Desperate Husbands

by Richard Glover

  Six days into our first brew, and by God I need a beer.

  Better than sex

  The way some of my friends talk about food, you’d think it was better than sex. Most of them have long ago stopped buying Playboy and Penthouse; instead they subscribe to Gourmet Traveller and Delicious. Apparently, they sit up in bed with their partners, reading these magazines, pointing out the weird new techniques and having a good hard look at the pictures. Sometimes, staring at a photo of Stephanie Alexander’s lamb roast, they lean close to their partner and whisper in her ear, ‘Darling, we really should try this one day—look what she’s done with the garlic cloves.’

  Some of them have Jamie Oliver videos hidden near the telly; recipes by Neil Perry in the bedroom drawer ready for ‘perusal’; and catalogues from The Essential Ingredient and Cook’s Paradise featuring all the weirdest gear. Brushes. Grill racks. French ovens. The government should forget the internet and start regulating this lot.

  Still, if the Penthouse generation is now buying Delicious and Gourmet Traveller, then these magazines should at least face reality. Maybe a letters column would help.

  Dear Foodhouse,

  I’ve never written to a magazine before, but what happened last night was really amazing. I’d pulled out some chops from the freezer to cook for my partner when she came home from work, but what a surprise she had for me. I knew I was in for something special when I saw the delicatessen bag on her arm, swaying from side to side, the light catching the David Jones Foodhall logo. Up the steps she came. I was right to be excited. She’d bought saffron-infused calamari for two. I cooked, we both ate, I had a cigarette and fell into a blissful slumber.

  When we woke up, she talked about inviting her friend Sandra over next time—that way we could do it all again but this time together. I counselled against. Less calamari for me.

  Blissful, New Farm, Qld

  Dear Foodhouse,

  I’m a thirty-year-old account manager for a city advertising firm. Until last month I’d never discussed home cooking with anyone other than my husband, but all that stopped when I met Philip, a young graphic artist working at our agency. It started when he mentioned a recipe for veal. I went home that night and tried it with my husband. He loved it. Now almost every day Philip comes by my desk and mentions a new recipe. He’ll tell me the ingredients and method, then describe what the experience of eating will be like. Oh, the words he uses! The vegetables glistening and firm. The meat succulent. The stuffed aubergine exploding, the contents errupting from the case.

  Each night I cook the dish but the experience of eating it is never quite as good as hearing Philip’s description. I’m left curiously flat, out of sorts with both myself and my husband. This leaves me hungry for the next day when I know Philip will come past once again. Today, he’s describing a Mussel and Fish Soup from Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. I can’t wait.

  On Edge, Leichhardt, NSW

  Dear Foodhouse,

  Just the other week I came home to discover my husband watching another cooking video. When we were first married he only had a couple of these. Now he’s got a whole drawer full. It’s making me embarrassed to cook, as my dishes never look as good as the ones in the videos. What’s worse is my husband is now pressuring me to copy some of the techniques he’s seen on screen. It’s not that I mind doing the Jamie Oliver recipes, but I’m uncomfortable talking in the cockney accent when serving up. Is it just me, or should I say no?

  Worried, Ringwood, Vic

  Yes, these magazines represent a disgraceful world of unbridled emotions. But some people have turned away from both sex and food in order to embrace an even darker passion. Sleep, friends constantly tell me, is the new sex. They just can’t get enough of it. So why isn’t there a dedicated magazine?

  Dear Sleephouse,

  I want to tell you about an experience my wife and I have every Sunday night. At about 8.30 we start watching the latest bonnet drama on the ABC, but within about half an hour we are both at it—fast asleep in our armchairs. Naturally, we have a normal married life, sleeping in a conventional bed; but there’s something so special about these Sunday night sessions. Maybe it’s doing it in a chair. Maybe it’s the way it’s so spontaneous. Maybe it’s the sense of abandon, as you give yourself over to the intense desire to sleep. I don’t know, but we both agree it’s satisfying like no other sleep.

  Mr Sleepy-Head, Norwood, SA

  Dear Sleephouse,

  I know jealousy is a curse but I want to tell you about my husband, Tom. He travels to work by train, an hour and a half each way, and I’m convinced he’s getting some sleep when I’m not around. I’ve got two children and a busy job closer to home; by 5 p.m. all hell is breaking loose. I’m supervising the homework, getting dinner ready and sorting out my own work stuff. Imagine my surprise when a neighbour told me that he saw Tom on the train—catching up on sleep, as brazen as anything. I think a marriage is a partnership, and I don’t like the idea of Tom getting his bit of sleep on the side. I’ve put my allegations to Tom, but he denies everything—saying he just had ‘his eyes closed, while he thought through some office work’. I think he’s lying but how can I be sure?

  Suspicious, Blackheath, NSW

  Dear Sleephouse,

  I keep fantasising about the sorts of sleeps I used to have when I was a young man, when I was aged sixteen and seventeen, sleeps that used to just go on and on and on, maybe for ten or eleven hours in a row. These days I can’t even manage four hours of consecutive sleep; I’m always waking up and padding up the hall to go to the loo. It wasn’t like that when I was a young fella! I used to do it everywhere—on the lounge, in an empty bathtub, even, on one memorable occasion, on a trampoline in a girlfriend’s backyard. Today these are just memories, but when I wake up in the middle of the night I let my mind drift back to those times and sometimes I get sleepy all over again.

  Dreamer, Subiaco, WA

  Even weirder are those middle-aged men who are into neither sleep nor food. They have their own passions. The passions of the middle-aged bloke. If everyone else is to get a glossy publication, they shouldn’t miss out.

  Dear Blokehouse,

  I’ve never written to a magazine before, but I wanted to tell you about an experience I had recently, going away for the weekend with two other couples. When we arrived, we set up the tents and started drinking—the men with beer, the women downing cans of rum and coke. By about ten o’clock we were all quite smashed and the women put on some really funky music for dancing. It was then I noticed that my Esky was a lot better packed than the Eskys brought by the other guys. The beers and ready-mixes were still really cold coming out of my Esky, something that couldn’t be said for the others.

  Partly it’s the way I pack it, but also the way I insist no one opens the lid for long. I always jump up and yell ‘Shut the lid!’ if anyone even walks close to my Esky. Plus, I have a rule about people helping themselves to drinks—something I usually police with some vigour. While the others danced and occasionally made out with each other, I kept an eye on the Esky and was well rewarded. By the next morning my frozen orange juice packs were still rock hard. It was certainly a night to remember.

  Mr Cool, Darwin, NT

  Desirable

  The Fabulon would

  communicate directly with

  the primitive parts of the

  woman’s brain. Once alone

  with her man, she’d find

  herself rashly removing her

  clothes, throwing them

  dramatically in the corner,

  before begging the bloke, in

  her throatiest voice, to

  gently launder them all.

  A message from SexyBoy

  Jocasta is standing outside our bedroom door mocking me. I’m on the phone in the hallway, leaving a voicemail message. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Remember to put that book in your bag.’ And then: ‘Bye now.’ It’s a simple enough message, but I find my voice has gone all t
ender and sultry. The ‘Bye now’ is intimate, almost caressing.

  That’s why Jocasta is laughing. The message is to myself; I’m leaving it on my work voicemail. Jocasta says the man on the other end of the line must be called SexyBoy, since I’m talking to him as if I’m deeply in love. I hang up and she comes up full of tender concern. ‘How was SexyBoy tonight?’ she asks. ‘Is he well? I know you two care a lot for each other.’

  Fair cop, I suppose, but what tone of voice are you meant to use when addressing yourself on your own voicemail? Businesslike? ‘Put that book in that bag and don’t forget.’ Brusque? ‘Book, Bag, Bye.’ Or emotional? ‘I’ve rung again because you’re the only one who understands me. Please help by putting that book in your bag.’

  Other questions crowd in. Should you say hello when it’s you on the other end of the line? And how do you sign off? Hanging up on yourself seems dysfunctional; and yet saying ‘See you later’ suggests a touch of Sybil.

  There’s a similar dilemma once I get to work. I park my car and head for the stairs. When you emerge at the bottom, there’s a large panel of mirrored glass. It’s your last chance, having rushed to get to work, to check if you’ve remembered to put on your pants. Yet I know it’s a two-way mirror, and the man inside the ticket booth is on the other side. He watches as each person steps from the stairs and he sees them flash the mirrored self a look of either admiration or despair.

  I imagine his mordant commentary. ‘You’re not that good, champ.’ Or ‘I agree, love. The stretch top was a mistake.’

  I know he does this because we had the same sort of panel in my father’s newsagency. I spent much of my adolescence stacking papers in the back room and, when I looked up at the panel, I would see people staring fixedly at themselves. We had a display of maps just above the mirror and they’d pretend that’s where they were focusing. Every day a score of people were absolutely engrossed in the map of Braidwood and Area 1:100,000. Their heads were tilted up towards the maps; but their eyes were angled down. A few, the younger ones, looked like they had just spotted their own SexyBoy or SexyGirl. They gazed at themselves with bedroom eyes. ‘Absolutely gorgeous,’ they were saying inwardly, the thought bubble pulsating into the shape of a heart. Most, though, just stared into the mirror with a sort of grim sigh, the way that you might look at a dog which had badly let you down.

  I have the same problem at the car park. I want to look but I don’t want to be caught. I pretend I’m staring at the glass itself rather than my reflection. Just as people in shopping centres pretend they are looking at the window display when, in fact, they’re checking out themselves. I’m hoping the guy will assume I’m an expert in German mirrored glass and am trying to figure the precise origin of the stuff he has fitted. Meanwhile, I rapidly tick off my preparations for the day. My tie is on. I have remembered to rinse the shampoo from my hair. I have pants on.

  I trudge down the road and into the lift at work. I wait to see if anyone else will get in with me. As we all know, catching a lift is a very different experience according to whether someone else gets in or not. With two of you in there, the lift is the most sombre place on earth. It’s like a funeral. You gaze at your feet. Or stare, fascinated, at the lift’s number display. (‘Actually, I’m an expert in German lift mechanisms and am trying to work out this one’s precise origin.’) But have a trip on your own and it’s twelve seconds of Dionysian abandon. Twelve seconds of burping, singing, dancing, mirror-staring and crotch-scratching—all of it ending just half a second before the doors slide open to reveal the model citizen, facing forward, arms loose, shoulders held high, ready to start his work day. A man so calm and poised he looks as though he’s never scratched a crotch in his life. Well, certainly not his own.

  By the time I finally get to my desk, I’m exhausted by the deceptions of the morning. How pleasing that the light on my answer machine is flashing. My heart races. I don’t want to hope too much, but I think it may well be a message from him.

  The eroticism of housework

  For decades, the adolescent Australian male has pondered the ads for pheromones—the spray-on female attractant on offer for the unbelievably low price of $44.95. This stuff, it is said, attracts women much like a flowering shrub attracts a swarm of bees. The adolescent male is not stupid. He is suspicious of the claims being made. He realises it would take a strong chemical indeed to blind women to his own rather obvious faults, which currently include a fresh plague of pimples, chewed fingernails and a voice that breaks in the middle of multisyllabic words (which, luckily, remain rare).

  On the other hand, there’s the idea of being swarmed by unaccountably randy women, an image which tends to play on the mind of the adolescent male. Within days, hours, or more usually seconds, he finds himself filling in his cheque/money order/credit card number and sending off the order.

  The product, of course, is a total failure: merely making the young man smell like a pig wrapped in plastic. This brings a distrust of society and its institutions which can last a lifetime.

  But now new research from America shows where we went wrong. Instead of paying big money for the pheromones, we should have invested in a can of Fabulon. A quick squirt behind the ears and women everywhere would have been ours.

  The research comes from Dr John Gottman of the University of Washington in Seattle. Having interviewed thousands of couples, Gottman has determined that men who share the housework are considered more sexually attractive by their partners. The story has had a huge run in newspapers around the world, usually under the banner headline: ‘Housework Gives Men Sex Appeal: Study’, which shows you just how many women are now running major newspapers.

  Jocasta, along with women worldwide, has cut out the article and placed it on our fridge. She has always believed in the sex-housework link—and currently lists her erogenous zones as comprising the kitchen floor, the back bathroom and the lint filter in the spin dryer.

  According to Jocasta, women are not turned on by Iron Men; they’re turned on by Ironing Men. The strong hands flinging the ruched dress onto the ironing board; the delicate fingers separating the material so the iron can do its work; the heat of the iron; the smell of the Fabulon—it’s all a heady mix. Televise the Ironing Man contest from the Gold Coast and she’d be watching.

  If only men knew the secret: before every date they should simply douse their bodies with Fabulon. Unlike pheromones, it really would act on a woman’s subconscious—the Fabulon communicating directly with the primitive parts of her brain. Once alone with her man, she’d find herself rashly removing her clothes, throwing them dramatically in the corner, before begging the bloke, in her throatiest voice, to gently launder them all.

  You can imagine the advertisement up the back of People magazine: ‘You’ve probably noticed how some guys seem to get all the girls—even guys who are not that great looking. Now you know the truth—those guys are probably wearing Fabulon.’

  The only problem may be with quantities, since men usually operate on the theory that the more you use of a product the better it will work. Tell them that a squirt of spray starch behind the ears may attract women and you’ll soon have blokes emptying two cans’ worth down the front of their jocks. Apply a little heat and who knows what will happen.

  And yet, just when this army of men is reaching for the Fabulon, undoing their jeans and preparing to empty out a couple of cans, along comes another piece of American research. While Dr Gottman has been studying sex and housework at the University of Washington, his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts have had a tighter focus. Following years of analysis, they have discovered that married women delay the menopause by two years, compared to those who are single. The difference, according to the researchers, is due entirely to their constant exposure to male pheromones—not the ones purchased through magazines, but rather the simple scents secreted by their husbands’ sweat glands.

  Men, it seems, need do nothing more than lie on the couch and give off odours and already we
are socially useful.

  For years women have delivered the shouted challenge to their menfolk: ‘How come you’re just lying on the couch, stinking the place out?’ But no longer is this the insult it once was. ‘Exactly,’ we shall answer as one, ‘and couldn’t you show a bit of gratitude?’

  Some women, it’s true, remain unconvinced about the utility of having a man around. ‘Sure, I’d like to put off the menopause for two years; but are there any other good reasons to invest in a man?’

  The answer is yes. Largely because men will do anything for sex.

  If men had a calling card, it would probably read:

  The Male of the Species

  Quick repairs

  Companionship

  Pheromone secretion

  ‘We’ll do anything for sex’

  But there must be more to recommend us than the fact we stink. Well, you’re right: there is more.

  Killing rodents. Women, of course, are quite capable of killing rodents, but many see this activity as a useful opportunity to keep their bloke in touch with his tribal masculinity. Evolution has trained man to hunt down bison and buffalo, kangaroo and emu, and then to kill them in a frenzy of bloodlust. Yet opportunities for this sort of action are rare if you live in a flat in North Ryde or Chadstone. Killing a cockroach with a rolled up copy of Men’s Health will just have to do. Watch your man! Applaud your man! Draw a halt only when he suggests mounting his victim on an oak plaque above the fireplace.

  Heavy Lifting. The workplace safety people have developed all sorts of complex codes about what weights can be lifted safely, according to the size of the bloke. All ignore the fact that each bloke has two weight-lifting modes: (1) on his own; or (2) watched by women. A man who will struggle to shift a pot plant on his own will find himself able to lift the back of a car when observed by a group of women. Yes, this will be followed by a lifetime of agonising back pain, but it’s well worth it for four seconds of passing admiration.