Hot Night in the City

'That shows how much you know! My play was only one act!'

'Ah, so you write one-act curtain warmers to get idiot audiences in the mood for the real farces that will follow. And you dare to sneer at plays that deal with human suffering and social issues and the criminal oppression of women! Humph!'

'Actually, nobody really says humph. It's just a literary convention.'

'Well, I say humph. Especially when I'm talking to writers of trivial...' She frowned. 'My sister is not consumptive. What on earth gave you that idea?'

'Er-r-r-r,' he struggled to catch up with this lurch of subject. 'Oh, I see where you are. Well, I deduced that your sister had weak lungs because the waters of Cambo-les-Bains are famous for improving two conditions: consumption and what are euphemistically called 'Woman's Problems'. Since this latter tends to befall mostly women of 'a certain age' with little to occupy their overactive imaginations, I naturally assumed that—'

'That would be Aunt Adelaide.'

'...Aunt Adelaide?'

'My father's sister. She came to look after him after our mother died. But lately she's become a little... none of your business. Sophie accompanied Aunt Adelaide to the spa for a course of the waters to treat her... ailments.'

'Sophie being your sister?'

'Aren't you listening? My father could hardly let his silly sister go down there all alone. She's an even greater romantic than our Sophie. You know, I'll bet anything that Aunt Adelaide is in on this plot of your brother's to snatch poor Sophie from her family. I'm starving.'

'Er-r-r-r.' That lurch again. 'Ah! Well, the steward said that they—'

'Don't mention that insinuating, low-minded worm to me.'

'All right, but the Unmentionable Invertebrate said that they would begin serving in fifteen minutes, and that was...' he fished out his watch and snapped it open '...twenty minutes ago. I assume you'd rather not dine with a crass purveyor of trivial farces, so I'll await your return before—'

'Nonsense. We'll dine together.'

He was surprised... but oddly pleased. 'So, I guess I'm not all that bad after all.'

'Your badness has nothing to do with it. I have no money.'

'Oh.'

'Shall we go?'

'Ah... by all means.'

They were conducted to a table at the far end of the 'American' dining car, which obliged them to walk a gauntlet of frank curiosity mixed with—something else. She called up a mental snapshot of these very faces peering out at them as they dashed frantically for the train, and suddenly she recognized what this something else was: complicity. Benevolent complicity! As we foretold it would, a tingle of embarrassment rushed up the back of her neck into her hair at the realization that these romantic busybodies took it for granted that they were eloping lovers rushing off to their honeymoon. Probably leaving irate parents and jilted fiances in their madcap wake. Oh, the humiliation of it! Actress that she was, it was not having an audience that she minded, it was the absurdity of her role in this vulgar farce.

Man that he was, he had noticed nothing.

She sat in rigid dignity, her lips compressed, her attention riveted on the menu, but painfully conscious of smiles, whispers, and nudges out on the defocused edges of her peripheral vision. She looked up to see him nod politely at two smiling women sitting at the table opposite, beaming at them. Sisters, obviously; unmarried, probably; and nosy without a doubt. His social smile dissolved under her disapproving frown. 'What's wrong?'

She leaned forward towards him and smiled an actress's smile: all in the lips and cheeks, nothing in the eyes. 'Don't you realize that everyone is looking at us?' she asked in a honeyed whisper, though there was asperity in her tone.

He looked around. 'Why, yes, now you mention it. They seem a friendly enough lot. The old gentleman down there just waved and winked at me.'

'If you wink back,' she whispered sweetly, 'I'll kick your shin so hard that you'll limp the rest of your life.' She smiled and patted his hand.

'I don't understand.'

'I believe that. They think...' she beckoned him with her finger, and he leaned over the table towards her. 'They think we're newlyweds.'

'But that's ridiculous!'

'Keep your voice down.'

'But why should they think—? I mean, what right do they have to imagine that I'd—'

'Keep your voice down!' she rasped. 'The last thing I want is for them to think we're having a lovers' quarrel. That would be meat and drink to them.'

He looked again over at the two maiden sisters. The plumper one pursed her lips and shook her head in a gesture that said: naughty, naughty (but adorable) children.

'Ohmygod,' he muttered.

'Exactly,' she said.

'Well, you need have no fear for your reputation, mademoiselle. I'll see to it that it suffers no harm.'

'My reputation is no concern of yours. I'm perfectly capable of defending it myself.'

'Perhaps so, but you will have our chambrette to yourself. I'll spend the night sitting up in the smoking car. Staring out the window... alone... cold.'

'You'll do nothing of the kind! You—' She controlled the intensity of her voice and forced herself to smile on him as she whispered, 'You will not feed their gossip with the choice morsel that we've had a spat and I've made you spend our wedding night sitting up in the smoking car. You will spend the night sitting up in our chambrette, staring out the window, if you wish, cold perhaps, alone certainly, while I shall be sleeping not a meter away, totally undisturbed by and totally indifferent to your presence. And now, dearest husband, I believe I am ready to order.'

'I've lost my appetite,' he said petulantly.

'You will, nevertheless, order a full meal. And you will eat every crumb of it. I'll not have these people thinking that we are rushing through dinner so that we can— That we're rushing through dinner.'

The waiter's smarmy solicitude extended to placing a bud vase on their table: a single white rose of chastity, soon, presumably, to be dutifully surrendered. She acknowledged the vase with a dry, 'How very kind,' uttered without unclenching her teeth.

They were halfway through their soup (large bowls only half full, in consideration of the swaying car) when, after a brooding silence, he spoke out in midthought. 'It's not as though I were unaware of—or indifferent to—the social injustices that women face every day. Quite the contrary. It's just that... Oh, forget it.' He shrugged.

'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 Theatre 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