Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

Afterward Dixon and his best friend’s wife sat up on the couch watching TV and finishing their Scotch. She tipped her glass back until the ice clacked and slid against her nose. Dixon flipped channels until he came to a soft-porn show on cable—fetishists on all fours wearing leather bridles, g-strings with horse tails, straddled by riders with crops. They laughed at it together, the comedy of sex, the light, weird entertainment of it, bumping shoulders, leaning against each other, and finally, in the course of things, kissing.

  …

  Dixon heard footsteps above, over the sound of the coffee, and knew that his best friend’s wife was up. His own wife had climbed out of bed two hours earlier—she’d left the clock radio playing NPR—and he’d heard his best friend offer to drive her to work and then take Dixon’s daughter to the mall. Dixon’s wife didn’t like to drive, and his daughter doted on the best friend, had been flirting with him ever since she was a toddler. They’d had a game back then, the tiny girl running, tottering with excitement, through the friend’s spread legs, shrieking with pleasure. Dixon kept calling it the Tunnel of Love until his friend quit it. He still felt the need to tease his daughter about her crush, but the result was that she found ways of spending time with his best friend without him. He’d stumbled downstairs with a bad case of bed-head, which his daughter had mocked and his wife had failed to smooth down, in time to watch them, blearily, walk down the path to the car. It had struck him how much his daughter, taking his friend’s hand, resembled his wife—the set of her shoulders and neck, her thin, springy legs. “You’re so lucky,” his friend had told him when she’d been born, the first child to any of them, and Dixon had been moved by his envy.

  He wondered for a second about his own wife, her fidelity. Would she ever? Might she be tempted? But he was confident of her love. He recalled a moment years ago when he’d been in a car with his wife and his best friend’s wife—though neither of them were wives then. Perhaps they’d dropped his friend off. Perhaps they were going to pick him up. But no, it felt late, in his memory, as if they’d left him. They’d been drinking already too, because the girls, the not-yet-wives, were talking about boys, and his girl, his soon-to-be wife, said, “I love the way he smells,” and Dixon, who’d been watching the road carefully because he’d had a little too much to drink, realized slowly that she meant him. He teased her for years about it. But when he thought about it now, what was special was the way she told it to the other, the other proto-wife. She had said it to him before, when they were alone, but said to someone else it had a different, thrilling force. He knew she loved him, because she said it like that, because she couldn’t stop herself, because it was too big for just the two of them to know.

  He was staring at the empty bottles from the night before, rinsed and upended to dry in the rack, when his son and his best friend’s daughter came clumping through the kitchen, the boy in a fatigue jacket, the girl in a yellow slicker, on their way to the rink across the park. He told them to have breakfast, but they were in a hurry, and he contented himself with reminding them to be back in time for lunch. The girl called him Uncle, and his son laughed at her. He watched them cross the back yard and head off through the woods, and then he watched the trees.

  Nothing had happened beyond the kissing the night before, beyond their both knowing they’d like sex and agonizing about how terrible it would be. But they’d done the right thing. Dixon was glad of it, and when his best friend’s wife appeared he saw from her face that she knew it was for the best too. It was an awkward moment. He wasn’t sure if they would ever refer to it, and he thought he’d let her decide. She was in a jade-green bathrobe of his wife’s, with her hair up in a towel, and she looked tired.

  “Coffee,” she croaked, like a man in a desert, and he poured and sat with her at the breakfast table. She licked her lips and he smiled.

  “Me too.”

  Outside they heard the percussive bap of a basketball on the sidewalk approach and recede.

  “Tell me you hear that too,” he said. “It’s not just in my head.”

  She smiled, and it made her look haggard, though whether from fatigue or anxiety he couldn’t tell.

  “Getting old,” she said, as if reading his mind, a litany between the four of them for years, a sour punch line to so many of their discussions about the children, their students. But this morning in the buttery sunlight cutting through the kitchen blinds, he saw it was true. Her pale skin was wrinkled and bruised-looking beneath the eyes, and her always slightly mannish features looked heavy. He recalled a moment, a phrase of his best friend’s, tried to place it—back in grad school, in a bar when the best friend still drank, or tried to, just the two of them certainly, but maybe later, after the children: “She puts the dog into dogged.” He hadn’t thought of it in years, and it made him feel suddenly awful to know it, to hear again the old and probably long-forgotten bitterness of it, but mostly to have carried it as a secret for so long, a secret for his best friend, from his friend’s wife. To carry the simple power to hurt. He sat quietly, trying to quell the terrible, choking feeling that he might just blurt it out.

  He found himself staring at her bare calf where it swung beside the table, delicately veined, the skin shiny, the flesh soft but a little loose. He wanted to reach out and grip it tightly. He remembered her lips—full and smooth but with that slight waxiness before chapping—and he was filled with an overwhelming sense of pity. Not that she wasn’t still good-looking, he thought, out of a kind of fierce loyalty, but it made him feel foolish, more foolish for last night, more foolish than on the nights he sat up alone, awake, thinking of his most attractive students—their casual, studied appeal. It seemed dumber to risk everything for this, less real somehow, less serious.

  “Sleep okay?” he asked her, and she nodded.

  “Just not enough. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No regrets?”

  “No,” he said carefully. “You?”

  “Rien.” Her tongue fluttered against the roof of her mouth, rolling the r.

  “The sleep of the just,” he said, but she seemed distracted, listening to the grind and slap of a skateboard pass in the street.

  “I hope you know,” she said at length, “it wasn’t anything to do with you. If things were different . . . Well. I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  He smiled, not sure whether to be hurt, not sure whether he’d rejected her or she him. But after all, he thought, wasn’t this inevitable for every friendship between two couples: that a partner in one would speculate about a partner in the other?

  “More than once,” she said. “Over the years.”

  “Moi aussi.” He was trying to be flippant, but his accent, he realized, was atrocious. He felt like a boy whose voice had just broken. Something was happening, he thought, and perhaps because he had thought the danger was past, perhaps out of relief, perhaps because he felt he’d done what could be humanly expected, because they’d already done the right thing, he said, “They’re all out,” and she said, “Yes. Yes, they are.”

  They kissed then for several minutes in the kitchen, in full view of the windows, until the fear of being seen lent him urgency and he pulled her away. He led her up the stairs, putting his hands under her robe, shocked at her warmth. Her skin was still damp and slightly tacky from her shower, and his hands wouldn’t slide over her. There was a moment of indecision at the top of the stairs, his—their—room, the faint strains of public radio still drifting from it, or the guest room? But she seemed to sense it, pressed herself against him. And it occurred to him to take her here on the landing, between all the rooms of the house, all the doors, and he told her to wait and ran into his bedroom and found a blanket. The radio was playing jazz and he rolled the volume up. He was coming back to her, aware that any second’s pause might end this, but at the last minute he thought of a pillow for her. It was a kind thought, loving, domestic, the type of thought that made him think he was still a good person, and for a second he was a
bsurdly comforted by it. Back in the room, bending over the bed, taking his pillow, he paused, stooped, his erection pressing against his pants, and looked out the window to the trees, saw a movement, a flash of something yellow. At first he thought it might just be a trick, the constant swaying of the blinds in the rising heat from the baseboards. But there it was again. His best friend’s daughter, her slicker open, flapping, and his son. And he felt a flutter of something in his chest, felt a dizziness, put out a hand to steady himself.

  When he was calm he called her to him, and she slipped gingerly into the bedroom and crouched with him, one hand on his back as they watched the children: the boy, twelve, the girl—what? Dixon couldn’t quite recall; twelve or thirteen, though. He remembered his best friend and his wife doting on Dixon’s baby daughter. “You’ve inspired us,” his best friend had said. Their daughter had been born two years later, Dixon’s son six months after that. Now the children walked arm in arm, staggering a little against each other, swinging their skate bags in their free hands, and just before the treeline they stopped and the girl leaned up against a birch and the boy pressed against her—for a paralyzed second Dixon wondered what he was doing—and kissed her, a long kiss, so long Dixon felt himself redden, conscious of the indecency of watching but unable to turn away, a kiss not even interrupted when the boy shifted to press his hand against the girl’s small chest. And when it was over, finally, Dixon felt young—or at least, as he would think of it later, newly, freshly, vibrantly old—and the woman beside him, his best friend’s wife, patted his back and said, “Oh!” and then, “Well,” and then finally, “Oh, well,” and they straightened, shakily, guiltily, blushing, and went down to greet their glowing, lying children.

  Sales

  MY EARLY RETIREMENT came about after one of my customers wanted to cancel her order. Mrs. Kidner, her name was. Got on very well, we did, too. She looked about my age—going a little gray—but she must have been younger, because she was raising a little girl. On her own and all. I remember thinking she’d have dyed that hair if she’d still been married.

  Anyhow, she talked and talked about this girl. My darling this and my darling that it was, and there were pictures of her all over the house, even one of those pretend oil paintings they make from a photo in a big gilt frame. “I wish you could meet her,” Mrs. Kidner went. “She’ll be so sorry to have missed you.”

  “I feel like I know her already,” I said.

  She made me tea and sandwiches and she even took me upstairs and showed me the little girl’s room. She opened the cupboard doors and the chest of drawers and showed me all her clothes folded away. It seemed a bit funny, but I had to admit she kept a very neat room. “Not like my lad’s,” I said.

  I told her I could come back another day if she’d like me to talk about the encyclopedia with her girl, but she said, “Oh no, Mr. Robson.” I liked that. “Oh no, Mr. Robson. That won’t be necessary. I couldn’t bring you all the way out here again. Besides, I’ve already made up my mind.” She signed an order for the most expensive leather-cased set with a commemorative page bound in the front of the first volume: “To my daughter, Mary, on her twelfth birthday, from her loving mother.”

  When I went into the office the next week, there’d been a call from Mrs. Kidner’s son. Her grown-up son, that is. It seems she isn’t all there. Bit gaga, you might as well say. Turns out her daughter was knocked down and killed nine years ago.

  …

  I used to be famous around the office as the only salesman who actually read the encyclopedia. The other lads took the Mick something rotten. “What page are you up to now, Robbo, you sad bastard?” “Four hundred and sixty,” I’d say, or “Seven hundred and eighty-eight,” or “A thousand and forty-frigging-five.” And when they started throwing paper, I’d stand up and put my hand on my heart and say, “Know your product, boys. Know your product.”

  I started reading it for my lad, Kevin. He was just a nipper then, asking me all these awkward questions. “Why is the sky blue? What makes the sun shine?” My wife, Beth, just stood there laughing. “Go on then, Tom. Tell him. You spend every waking hour with those books of yours. Can’t you answer a simple question for your son?” And you know, I really wanted to have all the answers. For him, like. More than anything I’d ever wanted. So I started reading up on things, and that’s how I found that it helped with my selling if I was able to tell people that my boy and I used the encyclopedia ourselves.

  People look at you like you’re a magician if you tell them you’re a salesman. They think you’re going to sell them something if they’re not careful, like pulling a coin out of their ear. You can tell them water’s wet, in that mood, and they won’t believe you. It’s the most awful thing about the job when someone won’t trust you. It’s like an insult, is what it is. “Nothing up my sleeves” is all you can say when you see them get that look. But sometimes if you mention your own children, that makes them think twice.

  I have never in my life tricked anyone into buying an encyclopedia. Every one of my customers, I tell them that owning an encyclopedia isn’t going to make them smarter. “Look at me,” I told Mrs. Kidner. “I’ve been driving around for twenty years with a set in the boot of my car, and it hasn’t rubbed off on me yet.” Just spending the money isn’t going to get your kids to college. But if they want to use it, it’s there for them and it can be the most powerful tool in the world.

  I told my boy that on the phone one Christmas—he asked me how work was going—and he told me I’d been reading my brochures too long. “It’s Christmas, Dad,” he said. “Take a day off.”

  …

  I started out with an old hand called Teddy Daws when I first joined the company. Been at it since he was demobbed in ’46, Ted had. Real knight of the road. Always get me to give him the once-over, he would. He’d put his hand on my arm before we went in, look me in the eye, and say, “Tom, is my snout clean, then?” And he’d tip his head back for me to have a look. Then he’d bare his teeth and make me check for any bits of food.

  Bloody bonkers he was, but Ted was the best rep I ever saw, and one of the kindest lads you could hope to meet. Ted had the company car in those days—a Hillman Hunter—and he used to give me a lift to Beth’s boardinghouse when we were courting. She was from the old country, near Sligo, seven years younger than me and finishing up at nursing school. We’d met at a tea dance organized by the London Irish Club.

  “Snout?” Ted’d say before I got out of the car. “Teeth? All right, off you go, but wipe that silly grin off your face or she’ll never trust you.” Made me feel a proper pillock. Ted used to say courting was the hardest sale of your life, because you were selling yourself. “Course we’re always doing that, in a manner of speaking, but this time the customer knows it too.” Ted was best man at the wedding, and Beth made me promise he wouldn’t try and sell to any of the guests. She was afraid he’d pull a card out of his pocket for the priest when he gave me the ring. As it was, they got on like a house on fire.

  “Good turnout,” Ted whispered as we waited for Beth to come down the aisle. I tried to ignore him. “Betcha haven’t seen this many salesmen in a church, Father, since Jesus chucked ’em out of the temple.”

  “Perhaps I could learn a thing or two from you,” the priest whispered back, “the way my congregations are declining.” He shook his head.

  “Best time to be in sales, is that,” Ted told him. “When no one believes in anything anymore. Talk about your competitive advantage.”

  Teddy’s big idea was that selling was just like an argument. “People are reasonable,” he used to say. “No one invites you into their house and hears you out and then calls you a liar to your face. You wouldn’t do that in an argument with your missus or the kids. It’s like losing your temper. All it means is you’ve lost. The only way to win is to come back with a better argument, and that’s our job—always having the best argument. You try and persuade the customers that they need the book, and if they get into it with y
ou, they’ll try to persuade you that they don’t. But then if they lose, it’s too late to say, ‘No thanks. I don’t want it.’”

  Of course, the surest way of winning is to believe in what you’re selling. That was Teddy’s first rule: “Never sell something you don’t believe in.”

  “But what if you don’t believe in something?” I asked him once.

  “You’re not trying hard enough.” He grinned. “If all else fails you, just believe in belief.”

  …

  Beth left me when Kevin was six, but things started going wrong long before that. When she was expecting, she used to call me at the office all the time. I had to start lying, saying I had another call, just to get some work done. “You’ve got more time for your customers than you have for me,” she used to say. This was in the early seventies. The country was in a shambles, sales were down, and I was working a fifty- or sixty-hour week just to make ends meet.

  Then she phoned once and I was on a call and the receptionist didn’t recognize her voice. “Can I transfer you to another representative?” she asked, and Beth said, “Why not?” I got home and she was grinning from ear to ear like it was some big joke and there was Don, one of the lads from the office, with all the brochures spread out and looking confused. Afterward Beth said she was just interested in my work. It was natural, she said, for a wife to be interested in what her husband did. I had to slip Don a couple of good tips to make up for the waste of his time, and I told Beth not to call me at the office anymore except in an emergency.

  After Kevin was born, things were better for a while, except Beth kept at me to work less and spend more time at home. How could I, I told her, with things still tight at the office and an extra mouth to feed? That winter she began having salesmen visit her at the house every few days. Insurance blokes, double-glazing salesmen. “They’re just so friendly and helpful,” she’d say. I’d come in some evenings and hear Beth going, “There’s my husband now.” Then I’d have to watch some vacuum cleaner salesman sprinkle ash on my carpet or an insurance rep show us bright color slides of investment growth and life expectancy. Once it was even Mormons!