The Husband

by Sol Stein

  They entered from the front of the plane, where some faded stretch of red carpet led to the stairs. Some promotion man, somewhere long ago, had thought of that. He was probably working somewhere else, maybe for another airline, trying to come up with something to sell in the ads because fares were the same, and if you couldn’t buy price, what else could you buy except destination and some gimmick?

  The first-class seats were much wider than the ones Peter was accustomed to. He was struck by how easily Big Susan had managed to get Paul into the seat in the row behind them so that Peter and Susan would sit together. So Paul could eavesdrop? It didn’t make sense. What could Peter give away? He didn’t even know why they were going.

  First class really didn’t make sense either, considering the price difference. A short time in a wider seat, a bit more attention, drinks served faster, off the plane a bit faster, not much really.

  It wasn’t money they were spending, Peter thought. You didn’t build equity in an advertising agency. An agency sold service, ideas, built nothing solid that could go on independently of the people who created the ideas, performed the services. An agency was as good as its people, who played musical chairs because you got ahead by switching agencies, not climbing within one, and after a while the money didn’t matter, only the power, the freedom, and there wasn’t much of either because power was really in the client’s hands. An agency was as affluent as its clients, but they could leave quickly, one, two, all, and how many had a sense of loyalty or even habit strong enough to resist the Pied Pipers from other agencies, the new fads, the “in,” the chic, the popular? And so if an agency made money, it spent it on such things as first-class fares because it gave the beneficiaries a brief sense of importance as they headed toward their clients, where deference was expected.

  The plane was starting to move, and Peter was suddenly startled by Big Susan’s hand terribly close to his lap. Then she pointed up. He hadn’t observed the seatbelt sign. He quickly buckled his, thanking her, and wished the hostess would hurry the first drink.

  It was early to be drinking. Thank God it was customary in airplanes.

  The jet engines were now at a maximum; he knew the sounds well enough. And then they were hurtling down the runway, gathering speed as they went past the point of no return, and he had the sudden feeling that everything he knew about flying had come from stories and that planes loaded with nearly a hundred passengers, as this one was, couldn’t possibly get off the ground, and yet the speed increased and it would only be seconds before they’d smash into the barriers at the end of the runway, and what would be left for Rose and the children? He had not bought insurance at the airport and it was now too late, the tail elevated, the impact inevitable, and suddenly the ground outside the window started to fall away and he knew that they were airborne.

  How many generations would it take before a man felt natural in the air? In the thirties, when Peter was a boy, the infrequent sound of an airplane overhead was always cause for the kids to stop, even in the middle of a ball game, and look up until the plane had passed. Kids no longer looked up unless a jet was particularly noisy or a helicopter flew particularly low. Would Jonathan and Margaret fly with greater ease? The statistics were in favor of flight; mile for mile cars were more lethal, and yet cars, like trains, traveled on the ground. The fear of flight was in the mind, impervious to statistics, resistant to fact.

  The suburbs of New York were now game-sized rectangles of row houses laid in parallel lines, neat as the fields would be farther west.

  “Good morning,” said the loudspeaker, “this is your captain. We will be flying at twenty-three thousand feet against a slight head wind and should be landing at O’Hare in two hours and five minutes. There’s a drizzle in Chicago but it may be gone by the time we get there.” The sound clicked off. Bored voice, the captain’s. Flying for him, thought Peter, once held the greatest excitement; now a taxi driver, New York to Chicago, Chicago to New York. Planes were metal, clouds were weather, and what waited at the end of the line was not adventure but retirement.

  “Same,” he said to the stewardess when Big Susan ordered Scotch.

  “Before you get sotted,” said Susan, “let me fill you in.”

  “Fill,” said Peter.

  “In Chicago, Paul will refer to you as Dr. Carmody.”

  When Peter was still in school, before the war headed off his Ph.D., he had looked forward to being called “Doctor,” not as a learned title but as an appellation likely to be mistaken for its medical equivalent. Years of exposure to doctors tarnished the effect. Turning his sudden title over in his mind, he found none of the old pleasure in it.

  “Hey, come back,” said Big Susan.

  “Sorry.”

  “H. Q. Wilson, who—”

  “I know who.”

  “Okay. He’s the reason we’re going to Chicago.” She turned to see if Paul were listening. Peter wished he could turn, too.

  “H. Q. Wilson runs Bermar with two tight fists. Bermar’s doing all right, thank God, but H. Q. owns a big slice of a semiconductor business on the side in Texas, and the competition in semiconductors has been ferocious. All the competing semiconductors have about the same quality, and haggling is all on price or payoffs. H. Q. doesn’t run the Texas Company, he just counts on it for his biggest money. And so now he takes it out on Bermar, which means us. He also takes it out on his wife and kids and has been going to a headshrinker for nearly two years. It’s one of those late-in-life loves when a noneducated, nonintellectual like H. Q. gets involved with Freud after fifty and becomes completely shrink-oriented. He discusses our proposed campaigns on the couch and admits it. It’s like going to a fortune teller, you know? H. Q. is Coolidge’s account, but Coolidge told too many headshrinker jokes to H. Q. before H. Q. got the bug. Coolidge hasn’t any face left. That’s why Paul is flying out with an industrial psychologist like you.”

  Peter looked at Big Susan as if she were nuts.

  “Why are you looking at me like I’m nuts?” she asked.

  “What the hell do I know about industrial psychology? I couldn’t open my mouth.”

  “Paul doesn’t want you to open your mouth. He’ll introduce you, make his pitch, and every question he asks you will have an obvious yes-or-no answer. You can even shake or nod your head if you’re shy about one-word answers. Look, all you are on this trip is a warm body that happens to look like an industrial psychologist.”

  “Why couldn’t Paul just hire one?”

  “Too risky. He might say something.”

  She patted his hand. “Leave it to Paul.”

  Peter couldn’t help it He turned around. Paul was fast asleep, a half-finished drink in his hand.

  “The nap is good for him,” Susan said.

  *

  The drizzle hadn’t cleared Chicago. The plane came in under the ceiling, straightened up, cut its airspeed a bit too fast and came down with a bump the passengers didn’t appreciate. It woke Paul, who leaned across the top of the seat and with surprise in his voice said, “We got here.”

  “Dr. Carmody is fully briefed,” said Big Susan.

  Paul nodded his satisfaction, yawned. Bit by bit the fissures in his face started to fill with intelligence and life at the prospect of success in Chicago.

  *

  By the time they reached the hotel in the Loop, it was cocktail time, and Paul suggested they stop in the bar. Big Susan took just a moment to check all three of them in, and from the room numbers Peter had a fleeting impression that Big Susan and Paul had rooms next to each other. Probably connecting doors.

  He regretted having thought that. He knew, everyone knew, that Paul and Susan were a package. He assumed, everyone assumed, they weren’t just pals. It was none of his business. He couldn’t care less. Really.

  Two doubles apiece, ordered quickly, drunk quickly. Paul was obviously celebrating his intact arrival. He actually seemed jovial.

  “You see, the honest thing about Bermar,” Paul was saying,
“is that number one in car rentals is going to stay number one and number two is going to stay number two, and there’s one helluva gap between two and us. The only real way of narrowing that gap is for Bermar to get locations in third- and fourth-level towns, maybe two, three hundred within a year, because car rental is convenience, not a model’s face in the ad. But that would take more working capital than H. Q. can come up with now or in the foreseeable future, and he knows it. So we’re going to have to play games.”

  Peter could swear that Susan had put her hand on his thigh for a split second without any attempt to conceal the move from Paul.

  “The game I’m throwing him at our dinner meeting this evening,” said Paul, “is the kind of idea he expects from an advertising agency, an idea he’ll think of as a breakthrough since he can’t come up with more branches. I’m going to propose a Car-of-the-Month Plan. You sign up with a Bermar dealer and once a month you get a different car for the weekend. Your choice off a list of available cars; one weekend a Thunderbird, the next an MG, the next maybe a Toronado, you know, a family fling around the neighborhood trying out all the cars the average fellow dreams about and seldom has the guts to buy. If he signs up for a second year, the first month he gets something really special for the weekend, say a Lincoln Continental, and maybe the third sign-up gets him a Rolls. If you organize things right, you won’t need a lot of fancy cars to make thinks work, and what Bermar’ll be doing is renting cars on a regular, predictable basis, on weekends, when business is off anyway, to guys who don’t really need to rent a car. That’s the key. This Car-of-the-Month idea will bring Bermar a lot of new customers and put them on a steady sign-up basis, and the capital investment for the new cars’ll be a fraction of what it would cost to set up a couple of hundred or more new franchises. Also the ad campaign for Car-of-the-Month will glamorize the whole Bermar operation, pick up a lot of industry comment, and maybe even get H. Q.’s mind off the electronics business in Texas.” Paul laughed.

  Peter was impressed.

  “As for you,” Paul continued, “whenever I mention some phase or other of the plan, all you do is nod approvingly, and if you want to be a nice fellow, you’ll pop out once in a while with ‘Very sound psychologically’ or some such, okay?”

  The United Nations types one runs into in New York are always saying everyone in the world is really the same. Where in Africa or Asia, thought Peter, in what Welsh coal mine of Slovak village, did any human being even think the way Paul just did? Everywhere? Or did most of them emigrate to America?

  At the elevator on the twelfth floor, Paul and Susan went right, jangling their respective keys, and Peter went left. There were two hours before the scheduled meeting. Ease off. Call home.

  In his room, Peter was unable to find his suitcase. He phoned down to the desk and was told the bags had gone up as instructed when they checked in. He dialed Susan’s room number.

  “No, you’re not bothering me,” she said. “Wait a minute and I’ll look.”

  She came back to the phone and said, “It’s here.”

  “I’ll be there in a flash.”

  “Five flashes. I need a couple of minutes.”

  Peter hung up and stretched out on the bed, careful to get his shoes on the footboard and not on the bedspread. Good boy gets check mark for being considerate to hotel bedspread. Mother had been dead eighteen years. He was still keeping score for her.

  He closed his eyes and thought that while home was nice, another city, even if not a strange city, was good, change was good; all the senses needed a new locale from time to time.

  Better get up, he thought, you’re dropping off. He was on his way down the hall when he remembered again that he hadn’t called home.

  Peter knocked twice on the door of Susan’s room. He smelled the perfume even before he entered and headed for his suitcase on the luggage rack with the thought of getting in and out fast so as not to intrude. The lock click made him turn. Susan was leaning against the closed door, and the shock of what he saw made his right hand sweat on the suitcase handle.

  He lowered the suitcase to the floor.

  Susan was wearing something chiffony, covering her from neck to toe and yet transparent enough for Peter to see the darkness of the areolas of her breasts and the hair where her legs met. Over the years, he must have seen Susan dressed in a hundred different garments, suits mostly, and they flashed through his mind now, but never had he suspected that the large, well-proportioned lady was anything like the woman leaning against the door.

  With a pleasurable sting, he remembered the hand on his thigh in the bar.

  He felt himself thickening.

  “Did you like,” she said, “Paul’s plan?”

  Susan passed very close to him, headed for the open bathroom door, turned the shower on, and as she did so, dropped the negligee at her feet.

  “You could be an angel,” she said lightly, lightly, “and soap my back.”

  He took the bar of soap like an automaton as she stepped into the shower.

  “You’ll get your jacket wet,” she said, facing away from him and letting the water rivulet over her.

  Peter hung his jacket on the knob of the door and rolled up his right sleeve. “Let me borrow that,” she said, taking the soap from him and covering her large self with a white film that turned to lather and then ran off, swirling into the shower drain. She handed the soap back and turned her back.

  Peter was sure it wasn’t happening.

  “A little lower,” she said, and he did.

  His mind was observing in fragments: the lather swirling into the drain, the shape of her right hip as it curved toward the front, and then the fact of the second door; it was a connecting bathroom, and the door into the other room wasn’t locked. If Paul had wanted to, he might even have heard their conversation. Peter touched her shoulder and gestured toward the second door.

  “He’s a gentleman,” she said. “He’d never open without knocking first.”

  Susan’s wet face was close to his. Suddenly there was the commitment, her lips on his mouth, a rousing excitement that was frighteningly unbearable. She glanced down and smiled her pleasure that her attentions had had the desired effect.

  “Dry me,” she said, her voice meaning “please” also. He never had before. Not Rose. Not Elizabeth.

  “Lightly,” she said.

  It was unbearable.

  In a moment Susan had gone into the bedroom, on the lightest of feet, it seemed, as if dancing, and let herself down on the bed, a Maya, Odalisque, and the thumping inside him would not be put off. His clothes fell where they fell, his pulse like a river now, and he was kissing her, preparing to let an enormous lust loose, when the second door had the promised knock and before Peter could think a thing, Susan had said, “Come in,” and Paul was standing there in a bathrobe watching them.

  Chapter Six

  Peter’s first feeling was the expectation of violence, Paul picking up some lethal object and smashing him for trespassing, revenging himself on the errant son caught in the mother’s bedroom. This sense of immediate punishment was reinforced in an instant by the sure knowledge that his days at the agency were over; he was suddenly out of a job, with no reference from his employer possible.

  Instead, Paul said nothing.

  “Paul won’t hurt you,” said Big Susan softly, touching him to retrieve his downfall.

  In that second he felt surely Big Susan was lying; Paul was ready to smash.

  Peter wanted desperately to buy a moment’s respite to think, but Big Susan’s experienced hands and lips kept after him.

  In the same moment that Peter began to understand what was happening, Big Susan pronounced it: “He only wants to watch.”

  Everyone knew about voyeurs, but Paul seemed so normal.

  It was the word normal that careened around in his head as he saw Paul standing there, the impassive exterior cracked by just a trace of anguish, and Big Susan frantically trying to make things work out—for whom? Fo
r him? For Paul? For herself? Certainly not for him. For Paul then?

  Was the whole trip to Chicago planned for this, a grotesque camping-out seduction? Was the meeting with H. Q. Wilson at Bermar just the excuse?

  He looked down at Big Susan, who was trying to work things around to a solution, as she must have tried in countless previous experiences with someone as unprepared as Peter. What a threatened way to live, Peter thought. Or were they used to it?

  It was then she repeated the harmlessness of it all in the same words. “He only wants to watch.”

  Peter couldn’t do it. There are moments in childhood when you want the trapdoor to open, the instant escape from what is happening. You never give up the hope of such trapdoors. He needed one now.

  It was his body refusing. If Peter were capable, he might have gone on with it, as men have with women and women with men in countless instances, on with it because of the disappointment on Paul’s face and because Big Susan seemed so desperately to want to succeed.

  He looked at Paul and moved his shoulders as if to apologize.

  Paul left the room without a word.

  The door to Susan’s bathroom closed. Peter could distinctly hear the second bathroom door close and lock.

  Big Susan turned off the main light, leaving the room in the softer glow of the bedside lamp. The voyeur gone, the visibility could decrease. Was it her disappointed, angry vengeance he would have to face now, as he had Rose’s on those occasions when Rose had been disappointed in herself and had turned her disappointment on him?

  Susan’s face seemed softly honed in the lesser light. She kissed him very gently on the cheek. As if it were a rare distinction, she said, “You’re a wife fucker.”

  That wasn’t true, of course, and Susan knew it because she knew about Elizabeth. But was it in some sense true? If it was, why had he gone as far as he had before Paul came into the room? Because a man is a physiological instrument, subject to the whims of chance? He felt affection for Susan, built over the years. Had he been attracted by the sudden sight of her nearly nude and feminine in a way he had not imagined her before? Or was there a law of sexual opportunity which affected men differently than women?