The Spare Husband
a short story
by Angus Brownfield
***
Published By
Copyright © 2011 by Angus Brownfield
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THE SPARE HUSBAND
“Always look both ways before crossing anything,” Uncle Scotty told my children when they were four and six.
They called him Uncle though he wasn’t really, not theirs nor mine, though old enough to be mine. The kids sat, wide-eyed and perfectly still, as he illustrated his admonition with the story of a buddy run over by a train the summer they worked together on a railroad surveying crew.
The accident occurred along the California coast, where double tracks run more or less parallel to Highway 1. Near Goleta they run just above the beach and intermittently in railroad tunnels blasted through spurs of the Coast Range, where it meets the ocean in steep cliffs. Warned repeatedly by the crew boss to check tunnels for trains about to emerge, the kid and Uncle Scotty—only a kid himself, a college student earning money for his education—would carefully look for oncoming headlights each time they crossed the tracks.
Sure enough, one day they were heading for the beach for a smoke break when here came a southbound freight train out of the nearest tunnel. It took some time to pass, Uncle Scotty losing count of the tank cars and box cars after he reached a hundred. Finally, the tomato soup red caboose clattered past and Scotty’s partner stepped into the train’s diesel-tainted wake the instant it was by, then, full of adolescent piss and vinegar, dashed onto the second track.
He failed to look the other way. A northbound passenger train, hidden behind the freight train heading south, hurtled into the tunnel, carrying the youth’s body plastered for an instant to the locomotive’s blunt red nose. Uncle Scotty had hesitated a second before following his buddy across the tracks, just long enough to avoid the same gruesome death.
And so he reached a venerable age where he was an oracle to two goggle-eyed youngsters.
The essence of Uncle Scotty’s lesson didn’t penetrate my thick skull until too late. The essence was: life is full of instances where you look both ways before proceeding. Only it wasn’t trains I needed to look out for, it was women.
Being struck by a woman, you insist, is nothing like being struck by a train. But allow me the analogy: it’s about not looking before you leap. Sure, the impact would depend on the woman, and certain aspects of it might be very pleasant, but getting run over by one woman while you think you’ve escaped another is a bummer. You can’t win. And when she’s catapulted you through the tunnel of love, there is not the mercy of death by massive trauma as you emerge.
I’d known both these women a long time. One I’d known about as well as a young fool can know a woman, which, if you’re not one yourself, is incompletely at best. Carol Bishop, nee Wood, was my wife for half a dozen years, back when we were Uncle Scotty’s neighbors. We married young, believing we knew exactly where we were going— “. . . young /we loved each other and were ignorant,” as the poet says. We were, in fact, too young and too ignorant: after one year of bliss and five of mounting misery, all we knew was that we didn’t know diddly and would never learn as long as we were held together by the thin paste of lust and guilt.
We split. Besides getting the house, the car and the children, she got broad of beam. I got alimony and child support, plus a certain wariness about permanent ties. Eventually she slimmed down, married again, stayed both slimmish and married, raised the kids decently. After a long period of estrangement, we became friends. I even became friends with her husband, Bruce.
The northbound woman, Lorna Fabbris, was my wife’s maid of honor. Lorna was, my late adolescent mind convinced itself on first sight, the woman of my dreams: petit, vaguely Mediterranean in coloring, graceful of movement and agile of mind and tongue. She had great cheekbones.
By contrast, Carol was tall, and though she claimed Scottish ancestry, it was clear a Viking or two had sneaked into her gene pool. Strawberry blond, toned by lots of swimming when I first met her: you could picture her riding across the sky with a band of like-shaped Valkyries, looking for slain warriors to scoop up and transport to Valhalla.
Lorna and Carol were friends from the fourth grade, confidants in later years, when it helped to tell someone about your bastard husband or reckless son. The moment I saw Lorna, at the wedding rehearsal, I fell for her. I admonished myself as I went to sleep that night: You’re going to meet lots of attractive women in your life; get over it.
But when Carol and I came back from our honeymoon, the sensation of confusion I’d felt on first meeting happened again. Lorna invited us over for drinks. After several rounds, Carol fell asleep on the couch; Lorna and I sat at the all purpose table in her all purpose living area, continuing a conversation most of which I’ll never recall. She could have recited the alphabet and I’d have soaked up every letter.
But one piece of slightly inebriated chatter I do recall. Just before I took my sleepy wife home, Lorna grew wistful. “I wish I were coming home from a honeymoon.”
“You gotta get married before you have a honeymoon,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said.
“You could be my number two wife,” I told her, squinting slightly to keep my eyes from crossing.
“Thanks, but I want to be someone’s number one wife.”
“Awww.”
The pleasant fantasy of a harem of two bounced around in my brain but soon came to rest as the reality of being a good husband to one woman crowded it into an area of my brain as miniscule as the pituitary gland. A good marriage required a good deal of work—or at least a good marriage in an age that seemed to make it harder and harder to be yourself and part of a couple at the same time.
Lorna eventually did marry. We stayed friends, flirted at social gatherings, not so much that my wife or her husband—whom I liked, too—became upset, but enough to establish the notion that, were circumstances different, we’d have been Brad and Angelina, or (older than those two) Gable and Lombard. Thanks to scotch and the last vestiges of adolescence, we even smooched a couple of times when no one was looking. I learned about pheromones and concluded my nose was attuned to Lorna’s pheromones in a way not duplicated elsewhere.
Leery of permanent bonds after the divorce, I played the field. At some point in my early forties, well off and not too well fed, I found myself not having to work at attracting women: success and self-confidence were the stron
gest aphrodisiacs of all. In my idealistic youth I’d vowed never to sleep with a woman who wasn’t a friend first, but I awoke, the morning after my forty-fourth birthday, in bed with a woman I should not have been in bed with at all, an employee of mine.
I pulled in my horns. I persuaded the bedded employee to go back to college and finish her degree. I avoided further temptation. I tried my hand at writing a novel, and while I was no good at it, it occupied a portion of my brain heretofore employed coaxing women into bed.
One day, my novel rejected by all the publishers I really wanted to be published by, Carol called me. After chatting airily—since we were no longer part of each other’s lives, how else would we chat?—she said, “Lunch, Jack?”
“Hmmm?”
“Let’s have lunch tomorrow,” she said.
“I’ve got a one o’clock—can we make it early?”
“Eleven? Petrone’s?”
I said, “You’re on.”
Petrone’s is one of those places that takes no reservations unless you’re a party of eight. They do righteous steak but the best grilled fish in town: tuna, swordfish or shark; they have a great bar, and half the fun of going there for lunch is standing in a packed crowd with a martini or a scotch highball, looking
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