Love, Honor, and Obey
Chapter Eight
The Woman in Grey
Elle Murphy, hypnotherapist, motivational speaker, author, and secret trainer of hypnodommes, sat in her study tapping away on her second book, HYPNOSIS FOR WIVES.
An objective observer would have to have said that Elle Murphy’s life at that moment could not have been better. After the unpleasantness of a few months ago, she had set out to put her affairs in order, and succeeded admirably. In HYPNOSIS FOR GIRLFRIENDS she had asserted that a woman with the proper attitude and training could work out once at any gym in America and come home with six hunks eager to do her bidding. True enough, but Elle had now transcended the random hunk. She’d set out to find the skills she needed to make the Elle Murphy machine work smoothly, and she’d succeeded. In her stable of devoted servants she now counted one lawyer, one auto mechanic who doubled as a driver, one doctor, one masseur, and one night-club bouncer with amazing muscles and access to backstage passes. Oh, yes—also one chef, who as a matter of fact was in the kitchen right now fixing her dinner. Something with artichokes.
She liked artichokes.
Elle appreciated how good things were. If she sometimes felt a little empty, a bit wistful, she knew that these feelings were normal. They come and go, even in truly happy people like herself. And they might be slightly more intense if the person had just ended a relationship. Even if the relationship was nothing special—needless to say, hers with Louis had been nothing special, not at all—the remaining wistfulness was simply the remnant of familiarity, like Pavlov’s dog missing the dinner bell after the experiment was ended.
Her life could not be better. Not at all.
“True dominance is loving dominance,” she wrote.
For some reason that sentence stopped her. Something about the diction made her uncomfortable. “A true dominant acts of out love”? No, that didn’t work either. But it was true; evil domes weren’t good dommes, and they weren’t happy dommes either.
Naughty dommes were different, of course. Naughtiness was fun. And love—did she want to write about whatever that was?
But she was writing for wives, for women seeking dominance within a committed relationship. Her readers had opted for love, had settled on one man, someone who fulfilled a part of them and with whom they wanted to spend—
Off-topic, she thought.
She looked up from the screen and sighed. This would not be a good place to stop writing, because she did not know what came next.
“All relationships have flaws,” she wrote. “A wife-domme accepts this.”
True enough, but the fun had gone out of this chapter for tonight. Perhaps she’d have the vhef—what was his name? Tommy? No, Tony—bring her a glass of wine. She’d sit by the fire until dinner. Sitting with her thoughts would be fun—well, maybe she’d read that new novel she’d bought and hadn’t opened, that would keep her thoughts from wandering.
She wanted to keep her thoughts from wandering.
The doorbell rang.
Relieved at the interruption, she stood. “I’ll get it, uh, Tom-Ton—I’ll get it,” she called to the man in the kitchen. She wasn’t expecting anyone. It was probably the florist or the Fed-X man with another sweet but ever-so-slightly tiresome tribute from one of her followers, or even one of her exes. They were nice gifts, as nice as gifts can be from men who don’t really know you as a person and adore you only as a fantasy figure. She always accepted them, but always with a handwritten note quoting the Doorkeeper of the Law in Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “I’ll only accept this so that you don’t think there’s anything you’ve failed to do.”
It was not the Fed-X man. Standing on her front porch was an attractive woman in her 60s, wearing a very tasteful grey silk dress and a pair of silk heels that Elle instantly coveted. The look was uncanny. It was like someone had cloned Elle’s taste onto another woman. And something about the woman’s face was oddly familiar too—even though Elle knew she’d never seen her before. Or had she? Had she seen her somewhere so ordinary it escaped her notice?
“Ellie,” the woman said. “Do you know how I am?”
Elle was nettled. “Did you ring my doorbell to ask me who you are?”
“Ellie,” the strange woman said again. “Do you recognize me?”
“I’m afraid not,” Elle said. “I’m—“ Where had she seen this face? Was it . . was it in the mirror?”
“No,” Elle said. “No, I don’t—I don’t recognize you, who are you? Never mind, go away.” She began to back away from the door, pushing the air forward with her hands as if fending off evil spirits. “Go away! Go—“
As if in despair, the strange woman gestured to one side, and another figure stepped into view—an outlandish figure, tall and massive, with a great bald—
“Uncle Ray?” Ellie said. “Uncle Ray, is that you? Uncle Ray, what is going on?”
She was on the verge of screaming, or maybe she was screaming, she felt out of control, terrified, and she didn’t know whether to run away or attack the strange doppelganger, this older dream-version of herself. “I’m having a breakdown, Uncle Ray, you’re not real, she’s not real, oh, God, please call 911 . . . .”
“Shh, Ellie darling,” the big man said. He held out his arms and she ran to them, feeling suddenly like the 13-year-old girl she had been when he last held and comforted her because her parents—
“Shh, Ellie, just relax,” he whispered. He gently rocked her back so she could look up into his eyes. “Look at me, Ellie. You know me. You know who I am. I taught you to relax, remember? You know how to relax and listen and understand, to let go of all the fears, just to relax . . . “
“Yes,” she said.
“Just breathe now, breathe slowly, match my breathing,” the big man said.
“You’re trying to hyp=notize me,” she said. Her face was dreamy, the eyes seemed to be drifting in and out of focus. “You can’t hypnotize me. No one can hyp-mo-tize me. I’m Elle, I’m the hyp . . . mo . . . domme.”
“Of course not, Ellie,” said the man’s voice from far above her. “I would never try to hypnotize me, because I know you know how to relax yourself without being hypnotized, you don’t need me to hypnotize you, you’ve hypnotized yourself and you’re so relaxed now and ready to hear what we have to say, aren’t you? Nod.”
Ellie nodded, feeling dreamy and calm now.
“You know who I am, don’t you, Ellie?”
“Yes, Uncle Ray.”
“And you know who this woman is, don’t you, Ellie?”
After a moment, Elle wordlessly nodded her head. “Yes, Uncle Ray,” she said into Ray’s chest, as if afraid to look around. “But how—“
“Thereby,” said the Amazing Ray, “hangs a tale. But first—how about a hug for your mother?”
Her mother smelle she’d forgotten that smell, lilac and peppermint and—Mom. Tears sprang to Elle’s eyes but she blinked them back. “I don’t understand—“
“Sit down,” Ray said. “Let me explain. You can just listen calmly and consider everything I say, it can’t hurt you, so just sit down and relax.”
She sat, and so did the woman in the grey dress—her mother, she said—and as Ray began to talk she felt herself slip back into her childhood, to the lonely backstage hours when this gentle giant was the only figure in her life with time for her, when he would spend an evening (broken only by his time onstage) to tell her the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece or of Scheherazade of the Thousand Nights and a Night, and now the true story of how a little girl named Ellie had lost her mother without warning on a winter’s night long, long before and far away.
“Ellie,” he said. “Back when I and the world were young, I worked for a—let’s say a certain government agency. It was the height of the Cold War, and both sides were working on technologies—and techniques—to produce the best human spies. Brainwashing, hypnosis, with and without drugs—you’ve probably read the small part of the story that has been made public, but there was much, much more. And the Soviets were ahead of us. Russians have always been mad for hypnosis, you know—they still are, from what I hear—and they learned to create perfect sleeper agents, who could come to the US without any guilt or worry and then pose for weeks, months—even more than a decade—as government workers, military personnel—or even . . . actors in a traveling theater troupe.”
She was listening so happily that it took a second to realize that this wasn’t a happy fairy tale. He was talking about—
“You?” he said to the woman in grey. “You are a Russian spy?”
“No, honey, never—“
Ray held up a hand. “Your mother was exactly who she claimed to be, Elle—a British actress who had followed her husband to this country—beautiful, Elle, a talent that belonged on Broadway, my God! If you had seen her play Desdemona . . . .” He caught himself with a visible effort. “Your father, on the other hand . . . He really was a Russian spy. Landed in Britain in 1972 with an ironclad false identity, broke into theatre in the West End, wooed your mother, and then grabbed the chance to go to the U.S. They used Britain as the entry point because they knew we were watching for sleepers in the U.S. And at a certain point, his handlers took your mother away for a few days and when she came back she was trained—not to spy, but at least not to notice or question certain things, to help with delivering documents and so on without asking questions, just to believe the cover story even when she had proof it wasn’t true.”
“Is that even possible?” Elle said. “Mo—miss—ma’am—you were hypnotized? Brainwashed?”
The woman in grey looked stricken. “Ellie, darling, I’m afraid I don’t remember anything. I just know that by the time I got to this country I was madly in love with your father, followed his orders without question, and never doubted anything he said.”
“She was,” Ray said with a certain asperity, “also quite indifferent to any other men . . . who might have been interested . . . .”
“Wait!” said Elle. “How did you come in?”
“The . . . federal agency . . . was tracking your father. We knew about the hypnosis program and we were concerned about it—but he was the only one of the hypno-spies we knew about, and we hoped that he would lead us to others. And so they took me out of the psychological warfare department and, hey presto! the Amazing Ray was born.”
“You were watching us? Was that why you always went where we were?”
“Yes, Elle—and I was the worst watcher in history—I had one job—to keep your father from snatching your mother and taking the information in his head back to the USSR. And . . . I failed. . . . I failed Alice,” he said, looking at the woman in grey.
“Oh, Ray,” she said, and put her small hand on his enormous one.
“What happened?” Elle said.
“As we reconstructed it—we don’t know the whole thing—your father made a contact in St. Louis who warned him that we were closing in. Your father had a deep trigger that made your mother totally compliant—“
“I don’t remember any of this,” the woman in grey said. “I just went to sleep in St. Louis and woke up in a mental hospital in Gorky. The doctors there said I’d had a mental breakdown, that I’d formed a delusion about who I was, and that they would work with me to remind me of who I really was.”
“They told you you were Russian?”
“Oh, heavens no, darling,” the woman said with a rueful, self-mocking smile, and Elle could see that she must have been quite an actress; as she warmed to her story, and her voice and gestures caught Elle up in the odd tale. For an instant, Elle wondered what it had been like for Uncle Ray, to watch this beautiful woman every day, unable to help her. “My Russian was never good enough for that. Instead, they told me I was Alyosha Martinova, a fitness instructor who was a widow of a hero who had died for the internationalist cause in Afghanistan. That’s how I’ve kept my girlish figure!” She had very graceful arms, Elle thought dreamily, as the woman in grey gestured toward herself. Then her face grew grim again. “I’ve begun to remember what they did to me—day after day, they’d give me injections, then tell me to watch a pulsing light while a voice . . . explained . . explain . . .” Her eyes drifted away from now, and her voice faced.
Ray put his hand on her shoulder. “Back with us now, Alice, wide awake. They can’t reach you any more.”
She shook her head. “Sorry, of course. Anyway, after a month I was cured. I was Alyosha Petrovich Platonova. A resident of Kiev, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, widow of Col. Oleg Andreivich Platanov of the Security Service, who had given his life for the internationalist cause in Afghanistan, a fitness instructor with the Ministry of Defense, living on a pension that was larger than most because my husband had been a Hero of the Soviet Union. I knew I was from England originally, but not in detail. I never thought about it.”
“Why did you stay?”
“Ellie—“ the woman said. “Ellie, oh please darling girl forgive me—they—they made me forget.”
The word drifted across the room like a cold wind. Her mother had forgotten her? All these years—all the nights she had cried and wondered where her mother had gone—she had been forgotten . . .
“Forgive me,” the woman cried again in a tone of anguish. “I don’t know how it was done, I don’t know why, they could have just let me go, I didn’t mean anything, I didn’t know anything . . .”
“They kept her because they didn’t want us to see how far they’d come in imposing new personalities on their subjects,” Ray said. “That’s what we’d hoped to learn from your father—and by the way, he apparently did something that displeased his bosses in the KGB, because he disappeared into the Lyubyanka and was never seen again.”
“I still hardly remember him,” the woman in grey said. “I do remember you . . . now. Ray has helped me. It came back to me when he found me in Ukraine.”
“Soon after she got there,” Ray said, “the USSR collapsed. At some point the KGB lost track of her, and she remained in Ukraine when it became independent, hidden in plain sight, leading reserve militiamen in calisthenics every day. They lost her, we lost her—until a couple of months ago, when I went back to them and said I had to know what had become of Alice Murphy, who had been such a promising actress and who disappeared in 1988 while she was involved in an operation. Turned out the information was in the files, but no one had put it together. So we went in and got her.”
“Are you telling me the CIA sent a mission to rescue my mother?” This seemed almost impossible.
“No names, no initials,” Ray said. “I wheedled the information out of an old friend in a government agency. I can be quite . . . persuasive—my friend has no memory of giving me your mother’s identity. I have some experience with unofficial intelligence channels too. I found some false documents and we went into Ukraine and pulled her out.”
“You keep saying ‘we,’” she said. “Who is ‘we’?”
“Come on, Elle—you know,” Ray said. “You know Alice is your mother. And you know, too, there’s one man who would risk his life to get you anything you wanted. Say his name.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “Louis?” she said. It was a great relief somehow to say his name aloud instead of suppressing it in her thoughts. “My Louis? Went to Ukraine with false documents? How is that even possible?”
“He didn’t just go with me,” Ray said. “After we snatched your mom on the street and began to restore her memories, it became important to get out of the country right away. The SBU—that’s Ukraine’s secret police—had no real interest in Alyosha Platonova, but there was surely a file somewhere with a secret sticker on it, and when she didn’t show up for morning fitness class some flunky would start looking for her files. So as soon as we got her calmed down, we headed for Boryspil Airport with our fake passports. We had to get out of Ukrainian airport before some wretched clerk blew the whistle on us. The SBU is shot through with traitors who report to Moscow, and the Russians would have wanted to squeeze me in particular, for secrets I know that they still don’t suspect. When Alice and I went through passport control, we had no problems—but I saw a bustle among the security a few minutes later. I still don’t know whether it was a message from Volodymyrska Street headquarters. I signaled Louis. He created such a scene at the airport that they forgot about us just long enough . . . “
“A diversion? How?” She was picturing quiet, shy Louis, her perfect submissive, paralyzing a great airport.
“It was his idea,” Ray said. “He packed a bottle of vodka in his carryon. When they told him he couldn’t take it aboard, he became agitated. It was Ukrainian vodka, he told them, special Ukrainian vodka from a small distillery near Lviv that was famous among liquor fanciers in the West—he had promised his fiancée’s father a bottle, if he didn’t bring it the family wouldn’t allow the wedding, his life would be over’— Gradually the story drew in all the security people at the checkpoint, the line ground to a halt, everyone got rattled and they agreed on a compromise.” Ray’s face broke into a smile. “Louis would get on his plane and the guards would keep the special vodka and ‘send it on later.’” He laughed. “I doubt it lasted till the end of the shift. Anyway, Louis ran down the jetway just as the door closed, we went wheels up, and eight hours later we were in Paris.”
Elle hid her head in her hands. She still felt teary, but she was giggling too, at the idea of Ray and Louis—the outlandish giant and the quiet preppy author—outfoxing Ukrainian police—and the idea that the woman in grey was—was her mother . . . .
“It’s all too much,” she said. “I can’t . . . .”
“Yes, it’s a lot,” Ray said. “And there’s someone who needs to tell you what he’s feeling about all this. You owe it to him to listen.” He stopped for a moment, ran his head across the bottom of his face. “Elle, that boy may be submissive, but he’s also a hero.”
“Where is he?”
“Where is he? He’s outside. He can’t come in until you invite him back, remember? Talk to him. Elle, this is important.”
And she did remember then, for the first time, that in her panic and fury she had blurted Louis’s trigger words, that she had told him he could not speak to her or find her or contact her until she told him to—and then that all the nights she’d lain awake wondering why he didn’t call and beg her to take him back—all those nights were her fault, not his. He’d wanted to call, he’d wanted to beg.
And just like that a huge weight was lifted off her shoulders.
She walked to the door. In the darkness she saw an indistinct figure, standing tensely as if poised to run away. “Louis,” she called to him. “Louis, listen to me. I have something important to tell you, Louis. This is important. You must come inside. You may speak to me, Louis. All those suggestions are lifted. Come inside the house now, Louis. Come inside.”
And in a moment there he was, standing in front of the fire, looking as adorable and dopy as he had the last time she saw him—or did he? Was there something new in his eyes, some sign of his tour as international man of mystery?
“Elle,” he said, and took her hand. “Elle, darling.”
And then he was kneeling. She had not told him to kneel. He shouldn’t be kneeling unless she told him to kneel.
“Get up, you ridiculous boy,” she said.
“No.”
She drew back in surprised at those words. He had never told her no about anything before. “What did you say?”
“I said, no, I won’t.”
“Louis, this is imp—“
“HUSH!” he said, and her jaw clapped shut. “I won’t get up until I say what I have to say. Then you can trigger me and send me away again or anything else but I—am—going—to—say—this.”
“Go ahead, then.”
“Elle Murphy, you are my true love and my true mistress and please darling . . . will you marry me?”
She’d felt unshed tears when she saw Uncle Ray again, and more when she imagined that the woman in grey was really her mother, and now—now she broke open like a soggy paper bag, tears streaming down her face, her mascara running, she must look a mess and then for the first time in a long time she knelt to a man, she knelt beside him and took his hand and she said, “Yes, Louis, of course I’ll marry you.”
Everybody began to cry at this point. The unfortunate chef, Tony, picked that inconvenient moment to enter the room and say, “Dinner is served, mistress—“ His words trailed off as he took in the incongruous scene in front of him—four adults weeping, two kneeling, and none of them appearing to be hungry for food.
Elle quickly stood, brushed off her grey skirt, and turned to face him. “Tommy—Tony—oh, child, what IS your name?” she said.
“Tony, mistress.”
“Right. Tony.” She caught his eyes, then reached out and touched a long red fingernail to the center of his forehead. At once his face went slack. “Tony,” she said. “I have something important to tell you. You are going to go back to the kitchen, cover all the food with foil, and then get your hat and coat and go home. You won’t call me, you won’t visit, you won’t think of me at all until I summon you. Nod, Tony, show me that you understand.”
Tony nodded, and then vanished like a puff of smoke, and as the smoke cleared, the woman in grey turned to Ray and said, “Who was that man? Why does everyone call her ‘mistress’? What did she mean ‘trigger’? Something is going on that I am missing.”
“I’ll explain later,” Ray said. “Right now I think we might leave these two young folks to their discussion. Don’t. You. Think. So . . . Alice?”
She startled briefly, then nodded.
Elle sent them a loving but distracted look. “We’ll talk tomorrow, ok? Uncle Ray? Can we talk tomorrow? Will you still be here tomorrow . . . Mommy?”
“Every day until I die, Ellie,” Alice said. “I will never leave you again.”
Then they were gone and Louis was still beneath her on his knees.
After admiring the cute picture he made, she extended a hand and helped him up. He was struggling to speak, overcome with emotion. “You weren’t kidding, were you, Elle?” he asked in a desperate tone. “You really will marry me?”
“Of course, you silly boy.”
“And will you never send me away like that again? Please, Elle, that was the worst thing ever, that was like dy—“
She laid an elegant finger across his mouth. “I know, darling. I was being silly and weak. Never again. Never, never again. Now come with me!”
She turned to the bedroom and was gratified to see that he trailed behind at once like the obedient duckling he was. He’d been very gallant to refuse her order to stand, and she was thrilled at his proposal; but nonetheless, open defiance could not be allowed, all the more so as he was now going to move from ordinary submissive to . . .
Husband? Really?
The thought was complicated and mildly alarming, but it also felt right. This was the time, and this was the man. She was going to be the author of HYPNOSIS FOR WIVES and she needed Louis to practice on. And she was fond of him, silly boy—oh, hell, enough of kidding herself about what she felt, she was insanely in love with all his silliness and submissiveness and she couldn’t replace him in this empty house with six male zombies or six hundred. Now that she had him in her claws again, he would never escape. Of course he would be her husband.
She led him into the bedroom and began to undress him slowly, until he was naked and stood dreamily before her, his face blank and defenseless. She was still dressed in her pencil skirt, blouse and heels, and she felt again how marvelous it was to have total control of this handsome, kind, sexy man.
Naughty dommes are good dommes, she thought suddenly, and on an impulse she said, “Louis, Uncle Ray says you are a hero.”
Silly boy that he was, he blushed bright red. “Oh, well, it was . . . well . . . it was fun, really . . . I wasn’t scared until afterwards . . . Anyway, it’s no great trick to get Ukrainians excited about vodka, you know . . . .”
“Look at me, Louis,” she said. “Look into my eyes. I want you to show me how . . . how a hero makes love.”
She didn’t know what she might be unleashing, but it turned out a gentle man becomes a gentle hero—gentle, but a hero nonetheless. A hero, apparently, was a man who took an hour to kiss every inch of his fair lady’s body, beginning with her lips and moving down slowly and thoroughly, lingering between her legs until she cried out and then cried out again and only then moving down her thighs and to her legs and her feet and her toes and when lady fair said, “Come up, Louis, I want you now,” the hero cried “Silence, wench!” and lady fair settled back giggling and freshly aroused at his impudence, and then, his mission of kissing complete, the hero took his lady fair from above, thrusting into her so slowly that she thought she would pass out, and then turning her over and taking her again from behind just as slowly and then because he really WAS a hero, for a third time, lifting her off the bed and carrying her, legs wrapped around his waist, over to the wall where she surprised herself by crying “Louis! Louis! OH MY GOD LOUIS!”
Afterwards, as they lay in bed, she whispered a few endearments that sent him off to sleep. As he breathed softly next to her, she thought of getting up to get some work done. She began to list her jobs for the next day. First off, she had some household help to fire. They were programmed to be triggered by text, so that would not be hard. And then there was . . . there was a wedding to plan, there was a hall to hire where she would marry Louis . . . marry Louis . . . Louis . . . .
She slept, his lady fair, next to her perfect knight, and sweet delight adorned their bower green.
From THE TRI-COUNTY TRIBUNE, recent date:
Weddings: Murphy-Wentworth
by Tanya Trotter
Special Social Correspondent
Ms. Alice Murphy and Mr. Craig and Mrs. Marge Wentworth announce the marriage last Saturday night of her daughter, Dr. Elle Murphy, to their son, Mr. Louis Wentworth.
The bride is a well-known area motivational speaker and hypnotherapist. Mr. Wentworth, a recent arrival in the Tri-County area, is the author of two critically acclaimed novels.
The bride’s mother is a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and of Lord Livermore’s Traveling Troupe, which performed in the Midwest during the 1980s but disbanded shortly after she left it in 1987 to pursue other interests. Despite a considerable absence from the stage, she has resumed her career and was recently cast as Amanda Wingfield in the Oak Mill Dinner Theatre’s upcoming production of THE GLASS MENAGERIE by Tennessee Williams.
The ceremony was held at the couple’s new home in the fashionable East Hills, which Mr. Wentworth is understood to have bought as a wedding gift for Ms. Murphy. The purchase was financed by a rumored seven-figure three-book advance paid for his latest Young Adult fiction project, tentatively entitled THE TRANCE TRILOGY. (HOLLYWOOD REPORTER noted last week that negotiations are underway for adapt the yet-unpublished trilogy as a weekly series on the CW network.)
Officiating was Professor Raymond Strong, formerly a faculty member at an educational facility in Chantilly, Va., who has recently relocated to the Tri-County area to open a new outlet of his successful retail chain, Mr. Kelly’s Ultra-Magic Boutique and Toy Museum. In the vows, Mr. Wentworth borrowed ancient prayer book formula, “With this Ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” Apparently he neglected to edit the old prayer book, for he then accidentally promised to “love, honor, and obey” the bride. Dr. Murphy, using vows written in contemporary language, promised only to “enjoy and protect” her new spouse.
Following the vows, Prof. Strong surprised the guests—but not the bridal couple—by asking Ms. Murphy, the mother of the bride, to join him at the podium, where he and she also recited wedding vows, making the occasion a double ceremony.
The bridal couple served as best man and matron of honor.
Guests enjoyed a seated dinner donated by Chef Tony, owner of Charcot, the popular new downtown restaurant. After the meal, Prof. Strong presided over toasting. As a special treat, he then presented a sample of his magic, mentalism, and hypnosis act, which he will perform publicly at the Tri-County Fair next month. After a few whispered suggestions and a few “magic passes,” he persuaded the maid of honor, area radio personality Juliet Brandon, to sing an up-tempo version of the famous 1980s hit, “Maneater” by Hall and Oates, while several groomsmen impersonated sensual “cage dancers.” (Asked later whether she would soon be singing on her popular radio program, “Tri-County A.M.,” the ever-amusing Ms. Brandon pretended not to remember her performance.) Music was accompanied by a small swing orchestra thrown together by friends of the bride and christened, for the evening, “The Grateful Subs,” apparently in reference to the popular sandwich chain.
After the toasts and the performance, the happy couples danced to the band’s rendition of the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer standard, “That Old Black Magic.” The evening finished with presentation of a six-level wedding cake (also donated by a friend of the bride), served with vanilla ice cream.