Hot Night in the City

by Trevanian

  "It's just that... what?" she wondered.

  "Well, if you must know, I don't believe that heavy-handed 'social drama' does any good. It may rub the audience's nose in their flaws and failings but it doesn't solve anything. For one thing, social drama preaches only to the ladies of the altar society, and—"

  "The ladies of the altar society?"

  "That was a figure of speech."

  "I hate figures of speech."

  He stared at her. "How can anyone harbor a general antipathy against figures of speech?"

  "Nothing easier. I've done it all my life. What's all this about the ladies of the altar society?"

  "The only people willing to sit in the gloomy Théâtre Libre and let themselves be bludgeoned by great chunks of 'message' are those who already agree with those messages. If you want to persuade the indifferent masses, you've got to put your message into a form that most people enjoy."

  "Like your farces, I suppose?"

  "Exactly. Now in my last farce—"

  "...A mere one-act curtain opener..."

  "...In my last farce, I ridiculed the men who consider lonely, unappreciated wives in search of love and understanding to be 'fallen women', while husbands out on the town are thought of as gay blades and sly old rogues."

  "Well... maybe." Hm-m, perhaps there was more to this fellow than a handsome face, and that thick curly hair, and those liquid Basque eyes, and that mouth with its upward—"But I'll bet anything that your women are transparent stereotypes, as in all farces: the Domineering Wife; the Pert, Desirable Soubrette; the Volcanic, Seething Femme Fatale; the Innocent, Empry-Headed Ingenue; the Flapping, Fluttering—"

  "It's true that playwrights use stock characters to—"

  "Don't you try to wriggle out of it by claiming they're just figures of speech!"

  "Figures of speech?"

  "All right, all right! So I've never grasped just what figures of speech are. Is that a crime? Is it a disgrace not to know the difference between a metaphor and a hyperbole and an anagram and a litotes and a—?"

  "An anagram is not a figure of speech."

  "Thank God something isn't."

  "Sh-h-h. They'll think were having our first quarrel." He smiled.

  "You think this is all very funny, don't you."

  "I think it's good material for a farce. A social farce, of course. A farce of Impelling Social Significance. I could have a character like you: charming, determined, fiery, spouting all your suffragette stuff. While the dignified, understanding, oddly attractive playwright looks calmly into her flashing eyes and—"

  "...My suffragette stuff?"

  "Well, you know what I mean."

  She was prevented from telling him that she did not know what he meant, and didn't care to learn, when the waiter came to replace the soup tureen with a large platter of steamed oysters, for it was almost New Years, the traditional season for oysters.

  He applied himself with dexterity to liberating the delicious molluscs from their shells, but after the first three, he suddenly realized she was not eating.

  "What's wrong? I thought you were hungry."

  "I'm famished. I haven't had a decent meal since we received that telegram from Sophie, announcing her intention to marry the brother of an ink slinger who churns out low farces."

  "Well, if you're so hungry, why aren't you eating?" He leaned forward and smiled into her eyes as he whispered in his most 'new-husbandly' voice, "You wouldn't want people to think you can't eat because you're all fluttery with anticipation, would you?" He pumped his eyebrows.

  Her eyes hardened and she whispered, "I am not eating because one cannot eat oysters with one's gloves on."

  "In that case," he said in a caressing tone, but separating his words carefully as though speaking to the village idiot, "why don't you take your gloves off?"

  She laid her hand over his and smiled up into his eyes. "I don't take them off because..." she pinched that particularly excruciating spot on the back of the hand known only to girls who have had to learn to avenge the teasing of older brothers "...because, stupid, I'm not wearing a wedding ring. And if there's anything I'd find more repellent than these people thinking I'm your wife, it would be their thinking I'm your mistress." She hissed this last word as she twisted the pinch, hard.

  "Ai-i-i!" He snatched his hand from beneath hers and rubbed the back of it, mute accusation in his wounded eyes. "So it's the old she-can't-take-off-her-glove-because-she-isn't-wearing-a-ring problem, is it? All right, I'll show you what a clever farce writer can do. Hm-m-m." His focus seemed to turn inward as he ransacked his imagination for a ploy that would—ah!

  "Take off your gloves," he said.

  "But, I—"

  "Please just do as I say. Take off your gloves."

  Reluctantly, she drew off first her right glove, then the revealing left.

  "Now just follow my lead," he whispered; then aloud, he said, "Goodness gracious me! Where is your ring, darling?"

  Her eyes narrowed. "If this is some vicious stunt meant to embarrass me..." She lifted her forefinger and pointed at his heart.

  All around them, ears that had been straining in their direction since they sat down (and particularly since his heartfelt 'ai-i-i!') now fairly vibrated, as bodies leaned towards them, although no one was so obvious as to actually turn and look.

  "I told you, darling heart," he continued aloud, "that Grandma's ring was too large for your dainty finger. But, impatient little imp that you are, you couldn't wait until I had the jeweller... ah... smallen it, could you?" He wrinkled his nose at her as he picked her gloves up from the table.

  "Smallen it?" she echoed, promising herself she would pay him back for that 'impatient little imp' business. And as for his nose wrinkling...

  "Now what am I going to tell Mother? She'll be heartbroken to learn that Granny's ring has been— Well, I'll be hornswaggled!" He was pinching the ring finger of her left glove. "Here it is! It slipped off with your glove. You silly billy, you."

  "Silly billy?"

  He 'milked' the nonexistent ring down the finger of the glove, then he reached inside and pinched the air between his thumb and forefinger and stuffed the bit of captured nothing into his watch pocket, which he patted protectively. "And there it stays, snookums, until I have a chance to... uh... smallify it. Hubby knows best," he said, wagging his finger at her, and he could almost feel the silent applause of the entire dining car. She, with her actress's instinct, was even more aware of the silent applause than he... and she hated it. And as for that wagging finger...!

  He slipped back into their now-habitual undertone. "Be honest and admit that I have the gift of invention necessary to be a successful playwright."

  "If all it takes are the instincts and tactics of a confidence trickster, then maybe so."

  "I've given myself three years to make it in Parisian theater."

  "It might take longer than that with lines like 'I'll be hornswaggled!' And if you don't 'make it' in three years? What then?"

  "Well, in that case, I'll... I don't know. It's risky to consider failure. It puts dangerous ideas into the mind of the goddess of Fortune. What about you? How long have you given yourself to make it as an interpreter of terribly, terribly significant social dramas?"

  "As long as it takes."

  "There's the girl! Now, to build up your strength for the long climb towards fame, riches, and social impact, perhaps you'd better start on those oysters."

  No longer burdened with gloves, she dug in with undisguised gusto; but now it was he who seemed suddenly to lose his appetite.

  "What's wrong?" she asked, manipulating her oyster fork with address.

  "These oysters make me think about my sister."

  "A pearl of a girl, is she? Or sort of slimy? Or all steamed up over your leaving her behind?"

  "She adores oysters. And she hasn't eaten a thing since we received my brother's telegram telling us that he had succumbed to the wiles of... well, that he had fallen totally and et
ernally in love with your Sophie, and intended to marry her immediately, whether or not the family approved. Here it is, after eight, and my sister can't even go to a restaurant. I am carrying our traveling money, naturally."

  "Naturally? Why is it 'natural' for men to carry the money? But I wouldn't worry about your sister." She finished her fourth oyster and fell upon the fifth. "I'll bet that at this very minute she's sitting across from my brother, demolishing a platter of oysters. Dieudonné would surely—"

  "Dieudonné?"

  "Don't bother, I've heard them all. Dieudonné would surely have insisted that your poor abandoned sister join him for dinner. My brother always does the correct thing. He is the perfect embodiment of all things conventional—even down to conventional standards of kindness and compassion... so long as it's towards 'the right people'."

  "You sound as though you don't like your bother."

  "Oh, I love him, of course. But, no, I don't like him very much."

  "That's exactly how I feel about my sister!"

  "Who's probably right now sitting across from him at a fashionable restaurant (he patronizes only fashionable restaurants and dumps them as soon as their popularity begins to pale). I can see him sitting there, looking around to see who's looking at him as he regales your sister with details of the punishments he intends to wreck on you tomorrow, when the next train brings him to Cambo-les-Bains. And your sister is probably demurely dabbing her oyster-stained fingertips with her napkin and trying to defend you."

  "That shows what you know. She'd be the last person in the world to defend me. Ever since she came to 'visit' me in Paris, totally uninvited, she's been making my life a hell."

  "Good girl."

  "She spends all day squandering her share of the family inheritance on clothes, then all night complaining to me about my failure to introduce her to any 'nice' people. ...What do you mean, 'good girl'?"

  "Then why don't you?"

  "Why don't I what?"

  "Introduce her to 'nice' people."

  "I don't know any 'nice' people!"

  "I believe that."

  The waiter replaced the depleted platter of oysters with poulet Marengo for her and a wine-rich daube for him. As she began eating with artless zest, she asked, "So your sister's a snob, is she? Well, she and my brother should hit it off famously. He would like nothing better than to limit his patients to the fashionable gratin of Paris. The two of them could rise through the ranks of polite society, advancing side by side from dull dinner parties with 'correct' people, to even duller dinners with 'important' people—great lavish feeds in which each course costs enough to keep an Armenian village from starvation for a week, and there's at least one liveried servant for every guest with his snout in the golden trough, and— What are you doing?"

  "I'm just scratching down a note or two. I have a pretty good memory for dialogue, but you rattle on at a terrifying rate. Still, if I can capture your basic energy and melody, I can flesh you out later."

  "I'm not sure I want you fleshing me out. I have all the flesh I—stop writing and eat your stew. It'll get cold." But he continued scribbling.

  People at neighboring tables would have given anything for a peek at what the bridegroom was writing in that little notebook of his. A love message, I'll wager. Something he'd be embarrassed to have us overhear. Oh, the young, the young! Well, at least he's eating his stew now. It would have been a shame to let it get cold, just as she told him. She's the sensible one. She'll wear the trousers in that house, you mark my words.

  She looked off into space, her eyes defocused, a temporarily forgotten piece of chicken balanced on her fork. Then she said half to herself, "I don't really blame her."

  "Er-r-r-r... No, no, don't tell me. Let me work it out. Let's see... ah-h... you don't blame my sister for not defending me against your brother's assaults on my character? Right?"

  "Wrong. It's my sister I don't blame. The poor little fluff-head is in love... however unworthy the object of her affections may be."

  "Well, I don't blame my brother, either. He's a victim of the romantic traditions of our family. My greatgrandfather, my grandfather, my father—each of them fell in love at first sight, and each of them snatched up the woman who had captured his heart and carried her away—in two cases, to the shock and scandal of the village, as they had been promised elsewhere."

  "And do you intend to shock and scandalize your village one of these days?"

  "If my ideal, irresistible, heaven-wrought woman were to come along, family tradition would oblige me to sweep her off her feet and carry her off to be my cherished companion forever."

  "And what if she didn't want to be swept off her feet? What if she'd rather retain her balance? And her dignity? And her free will. And her sense of independent worth."

  "Well, it's obvious that your sister has none of those petty inhibitions against being swept off her feet."

  "No, I'm afraid you're right. She's just let herself be carried along on waves of joy and rapture and..." She noticed the bit of chicken cooling at the end of her fork and ate it meditatively, watching the snow streak past the window. Then she said in a voice soft with awe, "...the Century of Woman."

  He blinked, trying to close the à-propos-de-quoi? gap. But he couldn't. "All right, I give up."

  "In three days we shall enter the Twentieth Century, which will be the Century of Woman."

  "Ah, yes, of course. Except that the Twentieth Century doesn't begin in three days. It begins in a year and three days, on the first of January 1901."

  "I've heard that, but I refuse to believe it. It may make some sort of petty mathematical sense, but poetic logic is all against it."

  "There's no such thing as 'poetic logic'."

  "Not for you, maybe. Just think... my daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters will be born in the Century of Woman. Maybe one of them will become president of France."

  "Only president of France? Empress of all Europe, surely."

  She nodded, accepting the additional responsibility philosophically.

  "Funny, isn't it?" he said, after a short silence, during which she separated the last of her chicken from the bone with surgical finesse.

  "The thought of my great-granddaughter becoming empress of Europe?"

  "No, that thought is more sinister than funny. What's funny is that now that we've had time to recover from the shock of those letters announcing that my brother and your sister intended to elope, he with a scheming vixen, she with a Basque brigand, all we really want is for them to hold off for a few weeks—a sort of cooling off period. After that, if they are still determined to launch themselves into the stormy seas of matrimony, they can have a proper wedding, with your family and mine gathered to see them off on the long voyage down the stony road of life."

  "I think you just launched their vessel down a stony road. Isn't that what's called a jumbled metaphor?"

  "Mixed. I thought you didn't know anything about metaphors."

  "It would appear that neither of us does. But, all right, I'd be willing to let them marry, if, that is, I find your brother to be worthy of my sister"

  "Oh, you will, you will. He's so very... well, frankly, he's just like me."

  She made a low, growling sound. Then she asked, "Aren't you going to finish your daube?"

  "Hm-m? Oh, no. No, I don't think so."

  She exchanged her empty plate for his half-full one. "Do you really imagine that when the snobs arrive on the next train, they'll be as solicitous and understanding as you and I are?"

  "Certainly not. They'll pout and stamp and huff. But I can deal with my sister. And I have no doubt that you can manage your brother."

  "That's true. So the upshot of all our panic and desperate rushing off to Cambo will be to provide you with material for a cheap farce?"

  "Cheap? Not at all cheap! I envision a lavish production. A practical, lurching train interior is no cheap thing, you know. And I'll have the smell of cooking food coming into the theater
through the heating vents—real Dion Boucicaut stuff—and an endless diorama canvas of countryside rolling past the windows."

  "Even though it's night?"

  "Uh... all right, we'll save the production costs of the diorama and just sprinkle a little water on the darkened windows and cast the occasional light over them to indicate a passing village. And the last scene? Ah, the last scene! A lavish multiple wedding. It will be spectacular. And very funny, of course."

  "A multiple wedding?"

  "Of course! The situation cries out for it! First to come down the aisle will be the headstrong, romantic young scapegraces who caused all the trouble in the first place. Then come the snobbish doctor brother and the social-climbing sister, who will pledge themselves to struggle upward and dullward until they achieve the highest and dullest ranks of society. (We can have some great slapstick stuff when the old eccentric they ridicule because they think he's the village idiot turns out to be the eccentric trillionaire Viscomte de Fric von Gottlot.) Then comes the touching moment (dim the lights; handkerchiefs at the ready, Ladies!) that touching moment when, inspired by the happiness of young lovers all around them, the lonely older couple (my mother and your father) decide to fill one another's autumnal years out of respect for their departed spouses. And there it is! A triple wedding with a grand— Oh-oh, wait a minute! I forgot someone."

  "I was wondering when—"

  "I've got to find someone for your Aunt Adelaide. Hm-m. Ah! I have a crusty old bachelor uncle, Hippolyte. The meeting and mating of your Aunt Adelaide will provide us with a comic subplot: the love-sick spinster and the quaint-but-loveable codger who by sheerest coincidence happens to—"

  "That's exactly what's wrong with farce! It's all based on cheap, trumped-up coincidences."

  "But coincidence is the means by which Fate influences the lives of mortals."

  "No, I don't accept all that nonsense about coincidence being 'the Engine of Fate'. That's just an excuse for story weavers to use hackneyed conventions. Like the convention of the happy ending, and the old ploy of mistaken identity, and the toad that turns out to be a prince, when in life—in grim, hard, real life—the prince more often turns out to be a toad, and probably a toady as well."