The Husband

by Sol Stein

  Chapter Eight

  The next week was the first that Peter and Elizabeth lived together.

  They did one or two daring things.

  They had their first quarrel.

  They nearly got killed.

  On Saturday, Peter rented a room from an ad in the Times. The ad called it “a small furnished apartment.” It was a furnished room with a pretense of a kitchen behind shutters on one wall. When he opened the shutters, two roaches scurried for cover. It didn’t seem to matter. Elizabeth’s apartment was only a short walk away.

  Peter arranged with the superintendent to phone him at the office if any telegrams arrived. He sent Rose a note giving her the new address and saying to send a wire if the children got sick or something. He transferred some clothes from his suitcase to a shopping bag and took it over to Elizabeth’s. On Saturday afternoon they listened to every side of every Mozart record she had. Then they went out to a local record shop and bought three Mozart records she didn’t have—this was going to be an all-Mozart day—and picked up a bagful of Chinese food on the way back. In late afternoon they fell asleep listening to Mozart. When they woke up two hours later, they took a walk along the river. The wind was whipping up and there weren’t many walkers, but they didn’t notice either the other walkers or the wind or see much of the river. They talked in inconsequentials of lovers. They held hands in public. That was Saturday.

  On Sunday morning Peter asked Elizabeth to hurry breakfast. They left immediately afterward and hailed a cab, which Peter directed to the Pan Am Building.

  “On a Sunday?” Elizabeth questioned.

  Peter stretched his legs, crossed them at the ankles, remained silent.

  “Okay,” she said, too happy to question further.

  The Pan Am Building, like any other office building on a Sunday, seemed a mausoleum until they came to the elevator taking people to the rooftop heliport.

  “I’ve never been on a helicopter,” she said.

  “Neither have I.”

  Peter made the ticket arrangements in less than two minutes, while Elizabeth stood to one side, trying to deal with the whisper of fear coiling inside her.

  “Will they take us without luggage?” she asked.

  “It’s not a hotel. Cash in advance, no questions asked.”

  The loudspeaker announced the next flight to Kennedy International Airport. Behind glass, they saw the arriving helicopter settle down, its idling rotors stirring up a whirlwind of dust and pebbles. The arriving passengers held onto their hats, instinctively ducking, though the rotors turned safely above their heads. To Elizabeth, the helicopter looked like an up-angled bus with attachments. The limp, flexible rotor blades certainly didn’t look strong enough to lift the huge, awkward machine off the ground.

  “It’s something out of Dr. Seuss,” said Elizabeth as they clambered aboard. “Does it work?”

  Peter himself was quite unprepared for the takeoff, the sudden increase of noise, the whirlwind of dust again, and then the roof and all of New York slipping away underneath them with an unexpected suddenness. He remembered the first time, as a boy, he had been up on top of the Empire State Building and how fearful he had been that the building might move. Now it was moving.

  He looked at Elizabeth. She seemed really apprehensive. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “You can’t get out and walk,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “You’re a fatalist,” she said. “I don’t like taking unnecessary risks.”

  “How do you know which risks to avoid?”

  “Well, the ones that make me nervous, like this.”

  “You smoke cigarettes.”

  She nodded.

  “You cross New York City streets dozen of times a day.”

  She nodded again.

  “You breathe our immeasurably polluted air.”

  “I was about to say those were necessary risks—”

  “But you thought better of it, clever girl. This helicopter ride is a necessary risk in two senses,” he lectured, making it up as he went along. “If our object is to go somewhere, getting there becomes a necessary risk. But in another sense, it is a necessary risk for some part of every generation to expose itself to the hazards of new things until they become old things. In the nineteenth century—listen to the professor, elf, you can look out of the window later—those cross-continental trains were hazardous. If an accident didn’t get you, the Indians might. Well, the Indians and accidents got some people, not most, and today nobody’s scared much of trains or Indians But at the beginning of the century, nearly everybody was leery of those put-put automobiles. People reacted just as the horses did to the horseless carriage. Nowadays we kill fifty thousand or more people every year in those horseless carriages, but you don’t panic if I ask you to step inside a car, do you? You get used to the hazard, so you think the hazard disappears. We barely got used to traveling in airplanes and they come up with these freak helicopters, which don’t move the way we expect planes to move, and go so damn slow, and land on top of buildings. Well, somebody’s got to get our generation used to it. You can look now. That’s Brooklyn.”

  “We’ve crossed the East River?” she said, astonished.

  “We’ll be coming down in a couple of minutes. The trip only takes seven.”

  They spotted the racetrack, a large oval in the midst of the long rows of toy houses, which began to thin out, and then the helicopter was lowering itself in among the hangars and terminals of Kennedy. The airship seemed to squat rather than land in its yellow-rimmed target. Out the window Elizabeth could see the dust and stones swirling as, its front end raised, the monstrous metal praying mantis they were in taxied to the discharge point.

  Peter’s firm grip on her arm signaled they were to sit still as the other passengers got off. When the stewardess drew alongside, he flashed his ticket and they sat still while several passengers boarded, and off they went to the yellow circle, where the noise overwhelmed them as they lifted off.

  Elizabeth found herself relaxing. Peter let her enjoy the startling experience of approaching the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan from an angle that seemed neither up in the sky nor down on the ground but midway, and equal to the grand edifices. They landed at the Wall Street Heliport and then in a few minutes were off again, across New York harbor to New Jersey and Newark Airport, where everybody except them disembarked, some newcomers arrived, and they were up and off again, approaching Manhattan from the west, catching an instant’s fantastic view up the Hudson River, and then they were settling with finality atop the Pan Am Building, where their journey had begun.

  As they descended the four steps from the copter, they felt the upsucking air lift their hair. Elizabeth laughed at Peter’s appearance and he at hers. Hand in hand, they went inside the tiny terminal.

  “Marvelous,” was all she could say.

  “Now, dear veteran of helicopter travel,” said Peter, “you are a generation ahead of your time.”

  She had to admit that at the last she had gloriously enjoyed it.

  “A new experience a week for the next forty years will guarantee you a long life,” he said, both of them laughing at the falsity of the promise. As if to belie the lie, Peter said, “Next week it’s sky diving.” They both knew that was a line another generation would have to cross for them.

  *

  On Monday after work they had a couple of drinks in a posh bar around the corner from the office, unafraid that any of the people in the office might see them together, though none did, and then went to a movie for the first time without ducking. They had seen some films together during the preceding months and discovered its hazards. If you were seen going into a movie or leaving a movie with a woman not your wife, it was as sure a sign to some people as witnessing you in bed. Once indeed he was stopped on the way out—carefully not holding Elizabeth’s arm—by a woman who had been a friend of his mother’s way back and didn’t even know he was married, it had been so long ago. He h
ad started to introduce Elizabeth—“This is”—not knowing where the sentence was going, when the woman interrupted, saying, “I know, I know.” Which she didn’t, of course, and it gave them a laugh afterward. Another time, however, it had been Jack ambling toward the subway, but luckily Peter had spied him in time to turn around and walk right past Elizabeth back into the theater, much to her momentary puzzlement. But now they both walked into the movie house, clearly together, and enjoyed that as much as they did the film. He could tell Elizabeth was relaxed by the amount of popcorn she ate.

  His sexual appetite that week, and a capability to match, astonished him. They were late to work on Tuesday morning and only at a hurried breakfast in a coffee shop realized they had not eaten dinner at all the night before.

  On Tuesday, after work, they tried an experiment. Elizabeth rang up a friend she hadn’t seen in quite some time and invited Peter and herself over for cocktails, with only the most perfunctory of excuses. Georgina was very married, four young children, a full-time mother. When her husband Ralph arrived home from work, he found the interlopers there and into their second drink.

  “Elizabeth, how nice to see you,” said Ralph, shooting a look at his wife.

  “Good to see you, Ralph,” she said. “Meet Peter Carmody.” Just that. No explanations of any kind.

  Ralph knowledgeably glanced at Peter’s hand. Luckily Peter had never worn a wedding ring.

  They chatted about the children, advertising, the film they had seen the night before, nothing.

  When Peter and Elizabeth left an hour later, Elizabeth let go a sigh of relief.

  “What did you expect to happen?”

  “Inquiries, prodding, prying. She’s a terrible gossip. That’s why I tried her.”

  “She’ll have to invent all the gossip. We gave nothing away, did we, elf?”

  “Nope.”

  When the phone rang in Elizabeth’s apartment later, she said, “Georgina” at once, and it was.

  “She was fishing,” said Elizabeth once she was off the phone. “I didn’t give her a thing.”

  They laughed. They were testing.

  “Maybe in a week or so we’ll have them up for a drink and see what happens.”

  After work on Wednesday, Peter took Elizabeth to the House of Chan. He felt in the mood for a tremendous meal, and a Chinese meal didn’t involve the penalty of extra calories.

  He said the right things to the headwaiter, palm to palm, and they got an excellent corner table. Elizabeth ordered a martini, extra dry with lemon peel and on the rocks.

  “In an ordinary Chinese restaurant,” said Peter, “which means most Chinese restaurants except this one, martinis are hopelessly drowned in vermouth. I order gin on the rocks, vermouth on the side, then I stir in a few drops of the vermouth. It’s wasteful because the rest of the vermouth doesn’t get drunk unless I’m with Rose.”

  Rose’s name hung in the air.

  “What I meant was,” said Peter, trying to brush it aside, “she prefers vermouth to what she calls real drinks.”

  Elizabeth concentrated on the menu.

  “Drinkers,” said Peter improvising again, “cover the range from A to Z. A’s don’t drink on principle. B’s think they need to have absolute control at all times. They’ve tried liquor and don’t like what it does to them. C’s are mostly women who don’t like the taste of whiskey. Their favorite drinks drown a minimum of alcohol in something long and sweet. D’s are C’s who get off the sweet mixers like Coke or ginger ale and conceal their small doses of alcohol in Bloody Marys. Danish Marys test the bartender and the restaurant. Virgin Marys get you back to A without announcing it in fourteen-point type.”

  Elizabeth did not seem to be paying attention.

  “I’m being clever,” he said, “and you’re not paying attention.”

  “You’re being academic.”

  Something, thought Peter, has gone wrong. He looked around the room. He wished the waiter would hurry up with their drinks. He felt he had no option but to continue.

  “To continue,” he said.

  “Do,” she said.

  The word withered him. “At the other end of the scale,” he said, depressed now and wishing he hadn’t started, “are the fellows who take their poison on the rocks with a splash of soda or water. You know, the barest splash. One step further you have the serious drinkers. On the rocks, period. Then those who sip whiskey neat. Then those who down the shot in a gulp. After that come only the guys who drink out of a tumbler at home. Or out of a bottle in the street.”

  The waiter was just putting the martinis down in front of them.

  “Does that,” she said, “conclude Professor Carmody’s catalog?”

  He felt the flush of color in his face. He waited until the waiter left.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I didn’t say anything was the matter.”

  “You were being caustic.”

  “Let’s drop it, shall we?”

  What had brought that on, the mention of Rose?

  They drank their drinks in silence.

  When the waiter reappeared, Elizabeth turned down a second drink. Peter defiantly ordered two martinis, and when the waiter brought them, Peter moved both drinks over in front of himself. Elizabeth moved one of them back to her place.

  “I thought you didn’t want another?”

  “I’d rather have a second than sit and watch you have three.”

  “Look, are we having a quarrel?”

  Elizabeth thought a moment. Then she said, “I’m sorry.” She raised her glass, clinked his and said, “Skoal.”

  He ordered fried wonton as an appetizer for them both, and an order of shrimps in lobster sauce and barbecued spareribs for them to share.

  “Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Will you anyway? To please me?”

  “It’s just that it’s unfair.”

  “What?”

  “The setup. Don’t press me.”

  “What setup?”

  “The deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “The deal a girl gets. A fellow can get out of school,” she said, “begin a career, look around, case the scene, date around, take his time. A girl can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Find out who she is and what she wants before settling down. She dates. She gets a job. Maybe she likes working. Maybe she likes the smell of a career.”

  “So?”

  “So the girls around her are dropping like flies.”

  “Getting married.”

  “Right. Right and left, until the one who doesn’t get married fast is conspicuously single, you know what I mean?”

  Peter stayed silent.

  “You date a fellow here, there, maybe get serious, find out he’s not right, date another, and before you know it you’re in your late twenties and all the men of the right age are married already.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” said Peter.

  “Not a bit. By the time I found out I liked my work and my painting and what kind of fellow was right and what kind was wrong, the field had changed.”

  “What field?”

  “Men. The field had narrowed down to the uglies, the cranks, the mamma’s boys, the fairies who know it and those who don’t, and the miscellaneous types with large, unresolved problems like impotence. What a choice!”

  The intensity of Elizabeth’s feelings reached him.

  “You know what a girl of thirty or thirty-two runs into? The date who studies you. He’s got a pattern for a girl all cut out, and he’s measuring you to see if you fit the pattern. If you don’t fit, finished. Or the date who turns out to have a mother at home he wants you to meet right away and you say you hardly know him, hold off on Mamma, and he gets insulted because he’s looking for a daughter-in-law, not a wife.”

  “Are they all like that?”

  “You’d be surprised at what’s floating around.” />
  “Where does that leave me?”

  “You,” she said, “are already married.”

  She stirred her food around with her fork. “It may sound bitter, but it’s true. The girl over twenty-five has to prospect among the married men if she doesn’t want a nut. And taking up with married men, that’s a universe of its own. You meet the explorers who always want to go home after a trip, the gutless ones who may hate their wives but wouldn’t leave home if you carried them out, and—this is the really large group—the ones who want you and their wives.”

  Hadn’t this all grown out of an inadvertent mention of Rose?

  “When you tempt a married man who interests you,” she continued, “—and don’t tell me a girl doesn’t have to tempt, she does—your unhappily married friends turn on you as if you were stealing their husbands, and then their husbands suddenly get ideas about you. You’re battered by guilt and self-disapproval and the disapproval of everybody else. It’s a nightmare.”

  They were both silent until the waiter brought them hot towels. Elizabeth removed the sparerib grease traces from her fingers carefully, then took the other hot towel and wiped Peter’s fingers one by one. Then, their hands clean and dried, Elizabeth put her hands on his and said, “Here I am, supposedly grown-up, in love for the first time in my life, living a reckless week with you, supposed to be feeling marvelous and actually torn to hell.”

  Peter carefully disengaged his hands and put them on top of hers.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For explaining. It may help. Better said than not said.”

  “A sure road to ruin,” she said.

  He knew she was right.

  Out of habit he paid the waiter in cash in order to keep the bill off his Diners’ Club card. Outside it was drizzling. Luckily latecomers were arriving in a cab, and Peter held the door for them and let Elizabeth and himself in before the driver could flip on his off-duty sign.

  “I’m through for the day,” said the driver.

  Peter glanced at his watch. It wasn’t shift-changing time. “You’ll be through after you drop us,” said Peter. The driver, ready to argue, saw the policeman on the corner at the same time that Peter did. “It’s only a short distance,” said Peter, giving him the address.