Norman Singer: The Hungry Husband

Linda returned to the room, all smiles and neatness. "Jaimie's asleep now, the angel. It was really so easy. Flora said I was a wonder. All he had to do was sense my presence, and off he went…" She eyed David and her tumbled-looking bed. "What happened here, some sort of accident?"

"Yeah, an accident," he said, gazing up at her glowing, pristine purity. "I fell and hit my climax."

She began to giggle deliriously. "Oh David, you're a riot! And here I was afraid you'd had another nightmare…" Then more soberly, after turning over her creamy-wet pillow… "We've really got to do something about that, you know. Your nightmares, I mean… Either tranquilizers or a good neurologist, I'm not sure which."

A concubine, thought David… that's what I need. No doctors or pills, just someone to swallow me alive three times a week and show me where to send my body…

Linda crept into her bed and dimmed the light, spraying the room with silence. Crypt connubial.

Breakfast in the Fortune household the next day was the typically hectic skirmish it always was during the children's summer vacation. As he came down the stairs, David could hear Linda giving the kids their daily instructions, knowing that she and Flora had already officiated at the feeding of their youngest an hour earlier. He told himself that the comforting sound of her morning-voice washed away all the problems that haunted their dark and tangled bedtime hours. The house was bright and spotless, Linda having decorated the place herself in a style that could only be called Early Sunkist. Everything was done in a symphony of yellows-sometimes riotous, sometimes muted, as if the walls had been painted-or brainwashed-with a kind of totalitarian optimism.

Although the Fortunes employed sufficient personnel for housecleaning and child-care, Linda insisted that the kitchen was to be her special domain. Not for nothing had she been a whiz in Home Economics in High School, and a Dietetics Major in college. No cooks or serving-maids for her, since she was fully equipped to cook for a healthy family of five. No cake mixes or packaged foods either; everything was fresh and new, including the vegetables they ate, which came from the garden that she and David tended together. One of their favorite Sunday hobbies, planting and weeding away the hours together. David saw all these efforts as zealous labors of love, and he was mighty proud of Linda. Wasn't he?

He paused in the doorway of the breakfast-room for a moment to listen and watch, wanting to remind himself what a glowing treasure he possessed here in this house. Seven-year-old Janice-a perfect miniature of her mother-and her six-year-old brother Larry usually rose early during vacation-time, just to stare idolatrously at their handsome, broad-shouldered Daddy. However, his little daughter's stare had seemed much more penetrating to David ever since the day she'd unexpectedly opened his bedroom door and found him standing there, completely nude. She'd stared at his long plump penis with unabashed interest, as if it might be a pliable new doll she could add to her collection. Then she'd giggled and said, with a rather clannish conceit: "I got the biggest Daddy in the world!" And left the room. Strange to think one's little girl had confronted one's genitalia with such equanimity, when it still scared the living daylights out of her mother.

Linda looked up and saw David enter the room. "Oh, there you are, dear." She glanced up at the sunburst-clock on the wall. "You're about eight and a half minutes late, aren't you?"

"Roger," he said, kissing the reflex-offering of her cheek. "But I'll make it up on the freeway, if I'm lucky."

"The way Dad's got it made at All-Planet Insurance, he could be late every day if he wanted to," said Larry, "and nobody would say anything. Huh, Dad?"

Seating himself at the table, David glanced at the boy, deciding this had to be a burst of loyalty, since the child was too young to be making snide remarks about nepotism. "Well, I don't know about that, son. I wouldn't be setting a very good example, would I?"

"Of course you wouldn't," Linda put in hastily. "Don't talk so foolishly, Larry."

Everyone ate in silence for a moment.

"Hey Daddy, is it good or bad if somebody calls you a 'company man'…?" asked Larry.

Everyone stared curiously at the boy.

"Where on earth did you hear that phrase?" demanded Linda.

"Well… we were all out playing handball yesterday, and that's what Peter Grogan said… that his dad said my dad would always get ahead because he was a typical company-man…"

Linda and David exchanged knowing glances, each thinking of their old friend Bradley Grogan. Brad was an immense, volatile black-Irish Greek boy whom David had befriended all through high school and college. He'd married Joyce Barkley, a lifelong friend of Linda's and way above his station, as Linda often pointed out. Their marriage had broken up a year ago and it was common gossip that Brad had begun to live it up with a vengeance. Part of his revolt was to quit the job he'd had with David's firm, and to become, of all things, the manager-and part-time salesman-at an automobile showroom; although David wasn't too surprised by this choice, since Brad had been a nut about cars ever since he'd known him. Nor had David aped all his contemporaries by dropping this blacksheep, simply because Brad had had the guts to move into San Francisco for freedom and promiscuity. The two men had been close friends for too many years, and David was genuinely fond of Brad, and still saw him for lunch on occasion-unknown to Linda, of course, since she had sided quite vociferously with Brad's wounded ex-wife Joyce, who was still drying her eyes with all the community-property she'd won after the divorce.

"Well now, that certainly wasn't the sort of thing Bradley Grogan should have said to his little boy," Linda told Larry. And to David: "Imagine, he's only permitted to see the children once a month, and he uses that opportunity to pass on petty gossip. Oh, that vulgar, brassy clod, he's probably living right in the Tenderloin, which is just where he belongs! What you ever saw in Bradley Grogan is beyond me, David. He is now persona non grata everywhere that counts."

"I like Brad," David said emphatically. "He's my friend."

"Fair-weather," Linda chuckled lightly. However, she was an expert at dissolving tense moments, so she rose and went into the kitchen. When she returned a moment later, carrying a platter of hotcakes, she began some determined and extraneous chatter. "Here, darling, I kept these hot for you. But you'd better let your coffee cool. I forgot and left the water boiling too long. It's the heat… even I'm off-schedule." Then, not waiting for him to say anything more, she said: "Something's burning!" And escaped into the kitchen.

David looked at his children, and it seemed as if they were waiting for him to say something secure and sunny.

He flashed them a blinding smile. "Your Mommy's smart and cute and pretty, isn't she?" he said.

Not returning his smile, Larry and Janice nodded solemnly; then spoke in unison: "You'd better believe it!"

… But a man wants more than a mannequin, thought David. Then he rose, kissed his children, and departed for his daily battle with the Bayshore Freeway.

As David drove into San Francisco that mid-August morning he was relieved to be greeted by the city's cooling gusts of summer fog. If one had to work during the summer months-and he supposed he really didn't, if he wanted to let the Montclairs finance another world cruise for his family-it might as well be done in a temperate climate. San Francisco's built-in air-conditioning kept it the only spot in the area to remain unaffected by the heat-wave that was raging farther inland.

… Then why am I still burning and feverish, he wondered. Whether it be body-heat or barometric pressure, there was still a flaring-up inside of him, something abrasive and churning…