Hot Night in the City

'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 a-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