The Husband

by Sol Stein

  The “for a while” cracked the doctor up. “You nearly spoiled your plans. The mix you took wasn’t a temporary formula, Mr. Carmody.”

  “What about that electrocardiogram?”

  “Nothing to do with you. Nothing wrong with your heart. We’re doing a study at the hospital, you know, the relation between suicide and other factors. We’re checking on previous heart damage. You’d be surprised at the number of businessmen who’ve had heart attacks who try to commit suicide over something else later. God misses. They miss. Life goes on. Feeling better?”

  “Better than what?”

  “Okay, you’re feeling better. See you later,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of slashed wrists next door to talk to.” Peter reflected as to how inappropriate physical and mental medicine was to most ills of the human condition. How far more advanced were car mechanics, who could make a nonfunctioning car run and a poorly functioning car run better. White cap interrupted his reverie.

  “The doctor says you can see them.”

  “Them who?”

  “Three of them have been camping out there for some time.”

  Foolishly he tried to comb his hair with his hands and tidy the bed a bit, but he didn’t have the strength for it, really, and slumped back onto the pillow as the door opened once more and Elizabeth stood there as if she expected to see a corpse.

  In slow motion her expression loosened into a great smile, and she rushed across to the bed, holding his face, kissing his cheeks with an emotion he hadn’t known, a fierce, possessive, almost furious clutching at the fact of his life.

  Finally, when she raised her head, he said, “I smell like a hospital.”

  “It talks,” she said gratefully. “You don’t know how long we tried to get you to talk.”

  Behind her now he saw them, the most tentative, short creatures imaginable, boy and girl. Margaret took timid little steps toward him.

  “Take a giant step,” Peter said, and Margaret rushed to his bedside and he took her hand, squeezing it. Should he take Jon’s hand, too? He looked at the boy’s face. It was a boy’s face, not a man’s now, inexperienced, inefficient in dealing with matters of life and death. He held out his left hand for Jon, and they sort of shook.

  “Hello, kids,” he said, afraid for a moment to say more. Did they know why he was here? They must. What an example, finking out of life!

  “I’m sorry,” he said. They clearly didn’t know about what. “How did you get here?”

  Jonathan beamed. “In a limousine.”

  “The driver,” Margaret exclaimed, “has a uniform. He’s very handsome.”

  “All Paul’s doing,” said Elizabeth. “He phoned Rose. He told her he’d send for the kids and return them.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Just the chauffeur. The hospital said only immediate family for now. And me.”

  “And you,” said Peter.

  “They asked me if I was fourteen,” said Margaret.

  “What did you say?”

  “I lied,” said Margaret, twinkling.

  “I said I was fifteen,” said Jonathan. “I don’t know if the nurse believed me, but she let us in.”

  “That’s a nice nurse.”

  “Look what the man in the car had,” said Jonathan. He unrolled a giant-sized get-well card, held it high so Peter could see the flourishes of ten or twelve people from the office, including Paul’s.

  “The children have something of their own,” said Elizabeth, stepping aside.

  Margaret produced a Hallmark card with a fever chart on the front. Peter opened it slowly. Inside she had written: Don’t ever go away. I love you. Margaret.

  He knew she meant, Don’t leave this life, and not, Don’t leave this house.

  Jon sidled up to the bed. “I’m not good at mush, Dad,” he said. His card showed a man in a hospital bed, both arms and both legs in casts suspended by pulleys from the ceiling. The printed caption said, “How was the skiing?”

  Inside Jon had written simply: Dear Dad, Jon.

  “Thank you,” Peter said. He looked at his universe—Elizabeth, Margaret, Jonathan—and thought, what would his heart do now to that mad needle on the electrocardiogram?

  They talked inconsequentialities for a few minutes and then the nurse ushered them out, promising them all a chance for a visit soon again and leaving him, the door closed, alone with his life.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Paul had clasped Elizabeth’s hand and Peter’s hand in his own as if giving them his blessing, which in fact he was: a week’s paid license to go off together while Peter “convalesced.”

  As they waited for their rented convertible, Elizabeth said, “Paul has a lot of guts.”

  Peter looked at her quizzically.

  “I mean, taking you back, loss of face, giving you this week, and—”

  “And?”

  “Adding me to the package on no basis he could rationalize from a business point of view. He’s a nice man.”

  “He’s celebrating, too.”

  “Celebrating what?”

  “His relief. He must have blamed himself mightily, if I know Paul.”

  “You’re being cynical, Peter.”

  “Just truthful.”

  She thought it best to let the subject end.

  One of the nice things about renting a car, thought Peter, was the surprise of its color.

  He threw their two bags in the back seat and slid in beside Elizabeth. “It’s a hen’s-egg blue,” he said.

  “Hens’ eggs aren’t blue.”

  “If they were, they’d be this color.”

  He checked the mileage. Not too bad. One of the tricky things about rented cars was the chance of finding five years’ worth of mileage on a current year’s car. The attendant was watching as Peter checked the front ashtray. It was clean. The attendant smiled. Peter checked the back ashtray. It was full up. The attendant lost his smile and hurried to empty it.

  “Never mind,” said Peter. He gave the attendant a quarter, put the car into gear, and they were off.

  It was past the morning rush hour, and getting out of the city was easy. They were silent with their thoughts all the way up the East River Drive and onto the Hutchinson River Parkway. When they reached the Connecticut Turnpike, Peter broke the silence. “That’s better,” he said, accelerating to sixty.

  He had quickly become accustomed to the car, found its rhythm, and had to control the impulse to let her rip faster than the speed signs cautioned. It was a boyish way to feel. Boyish, he thought, was a good feeling.

  They made the Crabtree Inn a little after one. Peter was beginning to feel the first rumblings of hunger, which pleased him; he had lost six pounds during his week in the hospital.

  The red-uniformed colored man escorted them to the bar, which was very nearly empty, presented the elaborate menu, took their order for martinis, and returned with their drinks before they had studied the appetizers.

  “Take your time,” he said, and they did, savoring each elaborately handwritten item as if they were pretasting it.

  Elizabeth decided on lobster bisque to start with, and Peter ordered the avocado stuffed with shrimp.

  “If you want shrimp,” she said, “order shrimp. If you want avocado, order it neat. The combination is pointless.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said to Elizabeth. Then to the waiter, “I’ll have the avocado plain, with a wedge of lemon on the side.”

  If you didn’t let your pride get involved, learning could be an added pleasantness.

  She ordered the chicken curry and a salad. He decided on the beef, medium rare.

  “Baked potato?” asked the waiter.

  “Go ahead,” said Elizabeth.

  “Okay.” He smiled.

  “Sour cream and chives with your potato, sir?”

  He considered a moment.

  “Just butter, thanks. Then he added, “Could we get some of your famous popovers?”

  “You get them if you asks for them or not,�
�� said the waiter.

  All three of them laughed gently.

  Peter could feel the mild effect of the martini coursing through the length of his arms and legs, stirring his appetite. The martini glasses had been prechilled. He liked that.

  “I think everybody ought to go to the hospital once in a while, just to lie and think.”

  “What have you been thinking?” asked Elizabeth.

  “About you, me, the kids, life, love, work.”

  “No war and peace?”

  “Not a thought,” he said. “It was all very personal.”

  “Go on,” she said, treasuring the measured pace of their conversation, the laxity that seemed so natural and easy in contrast to the jangled tempo of their recent lives.

  “I’ve come up with a kind of personal order of battle. The sides change, relationships change. What doesn’t change is that you’re stuck with yourself .”

  “Sounds like a simplistic version of psychotherapy.”

  “Madame,” he said, leaning across the table toward her, “history is littered with wise men rediscovering the obvious.”

  “Wise on.”

  “So, first is you. Meaning me. One comes to terms with oneself, and all that bullshit. But then life gets complicated. You can’t do it yourself, ‘it’ standing for practically anything, even fighting. Your universe enlarges to include one other person, preferably one you can do a lot of things with, like talk to, fornicate with, fight, like choosing up sides, you and me being one side and the rest of the world the other. In union there is strength, provided the union is small—preferably two. Bigger unions lead to chauvinism, price fixing, monopoly, featherbedding, wanting to get paid for the six minutes it takes you to wash your hands slowly at the end of a day. The biggest union I’ll go for is the tribe, but I’m afraid the space age has severely limited the scope of tribalism. Hence, I’m back to the union of two. Solve your own problem.”

  “Plural.”

  “Okay, solve your own problems. Find a mate you like to mate with, with all that implies. Everything else is as inflated as the United Nations.”

  “You’d de-politicalize the world.”

  “You have no idea how political, how hung up in power politics a simple twosome can get.”

  “And if the twosome isn’t simple—”

  “You follow me.”

  “I follow you, massa.”

  “You’re the best-looking gun bearer I’ve ever had.”

  “Bear your own gun.”

  “You’re the best-looking ammunition bearer I’ve ever had.”

  “Metaphor complete. Cut.”

  He put salt on the avocado, squeezed the lemon over it, savored a spoonful. She was right. If you’re eating avocado, don’t muck it up. He saluted her with the spoon.

  “How’s the bisque?”

  She tried a spoonful from the far side of the bowl. “Too hot to taste.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Your priorities,” said Elizabeth, “don’t give much weight to hearth and home.”

  “Heart and home,” he corrected her. “They do. Home is where one feels most comfortable. Right now my home is portable. Where we are. There’s no place yet, no fixed place. Your apartment isn’t our apartment. My hole in the wall isn’t anyone’s. But I don’t feel homeless. Just houseless,” he added, and she had to laugh.

  “As for the kids, let’s skip ahead. It’s conceivable, not probable but conceivable, that three or four or five years from now, they might feel more comfortable with you than with either Rose or myself, even if they lived with Rose.”

  Elizabeth started to protest.

  “No.” He held up a hand. “I didn’t mean you’d get custody in any sense. I mean kids pick their own crowd and their own people. After a time, inevitably, girls have problems with Mom, boys have problems with Dad—Freud itemized all that—so they pick more comfortable surrogates: a Dutch uncle, a teacher, a friend. Could be you. Get the point? Parents’ relationship with children is very temporary.”

  He knew she was going to take exception.

  “Sure there are exceptions,” he headed her off, “but don’t they come later, when the kids are no longer kids, when they fix up with the original father or mother as they would with a friend, a voluntary venture after the stress and strain is over?”

  “You and Mao. He puts the kids in twenty-four-hour kindergartens, and you put them in left field.”

  “No!” Peter lowered his voice. That “no” had been louder than he had intended. “What I mean is, I’m not discarding families, I’m just trying to stop lying about the relationships. It’s the one-two relationship, man and woman, that lasts if it works. Even in the best-managed families, when the kids are in adolescence, the one-two relationship is the only one that goes along as before. After the formative years, the kids are subject to as much guidance as the family dog. Or a friend. Or an employee. Yet look at the millions of bad, nonworking one-two relationships that are kept going because of a false notion of what’s good for the kids. It’s the most persistent middle-class delusion of them all.”

  “There’s another.”

  “Oh?”

  “I sometimes read the women’s magazines.”

  “Shame on you,” he said.

  “Have to. Part of the job.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “If you believe the women’s magazines, divorces happen because the husband is a drunk—”

  “Or the wife.”

  “Either way. Or the husband beats her. Or one or the other is unfaithful.”

  “Or both.”

  “They skip the biggest reason of all.”

  “Let me guess.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “Okay.”

  “Boredom.”

  “You have used that week in the hospital.”

  “Elf, I knew that one before the hospital. Every time I had a first-rate quarrel with Rose, it was over nothing. Nothing important, except the unholy boredom of our so-called lives. Boredom is the opposite of living. People want to live while they’re alive.”

  “Try saying that in a women’s magazine. The editor would get stomped to death.”

  “That’s what I was getting at,” said Peter. “To hide the truth, you turn on the myth-making machine. You make up a myth about people sticking it out for the sake of the kids. And if you find people getting divorces anyway, you change your pitch. You say okay, you divorce the wife, but you don’t divorce the children.”

  “You’re worried that in some sense you do.”

  “Sure, I’m uneasy about it. But it’s beginning to dawn on me that as kids get into adolescence, they’re in the process of getting their own divorces. In fact, that kind of divorce is indispensable for them, if they’re going to grow up and become independent.”

  “What about young kids—three, four, five, six?”

  “Haven’t worked that out yet. Anyway, Maggie and Jon are both past that, thank heaven.”

  “You make it sound easier than it is.”

  “It’s not easy, the law being what it is.” Peter felt anger tumbling him again. “What the hell do the law, lawyers, judges—the courts are full of bored husbands serving boring time on the bench in court as well as in bed at home—what the hell has the law anywhere ever done to make marriage work?”

  “Easy now,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “The law is a fink. It’s got no more to do with justice than barbers had to do with surgery.”

  Peter and Elizabeth discovered themselves holding hands across the table and instantly withdrew them.

  They had chocolate mousse for dessert and espresso afterward. Peter treated himself to a Jamaican cigar. It was after three o’clock. It had been a long, good lunch. He was glad they had talked.

  “I guess we’d better make time,” he said after a while.

  “Finish your cigar,” said Elizabeth. “There’s no hurry. I told Barbara we’d get there Tuesday or Wednesday, that we were just sort of meandering
up to New Hampshire, not breaking speed records. She said just to call a couple of hours before we got there so she could get the comic books off the living room floor.”

  Peter had almost forgotten that as a kind of New England beacon for their trip, Elizabeth had picked Barbara Estensorro, her best friend at Barnard, who had remained rich and single till she was twenty-eight and then married Fernando Estensorro, a Cuban sculptor of, as Elizabeth had put it, “famous people’s heads, the Karsh of clay.” They lived in elegant isolation near Keene, New Hampshire. Elizabeth and Barbara had kept in touch via Christmas and birthday letters and on Barbara’s infrequent dress-buying sprees in New York. Elizabeth had had a standing invitation to come up ever since Barbara’s marriage, and now, Peter in hand, was making her first visit.

  “Why don’t we camp here for the night?” said Elizabeth on a whim. “They have tourist rooms upstairs.”

  “It’s only three-thirty.”

  “We could loll around, take a walk, take it easy. Wasn’t that what we agreed to do? If you get bored with me, you’ve got half a dozen paperbacks in the suitcase.”

  “I’ll let you know when I’m bored with you,” he said.

  That early in the day there was no problem about a room. They got the hostelry’s best, what had obviously been the master bedroom when the inn was a private mansion. For $22 the night they got a huge bedroom, complete with match-ready fireplace, a pink-and black-tiled bathroom, plus a kind of anteroom, furnished in fake antique. It wasn’t until their hostess left that Elizabeth noticed the mirrored ceiling in the bedroom.

  “What the hell is that?” she exclaimed.

  “Probably a vestige of the original owner,” said Peter, “or installed by the innkeeper for the entertainment of his guests.”

  “Do you think it’s a one-way mirror and they watch?” she asked.

  If it was, thought Peter, what a perfect setup for Paul.

  He stood up on the bed and looked at the edge of the mirror. “Safe,” was his verdict.

  “I still don’t like the idea.”

  “You could always ask her to change the room. You could say, ‘Madame,’”—Peter fixed a falsetto in his voice—‘my lady objects to the mirrored ceiling.’”

  He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the bed. “I’ve never seen myself from this angle,” he said.