The Husband

by Sol Stein

  “Business is for men,” said Jonathan, refusing to be silenced.

  “Miss Kil—” and Margaret stopped. Something had told her she had stepped over the line. How to recoup? “Is Mommy in business?” she went on.

  “Well,” said Peter, “she’s very busy all day long, shopping, buying clothes, returning them, buying more clothes, electric toothbrushes…” Watch your step. Don’t needle. The Baxters would be here soon. They’d drink. All would pass.

  But there was Margaret, questioning. “Is business making money?”

  “Not all businesses make money.”

  “Well, see,” said Margaret, “if Mommy doesn’t make any money, then isn’t she in business, too?”

  “I give up.”

  “Now do get to bed,” said Rose, the voice in mid-phrase becoming vaguely British again. “You’ll never be able to get up for school in the morning.”

  “Well, see, he hasn’t answered what advertising is.”

  Concerned, Peter tried. “Advertising is…a way of telling people…about what to buy?” He hadn’t meant it to be a question.

  “Like on television,” said Jonathan.

  “Hopefully not always,” said Peter, smiling.

  “Well, see, don’t people know what to buy?” Lovely Margaret.

  “Sometimes,” said Peter, “they buy the wrong product.”

  “Like Pepsi-Cola?”

  “Exactly,” said Peter.

  “What’s wrong with Pepsi?” asked Margaret.

  “Daddy doesn’t have them as a client, stupid,” said Jonathan, scoring.

  “I like Seven-Up,” said Margaret, Peter immediately clapping his hand over her mouth in jest.

  “Shhhh, we must be loyal to the client. Like Paul. Paul is very loyal. He even drinks rum and Coke, the great beginner’s drink.”

  It was Rose’s turn. “Paul is hardly a beginner.”

  Jonathan was looking directly at Peter when he said, “Paul bosses Daddy.”

  The reaction came from Margaret with her bunched-up fists, and Peter swung them apart. “Now wait a minute!”

  “Tell him you don’t have a boss,” said Margaret, puffing.

  “I do,” said Peter. “Everybody has a boss.”

  “Why aren’t you the boss of everybody?” asked Margaret.

  “The president,” said her brother, “is the boss of everybody.”

  “To bed!” said Rose, and this time, played out, they kissed Peter good night and went, leaving him straightening his tie.

  That instant the front bell rang, and the kids escaped from Rose and went charging down the stairs to open the door.

  Jack Baxter was older than Peter—not much, he only looked that way. His body, fully clothed, seemed slack, and it was hard to imagine that Jack had played great tennis once.

  In the upper reaches of the law, there are lawyers you know in a second handle financial corporate matters, and the only crime they run into in their work is embezzlement. Then there are lawyers who don’t really practice law at all, the show business lawyers who are really star-level agents, packagers of talent, deal makers, and leave contracts to junior partners as a near-irrelevance, something to be completed once the deal is made so there will be something in the files to refer to in the event of a breach. Then there are the courtroom performers, the surgeons of the law, who enjoy catching a witness in a lie right on the stand. Few of these, Peter knew, had any special interest in justice.

  Jack Baxter was a poor bit of all three types. His corporate clients were very small guys with very small problems and liked Jack because he treated these problems as if they involved a merger of Du Pont and General Motors. Jack also played the show business lawyer, but only for two or three nightclub types he had met along the way. And Jack enjoyed the courtroom bit, but the courts were always lower courts, and Jack felt most comfortable when he knew the judge and when the ploy he was going to try was one he had tried successfully before; so he practiced on people not in the courtroom but in living rooms and bars and trains, where he didn’t have to win or lose.

  When a potential client paid a first visit, Jack would listen to his story and then say, “You don’t want a tough lawyer,” at which the new client would always assure Jack that was exactly what he wanted. So Jack made out all right so far as clients went. It was just that he knew now that he wouldn’t ever reach the big time, and it got him physically in his appearance, the slackness of a college athlete who now knew he’d never hear the cheering again.

  Next to Jack in the doorway, stood Amanda, who in her college days was a very attractive girl but had turned out to be sterile, and that was that. Her growing up from dolls to dates to being the busiest baby-sitter in the neighborhood had been pointed like a rocket toward motherhood. At the moment she and Jack heard the conclusive news from the doctor, Amanda Baxter’s main fuse turned off for life. Jack had said all the nice-guy things, such as, it didn’t matter, or they could always adopt, or think how free it would leave them to enjoy their own lives, and sometimes he really wanted to believe one or another of these things, but Amanda had thrown the switch on all that. For a while, bride Amanda was in what a doctor described as “an acute nervous condition.” Once when she had a very realistic nightmare about having a hysterectomy performed on her, which of course she had not, it looked bad, but within a day or two Jack had the sense to empty out Amanda’s closetful of dolls and give them to the Salvation Army, which brought her back to her senses. However, Amanda had been brought up in an atmosphere of extreme religiosity, which of course turned her as well as her sister and two brothers into agnostics, but Amanda was never able really to shake out the idea that sex was for procreation, and she deeply resented, now that she couldn’t procreate, Jack’s occasional insistence on taking his pleasure.

  Amanda was very well liked by her female friends, all of whom had children. Rose liked to be with her, Peter suspected, because Amanda was more like a sister than a friend, in appearance definitely an older sister, very reliable, comforting, and in no way a threat.

  This evening Amanda and Rose greeted each other at the door, as usual, with the kind of exclamations and embraces usually reserved for airports and train stations, though they had seen each other within the week. Jack and Peter shook hands. Peter thought that after all these years, he and Jack still didn’t like each other well enough to begin a social evening without the formality of a handshake.

  Peter shooed the kids back up the stairs and Rose motioned him upstairs, too, pointing to his shirt.

  “Can’t I make my friends a drink?” Peter thought his use of the word “friends” a definite concession that would please Rose enough to have her lay off. She didn’t.

  “You’ve got something to attend to,” she said.

  Peter, with a look of mock supplication, turned to Amanda and Jack. “See this spot on my shirt? That’s a Biltmore canapé. Does it offend you?”

  Jack and Amanda were puzzled.

  “Okay,” said Peter, “I guess it does. I’ll change.” He made the stairs two at a time.

  “What’s gotten into him?” Jack said to Rose.

  “Two martinis. Two that I saw. God knows what he had at that office party.”

  “Well,” said Jack, “we’ve got some catching up to do. Rosie, my love, suppose I make the drinks?”

  “Rosie is not your love,” said Amanda.

  “There goes that literal mind,” said Jack, “just like Maggie, except it’s excusable in a kid.”

  “Now don’t you two start,” said Rose. With a gesture, she turned the bar over to Jack.

  Jack quickly hung his jacket on a chair, rolled his shirtsleeve cuffs a few turns and, clinking two glasses, asked, “Rosie, what’ll you have? I’m having an economy-sized Scotch myself.”

  “I’ll just get myself some orange juice from the kitchen,” said Rose.

  “Rosie, I think you should have a drink.” There was no mistaking the lascivious tone of his voice. “A drink will positively loosen you up.�
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  “I don’t need loosening up,” said Rose, disappearing through the swinging door. Jack was left alone, pouring Scotch liberally over ice for himself. Alone with Amanda.

  “You’ve got a dirty mind,” said Amanda.

  Jack was not about to have his spirits squashed. “Everybody’s got a dirty mind,” he said, “just some people are stuffy about it.”

  Amanda was screwing her lips together, trying to build an anger she didn’t quite feel, when Rose came back in with the pitcher of orange juice and handed it to Jack, who plunked some ice in two large-sized glasses and sloshed some juice over the rocks with the kind of flourishes magicians once used in vaudeville. He handed a drink to each of the ladies and raised his own glass. “Well, bottoms up,” he said.

  They all took a sip.

  “Well,” said Jack directly to Amanda, “aren’t you going to criticize my saying ‘bottoms up’?”

  “This doesn’t taste like orange juice,” said Rose quickly, wrinkling her face.

  “I slipped some vodka in the glasses before the ice,” said Jack the magician. “I figured both of you could stand a screwdriver. And here comes one now.”

  Peter was far enough down the stairs to hear, and knew exactly what kind of evening it was going to be.

  “If you don’t stop it, Jack,” said Amanda, “I’m walking out of—I don’t know why you keep—really, all that stag-party talk, it’s not necessary. Rose, he’s just a big kid.”

  Jack pinched Amanda’s cheek. “Lolita,” he said, “I’m for you.”

  With a flourish he hoped was sufficiently broad to draw attention and change the course of conversation, Peter said, “Ho, happy people, how do you like my clean shirt?” He could hear his idiot voice saying, “Ho, happy people” and hated himself for playing the game, though the words, like the clowning, seemed unavoidable in an evening with Jack and Amanda.

  “Mind you,” said Peter, “despite the clean shirt I’m not really respectable.” He slipped his jacket off, and it was immediately apparent that the shoulder seam of the clean shirt had split. “I’ll look like a bum unless I keep my jacket on,” he said at Rose. “No, I am not changing my shirt again.”

  An evening like this, he thought, is like reading all of the Sunday newspaper or sitting in front of the tube for hours on end or going to a funeral of somebody you really didn’t know very well but where you had to show your face. A waste of life. He fixed himself a drink at the bar and noticed the silence. All three of them were looking at him. Nobody had said anything. Had they read his thoughts? Of course they couldn’t read his thoughts. Was he the culprit? Of what? What had he done now? The drink made, he took a very large swig.

  “Number three,” said Rose.

  She was counting his drinks. Sure, he could stop drinking. He could chloroform all three of them. How was that for a solution?

  His expression must have been enough to panic Jack, who headed for the piano, the loudest diversion he knew. Jack had one of those great big voices, good for occasions in which a group of men, all loaded, sing barbershop songs. It was a message voice, getting the message across.

  “I want a girl, just like the girl that married dear old Dad,” he sang. “Hey, this is a lousy piano. I want a girl, just like the girl—”

  Rose tried to cut in. “Jack?”

  “Next time I’ll bring my own,” said Jack, banging away.

  “Girl?” asked Peter.

  “Piano,” said Jack. “Oh, I want a girl, just like the girl that married Artie Shaw.”

  Rose tried again. “Jack?”

  “Some people like a roller piano,” said Jack, “but I like to roll my own. Oh, I want a girl, just like—”

  It was Amanda’s shrill voice that cut him down. “Jack!”

  “Present and accounted for. What do you want?” He continued playing, but with a light touch.

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Amanda, “Rose has been trying to get your attention.”

  “Well, speak up, Rosie old gjrl, bellow like Amanda does. It’s a sure attention getter.”

  “Jack,” said Rose, “do you handle divorces?”

  Jack took his hands off the piano.

  Peter was more surprised by the word than the question. Divorce, he thought, is an integral part of marriage, a shadow of possibility, an occasional secret wish quickly chopped down, or a brooding hope lurking in thoughts and arguments. The husband who has not had a fleeting thought of divorce is a liar, to himself mainly. The wife who says she has never had a thought of divorce is also a liar. The word, spoken out loud for the first time not in argument, where it can be a weapon thrust, but in front of friends, the way Rose had asked the question, was more than that: not a gauntlet flung (for a gauntlet can always be picked up) but a line crossed (when you look behind you, the line has disappeared). The public question, unlike the private threat, cannot be repealed. Even if never spoken again, it becomes a permanent fixture of the marriage.

  In an instant, Peter noticed the striking difference between Rose’s expression and Amanda’s. Rose, controlled on the surface, held the muscles of her face in a counterfeit of calm. Amanda looked as if she had been slapped.

  “Funny you should ask that,” Jack said. “Just this afternoon—”

  Amanda whipped into his sentence. “Don’t tell it.”

  “Told you, why can’t I tell them?”

  Amanda crumpled into a small patch of brown broken leaves, swept out of sight. Jack, suddenly enthusiastic for his subject, stood up from the piano, put a foot up on the stool and began talking at Rose and Peter with relish, unaware, it seemed, that his wife, for all practical purposes, was no longer in the room.

  “I was telling Amanda about my little fun afternoon and didn’t finish till we got to the door tonight. You didn’t overhear us, did you, Rose?”

  Rose shook her head.

  “Well,” he continued, “I thought maybe you had. You see, there’s this fellow I represented on a business deal—drew his will, too, I did—who’s been feuding with his missus, and this afternoon the big confrontation scene took place in my office. Armbruster, who’s representing the wife, is a nice quiet old guy, never had a fistfight in his life. He brings her to the office and my guy’s there because we figure we might patch it up. You see, there’re some kids involved.”

  Peter caught Rose looking at him.

  “It seems like everything was going to go peaceful when my fellow says something—it seemed unimportant—and the wife grabs the letter opener off my desk and throws it at him—missed, thank God—and Armbruster looks like he’s going to have a heart attack. And my guy picks up a paperweight, and I yell at him, ‘Put it down!’ The damn fool smashes it down on the glass top of my desk. Smithereens.”

  Peter got up. “Nice quiet profession, the law. Now why don’t we all just—”

  “Wait a sec,” interrupted Jack. “Haven’t finished. I’m going to add the cost of a new glass top to that guy’s bill. Not that the poor bastard’ll be able to pay, not in this jurisdiction. The husband always gets screwed by the judge more than he ever got screwed by his ex. Sure I handle divorces, Rose, got to. Hate ’em like every other lawyer. Why d’ja ask?”

  “Can’t we talk about something pleasant?” said Peter.

  “What makes you think advertising is pleasant?” said Jack, haw-hawing. “Mind if I pour myself another? Thanks.”

  The only sounds in the room: Jack’s steps to the bar, the clink of the ice, the Scotch pouring.

  “Two doubles is four,” said Amanda. She hadn’t disappeared after all.

  Jack had filled the glass too high and leaned down to take a slurp so that he could carry it “Three doubles is six,” he said. “You kids trying to play scoreboard? I tried to tell this guy most people can’t afford a divorce. It’s not just the trip to Mexico, it’s two apartments, double a lot of living expenses, and the husband gets socked for his wife’s legals as well as his own, and he’s up a tree and can’t pay. This fellow who was in this afte
rnoon, I know his business, and he sure as hell can’t pay—but mostly it’s the animus. If you think people are civilized, you haven’t seen them tangling in a divorce action.”

  “Okay, okay, Jack,” said Peter.

  “You can call me John, Peter, old boy,” said Jack, haw-hawing with the pleasure of attention. “You know, every time I settle a damn case where steam’s let off, I make a real big college try to get the adversaries to shake hands, and you know where it’s hardest? Divorces. They’ve been playing with each other’s breast, bum, and crotch, swallowing each other’s spit for years, and then won’t shake hands.”

  Amanda looked as if she might explode. “Jack, stop that talk!”

  “Okay,” said Jack. “Married people body around together, present company excepted. That okay, Amanda? Peter and Rosie must have gone to bed twice because those two kids upstairs looks like ’em, but we don’t have any damn kids, and that’s proof Amanda and I never go to bed.”

  He ended the speech inches from Amanda’s face. “How’s that, lover?”

  Amanda’s voice was barely audible. “That’s cruel, Jack,” she said.

  Jack took Amanda by the collar of her dress as if she were on display as a bad example. “I have my personal Legion of Decency right here,” he said.

  “Lay off, Jack,” said Peter.

  “Watch your language, Peter, old boy,” said Jack, enjoying himself and not noticing Rose coming up to him.

  “Aren’t there ever friendly divorces?” asked Rose, and Jack could see it was a sincere question, which worried him because the drinks had relaxed him enough to begin noticing other people, and he could see that Rose wasn’t being casual at all. He let go of Amanda’s collar.

  Peter could hear Jack’s voice shift gears. “Oh, some divorces are real quiet, but that’s usually when one of the parties skips. The only noise you get is a lot of complaining about what a bastard the vanished spouse is, but without the other spouse right there fighting back it’s a lullaby compared to usual. Your client tells you his side of the story over and over, and eventually you hear from the fled spouse’s lawyer. You pick up her official story. What neither of them tells you is what it’s like in bed together. But you always know.”