The Husband

by Sol Stein

  Rose excused herself and came out of the bathroom moments later, wearing a nightdress through which he could see not just the outlines of her body but the shape of her breasts, the nipples, the dark hair where her legs met and, when she turned, her bottom.

  “What if they come in?” he made his voice say in a whisper.

  Rose simply put a finger on his lips to silence him. She withdrew her fingers in favor of her lips, which brushed rather than touched his, but enough for him to taste the toothpaste she must have used in those seconds away.

  When they were both on the bed, he found himself kissing the edges of her mouth and then her lips full on, and finally her now slightly open mouth. He felt an impetus that would not subside.

  He raised her gown as if it were a curtain. She turned away, as if in shyness, but in turning revealed more, and soon he found himself kissing her body, and when her gown interfered, she let him take it off. She gestured at his clothes. It seemed to take him forever to get everything off, except his socks, which he didn’t think of as curious or amusing until afterward.

  Peter felt embarrassed about his erection and wanted to turn the light off, but she took his hand away from the switch. He had a great deal of difficulty at first, though thinking at the same time how automatic it was, how you didn’t have to learn. He was kissing her deeply, exploring her mouth as if to focus attention there, when in fact it was the thrust and thrust of his lower body that held his attention and hers, and suddenly the delicious agony couldn’t be kept back.

  The thought of it broke into fragments in his mind: he had done it, it was wrong, it was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, they had taken no precautions, and finally, as he slipped out, he saw in a wave of fright and triumph the slight stain that said it had been first for her, too.

  Terrified now that her father would rip him as Peter had ripped the newspaper, he dressed quickly and impolitely left Rose as soon as he could, flooded with guilt, shame, and exhilaration….

  All of this went through Peter’s mind like the shapes of a kaleidoscope as he watched Rose’s adult face intent on a question he had not answered.

  “Peter,” she said, “I’m asking you if it’s wise to make bartenders out of the children?”

  Peter turned to Jonathan. “Do you want to grow up to be a bartender?”

  “I want to be a microbiologist.” Jonathan pronounced the word perfectly. Peter would have to find out what microbiologists do, just in case the idea stuck. To Jonathan he said, “Now bartenders talk to nice, relaxed people all day. Microbiologists talk to other microbiologists. You’d better be a bartender. Margaret, my pretty, do you want to be a bartender?”

  Margaret shook her head. “I want to be a nurse in a psychiatric hospital.”

  “You see, Rose, what horrible futures are in store for these children,” Peter said. “They’d be better off as bartenders. Jonathan, stop eyeing my drink. If you want a sip, take a sip.” He was challenging Rose, and she picked it up.

  “Now please don’t do that,” she said.

  “Bartenders,” said Jonathan, an arch of wisdom over one eye, “are not supposed to drink.” Was his voice changing, or was that just a huskiness Peter detected in his son’s pitch?

  Peter nodded in the direction of the glass. “Go ahead, try it.”

  “No, it tastes awful,” said Jonathan in his husky voice.

  Rose, a slight genuine alarm in her voice, asked, “How do you know what it tastes like?”

  “I licked the ice once.” Jonathan’s face registered a facsimile of disgust.

  Margaret was not going to let Jonathan hold the center of the stage for long. “Daddy,” she said, her voice a controlled instrument, “Daddy, I love you.”

  Peter looked skeptical. “What’s the pitch? When you say it that way, I want the words behind the words.”

  Margaret looked defeated. “Daddy, how do you always know what’s going on in my head?”

  Peter lifted her chin with his curled finger. “Everybody butters up people once in a while. What did you want to say?”

  “Are you going to get drunk tonight?”

  How do you deal with a child who is so clear, innocent and direct? Jonathan was looking at him. So was Rose. It was a real question.

  “If Jack and Amanda are boring,” Peter said, “I might.”

  “What does drunk feel like?”

  “Gimme a kiss,” said Peter, hugging her.

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Next time I’m drunk, I’ll let you feel,” said Peter.

  Rose looked hopeful that the exchange might be over.

  “I mean it,” said Margaret. “Don’t joke.”

  “Well,” said Peter, deciding quickly that he had better try to be accurate, “how you feel depends on what you felt like before you got drunk. I mean, if you felt lousy before, you’re likely to feel better during, and—”

  Rose cut him off. “Almost always worse afterward. Peter, dear, do put on a clean shirt for the evening.” The accent was London now, with a try for Oxford.

  “The Baxters know I’ve got a clean shirt,” said Peter. “Can’t I just show them one?”

  “Look at that spot.”

  Peter suddenly felt very tired. “That’s not a spot,” he said, “it’s a Biltmore canapé.”

  The phone rang with a shattering brilliance, as if the ringing of a phone at this hour in this family was a signal. Rose knew it. The kids sensed it. Margaret glanced at her father and picked up the receiver.

  Peter watched Maggie as if she were, for that moment, a stranger’s child, a little skirted girl, never again a baby, though he wanted so to continue babying her, not quite grown-up but getting there. Getting where? he thought. And for an instant he remembered Rose on that first night, just a few years older than Margaret now. Unbelievable!

  “Yes, my daddy is home.” She sounded frighteningly grown-up. Margaret put her hand over the mouthpiece, watching her hand all the while as if to be certain that all sound were really blocked. Then she said to her father—was there a secretiveness in her voice, an edge of conspiracy, a confidence?—“It’s Miss Kilter.”

  “Oh?” said Peter, getting up, knowing the intended casualness of his “Oh?” had not really come out that way. He had always thought acting was a snap until Rose—how long ago was it now?—persuaded him to take a small part in a community theater play so that he’d be around to see her perform. He had learned with what seemed a terrible shock at the time that it was one thing to feel nuances and quite another to make them come out in his voice. He had learned to respect acting then as something quite difficult to do well, and really admirable since it was one of those things everybody thought they could do, and so few actually could. He had intended casualness now and had sounded as if he were walking up to a witness box in open court.

  He took the phone.

  “Hello, Elizabeth. Yes. No, the three members of my august household are immobilized, staring at my canapé spot. It was a soggy canapé. Yes, I’m listening.”

  There he was in two worlds, one coming over on the telephone, Elizabeth trying to keep a cool voice, asking a necessary question, and his family focused on him. En famille, he thought, the real world, and yet the wire running from the phone sang.

  “Of course, I looked at it before I left the office,” he said. “I thought the first sketch was far better.”

  He knew what Elizabeth had started to say and cut in quickly. “That’s not the first time Paul was wrong today.” Again she said what she had to, and he answered, “That’s not the first time a client was wrong.”

  Could they hear the sound of her voice? he wondered. “That’s also not the first time that Paul and a client agreed. Work up the first sketch,” he said.

  At last Rose moved. “Come, children,” she said, “let Daddy have his conversation in private.” She took them out the swinging door to the kitchen because it was the quickest escape route. What did the children sense?

  “They�
�ve taken to the hills,” he said into the phone, then, “Let’s get fired together.”

  He liked that thought. Fired. It meant someone took action, got rid of him, made it easy. Easy?

  With quietness, with a sense of risk, knowing he shouldn’t say it, he said into the telephone, into the wire, through a dozen connections across the city to Elizabeth’s ear, “I love you.”

  The house seemed hushed, and for a moment he wished the television were blaring.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth answered. Reserved Elizabeth reserved expressions of love for the most intimate moments, when their bodies were locked and moving into the private provinces of joy.

  They were connected by silence and by the background imperfections of the telephone system, whose silence was not yet absolute and therefore an intruder. And so, after a time, he hung up gently, not certain whether he had whispered good-bye. Then he cleared his throat—that seemed loud—and whistled the three notes he and Jon used as their identifying sign. From the kitchen he heard Jon’s three-note reply.

  When they trooped through the door, he stared at them as if they were strangers. Was it because the unit he now belonged to might be with Elizabeth and not here? How much did they sense, how much did they know? The most? The least?

  It was Rose’s face he was looking at now. It had slack in it, slack and lines. “I suppose it’s all right for us to come in,” she said.

  “I didn’t ask you to leave,” Peter said in a voice that he realized at once was too loud and too belligerent, but how to control it? “Rose, why don’t you have a martini? It’ll loosen up the charley horse in your face muscles.” He hadn’t meant to say anything like that.

  “My expression is my business, Peter.”

  “You can’t see your expression. I can.” Shut up, shut up, he thought.

  And there’s Jonathan, thirteen years old, heaven help him, and he’s going to try to make peace.

  “Mommy, Daddy, please don’t argue tonight.”

  “Done,” said Peter, suddenly relieved. “In fact, I’ll even change my shirt. Now you kids get upstairs and change into your bedtime regalia.”

  “And bathrobes,” Rose called after them.

  “By all means,” said Peter. “Jonathan, put on your smoking jacket!” Stop needling her, he thought.

  “I don’t smoke,” said Jonathan from the stairway, laughing.

  A good kid.

  “And how is Miss Kilter?” said Rose.

  A frontal. Let it pass.

  “Fine,” he said.

  Rose stood there looking at him, lost, he thought, the girl who’d married the fellow who was a hero at school because that was what success was then for them all, and the fellow who needed the prestige of a good-looking girl like Rose on his arm, wedlocked with a house and children, all of their adult lives a common past.

  Keep quiet, he thought. Don’t open your mouth.

  “What do you want me to say?” he said. “Look, I’m sorry about that crack. My nerves are on edge.”

  “Mine are on the same edge. Can’t we…?”

  She trailed off, passing the cue to him.

  “Can’t we what?”

  “Try,” said Rose. “Stop living from day to day.”

  “How do you want to live, wall to wall?” There he went. Bigmouth.

  “Peter, I’m serious. We never, you know, spend time alone together anymore. Not really.” Too much time, he thought.

  “I know how we could do time together,” he said, and noticed the look of sudden hope in her face. “When the Baxters get here, let’s kill them and get put away in a coeducational jail.” Bigmouth, stop. “If we kick and scream, we might get solitary confinement together. You and me. Alone.”

  “What’s wrong, Peter?”

  Husbands he knew just played the game, said nothing, kept the cork in, the lid on, let things pass. It was easier that way, but Peter had never learned—would never learn?—to stop the connection between thought and speech. For a second he thought he had it under control, but she said again, “What’s wrong?” and that did it.

  “I know the damn record by heart,” he blurted, seeing the surprise and pain in Rose’s face. She had not meant anything, had not intended trouble, wanted to soothe, smooth over. Let it go.

  “I’m bored,” he said, and he knew he couldn’t stop. “Classically, cumulatively, infinitely, overwhelmingly bored. Another couple of years of this and I’ll be hooked on television.” He was shaking his fist at the box, knowing that was not what his fist was for. “If you watch that thing long enough, you die sitting up, right there in that chair.”

  Was she trying to embrace him, or just to plant the ritual kiss denied him earlier?

  “I haven’t washed up yet,” he said.

  “I don’t mind,” said Rose. “I care for you, Peter. You don’t believe half the things you say. Why should I?”

  Thank heaven people believe what they want to believe.

  “I’ll see how dinner’s coming. Do change your shirt.”

  “I’ll change,” said Peter.

  *

  Upstairs, like an addict taking the needle out of a drawer, he went for the bedroom phone and dialed. Elizabeth answered before the first ring was over. He didn’t have anything to say to her. Why had he called? She was pleased, but why had he called?

  “Just making contact,” he said into the phone, feeling like a fool.

  “Thank you,” said Elizabeth. And that was all there was to it. He hung up, blood in his face and his heart going fast. He turned to find Jonathan at the door, dressed in the Coca-Cola costume.

  “Jesus!” said Peter.

  “Guess again,” said Jonathan.

  That kid would be all right. Would he, though, if Peter left, went off to live with Elizabeth, came only on visits, like jail or summer camp?

  The Coca-Cola costume was one of a hundred thousand distributed in one week, free with six-packs, just in time for Halloween, a hundred thousand walking billboards: Invented by Peter Carmody.

  Jonathan went into his act, and Peter could tell at once that it had been rehearsed.

  “While Coca-Cola’s got the touch

  Six full ounces isn’t much

  Pepsi’s got the quantity

  But Coca-Cola is the drink for me.”

  Peter broke up laughing. “Great, great,” he said. “I can retire. I’m absolutely replaceable.”

  And now Margaret was behind him in her Coca-Cola costume, vying for attention. “I’m working on one, too, Daddy. Jonathan’s isn’t buckeye enough.”

  “Dad,” said Jonathan, “isn’t my song buckeye?”

  “Where did either of you pick up that expression?”

  “Well, see,” said Margaret, “you said Mr. Dale likes buckeye.”

  Damn Paul, thought Peter. He thought it and said it.

  “Mommy,” said Jonathan, “says you shouldn’t damn Mr. Dale in front of us. It undermines our respect for authority.”

  Damn her, he thought.

  “You kids listen to me.” He hadn’t intended the stern note in his voice. He softened it. “Part of my job is to teach you to undermine some kinds of authority.”

  There was Rose behind Margaret and Jonathan. Had she heard? Did it matter?

  “Daddy,” said Margaret, her eyes glistening with mischief, “I want to be in advertising like you.”

  “A moment ago you wanted to be a nurse,” said Rose.

  “Oh, well, see, that was for laughs,” said Margaret. “Being a nurse is icky.”

  “Your grandmother was a nurse,” said Rose.

  “So was Florence Nightingale,” said Margaret, so sure of herself. “I want to make up advertising ideas like Daddy.”

  Peter thought he could put a stop to it. “Advertising,” he said, “is no place for women.”

  “Well, see,” said Margaret, “Miss Kilter is in advertising.”

  The silence lasted what, a second, two?

  “Miss Kilter,” said Rose, “is a career woman.”r />
  Had she wanted it to sound sinister?

  “She’s not married. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t have a man of her own, like Daddy. You don’t want to grow up like Miss Kilter, Margaret.”

  Margaret, side blinders on her eyes, fixed her vision on Peter.

  “You’re doing fine, Margaret,” said Peter. “You grow up any way you like.”

  Change the subject.

  “Is a career man like a career woman, Daddy?” asked Jonathan.

  Peter said sternly, “You were supposed to save that outfit for Halloween.”

  “Daddy,” said Margaret, “do you want me to grow up like Miss Kilter?”

  How had it gotten out of hand?

  Rose put her arms around both children. “To bed.”

  “Daddy,” said Margaret, stalling, “what is advertising?”

  “Everybody knows what advertising is,” said Rose. “Get ready for bed.”

  “It’s a fair question, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  Peter touched Margaret’s head, her hair. “You ought to be in politics. You’re a real smoothie.”

  “Never mind that,” said Margaret, her voice testing to see if she had gone too far. “What is advertising?”

  “Well, it’s a business,” said Peter, hoping to escape. He still hadn’t changed his shirt.

  “Everything is a business,” said Jonathan.

  Margaret shushed him. “You keep out of this.”