The Hobby Job: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

I didn't end up talking much to Troy about that night. I saw him at the bar again, and he might have said something like, “We cool?” to which I probably said, “Yeah, man.”

  At the time, I dismissed the whole thing as a drunken adventure. It had been really hot, and I kept replaying it in my mind, but for a while I told myself that was because the blowjob had been incredible, and because Eliza was fucking hot.

  But all this time, the image that stays with me from that night, and the thing I thought about the most, was Eliza's eyes on Troy as she sucked on me. I don't dredge up much else about Eliza – like I said, she wasn't really my type. But the sight of her eyes meeting Troy's, off to the side, staring right at him while she sucked on my cock, that's what I couldn't get out of my head.

  By the time I got around to realizing what it was about Eliza-Troy that had turned me on so much, Troy had left for a job somewhere out East. I wanted to talk to him about his relationship with Eliza – how he made happen, whose idea it was, how it worked out for him.

  But it wasn't the kind of things you just called someone up and talked about.

  So I did what any man would do.

  I turned to the internet.

  It turned out, of course, that there were a lot of men out there who liked to see their girlfriend with another man. Or their wife. Whole communities of men, whole forums full of advice about how to approach the “lifestyle.” It was a common fetish, it turned out, which made me feel better. But that being said, it wasn't exactly “out there.” You never saw it in a movie, for instance.

  I was a lurker, too. Everything guys wrote about how they lured their girlfriends or wives to the idea just didn't ring completely true for me. The pictures were silly: nothing more than regular porn with a caption that asked me to believe it was my girlfriend doing another man.

  But of course, it wasn't my girlfriend. A guy can only suspend his disbelief so much.

  The porn was even worse, because none of these women acted like or were anything like the women I was dating. They didn't scream like them, or say the things my girlfriends said, or move their hands the same way when they clawed at the sofa or the bed.

  The only thing I really had was my own imagination, which I put to good use at night.

  The one image that remained with me, that really worked? Eliza's eyes looking the other way, meeting Troy's eyes.

  Or even better, when I could hear her voice, grating right through me in the most sensual way. Soft like velvet, and serrated like a knife:

  “You want me to do this guy while you watch? Oh...that's it.”

  And later, when I had a steady girlfriend, all the way up through and including Laura? I loved to imagine that very same scene. Except I am where Troy is, and Laura's eyes are on mine.

  And Laura's mouth is on another cock, and the cum welling up in her mouth is the cum of another man.

  But how do you say that to your wife?

  So that's how things were.

  This was all just fantasy. Something I whacked off to and thought about of myself. I didn't dare to share it. And then life took a surprising turn of events.

  S OMETHING HAD TO CHANGE

  LAURA

  “Are you crying?”

  Was I? Was I crying?

  I felt my cheeks.

  “I think I'm just having some kind of hysterical fit,” I said, and my voice was calm, calmer than I expected it to be. It didn't even sound like my own voice.

  A laugh was leaving my throat, also. It all seemed to be coming from someone else. I even looked around, from face to face, to see who it was. Who the fuck had the nerve to laugh right now?

  My eyes moved over the scene in front of me again. Even my eyes seemed to be moving on their own.

  This must be it.

  This must be how people have a psychotic break.

  I remembered reading, once, about people who had gone into fugue states. They had just walked out the door one day, forgotten everything about themselves, and wandered around, maybe getting a new job and a new house, and in some cases, a new family. And then ten years later or something like that, they snapped out of it.

  I had a private fantasy, just for a few seconds, about doing that exact thing. Just faking it.

  Faking a fugue state. Why not? It was better than cleaning this up.

  “I just don't understand,” I was saying, and my voice sounded a lot like my mother's, which only caused my chest to tighten even more, “how....how?!!! HOW?!”

  I was about to lose it. I had more to say than that, but my mouth, like my eyes, seemed to be on its own course.

  Something about my voice was obviously crazy enough to make everyone, including the dog, stop and stare at me. Anyone old enough to have the idea began looking sideways for an exit.

  Conrad was eying the door.

  I pointed a finger at him. “Don't you even think about it,” I seethed. “And get that animal into the laundry room before he -”

  I watched the whole motion sort of roll through Bruce, the family dog. Up his spindly legs, into the muscles of his hindquarters and forelegs. I was going to happen, I could see that. The torque was building. It was going to wring itself through his muscles, then skin, then fur.

  And all of that blood-red spaghetti, and all of that dark sticky chocolate milk, it was all going to turn into droplets of sticky, staining nastiness.

  I watched them launch. Thousands of different trajectories. They streaked through the air.

  And landed. Landed, landed, landed. On the ceiling. On the paintings. On my new pants. On the sweaters, tablecloths, and cupboards.

  I closed my eyes as spaghetti – still warm – splattered all over my face.

  I don't want to be this person.

  That's what I thought first. Before “that person” even took hold of me, like I was possessed.

  I didn't want to care about spaghetti on walls. Or whether or not enough fucking vegetables had been served to these two gnome-sized people who refused any food that wasn't white. This person who was so filled with bitter, bitter rage because there were no matching socks in the entire fucking house.

  This person, who was going to end up cleaning spaghetti off the ceiling, because I had left the room for ten minutes.

  With another adult in the room.

  I opened my eyes and sent them, like daggers, at Conrad.

  The white walls of the kitchen, and the ceiling, and the children, were all flecked with red.

  A sort of red, murderous haze started to creep up from the bottom of my eyes.

  No. It was more like the red of desperation.

  Go-crazy-and-get-committed red.

  It wasn't as if nothing like this had ever happened before. We had two small kids, a dog, and a turtle. We'd seen a lot of shit, literally and figuratively.

  So I don't know why. I don't know why this one, particular thing was “it.”

  A sound emerged from my chest, and sort of gurgled around in my throat. By the time it left my mouth, I had no idea what it was. It didn't even feel like it came from me. Tears began to well up in my eyes, and then my sight was filled, as if I were underwater.

  But I was also laughing.

  “Oh god,” I heard myself saying. I was wiping frantically at my eyes, but they were filling up faster than I could wipe the tears away. “Oh god.” I sounded hysterical.

  Then I realized:

  I was hysterical.

  I was actually hyperventilating.

  Conrad – I think – helped me to a couch in the other room. Cleaned the kitchen, called a babysitter, told me to take a bath, brought me some wine.

  I barely remember any of that.

  My eyes were red and salty, but I was calm and actually feeling a little bit foolish, when Conrad came into the bathroom and sat on the toilet.

  I mean, who has a breakdown over spaghetti?

  He had his jokey, friendly, problem-solving smile on.

  This smile. It's a kindly smile that somehow is fatherly and best-friend-y. Sor
t of over-charming, like George Clooney or Mathew McConaughey. The kind of smile you feel like you shouldn't let someone get away with, because it's just too fucking charming. But the kind of smile you also know you're just going to go along with and feel better because of.

  The smile was, among many other reasons, a thing I had married him for.

  He just smiled this smile, and raised his eyebrows, and the whole conversation was done with.

  This is something I appreciate about Conrad, even if it's also a little aggravating. There's no need to talk for thirty minutes about how, even though I was a super person and trying my very best, I was coming apart like a five-dollar watch. No need to say what a great mom I was and how anyone would start losing their mind; no need to tell me that maybe Jenny Heller did fine with her four kids but she was also pretty dumb and didn't need much else besides her homemade fucking pies to be entertained to pieces, besides she probably had a stash of Valium somewhere. No need to say this was straining our relationship, that I was becoming uptight and slightly crazy, that we never had sex, that all I talked about was organizing socks.

  He just got that all out with his smile and his eyebrows.

  Something needed to change, he was saying.

  And he was right.

  I leaned back against the edge of the tub and closed my eyes. “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  “I have a plan,” he said.

  I shook my head. “If this is some, send-me-to-a-spa-for-a-day thing, it's great, I'll take it, but...” I could feel mild hysteria building up in my throat. “I just...it's not enough.”

  And it wasn't enough. I needed something...else.

  “You don't want to go back to work, do you?”

  I shook my head. That would be worse, I somehow knew.

  Although…

  I remembered my old job. I saw things in a new light now. Rows and rows of clean, orderly file cabinets. Clean hallways, that someone else cleaned. Tidy “in” and “out” boxes, with everyone putting the right thing into them. All the tall people walking around, unsupervised, who could be trusted not to stick anything metal into the uncovered electrical outlets even if you turned your back on them. The sweet, sweet silent times and hours where I just typed and completed things and no one complained all day that their Leggos were too big to put through the cheese grater or cried because the dog was white and they wanted a spotted dog.

  It actually seemed like a dream.

  Conrad had already moved on.

  “Do you need an afternoon to yourself?”

  “We tried that before...” I said.

  Such a waste of money. I just felt guilty the whole time. I usually ended up shopping, or taking some overpriced yoga class, and then buying an overpriced coffee, and the whole time it wasn't even relaxing because I knew the babysitter was at my house letting the kids eat millions of crackers and trash the place. And I was paying her for it. Fifteen dollars an hour because I lived in the sticks.

  I groaned.

  “You want to do some kind of nonfiction story, right?”

  My head was spinning. I had no idea where he was going with this.

  He was referring to my oft-dismissed ambitions as a writer. A mental image of my dusty laptop, storing the 237 pages of unassembled and half-useless memoir, pained my head.

  I squinted my closed eyes.

  “Okay...so I have an idea. Don't knock until you think about it, okay?”

  He waited.

  I groaned again. “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  I opened my eyes.

  Still with that cheesy smile. Involuntarily, I grinned back at him. Oh, whatever I felt about any of this, at the end of the day, I had a great guy in Conrad, and I did love him. I swirled the wilted bubbles around and held up my hand. My fingers were pruned. “Okay,” I insisted.

  He just wanted confirmation. I have a tendency to react poorly to suggestions right off the bat.

  Conrad was still smiling.

  I splashed him. “Okay. I got it. Okay?”

  He wiped his face off with a towel.

  “Okay. Here it is.”

  And then he waited for like a full minute, just to irritate me. I started sliding down, into the water. I blew a flotilla of bubbles away.

  “Conrad.” I am not a patient person.

  He laughed. “What if you got, say...a hobby job?”

  For some reason, this had no effect on me whatsoever.

  In fact, it went through me in a flat way, like a steady hum.

  And then it felt almost...appealing.

  I sat up. I was already thinking of problems. It's what I used to do.

  “The only thing is -”

  Conrad held up a hand. He started speaking quickly to keep me from interrupting. He had given it a lot of thought. “I know. But surely there's something you could volunteer for or...I dunno, like wait tables or something just one night a week. It's something to do, you're making some money so you don't care about the babysitter, you can quit any time, you'll meet some new people, you won't feel guilty, and it might give you something to write a short piece on -”

  “I got it!” I shouted. I splashed him again. “I got it okay? You're brilliant, you thought of everything.”

  I sank down again and let my head disappear under the water. The world was muffled to near-silence.

  A hobby job.

  I hated that it was such a good idea.

  I hated that I hadn't thought of it myself.

  I already knew the places I would apply.

  I already felt a little bit guilty that I was already looking forward to leaving the house behind, to seeing someone else besides Conrad for the evening, to doing something, anything, besides be here.

  I didn't want a real job, either.

  I wanted some kind of entry-level, brainless, mindless, pay-your-way through school job. Or a shift at a factory. Something like that, where I could just tune everything out and chit-chat with people. I loved articles about that kind of thing. They were all the rage right now among the would-be journalists of the world. I had just read one by a guy who had worked as a meat-packer. I had loved it.

  I sat up, out of breath.

  “I'll think about it,” I said, wiping water from my eyes. “Now get out of here.”

  Conrad smiled and handed me a facecloth. He knew his suggestion was great, and he knew I didn't need to think about it.

  “So fucking smug,” I told him, wiping my face.

  He kissed me on the forehead, and left the bathroom.

  I put the washcloth over my eyes. At the end of the day, no matter what happened, at least I had Conrad. Sure, some resentment built up about the minutia of life, but at times like this I remembered how lucky I was to have him.

  We had moved to the small-ish community of Kearny, about thirty minutes outside of the last rings of the city, with the great intentions of relaxing in the country. Conrad worked at the edge of the downtown core, and in point of fact, his commute wouldn't be that much longer. Some friends had told us about the property, because they were always “leaving town” to go look at antiques and apple orchards, and they had discovered this little town – maybe hamlet would be a better word – at the bottom of a big ravine, almost a valley, tucked away into the trees.

  In Kearny, you could almost believe you were really out in the country. A collection of houses were scattered alongside the creek, which was usually just a bed, and a convenience store and “hall” were all that contributed to the “town.”

  But a ten-minute drive south placed you in the ever-expanding suburbs, which had come crashing against the city's greenbelt, a tract of undevelopable land. Kearny was inside the no-development zone, and so Kearny would remain as it was.

  At least we hoped.

  The house we bought even had a septic tank. We had to order propane gas.

  Before Madison, I had thought I could keep working and take care of the kids and manage everything just fine. It became clear, after Madison in partic
ular, that not only was it a ton of work, it wasn't any fun. I made a decision I thought I would never make.

  To be a stay-at-home mom.

  I didn't even like thinking about that phrase. It gave me a queasy feeling.

  But...it relieved the pressure. No more food thrown at the microwave and scraped off the lids of Tupperware bowls. No more grocery store at ten pm. No more cramming feet into shoes as quickly as possible to get them in the car and to day care, no more high blood pressure in the car at 6:17pm, feeling the ten-dollar a minute late daycare pick-up charges draining from my bank account.

  Time to invest in writing, which is what I had wanted to do all along anyway.

  The house was great, the best of both worlds. Big-box stores fifteen minutes away. My friends were all on the other end of the city, but who cared? I was too busy to do anything with them, anyway.

  It all seemed like it was going to be a dream. And in many ways it was.

  But then the boredom set in. The routine of it all. The whining, the daily grind. There was no time for anything I had hoped to do. No sitting on the nice porch and watching the cattle on the adjoining farm graze their way through the pasture. No idyllic afternoons of canning freshly picked apples from the trees at the bottom of our yard (they were full of worms, for one thing, and canning, it turns out, was a huge pain in the ass).

  No writing.

  Just whining, messes, driving to stores, putting things purchased at the store into a cupboard, and listening to more whining.

  No. It was great. It really was. I preferred it. I really did.

  But by the time Conrad got home, my brain was diluted so much I couldn't carry on a conversation.

  And what's more, I really didn't want to. I had nothing to tell him about except how much milk had been spilled on the floor or how many loads of laundry I had done. How the dog had gone missing for an hour. Who knew to where?

  And then there was the resentment. It's inevitable. Conrad never did any laundry. Conrad never put anything back in the fridge. Conrad was always so tired from his job, while I envied the hour in the car he had to himself, twice each day, to finish one or two fucking thoughts.

  I almost always went to bed at nine. Conrad wasn't too tired to put on some TV, or go to his office, where I knew but just didn't care much that he watched some porn.