The Husband (7 page)

Jack mixed Amanda’s drink. “Peter,” he said, “tears always get me. Don’t they get you?”

“Another word out of you and I’m turning on the television set,” said Peter.

“Dinner’ll be ready in a few minutes,” chimed in Rose.

The exuberance was coming back into Jack’s voice. “You know what keeps marriages going these days? Those Connecticut parties. Everybody needs to switch around once in a while. Amanda, why don’t you go sit down in old Peter’s lap?”

Amanda, to everyone’s astonishment, perhaps to her own as well, finished off her drink, set down the glass and said, “I think I will.”

She sat down in Peter’s lap. It was a very strange feeling for Peter, as if his mother or his sister had suddenly made a sexual approach. He remembered the time he first saw Amanda in a bathing suit—at a beach party it was—and how astonished he had been that she had breasts and hips. He suddenly realized that Amanda had settled in his lap, not the way a stranger sits on the edge of a chair but in a way that brought a maximum part of her body in touch with his.

“Is this the way you mean?” said Amanda, and she kissed Peter, not on the mouth, thank heaven, but softly on the cheek.

“Wow!” said Jack, startled and somehow pleased. “Rose, my hostess, under the circumstances you’ve just got to reciprocate.” He took Rose by the hand and led her to a chair at the other side of the room, plunked himself down in it without letting go of Rose’s hand and said, “Now you sit right down on Jack’s plentiful lap.”

Rose looked at Peter. Peter looked away.

Rose sat down on Jack’s lap.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” said Jack, his voice having gained the platform again. “Now strike up the band.
I want a girl, just like
—”

“Stop wiggling, Jack,” said Peter. “Rose’ll fake an orgasm, and it’ll go to your head.”

“Peter!” exclaimed Rose, genuinely shocked because she hadn’t been aware at all that Jack was wiggling.

“Oh come on now, everybody, we’re having fun!” said Jack. “Let’s sing!
I want a girl, just like
…”

Slowly, hesitantly, they all joined in, and throughout the house there now resounded the voices of Jack, Rose, Amanda and Peter, singing.

“
I want a girl, just like the girl that married dear old dad. A sweet old-fashioned girl with heart so true, a girl who loved nobody else but you
…”

It was Rose who first noticed the children on the staircase in their nightclothes.

“Jon!” she said.

“Maggie!” said Peter.

“Ahem, did we wake you?” said Jack.

The adults started to disentangle themselves. Amanda got out of Peter’s lap, straightening her dress, and Rose was already up and away from Jack, floundering in dreadful embarrassment.

Peter, softly to the children, said, “It was just a little joke.”

Chapter Three

On the way to Elizabeth’s apartment, Peter found himself ten steps behind a blond girl whose hips moved in a rhythm that excited him. He walked rapidly, despite his heavy briefcase. As he overtook the girl, the anonymous and interesting blondness changed; in profile she had a rather ordinary face. What was all the excitement about?

He knew, of course. Elizabeth had brought a sense of spring and sexuality back into his life. Now he found himself looking at women as women, not in the fraudulent manner of ogling and whistling—the male way of pretending maleness to other men—but looking at individual women he had never seen before, as if each was someone one might indeed go to bed with. He gave each credit to start with, then took the credit away if he found them unattractive in voice or walk or manner or holding onto some other man in a declarative way. The surprise to him was how many kept the credit, including older women who, he noticed, were likely to have a quick sense of their own sexuality, or the frisky younger ones whose youthful assertiveness was more stimulating than their overkempt bodies, or even women he knew but had never before thought of as possible bedmates. How much fair game there was in the world!

The legend in America was that the women castrated the men, but Peter now knew that to be inaccurate. A good deal of that overt dominance was the result of dismay, the woman in effect saying to the man: if you’re not cock-of-the-walk, I will be; there has got to be a cock somewhere.

Since the advent of Elizabeth, Peter found that in the community of females there was a sense of his cockiness. Some women, he was beginning to find out, had an immediate response to the electricity a man felt inside himself. Where had his been so long?

Peter swung the glass door to Elizabeth’s apartment building forward with more energy than called for and just made the self-service elevator in which a fortyish woman, armed with groceries, was already pushing a button.

They looked at each other. Does she know I am going up here to get laid?

Would she like to get laid? She probably hadn’t thought about it. Was she thinking about it now that she and he were in the elevator alone?

Peter looked her full in the face and was immediately convinced that she hadn’t thought about getting laid for a long time. She wasn’t unattractive.

The woman got out of the elevator, flicking a look at him, and he suddenly realized why: he hadn’t pushed a floor button. He did, and the light went out. He got the light back on. He pushed the right button. Man, get ahold of yourself!

He let himself in with a key kept not with his other keys but in his wallet, in a small envelope on which he had taken the precaution of writing a fictitious masculine name. To avoid getting caught. Why avoid getting caught?

Elizabeth was lying on the floor, six or seven open books around her. She turned away from the one in her hand as she heard the door open. Her smile had a virtue no other had ever had for Peter.

Some people have a ready smile, which they flick on to say, “I’m smiling, don’t worry.” It usually was a cause for worry, like a salesman’s “Let me be candid with you.” Peter remembered the school librarian with the perpetual smile—not for him, or over anything, or to anybody at all, just a permanent, frozen expression of pretended happiness. Peter knew an art director who, at age forty-five or thereabouts, had been told that he looked younger when he smiled, and that smiler was now impossible to look at with a straight face. It was indeed rare when a smile was an expression out of the ordinary, showing pleasure short of joy. Elizabeth smiled when she meant it and could not bring herself to smile otherwise. It was a liability in business; it put some people off but never anyone that mattered. Hers was the league of people who felt that a smile was an expression one should not cheat with.

At this moment, Peter and Elizabeth were looking at each other, and he thought how rare that was, too, men and women who already knew each other taking the other in.

He put his briefcase down and flung his coat over a chair.

She was on her back now and slowly raised her legs until they were perpendicular. Then she slowly lowered them. Peter watched her as she repeated the exercise. Was it that her body showed through her clothes more than with other women? Was it perfectly proportioned, or was this another exaggeration, a way of his describing his feeling for her to himself? Ah, the old myth-making machine: my girl is the most beautiful girl in the world.

Still, he thought as her legs moved up, then down, what a body.

“You are a remarkable woman,” he said.

It was superfluous to compliment a woman like Elizabeth.

It was not superfluous to compliment any woman ever.

When the kids were crawling and toddling around, Peter used to get down on the carpet with them, playing at their level. But as Jonathan learned to walk, and then Margaret, getting down on the carpet seemed undignified. Yet here he was, lowering himself to the carpet next to Elizabeth, and as he put his arms around her, his self-consciousness vanished. He was aware of the warm musk of her lips and mouth, her breasts against his chest, her pelvis thrust forward to fix the body-length bond between them. It was incredible how the whole of him, embracing the whole of her, was instantly and fully engorged. As he kissed her again, he had the definite sense that his organ was reaching out for her as if it had a life of its own, hurrying him along.

His fingers raced to undress her, and himself. He felt the need of more hands, preferably nontrembling hands. How beautiful she was in her nakedness, small and perfect. He pulled her perfection against the bearishness of himself. Why did male desire demand the ultimate at once, and the female, like a soufflé, require gentling and patience?

He kissed the echelons of her body. He stroked her, hoping for gentleness, barely controlling the impulse to grab and fuck. How like the Saxon thump was male desire, how like the curlicues of French was femaleness, the light multiple syllables taking their own sweet time. His tongue moved over the recesses of her neck—he could feel the wild pulse in her body now—and he checked the rush and impulse to force his thrust inside her, and then, quite unexpectedly, her hand was stroking his member as she spread her thighs apart, and the opening was entered.

He raised himself above her as high as possible so that they were joined now only in the one place, and he moved as slowly as possible until her own rhythm forced him faster, plunging with fierceness, anger, love, until finally both of them flooded in communion.

*

They had been lying quietly in each other’s arms for a long time, and he had dozed off for a while.

She was up on an elbow, looking at him.

Smiling.

“Good morning,” she said, and his heart thumped until his eyes found the wristwatch on his naked arm and verified that he had slept only minutes.

Elizabeth was now slipping back into her clothes, and he watched her. Why did he not like to watch Rose dressing? Why was he fascinated by Elizabeth’s slow covering up of her body, first the brassiere, the cups to the back and the clasp in front, then pulling the whole thing around, then the panties which seemed so fragile to him, and then the outer clothes and last, stepping into her shoes. Why was he searching for significant differences as if there were a need to assemble bits of evidence for himself? Wasn’t the overriding evidence in the joy of it? Was he making a case? For what?

“What’d you do today, elf?”

“Do?”

“Every time I went by your office, it was empty.”

Elizabeth lit a cigarette. “Drink?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re skipping the subject nimbly.”

“I started out,” she said, “by having a wolf for breakfast.”

“That was yesterday morning. Wasn’t that a brilliant idea, showing up here at the crack of dawn?”

“No.”

He had thought she welcomed his unexpected appearance yesterday, letting himself in with the key, with light just beginning to show through the Venetian blinds, startling her awake with a kiss, then seeing the glow of her recognition. Love in the morning was not something he liked, but it had been especially good that morning. It was almost always good with her. When would it not be any longer? Only a creep would think that, he thought. Or a man old enough to know that commercials interrupted life, too.

“Were you afraid,” he said, “I might find you weren’t sleeping alone?”

“If I showed up at your house, would I find you sleeping alone?”

A thought he would rather not pursue. One of the constants of infidelity.

“You started telling me about today.”

“Well, this morning I dressed, bathed, went—”

“In that order?”

“Inclusively but not serially. Went for milk and bread and things, looked at last night’s painting, decided that I’d have been better off sneaking into a movie with you, then decided the painting was coming along okay after all, so I patted it, washed the breakfast dishes, left some food to thaw for supper tonight and went to work. Are you going to sit there naked?”

“Go on,” said Peter, starting to dress.

“Well, I punched the time clock, and I started to—”

“What time clock?”

“Well, I punched something or somebody on my way in. Maybe it was the fifteenth-floor receptionist. You know how irritable I can be in the morning. I hung my coat up, went into my office, discovered it wasn’t my office, went next door to my very own office and looked out the window.”

“Nice view?”

“Couldn’t see. Window washers were washing the windows from outside, and all I could see was the window washers.”

“So far I have a feeling you’re overpaid.”

“In twelve minutes flat I whipped off a first-rate sketch of a Coke Christmas display to go with that mean-looking Santa Claus, and the rest of the day was spent showing off my twelve minutes’ work to Members of the Hierarchy.”

“They liked it?”

She dismissed his question with a wave of her cigarette. He knew how good her work was.

“Any propositions today?”

“Are you being jealous or proprietary?”

“I know the environment.”

“I also did a cover idea for the Helena Rubinstein brochure, and I found out, in midafternoon, that you’re not a father.”

“I am a father,” he said.

“Well, then, I’m not a mother.”

He said nothing.

“If I were pregnant, you’d send me to the butcher.”

“No.”