THE collaboration known as marriage could, I think, be profitably extended from the domestic to the social sphere, where a man and wife might brighten their contribution to, say, the give-and-take of dinner-table conversation by preparing a few exchanges in advance. “It’s simply the principle of teamwork,” I told my wife in partially describing the idea to her one evening as we were dressing to go to dinner at the home of some friends named Anthem. “For instance, tonight, Sue Anthem being as hipped as she is on family trees, we’re bound to talk relatives at some point. Well, I’m going to tell about my seagoing grandfather who’s so wonderful. In the middle of it, I’ll pause and take up my napkin, and then I’d appreciate it if you’d ask me, ‘Was he on your mother’s side?’ ” (I planned to answer, “Yes, except in money matters, when he usually stuck up for my father.” This wasn’t much, but I was feeling my way around in the form, trying to get the hang of it before going on to something more nearly certifiable as wit.)
Dinner ran along the lines I had foreseen. Sue Anthem got off on kinship, and I launched my little account of this wonderful grandfather. I paused at the appointed moment and, glancing at my wife, reached for my napkin.
“I keep forgetting,” she came in brightly. “Was he your maternal grandfather?”
“Yes, except in money matters, when he usually stuck up for my father,” I replied.
A circle of blank looks met my gaze. I coughed into my napkin, and Sue picked up the thread of the discussion while I reviewed in my mind a couple of other gambits I had worked out with my wife, on the way over. One of these concerned a female friend, not present that evening, whom I will cut corners by calling a gay divorcée. She had just announced her engagement to a man so staid that news of the match took everyone who knew her by surprise. “Now, if the thing comes up, as it probably will,” I had coached my wife, “say something about how you’ve only met him a few times but he seems a man of considerable reserve.” I intended then to adroitly add, “Which Monica will get her hands on in short order.” I expected that to go over big, the divorcée being a notorious gold-digger.
The gossip did get around to her soon after it left the subject of relatives, and my wife came in on cue punctually enough, but her exact words were “He’s such a quiet, unassuming chap.”
This time, I had the presence of mind to realize the quip was useless, and check myself. Another misfire followed almost immediately. In preparation for possible discussion of Italy, where Monica and her fiancé planned to honeymoon, I had primed my wife to tell about her own visit to the Gulf of Spezia, where the drowned Shelley had been washed up. “In a way, you know, he was lucky,” I had planned to comment. “Most poets are washed up before they’re dead.” She told her story, but used the words “where Shelley was found,” thus washing up that mot.
It was clear that I would have to explain the system to my wife in detail if I was ever to get the bugs out of it. I decided, in fact, that I had better reveal in each case what the capper was to be, so that she would realize the importance of delivering her line exactly as prearranged. I did this while we were driving to our next party, several evenings later. I had ducked her questions about the failures at the Anthems’, preferring to wait till I had some new material worked up to hammer my point home with before I laid the whole thing on the line.
“At the Spiggetts’ tonight,” I said, “there’s certain to be the usual talk about art. Here’s a chance for you to get in those licks of yours about abstract painting—isn’t it high time painters got back to nature, and so on. The sort of thing you said at the Fentons’. You might cite a few of the more traditional paintings, like the portraits of Mrs. Jack Gardner and Henry Marquand. Then turn to me and ask—now, get this, it’s important—ask, ‘Why can’t we have portraits like that any more?’ ”
“Then what will you say?” she asked.
I slowed to make a left turn, after glancing in the rear-view mirror to make sure nobody was behind me. “ ‘It’s no time for Sargents, my dear.’ ”
My wife reached over and pushed in the dash lighter, then sat waiting for it to pop, a cigarette in her hand.
“Of course I’ll throw it away,” I said. “Just sort of murmur it.”
She lit the cigarette and put the lighter back in its socket. “Isn’t this a little shabby?” she asked.
“Why? What’s shabby about it? Isn’t it better than the conversation you have to put up with normally—doesn’t it make for something at least a cut above that?” I said. “What’s wrong with trying to brighten life up? We can turn it around if you like. You can take the cappers while I feed you the straight lines—”
“Lord, no, leave it as it is.”
“Can I count on you, then?”
“I suppose,” she said, heaving a sigh. “But step on it. We’re supposed to eat early and then go to that Shakespearean little theatre in Norwalk.”
MY wife and I parted on entering the Spiggetts’ house. I made off to where a new television comedienne, named Mary Cobble, was holding court with a dozen or so males. She was a small blonde, cute as a chipmunk and bright as a dollar. The men around her laughed heartily at everything she said. It was well known in Westport that her writers, of whom she kept a sizable stable, formed a loyal claque who followed her to every party, but it didn’t seem to me that all the men around her could be writers. I knocked back a few quick Martinis and soon felt myself a gay part of the group. Once, I glanced around and saw my wife looking stonily my way over the shoulder of a man whose fame as a bore was so great that he was known around town as the Sandman. Matters weren’t helped, I suppose, when, presently returning from the buffet with two plates of food, I carried one to Mary Cobble and sat down on the floor in front of her to eat the other. At the same time, I saw the Sandman fetching my wife a bite.
Midway through this lap dinner, there was one of those moments when all conversation suddenly stops at once. Lester Spiggett threw in a comment about a current show at a local art gallery. I saw my wife put down her fork and clear her throat. “Well, if there are any portraits in it, I hope the things on the canvases are faces,” she said. She looked squarely at me. “Why is it we no longer have portraits that portray—that give you pictures of people? Like, oh, the Mona Lisa, or The Man with the Hoe, or even that American Gothic thing? Why is that?”
Everybody turned to regard me, as the one to whom the query had obviously been put. “That’s a hard question for me to answer,” I said, frowning into my plate. I nibbled thoughtfully on a fragment of cold salmon. “Your basic point is, of course, well taken—that the portraits we get are not deserving of the name. Look like somebody threw an egg at the canvas.”
Fuming, I became lost in the ensuing free-for-all. Not so my wife, whom annoyance renders articulate. She more than held her own in the argument, which was cut short when Mary Cobble upset a glass of iced tea. She made some cheery remark to smooth over the incident. The remark wasn’t funny, nor was it intended to be funny, but to a man her retinue threw back their heads and laughed.
Meaning to be nice, I laughed, too, and said, “Well, it goes to show you. A good comedienne has her wits about her.”
“And pays them well,” my wife remarked, in her corner. (Luckily, Mary Cobble didn’t hear it, but two or three others did, and they repeated it until it achieved wide circulation, with a resulting increase in our dinner invitations. That, however, was later. The present problem was to get through the rest of the evening.)
We had to bolt our dessert and rush to the theatre, where they were doing King Lear in Bermuda shorts, or something, and my wife and I took another couple in our car, so I didn’t get a chance to speak to her alone until after the show. Then I let her have it.
“That was a waspish remark,” I said. “And do you know why you made it? Resentment. A feeling of being out of the swim. It’s because you’re not good at repartee that you say things like that, and are bitter.”
“Things like what?” my wife asked.
I explained what, and repeated my charge.
In the wrangle, quite heated, that followed her denial of it, she gave me nothing but proof of its truth. I submitted that the idea of mine that had given rise to this hassle, and of which the hassle could safely be taken to be the corpse, had been a cozy and even a tender one: the idea that a man and wife could operate as a team in public. “What could be more domestic?” I said.
“Domesticity begins at home,” she rather dryly returned.
I met this with a withering silence.
1956