“Constance!”
The wife looked at the husband. “So there’s no Constance, eh?”
The tall woman blinked at the husband. “What have you been telling Anne?”
“Nothing.” And that was the truth. “Well, she must know everything. I leave tonight on the jet to New York and then tomorrow on the Concorde to Paris. I heard there was a misunderstanding—”
“Sure as hell has been—” said the husband.
“And I thought I’d just race over and clear things up before I was gone forever.”
“Okay,” said the wife. “Clear?
“First, do I get a drink?”
The husband stirred.
“Don’t move,” said the wife, with a deadly coldness in her voice.
“Well, then,” said the lady as long as the lovely rivers of France and as beautiful as all of its towers and castles, “here goes. What an incredible woman you are!”
“Me?” said the wife.
“Your husband speaks of nothing else.”
“Him!?” cried the wife.
“Goes on and on. Drives me wild. Makes me mad with jealousy. How you met, how you courted, where you dined, what your favorite food is, the name of your perfume, Countessa, your favorite book, War and Peace, which you’ve read seven times—”
“Only six—” said the wife.
“But you’re on your way through seven!”
“True,” admitted the wife.
“Your favorite films, Pinocchio and Citizen Kane—”
The wif
e glanced at the husband, who shrugged sheepishly.
“Your favorite sport, tennis, and mighty good at it, beat the hell out of him. Good at bridge and poker, beat him again, four times out of five. Were the bright whirl at high school proms, in college, and on board the United States ship for England on your honeymoon and last year on a Caribbean cruise. How you won a Charleston contest on board the Queen Elizabeth II coming home from France the year before. Your love of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Your playing Desdemona in a little theater group eight years ago to great reviews. Your tender loving care when he was in the hospital five years back. Your treating his mother as if she were fine Dresden china. Your placing flowers on his father’s grave at least four times a year. Your resisting buying two-thousand-dollar Dior dresses in Paris. Your dinner with Fellini in Rome when Federico fell in love with you and almost carried you off. Your second honeymoon in Florence where it poured for a week but you didn’t care, for you never went out. The short story you published in the Ohio State Monthly; superb...”
The husband was leaning forward now, entranced.
And the wife had grown immensely quiet.
“On and on,” said the woman whose name had caused all the commotion. “Babble babble. How he fell in love with you when you were twelve. How you helped him with algebra when you were fourteen. How you decorated this place from parquetry to chandeliers, from bathroom to back porch, and loomed the rug in the front hall and made the pottery on the sideboard. My God, dear Lord, would he never stop! Gibber-gibber. I wonder—”
The tall, the long, the lovely lady paused.
“Does he ever talk about me this way, when he’s with you?”
“Never,” said the wife.
“I sometimes feel,” said the beautiful woman, “that I do not exist when I am with him. That he is with you!”
“I—” said the husband.