The Husband

by Sol Stein

  “How do you look?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Long.”

  She lay down next to him. “I look long, too.” They laughed, Elizabeth’s laugh stopping only when his mouth found hers. Perhaps because it surprised them both, it was the most exciting kiss they had experienced.

  Both windows looked out on evergreens. A squirrel skittered along a branch. Elizabeth closed the blinds before undressing. In the nude, she looked exquisite.

  “That squirrel is missing something,” said Peter, finding his voice as he rose from the bed and kissed Elizabeth again. Then he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed.

  “Don’t move,” he said and undressed himself without taking his eyes off her.

  With the blinds drawn, the room was quite dark.

  “Light the fire,” said Elizabeth.

  “Later,” he said.

  *

  They must have slept for several hours afterward. When Peter awoke, the fire was roaring. Elizabeth was in his arms, wide awake. His upward glance caught the flickering image of the lovers in the ceiling mirror.

  “Hello,” he said to her.

  “Hello,” she answered.

  “Thanks for lighting the fire,” he said.

  They stayed silent with their thoughts until the sound of cars signaled that people were arriving for dinner at the inn below.

  “Shall we?” said Elizabeth.

  “We shall,” he echoed.

  Peter hadn’t worn an ascot in years, but he had put one in the suitcase and now put it on.

  “I’d like to have a picture of you stark naked and in an ascot,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Got it,” the living camera said, blinking both eyes simultaneously.

  Peter had a burnt-orange shirt to go with the blue ascot, gray flannel trousers and a conventional blue blazer.

  Elizabeth said, “I’m afraid all I’ve got is a dress.”

  When they first met, Peter had been somewhat puzzled by Elizabeth’s attitude toward dress. She regarded it as unimportant as long as it passed certain minimum standards of taste and warmth, the way some people fed themselves to squash hunger till the next meal. At least that was the posture. But Peter had observed that Elizabeth usually dressed extremely well, simply, tastefully, even colorfully, with one difference from the many women he had observed. It was the total image Elizabeth went for, rather than the dress or the hat (Elizabeth never wore hats) dominating. Her consumption of clothes was not conspicuous; the effect was fine.

  The dress she put on now was really an elongated blouse, crisp cotton in what Peter thought of as a dark, quiet red, wine but clear, not a trace of lavender. She added her restrung pearls, and that was all.

  In the dining room, the dozen or so people turned to look at them. Peter wondered why for a moment, and then realized that they had not come in the outside door but down the stairs. Elizabeth was not wearing a ring. Perhaps she would never choose to wear a ring, even if married.

  Did it matter? It mattered to the police. One shouldn’t be guided by the preferences of the police.

  After the splendid dinner, they walked in the night air, pursuing what paths they could find by the moon’s light until they came to a rivulet which might have been a brook in another season. Elizabeth picked up a small, polished stone and dropped it in. Peter picked up another stone and dropped it in also.

  “We must come back to find those stones one day,” she said, gathering her skirt a bit as she found the trail back, knowing that Peter was watching her every movement.

  Inside, the diners had left, dishes had been cleared, and a few of the tables had been set for breakfast. The place had settled in a hush that seemed premature for city people at ten o’clock, but the peaceful lethargy in their limbs after the walk bade them climb the stairs. In the upstairs hall they heard voices from two of the rooms, meaning overnight guests, found their own, with the bed they had left rumpled now neatly turned down. They made love in the quietest way and were soon asleep.

  * * *

  They stopped for lunch the next day at a Howard Johnson’s about a hundred miles from Keene because Elizabeth felt in the mood for their special version of fried clams. After lunch, she phoned Barbara and returned to the table with a puzzled expression.

  “No go?” he asked.

  “Oh, she’s expecting us, and everything she said was fine, in fact excessive, but I felt a weird apprehension in her voice. I hope she and Fernando are getting on.”

  “You may have caught her in the middle of dishes.”

  “Of course.” She tried to put omens out of her mind.

  When they crossed the Massachusetts-New Hampshire line, Peter made a crack about the Mann Act.

  He got no response.

  “Doesn’t it bother you, crossing a state line for immoral purposes?”

  Still no answer. He wondered what Barbara might have said to bring on Elizabeth’s silence.

  The road map indicated they had to go through Keene and then head east. Halfway to Peterborough, a small road north brought them to the unpaved lane marked “Estensorro Private.” Peter wondered what they did in heavy snows. The road wound through the trees on a path that seemed as much up as away, and it was nearly a quarter of a mile before a clearing burst before them and they saw the house a hundred yards ahead. They had to park their car in the clearing. Suitcases in hand, they climbed the smooth stone steps set in the hillside. Halfway up to the house they saw Fernando clambering down to meet them.

  Peter was struck by how handsome Fernando was, despite his thick beard, a cigar butt clamped in his teeth, and the baggy green overalls he was wearing.

  “Let me help,” he said as they exchanged greetings. “I was in the studio when I heard your car.”

  Fernando took Elizabeth’s suitcase and offered to take Peter’s as well, but Peter indicated he could manage.

  “Where do you keep your car?” he asked. “Surely not up the hill.”

  Fernando gave a sly wink and pointed. Near the clearing, a small area had been bulldozed into the trees, but most of the trees there had not been cleared, their branches forming a kind of car-length shelter.

  “Keeps most of the snow off,” he explained. “Building a garage down here seems kind of pointless. Difficult to heat. This way, at least I don’t have to scrape a foot of snow off a dozen times a winter. In snow season, I back in and keep a dozer blade on the front so I can make a path here in the clearing and down the road. Takes two hours. Good thing I don’t commute to a job. Last year, January I guess, I didn’t even try for the first couple of days, snow was so high.”

  Fernando seemed exuberant and, Peter noted, wasn’t winded at all at the top of the climb, though Peter felt the full weight of his suitcase and was puffing mightily.

  “It takes getting used to, I guess,” said Peter.

  “Sit-ups,” said Fernando. “Eighty sit-ups, twenty-five push-ups, three minutes’ chinning at a bar every morning.”

  Elizabeth flicked a look at Peter. He couldn’t make out whether she was scoffing at Fernando’s physical fitness program or reprimanding Peter for not doing the same.

  Barbara was at the door, wiping her hands on an over-long print apron, her dark blond hair gathered in the back, a pioneer woman. She and Elizabeth kissed, Peter was introduced, and Barbara stared in the most conspicuous way. She started at his face and wended her way downward, taking him in a square foot at a time and then the whole of him. He expected her to say, “So you’re Peter.”

  “Come in to the fire,” she said. “Tea won’t be a moment.”

  They settled themselves in chairs, Peter picking a rocker.

  “Can I get you anything else?” asked Barbara, serving the tea.

  “Nothing, nothing,” emphasized Elizabeth. “Had a good lunch. Let me look at you. You haven’t changed.”

  Barbara blushed. “Older,” she said.

  “All of us,” said Elizabeth.

  “Elizabeth is a great relie
f to Barbara,” said Fernando. “Barbara was twenty-eight before she married, the last in her class, except for Elizabeth. So Elizabeth is her saving grace.”

  Tactless, thought Peter, but he soon saw that the matter was an old one between the three of them, or at least between Barbara and Elizabeth.

  “You’re married,” said Fernando to Peter.

  “Yes,” said Peter. “A boy almost fourteen and a girl almost thirteen.”

  “Ours is in boarding school,” Barbara said apologetically. She showed a picture of a little dark-haired, unsmiling boy who seemed much too young for boarding school. “It’s a special school,” said Barbara. “He has an emotional problem.” Fernando silenced her with a look.

  Peter looked around. Elizabeth had spoken of the place as a “cabin in the woods,” but it was far from that—a modern, large house on two levels, the rustic quality apparent only in some of the many antiques. He wondered if Barbara’s inheritance or Fernando’s sculpture had paid the way.

  “Can I see your studio?” he asked.

  Fernando was pleased. Elizabeth wanted to join them, but Barbara insisted on Elizabeth keeping her company. Soon the two of them were swept away in a babble of gossip about school friends and who was where with whom.

  Through the kitchen a door led to an unheated, covered-bridge passageway to the studio. “This is recent,” said Fernando about the passageway. “I used to find the twenty feet outdoors used to take away twenty minutes of warm-up time once I was in the studio.”

  The walls and ceiling of the studio seemed mostly glass. Peter noticed the glass was thermopane, which must have cost a packet. In one corner, there was a table littered with sketches, an electric coffee maker, cups; near the table, a couch with throw pillows. The rest of the room was devoted to platforms of various sizes, pedestals, and busts. Most of the faces were familiar and had one thing in common: the people had been in the news in recent years. Fernando’s style, a rough, masculine quality, was common to them all, even to the busts of Maria Callas and Julie Christie. A strange collection. “If I were a cartoonist,” Fernando explained, “I would draw every day the people of the day before. As a sculptor, I have a longer lead time. Fame animates me—unlike most artists, not my fame, but the fame of my subjects.”

  It sounded reasonable. The array of newsworthy busts just looked so peculiar. Stravinsky, General Lucius Clay, U Thant, Hubert Humphrey.

  “Do you work from life?” Peter asked, sorry he had asked it.

  “Oh, no, hardly ever. I find living models distracting. Besides, few would come here, and I like working in isolation, even from my subjects. These people, their photographs, are everywhere, and what I do—I have a darkroom in the main house—is make a composite, or rather a series of composites”—he showed several—“giving me the perspectives I need. I’ve never had complaints from purchasers, subjects, museums. Actually, the greatest market, from a dollar viewpoint, that is, is the reproductions. I get a royalty, just as an author would from a book—a book is a reproduction, is it not?—and people seem to want the likenesses of famous people around them. A photograph is too much—for an adult—but a sculpture, ah, that is art and the person, too. How is it in advertising?” he asked. “Do you find the work creative?”

  “It’s a reasonably unpleasant way of making a large living, I suppose,” said Peter.

  Fernando laughed.

  “Surely you would not occupy your life in something unpleasant?”

  “Well, no more unpleasant than a teacher supervising undisciplined children resentful of being in school, or writing for a magazine which finds its way into the trash can each subsequent month, or working in a foundation that gives away its money without perceptible effect.”

  Fernando laughed again.

  “Actually,” continued Peter, “the trick in advertising is to get enough power, to be enough use to someone, your client or your company, to have your own way about some things. I try to confine the ads I write to products about which I can tell the approximate truth. What I mean is—and this is hard for someone outside the field to understand—what I do is to describe the benefits or advantages of a product that really has some benefits and advantages. Some of our art directors—this will interest you—are actually quite talented painters, quite not being enough for a career in art. And so they use their skills, sometimes, I think, to the client’s disadvantage. That is, they may design an ad that calls attention to its artfulness, attention that should be focused on, forgive me, the message.”

  “You are very frank,” Fernando said, saluting.

  “Frankness deserves frankness,” said Peter, returning the salute.

  They went back to the women.

  “I have never sculpted an advertising man,” said Fernando in the passageway.

  “It is an anonymous profession,” said Peter. “No one the public would know about.”

  “Ogilvy?” asked Fernando.

  “What museum—or person—would want a statue of Ogilvy?”

  They were laughing as they entered the living room, where the women were having a high time of it.

  “We’ve been wallowing in gossip,” said Elizabeth, pecking Peter on the cheek.

  Peter noticed copies of Partisan Review and Commentary on the coffee table. “Are you going to do Podhoretz?” he asked Fernando.

  “When he makes enough money to buy the original,” said Fernando.

  Elizabeth joined their laughter, though Barbara remained conspicuously silent. Perhaps she didn’t know who Podhoretz was…. That phone call from Howard Johnson’s—why had it made Elizabeth apprehensive?

  Fernando served the largest drinks he had ever seen anywhere, twelve-ounce tumblers filled to the brim with ice and Scotch.

  “Salud!” he commanded.

  They clinked glasses several times before all four of them managed to touch glasses at the same time.

  Fernando unzipped a guitar cover, produced a magnificent instrument, and proceeded to sing several Spanish songs with a fair voice and remarkable verve. Elizabeth listened with fascination. Peter found it hard to keep his eyes away from Barbara. She seemed to be—he didn’t know why he thought so, but he was certain—counting the minutes. Why? Were they unwelcome? Did she want them to leave? They had planned to stay the night.

  “You are staying the night?” she said, as if reading his thoughts.

  “Oh, yes,” Elizabeth assured her.

  Perhaps it was the music, or the weariness of travel, but Peter found the drink going fast and its effect taking hold even faster. He wanted to caution Elizabeth, who was drinking right along with them all.

  “A small one,” he said when Fernando offered a refill. The small ones turned out to be half-high in the glass, six ounces of ice and liquor. Peter took one sip and put the glass an arm’s length away on the table beside the rocking chair so that he would not be picking up the glass unconsciously.

  After a time, Elizabeth got to her feet a bit woozily. “Wow,” she said, “that was a drink. I think I’ll go lie down a bit. May I? Then I’ll put on some slacks and a sweater and settle down for the evening.”

  “Sure,” said Fernando. “I’ll show you the guest room. Your bags are up there.”

  Which left Barbara and Peter alone for the first time. She brightened considerably.

  “Elizabeth has told me a great deal about you,” she said. “Of course, she had written before, but very discreetly. I’m so glad for her. She’s the last unmarried in our class. Can you believe I was a virgin when I married?”

  The assertion startled Peter.

  “I’ve reached the point in life,” he said casually, “where I can believe anything.”

  “It’s very difficult for a girl with a great deal of money,” she said. “When a boy makes a pass at you, you never know if it’s you or the money. I thought I was frigid.”

  Peter looked at her face closely.

  “Fernando changed all that,” she said as he descended the stairs.

  “Changed wh
at?” he said, ready to refill the glasses again.

  “Oh, never mind,” she said, getting to her feet. “Peter, how about me showing you the grounds before it’s completely dark? Out back there’s a magnificent view if you go a hundred feet farther up. I wish we’d built the house higher.”

  “Perhaps,” said Peter, looking at Fernando. “Actually,” he said, putting his hand over his glass at the proffered bottle, “I’m as high as I ought to be.”

  “Go ahead, go ahead,” volunteered Fernando. “I’ve got a drink to go, and I can fix the salad in the meantime.”

  There was a high color in Barbara’s face. “Fernando fixed the chili. He’s really the brilliant cook in the family.”

  Peter labored up the trail after Barbara. She waited for him at the top.

  “Look there,” she said. The view was indeed breathtaking.

  When he turned, her face was closer to his than he had expected. Was it the drink?

  “Do you enjoy sex?” she asked.

  Surprise caught any answer he might have given.

  “I mean with Elizabeth.”

  He didn’t know what he could say except, “Yes.”

  “Good,” she said, taking his hand. She led him farther along the path until their view was again obscured. Down below, the house now seemed far away. Even the smoke from the chimney seemed an altitude below.

  Peter realized that Barbara had taken his hand. “Just a bit farther,” she said.

  Where the trail seemed to end, there was a kind of lean-to. He searched for the view and found none.

  “Not through the foliage,” she said. “You have to look through the tree trunks, like this.”

  She lowered herself into the lean-to and motioned to him. He sat down beside her, realizing that his stiffness was unnatural. When his head was close to hers, however, he did see the view. Despite the gathering darkness, he could see the whole distance of the valley below, as if looking under the trees.

  “That’s Massachusetts,” she said.

  It was planned this way, he thought.

  Barbara rested her head against his shoulder. And as she did so, her hand rested on his leg.