The Husband (5 page)

“So was Florence Nightingale,” said Margaret, so sure of herself. “I want to make up advertising ideas like Daddy.”

Peter thought he could put a stop to it. “Advertising,” he said, “is no place for women.”

“Well, see,” said Margaret, “Miss Kilter is in advertising.”

The silence lasted what, a second, two?

“Miss Kilter,” said Rose, “is a career woman.”

Had she wanted it to sound sinister?

“She’s not married. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t have a man of her own, like Daddy. You don’t want to grow up like Miss Kilter, Margaret.”

Margaret, side blinders on her eyes, fixed her vision on Peter.

“You’re doing fine, Margaret,” said Peter. “You grow up any way you like.”

Change the subject.

“Is a career man like a career woman, Daddy?” asked Jonathan.

Peter said sternly, “You were supposed to save that outfit for Halloween.”

“Daddy,” said Margaret, “do you want me to grow up like Miss Kilter?”

How had it gotten out of hand?

Rose put her arms around both children. “To bed.”

“Daddy,” said Margaret, stalling, “what is advertising?”

“Everybody knows what advertising is,” said Rose. “Get ready for bed.”

“It’s a fair question, isn’t it, Daddy?”

Peter touched Margaret’s head, her hair. “You ought to be in politics. You’re a real smoothie.”

“Never mind that,” said Margaret, her voice testing to see if she had gone too far. “What is advertising?”

“Well, it’s a business,” said Peter, hoping to escape. He still hadn’t changed his shirt.

“Everything is a business,” said Jonathan.

Margaret shushed him. “You keep out of this.”

“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.”

“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
—”