The Spare Husband, a Short Story Read online

at all the Financial District types looking back at you.

  Something had changed about Carol. The strawberry blond was slowly morphing to ash blond, but that wasn’t it: she looked both worn and indomitable at once, a woman who suddenly had a story worth pursuing, compelling pheromones or no. In the vanguard of the early lunch crowd, we had time for one drink before a booth was ready. We commented about the ways San Francisco kept changing while always staying the same. We reminisced about dinners at Fisherman’s Wharf, nightcaps at the Buena Vista, chilly cable car rides on foggy nights.

  In the booth we each ordered fish and a white wine. I said, “That’s more than I’ve seen you drink at lunch; usually it’s iced tea.”

  “I need the alcohol; you always said it was the best analgesic around.”

  “Tennis elbow?”

  “No, Jack, I have a husband who’s dying.”

  “No way.” Bruce was my age.

  “Way, as the kids say these days.” Pain and indomitability were warring in sad eyes a little bloodshot, as if she’d been crying on the way over.

  She went on to explain the two kinds of multiple sclerosis, the slow kind that lets you live another thirty years, and the kind that wipes you out in a hurry.

  “I didn’t know Bruce had MS,” I said, feeling stupidly out of touch.

  “Well, now you know.”

  I said, “How are the kids taking it?” John and Mardi were in their late teens, still immortal, immersed in studies and dates and, in Mardi’s case, first seed on the school’s tennis team. She took after her mother.

  “They don’t know what to do. You might start seeing them more often,” she said, a slight edge to her voice.

  “And you?”

  She polished off her wine and held the glass up as our waiter went by. “I’m the principal caretaker. I cope. I could stand to see a little more of you myself.”

  “I’ll do anything I can.”

  

  One thing led to another. It reminded me of my own mortality, seeing Bruce in a wheelchair. I adopted an airy demeanor around him and hated myself for it, but I couldn’t help it: he knew he had not long to go; I knew it, and he knew that I knew it.

  One night after dinner, which was a protracted and grim affair, trying to pace my eating to Bruce’s, Carol and I sat at the table, the dishes cleared, and sipped Port and nibbled toasted pecans. After a decent interval I excused myself.

  The front door open, porch light glowing yellow, she kissed me goodnight. The perfunctory kiss led to a smackeroo, a lot of tongue, at first ignored but soon reciprocated. She leaned into me. Out of an old habit I stroked her bottom. She pressed her pelvis into me and said, “I can’t play games, Jack, I need you—in the most basic way.”

  “You mean, you want to meet me somewhere?” Incipient panic met lust just below my solar plexus and produced a growl we both ignored.

  “I mean, come and sit on the couch with me.”

  “But Bruce . . . ”

  “I gave him his medicine. He’s good till four or five.”

  I let her lead me by the hand. The incipient panic gave way to passion trying mightily to disguise itself as compassion. We did a lot of what we did as adolescents and I left at midnight, very rumpled, confused but surprisingly not disgusted with myself. I was being used, perhaps, but I was also being useful, filling a genuine need, not just having a recreational go.

  

  In the meantime, Lorna and David had moved to Southern California. I called her about once a month, we sometimes flirted over the phone, the kind of “if only” banter you have with an attractive woman when you’re having an affair with another one.

  By that time Carol was coming to expect my attentions, every week or two hiring respite care for Bruce and dining chez Jack, with each other for dessert. She would come to my door wilted and leave with her chin up, telling me what a true friend I was. Whether Bruce knew what was going on was something I dared not delve into, but it was always festering in the back of my mind.

  In spite of perpetual, low-grade guilt, I liked my evenings with Carol. While her beam narrowed to something resembling her youth, her character, in spite of the “cheating,” seemed to expand. She had ideas, insights, she was more interesting than anyone I currently worked with. Somehow, despite pretty nearly round-the-clock nursing care, she managed to read (sometimes, she told me, reading aloud to Bruce). She had become something of a movie buff, too, and would parse delicious scenes from films as disparate as The Way We Were and Rashomon.

  I was out of town for a while, in Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly work, a little play. While down there I called Lorna for lunch, which she couldn’t make, having taken a job, of all things, running the kind of agency that supplied respite care workers to Carol and Bruce.

  Instead she invited me out to dinner. “What do you feel like?”

  “Lamb,” I said.

  “I know the place. Meet you there at seven-thirty.” She asked if I had wheels and if it had GPS.

  “Shit, lady, I’m not that hip.”

  “Bring a laptop?”

  “That hip I am,” I said.

  She told me the restaurant, named for a French wine, and advised me to find directions on Mapquest.

  We arrived at almost the same time. She had put on a little weight, which all seemed to congregate in her bust, and she was wearing a blouse that let me know there was nothing between it and her skin. Her hair was the shortest I’d ever seen it, as short as mine except for a shock of hair flipped carelessly along the hairline: a touch of gray, while the rest of her hair maintained its Mediterranean ebony. The effect was something which, in her days of wirier build, she couldn’t have pulled off.

  We chatted. There was no flirting, it was about her business and mine, boring stuff if there weren’t the slightest tension in the air, something subliminal, perhaps her perfume enhancing those pheromones that always got me. I asked her what it was.

  “Joy.”

  “I don’t remember you wearing it before.”

  “Back then you said I smelled as if I’d just stepped out of the shower.”

  “How uncouth of me.”

  She said, “We all grow up, you know.”

  I said, “Are we grown up?”

  “As in, ‘Are you grown up enough for Granny Goose?’ We better be.”

  After dinner she asked me if I’d like to take a ride in her vintage FIAT roadster. I asked the maître d’hôtel if I could leave my car in their parking lot for an hour and he said, “Just be back by midnight, we put a chain across the lot then.”

  I didn’t even know FIAT made a roadster, much less one that looked like a junior Ferrari. It made very sporty noises and went as fast as you could go, where we were going, which was Mulholland Drive. Once there she let it out, shifting up and down like a pro, drifting through a couple of corners, until there was a turn-out on the downhill side of the Hollywood Hills, where she came to an abrupt stop and turned off the engine. While it pinged to us in Italian, we looked down at Hollywood and the Los Angeles beyond, summer heat still coming off the land and pavement, making a million lights shimmer.

  “Where’s the smog?” I asked.

  “I told it to go away, you were coming to town.”

  “I need to kiss you,” I said.

  “So do I—I mean, I need to kiss you, too,” she said.

  And we did. And it might have gone a lot further, but the little car had a big impediment between the seats, under which the drive shaft ran, and the battery was in the corner of the passenger side floor space, and all in all it wasn’t going to happen.

  We came up for air and I told her where my motel was, on Sunset, a rifle shot away as the crow flies, but we aren’t crows, and there was my rental to rescue at the restaurant, but she said she’d drop me and follow.

  “David?” I inquired.

  “In Phoenix on business.”

  “Kids?”

  “The sitter will stay late; she’s done it before.”


  I finally got what I’d wanted for twenty years, almost, and it was not a disappointment, it was once, twice, three times a thrill, and afterwards I uncorked the bottle of scotch I’d brought along, there was a mini fridge with fresh ice cubes, and we lay in bed, naked and replete, sipping a nightcap and musing.

  “It’s been two years,” she said.

  “Two years since you . . . ?”

  She nodded.

  “I should have guessed; it had a lot of brio behind it. You were glorious.”

  She said, “Brio? You weren’t too bad yourself.”

  “I’m here till Friday.”

  She said, “I’m picking David up at the airport tomorrow at rush hour, darn it.”

  “Rats.”

  “Don’t worry; we’ll find a way.”

  

  She did, we didn’t. I went home, had Carol to dinner, confessed my infidelity to a former wife who was being unfaithful to her current husband. She cried briefly then made passionate, almost savage, love to me, as I neared a climax rocking her pelvis in such a way that I actually screamed as it arrived.

  That was the last time we made love before Bruce died. He got an infection, a common sequela of the disease, and it turned into septicemia and then pneumonia, and he died in the hospital, Carol and the kids at his bedside, a happy death, the hospital chaplain called it.

  I went to the funeral, cried from years of suppressed guilt, supported Carol when her knees buckled graveside, and said—miraculously, because it was unrehearsed and to this day unremembered—words to the kids they told me time and again were what pulled them through the rough period.

  After a time—the time in which Carol found out how much a death affects