Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  Eventually, the dough looked and felt right. Following the recipe’s instructions, she rolled it into two sheets that weren’t quite uniform in thickness but were the best she could produce. Once they were baking in the oven, she searched the kitchen for the templates she’d cut out—four wall pieces, two roof pieces. Why couldn’t she have built a gingerbread tent, instead? A pup tent—two sheets shaping an angle, propped up by stale sticks of licorice.

  Through the ceiling she heard the thump of footsteps. The girls were clomping back and forth between their bedrooms above the kitchen. Ellie considered summoning them to help her clean some of the mixing bowls and utensils, but it was Christmas Eve. Shrewishness and nagging were not suited to the spirit of the holiday.

  So she scrubbed the bowls and utensils herself. Once she had everything balanced in the drying rack, she reread the recipe for the tenth time in preparation for tackling the frosting.

  What crazed person had invented gingerbread houses? she wondered. The Brothers Grimm? They wrote all those sadistic German folktales about witches devouring children and mothers giving their daughters poisoned apples to eat. Didn’t the witch in Hansel and Gretel live in a gingerbread house? And look at what had happened to Hansel and Gretel: they’d died. Or killed the witch. Or something.

  Where the hell was Curt?

  By the time he arrived home, the sky had gone black and an inch of snow covered the ground. Wearing a big grin, he swept into the kitchen from the mudroom, his tie loosened and his hair damp. “Whoa, it smells good in here!” he boomed before sweeping Ellie into a hug.

  The baking pastry had managed to fill the air with a holiday fragrance. Her frosting was lumpy, and the unevenness in the gingerbread sheets appeared obvious now that they were cooked. When she’d pulled the trays from the oven, she’d seen that the edges of each sheet had turned a dark, tarry hue and the centers were puffy. Somehow, she didn’t think her gingerbread house was going to be up to code.

  She hoped it would taste better than it looked—the parts that weren’t burned, anyway. And if it didn’t, at least she could assure herself that she’d tried her best. Certainly her effort had to be worth a few mommy points, regardless of the outcome.

  She felt a lot mellower about the project once Curt closed his arms around her. She relaxed against the soft cashmere of his coat, which was chilly from the outdoors. The scent of baking mingled with the scent of him, of snow and the night air and his aftershave and…another smell. A flowery smell.

  Perfume?

  “How was the party?” she asked, easing out of his arms.

  “The usual,” he said as he pulled off his coat and carried it to the coat closet by the front door to hang up. Unlike his children, he didn’t leave his crap all over the kitchen. “Everyone had fun. A few people got a little tipsy.” He returned to the kitchen, peered at the sheets of gingerbread and then at the recipe. He looked impressed—and ridiculously handsome with his tie dangling loose, his hair mussed and a shadow of beard darkening his jaw. “People were thrilled with their bonuses. That always fills them with holiday cheer.”

  Ellie caught another whiff of the unfamiliar perfume, faint yet obvious because it didn’t belong. “Who threw herself at you?” she asked. She wasn’t jealous. She had absolute faith in Curt. She just didn’t like the idea of a female colleague drinking too much and nuzzling him. Didn’t that qualify as sexual harassment?

  Curt chuckled. “Four secretaries, two paralegals and Gretchen.” One of the founding partners, Gretchen was in her sixties and resembled a mastiff. “Moira Kernan just couldn’t resist me, and Lindy Brinson made passes at all the partners and also a potted plant. Oh, yeah, and Bill Castillo put the moves on me. Whenever he has a few drinks his true bisexual nature emerges.”

  Ellie scowled. “Does he wear perfume?”

  Curt slung his arm around Ellie. “Everyone was throwing themselves at everyone. That’s what happens when people get big bonuses and consume a lot of Christmas punch.” He pressed a kiss to Ellie’s temple, which he knew was one of her most sensitive spots. A reflexive heat whispered through her. “Nobody at the party was as beautiful as you. Did you know you’ve got flour on your nose?”

  “I do?” She rubbed the tip of her nose.

  She must have missed the spot. He moved his thumb gently along the side of her nose, just below the bridge. “So, you’re really going to build this thing into a house?”

  “The girls asked me to. It’s Christmas eve. How could I say no?”

  “Like this.” He released her, gazed down into her eyes and murmured, “No.” Then he bowed and kissed her, a real kiss on the mouth. “I wish you could’ve joined me at the party, but we’ve got that damn no-guests rule. If I brought you, everyone would want to bring their husbands and wives, their boyfriends and girlfriends and their cousin from Quincy.”

  “I’d be bored at your party,” she said, although being wrapped up in Curt’s arms, the taste of his kiss lingering on her lips, was anything but boring.

  “Believe me, there’s nothing boring about listening to Sue Pritchard sing ‘Good King Wenceslas.’ She sings it really slow, like a torch song. I think in another life, she had the hots for the good king.”

  Ellie grinned. Sue Pritchard was the firm’s senior-most secretary. She’d been there longer than Curt, and in that time she’d been through three marriages. All her divorces had been handled by Gretchen the mastiff, and Sue had emerged from each one exponentially wealthier.

  “Well, some of us actually had to work today,” she said, giving Curt a parting hug before she turned back to the table to arrange her templates on the gingerbread. “I saw two kids with upset stomachs, one with what looked like conjunctivitis and one with a splinter. Then I came home and baked.”

  “Santa will reward your hard work,” Curt promised as he headed toward the stairs. “You’ve been good, for goodness’ sake.” With that he was gone, announcing to his children that he was home.

  Ellie didn’t construct the gingerbread house until after dinner—a snack of cold cuts on rye bread. Tomorrow her parents would be coming for dinner; she’d be preparing the turkey, along with stuffing, winter squash, corn bread and steamed beans, and brownies and Christmas cookies for dessert. That plus the gingerbread house seemed like more than enough food preparation to earn her a sleigh full of presents.

  The kids didn’t mind a supper of sandwiches, anyway. Ellie suspected that they preferred the light meal to a roasted turkey.

  After dinner, the children were giddy. Twelve-year-old Katie considered herself the epitome of cool sophistication, but she couldn’t conceal her excitement about the holiday. Ten-year-old Jessie veered wildly between preadolescent aloofness and childlike glee. She insisted that the family watch a DVD of Frosty the Snowman, which even Peter considered infantile, followed by a showing of A Christmas Story, which they’d all seen so many times they could recite most of the script along with the characters.

  Before bed, the children brought the gifts they’d bought for one another downstairs to the living room and arranged them under the tree. Ellie had explained to Peter a few years ago that while Santa brought most of the presents, people also gave gifts to their loved ones, because Christmas was all about giving. Peter had a tendency to give the sorts of gifts he would love to receive: packages of Gummi Bears for his sisters, baseball cards for his father and—usually because he’d run out of money—a crayon drawing in a Popsicle-stick frame for Ellie. She treasured his drawings and counted her blessings that he never gave her Gummi Bears.

  “All right—bedtime,” Curt announced at around nine-thirty. He’d changed from his suit into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, and he looked tired and comfortable and glowing with the serenity the holiday was supposed to bring.

  The kids exerted themselves to shatter that peace. “It’s too early! We’re not babies! We can sleep late tomorrow!”

  No one was going to sleep late tomorrow, not with Peter rampaging through the house, shrieking that
Santa had once again consumed the cookies and left a ton of packages under the tree. “Santa doesn’t visit houses where the kids stay up late,” Curt warned, and all three reluctantly kissed him and Ellie good-night and trudged up the stairs.

  An hour would pass before they were asleep, Ellie knew. She and Curt couldn’t arrange the presents under the tree until the children were in dreamland—especially Peter, since he still believed fervently in Santa, his classmate’s statement notwithstanding.

  But that hour of settling-down time was fine with Ellie. It would probably take her close to an hour to assemble the gingerbread house.

  “I’ll help,” Curt offered, rolling up his sleeves and surveying the pieces of gingerbread she’d cut using her templates. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Shovel the snow from the driveway,” she joked, then shook her head. “Actually, I could use your help. If you can hold these two walls like this, at a right angle, I can glue them together with the frosting.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t be using concrete?”

  “Don’t get smart with me. Either you help or you clean the driveway.”

  “Okay. Right angles.” He hovered over the table, his large hands dwarfing the slabs of gingerbread. Ellie used a narrow spatula to seal the corner with icing. She managed to get some of the icing on Curt’s pinkie. He let go of the wall to lick it off, and the house nearly collapsed.

  “No licking till we’re done.”

  “You’re a slave driver.”

  “You partied all afternoon. Now I get to boss you around.”

  “Hmm.” He nudged the top of her head with his chin. “Are you going to discipline me with a velvet whip? Maybe use some fur-lined handcuffs?”

  “If I handcuffed you, you wouldn’t be able to hold the walls up. Right angle, Curt,” she emphasized when he shifted the wall slightly. “Ninety degrees.”

  “I forgot to bring my protractor,” he joked, but he adjusted the walls and Ellie was able to cement them with the icing.

  More than an hour passed before they had the house standing reasonably solidly and decorated with candy canes, M&M’s, jelly beans and gumdrops—a few of which disappeared into Curt’s mouth instead of becoming part of the house’s decor. “It’ll do,” Ellie said wearily. The gingerbread houses she’d seen in magazine photographs looked a hell of a lot better than this one.

  “Not done yet,” Curt interrupted, fishing a toothpick from the box on the table. He dipped it into a smear of frosting and dabbed it against the house’s front wall, above its white-icing door. Another dip and a dab, and another. When he was done, Ellie could see the faint white shape of two letters in the slightly bulging gingerbread that rose toward the peaked roof: “H. S.”

  Hope Street. Just like the shingle he’d made for this house and attached to the front wall above the door. She remembered the day he’d emerged from his basement workshop carrying that shingle, just a few weeks after they’d moved into the house, when she was eight and a half months pregnant with Katie and looked as if she’d swallowed a watermelon whole. Curt had hung the shingle, then taken her in his arms and said, “I promised you we’d always live on Hope Street. This house might be on Birch Lane, but we’re living on Hope Street, too.”

  Now the gingerbread had officially been granted a Hope Street address. Suddenly, the crooked little structure seemed more beautiful to Ellie than any gingerbread house in any magazine.

  She carried it on a foil-covered tray into the living room and set it on the coffee table next to the cookies Peter had left out for Santa. “Do you think we can do the presents?” Curt whispered.

  They glanced toward the stairs. No sounds emerged from the kids’ rooms, no activity, no signs of life. Ellie nodded, and they tiptoed down to the basement and retrieved the gift-wrapped parcels from assorted hiding places. Katie’s gifts were all wrapped in red foil, Jessie’s in silver, Peter’s in green, Ellie’s in white and Curt’s in gold. Ellie had explained to the children, years ago, that Santa liked to sort the packages this way so he’d know who was getting what.

  From under the tool bench Curt hoisted a large white parcel, squarish but not rectangular enough to be a box. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “You’ll find out tomorrow,” he teased.

  “Oh, come on—you can tell me!” She sounded as wheedling as the girls when they were angling for some new privilege.

  “It’s a very big bracelet,” Curt said before tiptoeing up the stairs with a bulky pile of gifts.

  After a few trips between the basement and the living room, all the presents were arrayed under the tree. Delicate white lights winked among the Scotch pine’s branches and glittered off the tinsel garlands, giving the tree an elegantly icy appearance. The Frost tree should look frosty, Curt always said, so they limited their decorations to white and silver. If the tree were standing outside, it would be even more frosty, glazed with snow.

  Curt switched off the living-room lights so only the tree illuminated the room. “Sit,” he murmured, nudging her toward the sofa before he vanished into the kitchen. He returned carrying two glasses of port. Then he lowered himself onto the sofa next to her and arched an arm around her.

  He no longer smelled of perfume or punch. Only of Curt, a dark, heady, deliciously male scent that made her long to melt into him. She rested her head on his shoulder and wished she looked better. She still had on the baggy sweater and frayed jeans she’d donned once she’d gotten home from work, and her scent carried heavy undertones of flour and molasses and ginger. Not the most romantic fragrance in the world.

  Curt didn’t seem to mind. “The house looks great,” he said.

  Ellie took a sip of port, then shook her head. “My mother won’t think so. What do you want to bet she walks through the door tomorrow and tells me I should wash the kitchen floor?”

  “I meant that house,” he said, gesturing toward her gingerbread creation. “But our house looks great, too. Your mother will be too busy fussing over the kids to notice the kitchen floor.”

  “Oh, she’ll notice.” Ellie’s mother wouldn’t have cared about Ellie’s floor if Ellie had fulfilled her destiny and become a doctor. “If you were a doctor, I wouldn’t expect you to have time to scrub the floors,” her mother would say. “But you just work at that school. You’re home by the middle of the afternoon, and you can’t possibly be tired. If you haven’t got a demanding career, the least you could do is have a clean house.”

  It was clean enough. And at age forty, Ellie was no longer desperate for her mother’s approval. Maybe in another few years, she wouldn’t even mind the criticisms anymore.

  Curt sipped some port, then lowered his glass to the table. “I think the kids’ll be pleased with their presents.”

  “They ought to be.” Along with the usual books, CDs, games and stocking stuffers, they’d bought Katie some computer software that would enable her to edit videotapes—she’d pretty much taken over the family’s camcorder, and her current dream was to direct music videos. Jessie would be getting a Discman, which she’d been hinting about for months. Peter had written in his letter to Santa that he wanted a new baseball bat and glove, and those items now sat beneath the tree, awkwardly wrapped in green paper. “I know I’m eager to try on that very big bracelet,” Ellie added, gesturing toward the mysterious white package Curt had carried upstairs.

  He chuckled softly and kissed the crown of her head. Then he eased her glass from her hand, placed it beside his and pulled her half onto his lap. “It’ll look gorgeous on you. You’ll have to model it for me—wearing just the bracelet and nothing else.”

  “Do you think that’s what Santa had in mind when he got it for me?”

  “Santa’s a dirty old man,” Curt warned before kissing her again—a deep, sensual kiss that stole Ellie’s breath. She turned toward him, reaching for his shoulders, and he slid a hand under her sweater and cupped her breast. “A very, very dirty old man.”

  “We shouldn’t do this down here,” El
lie warned.

  “The kids are asleep.”

  “They could wake up.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.” With that, he twisted out from under her, deposited her onto the sofa cushions and sprawled on top of her. “You know what the best thing about Christmas is?” he murmured as he pushed her sweater up, baring her midriff. “Being married to you.” He punctuated this sentiment with a warm, wet kiss on her belly.

  Her exasperation with the gingerbread house went forgotten. The children’s prebedtime rambunctiousness faded from her mind. Her parents’ impending visit, the now-refrigerated turkey she’d have to dress and roast tomorrow, the early-morning wakeup Peter would subject them to with his exuberant yelling…Her mind emptied of everything but Curt, his weight, his warm hands moving over her skin, his hips pressing into hers. His stubble scratched her cheeks and throat as he kissed her, and she wondered if she’d have beard burns marking her skin tomorrow. Not that she cared. In fact, they might distract her mother from the fact that the kitchen floor wasn’t spotless.

  Ellie and Curt had been together for twenty years, married for seventeen. They’d done their share of experimentation—although, joking aside, neither of them had a taste for velvet whips or fur-lined handcuffs. But Curt still excited her. He touched her as if each time was an entirely new experience, as if each brush of his fingers or his lips or his tongue represented a unique discovery. His body was as lean and hard as it had been the first time she’d seen it one twilit morning in his apartment on Hope Street. He’d thrilled her then. He thrilled her now.

  “I love you.” She sighed as he eased her slacks down her legs. “Oh, Curt…”

  “We got this right, didn’t we.” He slid his hand between her thighs, found her wet and trembling. “The love part.”

  She didn’t want to come without him, but he was too deft, he knew her too well. A few strokes and she was gone, gasping into the hollow of his throat as her body throbbed with pleasure.

  “I love when you come,” he whispered, and his words made her come again.