrs. Updike was Ronny, Gerald's close friend for more than a year now. Except that his hair was a bit longer and a bit blonder than seemed absolutely necessary, he was dressed to match. The three of them also displayed an impressive collection of large and unusual rings.

  "Hello there, funny face," Ronny said with a feline little smile. He didn't kiss her. For some time Ronny had suffered under the hallucination that she and Gerald Updike were—or had been—emotionally involved and his jealousy of her was boundless. The whole idea somewhat amused her. Ronny was such a creepy little boy.

  "Well, let's take a look at you, darling," Mrs. Updike roared in her rich contralto. Mrs. Updike grasped her by the shoulders and held her out at arms' length. She was quite farsighted. "Sweet hat!"

  "Just what I said to her, Mother," Gerald said.

  "Darling, we were all sick to hear about the baby," Mrs. Updike said. Then Mrs. Updike kept her spell-bound audience waiting while she fished into her big black purse, withdrew a gold cigarette case, withdrew a Parliament from that, fitted the Parliament into a holder and put the holder in her mouth. Simultaneously, two gold lighters—one reading "Gerald from Ronny," the other "Ronny from Gerald"—flared up to light Mrs. Updike's cigarette. Mrs. Updike inhaled deeply, went into a spasm of coughing, and had to be thumped on the back by her son.

  "Thanks, Maude,” Mary said after order was restored, "but it was really all for the best."

  "Oh, everything is, darling, I . . . What do you mean, dear?"

  "I mean that we're separated and we'll more than likely be getting a divorce."

  "No!" Gerald gasped, his hands fluttering helplessly to his tie. "When?"

  "Just today, in fact. I may even be hitting you for my old job back."

  "Oh, really?" Ronny said coolly. Ronny had replaced her at Mrs. Manley Updike, Inc., Interiors. He was not terribly efficient at his work and was tolerated largely because his presence kept Gerald in the shop. Still, it was a better job than the display department at Lord and Taylor and he had no intention of giving it up without a scene, if not a struggle.

  "Darling!" Mrs. Updike bellowed, "how wonderful! Well, I don't mean it's wonderful, exactly, but of course you could come back tomorrow if you wanted to."

  "Tomorrow's a Sunday," Ronny hissed a bit petulantly.

  "Be still!" Gerald whispered.

  "Oh, my dear," Mrs. Updike went on elaborately. "I promise you, we're simply up to our eyeballs in work—turning down commissions, in fact—and I haven't been able to find so much as a swatch of sailcloth since the day you left us." She paused, cast Ronny an eloquent look and continued. "My dear," Mrs. Updike added with a portentous lowering of her voice, "don't think that I don't know the hell you're going thrrrough. When that no-good, drunken Updike left me . . . Oh, there I was down in Baltimore, hardly more than a girl, Gerry just a little baby—and collicky! When I think of the yeahs of struggle just to get Gerry through St. Swithin's and the Parsons School! All I had left—everything—was the house on Biddle Street (and that mortgaged to the hilt), my jewelry and some old family furniture—my family's furniture, mind you; Manley pieces, not Updike stuff. But I had courage and I had talent—yes, ta
lent . . ."

  Mary had heard the saga of Mrs. Manley Updike's rise in the decorating business so often that she could repeat it word for word. Its full recital gave her just time to bum a cigarette and a light from Gerald, snag a martini from a passing tray, take a healthy gulp, swallow, moisten her lips and be waiting in the wings for her cue. The performance was running exactly on schedule.

  "Imagine!" she said. She had always said Imagine at exactly this point in the Updike Soliloquy. It gave Mrs. Updike a chance to take a puff of her own cigarette and sip of her own drink.

  "They're all alike, men. All except my darling Gerry. He's stuck by his mother and his mother has stuck by him." Again she gave Ronny the fisheye. (Mrs. Updike was a worldly woman with no delusions about Gerald and Ronny. On the whole, she liked Ronny very little more than she had that tough Italian weightlifter of two years ago, but even Ronny was preferable to a daughter-in-law.) "Oh, that husband was wrong for you, darling, wrong, wrong, wrong! Gerry said so. I said so. Even Ronny said so."

  "Well, he . . ."Mary began.

  "Oh, yes, dear," Gerald said. "He was so awfully . . ."

  "So awfully what?" Mary asked. She found herself growing a bit annoyed at this crew for running John down—not that they'd actually said anything—and more annoyed with herself for being annoyed with them.

  "Well, he was so awfully sort of insensitive to beautiful things and making all that money from those horrid Popescus . . ." Gerald began,

  "Whom he met through you," she said rather too sharply.

  "They were clients, dear," Mrs. Updike interjected. "No one in our social milieu."

  "Well, you know, darling," Ronny smiled, "rather a Babbitt."

  "If there is one thing John was not—and is not," Mary said hotly, "it's a Babbitt. He happens to be one of the cleverest writers in . . ."

  "Darling," Mrs. Updike said, summoning forth her famous Baltimorean charm and tact. "The boys don't mean to upset you. Now stop it, both of you! (I'm ashamed of you, Gerry! You've certainly been raised better!) Now listen, dear, your problems are your business, and we've no intention of meddling. But I do want you to know that we're all standing behind you—and I advise immediate action. Any help you want, we're willing to give you. I know a marvelous lawyer who can handle the whole divorce for you. You can go away for it, if you want, or he might be able to arrange it right here in New York. I'm sure he can get you a splendid settlement. And remember, dear, your old place is always waiting for you . . ."