“I did not send it!” Archer shouted.
“You mean you forgot my birthday?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. But I did. That’s not important now, though. What’s important is who—”
“You forgot my birthday!” Llona’s voice went up the scale and ended in a sob. “We’re married five weeks and you didn’t even remember my birthday? How could you? Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I love you!” Archer found himself back on the defensive. “I said I was sorry. It’ll never happen again. But I want to know-—”
“It will! It will happen again! Because you don’t care! You don’t care enough to even know I exist!”
“Now just a minute! Just a minute!” Archer forced himself to calmness. “Let’s just forget all that for a minute. What I want to know is, if I didn’t send you that nightgown, who did?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.” Llona went from hysteria to frost.
“What do you mean you don’t know? That’s obviously a pretty expensive garment. Probably thirty or forty bucks. Now who would send my wife a thing like that? You must know!”
“Well, I don’t.” Llona feigned puzzlement, then dissipated it. “Unless-—”
“Unless?” Archer waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, his calm slipped away from him again. “Unless what? Unless who? Who? Who? WHO?”
“Well, I thought of— But it couldn’t be. No, that’s ridiculous.”
“Are you going to tell me!” Archer shouted.
“Tell you what? Be specific. And do try to get hold of yourself, dear. Your face is turning purple.”
Archer made the effort. “Who do you think it might have been?” He phrased the question carefully, spacing the words out as he asked it.
“Well, it just flitted through my mind that it might have been Pierre Strongfellow.”
“Pierre who?”
“Strongfellow. It suits him too. Such muscles!” Llona sighed as if remembering, admiring, and batted her eyes at Archer.
“What the hell kind of a name is ‘Pierre’?”
“He’s half-French. By birth, I mean. By personality, he’s all French.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Archer demanded.
“Well, you know. He’s very continental, very suave. And those muscles . . .”
“Let’s just forget those muscles!” Archer’s tone was dangerously low. “I want to know who this guy is. Where do you know him from?”
“Well, I used to go out with him, dear. Before I knew you.”
“Just how serious was it?” Archer’s tone was still carefully low.
“Oh, not really serious. It was a fun thing, you know.”
“No! I don’t know! What the hell do you mean ‘a fun guy’? ”
“Why, Archer, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous.”
“I am jealous!”
“Oh, I can’t believe that. Why, any man who isn’t interested enough in his wife to buy her a birthday present certainly couldn’t be jealous over some old flame from before she was married.”
“Never mind that! When was the last time you saw this—this--this Pierre?”
“Funny you should ask that. I ran into him on the street when I was downtown shopping just the day before yesterday. As a matter of fact, he bought me a drink.”
“What do you mean ‘he bought you a drink’? Where do you come off sopping up whiskey with old beaus when you’re married to me?”
“Gin.”
“Huh?”
“It wasn’t whiskey, it was a martini,” Llona told him. “Two, to be precise—and then we had some lunch.”
“Oh, so you had lunch with him too! What did you do, spend the whole day with him?”
“Well, the afternoon did go by rather quickly.”
“I’ll bet it did! I’ll bet the hours just sped by if he was impressed enough to send you a nightgown. Did you go to his apartment?”
“Well, it was right around the corner from where we were, and we’d gotten on the subject of Chagall, and he mentioned he’d just bought some prints signed in the stone, and so naturally--”
“You did! You did go to his apartment!” Archer was beside himself now.
“Well, it was all perfectly innocent, dear. I mean, he made a pass, but you know how men are. They think it’s a reflection on their manhood if they don’t.”
“A pass? A pass! What kind of a pass? What exactly did he do?”
“Well, he tried to kiss me.”
“Tried? Or kissed? Which is it?”
“Archer, I can’t say I care very much for all this cross-examination. First you forget my birthday, and now you’re trying to pick a fight with me over a perfectly innocent —”
“Never mind that! Did. . .you. . .kiss. . .him?””
“Well, not really. He kissed me. But I didn’t really respond. It was just a friendly kiss.”
“ ‘Friendly kiss.’ I see. And then what happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I just put on my clothes and left.”
“Well,” Archer said in a more mollified tone, “you shouldn’t have let him ki— Put on your clothes and left! Put on your clothes! Your clothes! What the hell? What do you mean? Why were your clothes off?”
“The rain. I told you.”
“What rain? You didn’t tell me anything about any rain!” Archer was trembling.
“Yes, I did. You’ve forgotten. At least I think I did. Didn’t I mention it before? About us getting caught in this rainstorm — the skies just opened up—right after we left the cocktail lounge?”
“No, you didn’t say anything about any rainstorm? And I don’t see why you had to take off your --”
“Well, I was soaked to the skin. Pierre lent me a robe and we dried them out. Now, Archer, don’t be foolish about this. There was nothing else I could do.”
“You could have come straight home!”
“I would have caught pneumonia. And it was all perfectly innocent. Even the kiss.”
“Oh, sure. Perfectly innocent. Sitting around a strange man’s apartment in the buff and necking. Perfectly innocent!”
“I wasn’t in the buff. Pierre lent me a robe. Oh!” Llona snapped her fingers. “That explains it! That’s when I mentioned it about the robe being okay because I didn’t even own a decent nightgown . . . Why do you keep grabbing at yourself that way, Archer?”
“I’m not grabbing at myself!”
“Yes you are. It looks positively obscene, playing with your —“
“I’m not! I’m just looking for a cigarette down in the bottom of my pockets.”
“A cigarette? I thought you went out to buy cigarettes?”
“I did.”
“Then where are they?” Llona asked reasonably.
“I forgot them!” Archer gritted his teeth so hard the fillings rubbed together with the sound of chalk screeching a blackboard. “And never mind that anyway! You’re just trying to distract me. I want to know exactly what happened with you and this Pierre Strongfellow!”
“Who?”
“Pierre Strongfellow! Don’t play inno—”
“I don’t know anybody named Pierre Strongfellow,” Llona informed him blithely.
“What the hell do you mean?” Archer’s rage gave way to a new wave of confusion.
“What kind of man would have a name like that anyway?” Llona’s smile was dazzling.
“A muscular Frenchman, continental, suave . . . Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Archer took a deep breath. “Didn’t you tell me Pierre Strongfellow sent you that nightgown?”
“I never told you any such thing.” Llona was indignant.
“I said right along that I doubted it.”
“What about your going to his apartment and taking off his clothes and kissing you?”
“I made all that up,” Llona said blithely. “I made it up Just to get you angry because you forgot my birthday.”
“I don’t believe you!” Archer said. “If you made it up, who’s the secret admirer?”
“There is none. I made him up too. I wrote that card myself.”