Kiss and Make Up

A honeymooning metropolitan dandy, drunk on the marble-and-brass mirage of grand-hotel modernity, drags his guileless bride into a gilt cage where every corridor echoes with flirtation; once her unmannered charm magnetizes bellboys, bankers, and ballroom ghosts alike, the couple flee westward to a sun-scorched bungalow whose stucco walls promise pastoral calm. Domesticity mutates into bedroom farce when she orchestrates a clandestine soirée: musicians scurry under chaises like startled mice, a tipsy caterer hugs drapery, and a florist’s bouquet becomes both alibi and smoking gun. The husband’s premature return detonates a daisy-chain of pratfall paranoia—every stranger is recast as paramour, each misplaced billet-doux a smoking gun of imagined adultery. Yet beneath the slapstick tremor lies a brittle meditation on proprietorial anxiety, the way marriage can curdle into ownership, and how laughter, spilling out like cheap champagne, finally rinses the stains of suspicion.