STEPHEN EVANS
THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS
The story of a crossed love that is star to every wandering bark.
Together as husband and wife, Nick Ward and Lena Grant ran a successful boutique law firm in Minneapolis, vanquishing all their legal foes side by side. When Nick’s charmingly erratic behavior finally became too much for Lena, the marriage and the partnership ended. But—like C. K. Dexter Haven and Tracy Lord—it seems that Lena and Nick just can’t quite separate.
Lena works out fiercely, keeps her dates with the boring and conventional Preston Winter, and daily battles on against corporate greed. But Nick’s not doing so well.
Still brilliant and devilishly clever, he is now also almost crazy. He is prone to fantasy and the big gesture, and he engages frantically in guerrilla activism for the sake of animals wild and domestic. Nick doesn’t make plans; he has visions. And eventually his antics put him back into Lena’s hands. While she tries to navigate the legal waters into which he’s thrown them, Nick veers out of her wake and into the midst of a strange set of companions, including Oscar, his psychiatric attendant and Action Comics collector; Ralph and Alice Wilson, the rebellious managers of the city animal shelter; and an aging Russian hound named Wolfram.
Often laugh-out-loud funny, with bright wit and brilliant machine-gun dialogue, The Marriage of True Minds sweetly explores modern love, undying idealism, and one cracked partnership that can’t be sundered—from without or from within.
If you like screwball comedies, like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, then you’ll love The Marriage of True Minds!
Lena woke to dark eyes staring down at her. Sancho leaned against the lamp on her nightstand, holding a crimson rose.
She sighed, then explained to Sancho.
“It’s not you.”
She picked the puppet up and held him for a moment. Then she placed him on the bed, put on her pink silk robe, dumped the rose in the trash, and walked out of the bedroom.
Nick’s door was still closed and padlocked. She dialed the combination, slipped the padlock out of the ring, enclosed it in her fist, and knocked. The guest room door toppled inward off its hinges like a stop-action colossus. Closing her mouth, she moved back up the hall.
The kitchen was nearly as large as the living room. The original stone fireplace, tall enough to stand in, contrasted with the recently acquired stainless steel appliances at the other end. Whenever she lit a fire (which was not often), the reflection transformed the kitchen into a brushed scarlet inferno.
A wood-block island in the middle of the kitchen bridged the eras. Nick sat on a stool by the island, doing the crossword, stirring his coffee with a hinge pin. Lena shuffled in wordlessly, sat across from him, grabbed the paper, and examined his answers.
“These are all wrong.”
“In what way?”
“In the way of not being right.”
“They fit.”
Lena looked closely. The words did fit in the spaces. And they did fit with each other. But they had nothing to do with the clues.
“They give you clues so that you can get the answers. They don’t give them so you can at all costs avoid the right word.”
“That’s what they’d like you to believe,” Nick said, taking the paper back.
“It’s my crossword. Don’t abuse it.”
“Fine,” he said and continued his work, entering the correct answers this time, though upside down and backwards.
“Coffee?”
He poured her a cup from a pewter decanter she didn’t know she owned. She took a sip.
“Look. This isn’t going to work unless—”
She took another sip.
“This is good coffee,” she continued.
Nick inhaled the arousing perfume of the brew he’d bought at Sebastian Joe’s a half hour earlier.
“Thanks,” he said.
Then Lena slammed down the coffee mug.
“Damn you, Nick,” she complained. “You are not going to turn me into a commercial.”
“I’m sensing that something is wrong.”
He looked up from his crossword. Lena’s long hair was free and tangled and her slightly bloodshot eyes crinkled as she squinted against the morning. Her robe slipped open, revealing rumpled blush pajamas, whose three unbuttoned buttons briefly took his breath.
“Look,” said Lena, pulling her robe closed. “This is not going to work unless you stop this.”
“Stop making coffee?”
“Yes. No. Yes. Stop trying to do whatever you’re trying to do. Whatever that is. Not that I ever understand what it is. ”
“I’m just trying to show my appreciation.”
“Stop it!”
“What?”
“Being nice to me. It creeps me out.”
Nick smiled … and sipped his coffee.
“Now that’s good coffee,” he noted and smiled like Mona Lisa.
Stephen Evans has lived in the Washington, D.C. area for most of his life and lives now in Silver Spring, MD. Though he works as a computer analyst, he’s long been in theater, writing his first play in 1990. He is co-author of a children’s musical, The Talent Machine, which ran each summer for a number of years in Annapolis, MD, and eventually spawned a theater company of the same name. His latest play is entitled Spooky Action at a Distance—a Las Vegas comedy. The Marriage of True Minds is the author’s debut novel. - Author photo by Avonlee Photography
