Trading Husbands

By C.D. HOPKINS

George and Emily decide they're through with sex. Too bad they're not married to each other. Their respective spouses, Anne and Robert, aren't at all happy with this turn of events. When Emily, on impulse, offers Anne her husband's services, Anne actually thinks: Why not? Robert may have hair in his ears, but he's got a trim body, an interesting face. And the two couples have been friends for decades, so no one would be jealous, no one will get hurt.

Could life, just this once, be that simple?

"Are you kidding?" say a woman named Jane and her mother, the writers of this novel-within-a novel. Archeologists of human nature, they pick up the shards, put them back together. But it's a new mosaicpieces not where they used to be, not where they ought to be. Not where you'd think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440116421

C.D. HOPKINS

Born and raised in Southern California, C.D. Hopkins has lived more than half her life in Massachusetts, where she has worked for twenty years as a science librarian. She is the author of two novels: Captain Nitwit and Trading Husbands. Some of the stories in this collection have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Quarterly, Room of One’s Own, and Per Se, an anthology in the memory of Arthur Edelstein.  

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Trading Husbands

C.D. Hopkins

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Copyright © Copyright © 2007, 2009 by C.D. Hopkins

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-1641-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-1642-1 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 04/30/2009

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all?

Shakespeare, King Lear

I have to talk to you, George told Anne.

Mildly annoyed, because she’d been watching Jane Eyre, with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, Anne followed her husband into the parlor and sat down in the other wing chair. She was trying to hide her ill temper by looking pleasantly expectant, but why bother? George was frowning at the unlit birch logs, maybe envisioning a fire, though this was July. He waited until she’d finished fishing a Kleenex out of her pocket. Then he said, in a voice that bordered on the sepulchral:

I’ve lost all interest in sex.

He seemed to think this was something of a bombshell, but his libido had disappeared a year and ten days ago, not long after he started taking Paxil. In his youth, which lasted well into his fifties, he had been Anne’s ideal partner—possibly a little too eager, but his horniness was a turn-on in itself. Premature ejaculation never mattered much; he could usually make love again, often twice.

It’s like when you make pancakes, Anne used to say. The first one’s to test the pan—it hardly ever turns out right.

The sacrificial fuck, she and George called it.

For months, she’d been after him to consult another doctor, one who wouldn’t say, Well, you’re what now—seventy? Certainly there were other drugs he could try. She had compiled a list. George refused to examine it. He would rather—just as she said—be impotent than anxious. Also, he thought he had no choice. Never mind that he'd promised her in their youth: We’ll still be doing it in our nineties, toots. Here he was, trying to tell her it was over—the love life that was supposed to have lasted forever.

If I wanted sex, sweetheart, I’d want it with you. It’s just that nothing turns me on.

You mean I don’t.

A fortiori.

She was married to a man who’d rather be unkind than illogical. But then he added, Please don’t take it personally.

How can I not? She took off her glasses. Bitterness was welling up from the ache in her chest. It turned into a surge of rage. How would you feel if I took a lover?

If only he’d had the sense not to answer so readily: I guess I could handle it. I want you to be happy, or had managed to keep himself from chuckling, But realistically, where would you find anybody?

It made her see that his shoulders were narrower than they used to be. Pinched into the wing chair, he seemed to have lost stature. He was a seventy-year-old man with a paunch and a wattle, and he was dumber than she would have thought possible.

But she said, neutrally enough, Maybe the Internet?

He shook his head. You wouldn’t want anybody like that.

Her smile was pure ice. Don’t count on it, buddy.

She marched upstairs and made two phone calls.

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The women she called were her two best friends, Emily Peterson and Deborah Borden. They were such old friends, such good friends that sometimes she forgot they were her only friends. Once a month or so, they got together for lunch—on Saturdays, since Anne and Deborah still worked. Emily had never worked a day in her life, except Christmas jobs, teenage stints. She was proud of being a faculty wife, proud of her husband, a full professor. She was sixty-three, a year younger than Anne, though her dark-brown hair made her look much younger. Anne’s hair had been gray since her forties, a silvery gray; it was short and well-cut (like a manicured lawn, George used to think but knew not to say; long ago, he’d had tact.) Deborah, the baby of the bunch, was a slim, freckled redhead of sixty-one.

They met, usually, at Sally’s Soups. The tables there were small and tippy, the fake philodendrons a little dusty, but several of the soups were potent with cumin, a spice that Deborah used to use lavishly. Since remarrying, she’d had to quit cooking with cumin—a perfect paradigm, it seemed to Anne, of the constraints of this second marriage.

Emily scooped up the last of her black bean soup, and then she tackled the half-bowl that Anne had pushed aside. Anne liked black bean soup as well as Emily or Deborah, but when she was upset, she couldn’t eat.

It’s too bad, Emily said, between mouthfuls, it’s a real shame I can’t loan you Robert. I mean, Robert’s still interested, and I’m really not. And he always did think you had a lot of style.

Style, Anne said. "What the hell does that mean?

It means you always look smart. Plus he thinks it’s neat that your eyebrows stayed dark.

At least he liked her for something, Anne thought; it was more than her own husband did. As for Emily’s Robert, he had to be the dullest man who ever lived. But a man, for all that. So, why can’t you? she asked.

Can’t I what?

Lend me Robert.

Emily fell silent. She planted both elbows on the table, one on either side of Anne’s bowl, and, resting her slightly double chin in her palms, stared down into the empty depths. She was thinking, a process in Emily that was grave and ponderous, perhaps more so than in her youth but not much.

Finally she mused, I don’t see why not. I don’t think I’d be jealous. It might be a relief. She looked up. Robert still wants it once a week.

Anne nearly said, Are you warning me or bragging? but there was no sense in being churlish. Once a week was better than nothing. In any case, she had slowed down herself. Oh, for the stud George used to be!

Deborah saved her. Do I fit into this picture? What about Bucky—if I want to trade him for something?

Swap, Anne said. It’s called ‘swapping’.

Emily clasped her hands in front of her bosom, in a way that reminded both Deborah and Anne of a squirrel begging for a peanut. Oh, I don’t think Robert could handle two.

Don’t worry, Em, Deborah told her. I’ve already got all the sex I want, thank you.

Deborah and Bucky had been married just three years ago; Emily and Anne were still wondering why. It was not that either of them had anything against Deborah’s remarrying, and they had nothing against Bucky except that he smoked, but they felt he didn’t live in quite the same world. What, literally, could you do with a man who wouldn’t see foreign films or any movies in which right didn’t make might? He was pretty definite about his taste in restaurants too: Chinese but no other Asian cuisine. Nothing peppery, nothing spicy. They had never known him to order anything but chicken with cashews. Deborah’s first husband had been an excellent cook, turning out fried scallops, fried shrimp; he made his own pasta. He had died four years ago of a heart attack.

Within the year, Deborah had met Buck. Green-eyed physician, strawberry-blond, seeks love and companionship with SNS in his 60s... was the way her very brief ad began. She ran it in The Harvard Magazine personals. The ads of the other women’s (there was not a man’s among them) were several inches long, dense with frightening detail, so that Deborah’s simple three lines perhaps suggested accessibility; and her ad was the one that drew your eye. As for why Bucky had been reading The Harvard Magazine personals: he said he thought he might as well start at the top, and besides, it was more likely to be local than The New York Review of Books and certainly than The London Review, whose ads he never understood anyway; so many of them seemed to be written in code.

He and Deborah met for a drink, then they walked around Harvard Square, then they had dinner. One thing seemed to have led very quickly to another.

It had occurred to Anne and Emily but not, apparently, to Deborah, that Bucky might just have been looking for a home, a haven: somewhere to sleep, someone to cook his dinner, perhaps no more than a lily pad to jump to. He needed one, for, when he and Deborah met, he was still living in his third wife’s house. This wife wanted a divorce, as had the second, though not the first. Because of the delicate living situation, he and Deborah had never dated, except to eat out in obscure places. They had never tried to share a bed for more than a few hours, either, and therefore failed to imagine it could be a problem. But Deborah had a history that should have alerted them. During most of the thirty years she was married to Harold, she had slept by herself in the spare room. That was because Harold was a raucous snorer who farted in his sleep more than any normal person. He was unaware, most of the time, of what he was doing, or so Deborah had tried to believe. She was confident she could have learned to sleep with Bucky if only he hadn’t given up on her so quickly.

For the first four nights they were together, she was so tense she barely dozed. Her own bed felt to her strange and precarious, as if she were lying on a log that might roll. She had no idea what was wrong with her. Except for getting up once or twice to use the bathroom, Bucky slept more quietly than anyone she’d ever known.

By the third day, she had caught herself nodding off at her desk, unable to remember what the mother of a sick three-year-old had just told her. It was on the fourth night that she ended up in the spare room, a guest again in her own house.

This is no good, Bucky said, when he found her.

He slept, the rest of that night, on the living room sofa, and there he stayed for the next three years.

Nor were sleeping arrangements their only problem. Deborah, who had thought she was through with what she called drudge cooking (her dead husband, the chef, had confined his cooking to feasts for special occasions), found herself spending too much time in the markets, too much time trying to plan what to fix for dinner. It was worse than having a child, she told Emily and Anne, for she had trained her children, a son and a daughter, to make at least lunch, while this man was not capable of spreading peanut butter on bread.

I don’t think Deb knew what she was letting herself in for, Emily confided, first to Anne and then to Robert. She really didn’t know Bucky very well. She should’ve known he couldn’t cook. There were some other things Deborah should have known about Bucky. Nevertheless, he could liven up a social gathering, and he was only sixty-six and very good-looking.

Anne was already thinking that having it on with Bucky would be a lot more fun than going to bed with Robert.

She had her own theory about why Bucky slept on the sofa instead of upstairs in the bed with Deborah: Deborah’s cat, a Himalayan, lived upstairs, shedding long, dark hair on the blankets and bedspreads. Bucky made no secret of how much he hated to wake up with cat hair stuck to his lips. This made sense to Anne, who was a dog person and not all that fond of Deborah’s cat herself.

She should get rid of the cat, she had once told Emily.

Emily was horrified. You know how she loves Aphrodite.

She says she loves Bucky.

She shouldn’t have to choose.

She shouldn’t let him sleep in the living room.

Deborah had attempted to persuade Bucky to try the spare room; he could shut the door, she said, and keep Aphrodite out. But when he woke up in the night, he liked to have a cigarette, and Deborah wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. He would have had to go downstairs and stand in the breezeway; to get to the breezeway he must go through the living room. Perhaps it was only natural that the living room became his bedroom, even though this meant that Deborah no longer had free access to her piano. This was a woman who somehow had practiced an hour a day all through medical school. Now she couldn’t practice unless Bucky was somewhere else—working in the garden or off playing bridge. He was a serious gardener, even more serious about bridge, and he did a lot of the yard work on weekends, so it wasn’t as if Deborah didn’t get to practice at all, but still she felt constrained by his schedule. When she retired, if she ever did retire, she would have the living room to herself four afternoons a week, while Bucky played bridge at several senior centers. He was an excellent player, too good for the people he played with: women in their seventies, their eighties, their nineties. He teased them, flirted with them. They liked him—rather too much for his own good, probably. Despite his being a married man, they suggested that he come over for dinner, and sometimes he took them out to lunch. It was possible they didn’t know he was married; he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Deborah knew he was a flirt; it was part of his charm. A mismatch, Anne said, if ever there was one. But even Emily thought it might be fun to go to bed with him.

I might just want someone else to feed him, Deborah said. I could feed Robert—I wouldn’t mind that. Or George. Both men were more cosmopolitan. I could go to movies with them, movies and concerts. Because that was the other thing about Bucky: no concerts. He liked Classical but not to go sit in a chair and listen; having the radio on in the car was all right.

What did you think you were going to do together? Anne had asked, just once, but Deborah said, Screw, which shut Anne up. She didn’t want to ask if screwing was what they did, because she was having such an attack of envy she couldn’t speak.

That was how it began, the idea of trading husbands. Not forever, maybe a week or two at a time. They could begin small and see how it went, where it went. They wouldn’t have much time to spend on it. Anne intended to work for as long as she could, as did Robert, though George was putting pressure on Anne to retire. He’d been home for three years, and he wanted to travel, something to which Anne was not averse. But how could she travel, the way he wanted? Every year she had three weeks’ vacation. They’d gone to Spain, to Italy, to Mexico, to Greece, to England, to France and Scandinavia. But not to Scotland or Ireland or Switzerland or Germany, nor to India or Peru. George wanted to go to the Galapagos. All those places. He wanted her to retire as soon as she turned sixty-five. But if she retired, Anne feared, her life would be over. She liked her work in the hospital library. She liked her colleagues; she did not like the commute. But to get dressed for work, look (as Robert said) smart, feel professional, attend MLA conferences in other states—all this did good things for her ego. George used to look professional; now, sometimes, he didn’t even shave until evening, and Anne would find herself looking at him critically.

They all looked at their husbands critically. Of course they did. But they didn’t have to feel so critical of the husbands of their friends. When Robert started one of his long, boring stories—some anecdote about something at the university—Anne and Deborah didn’t have to try to hurry him along, not that it did any good; Robert was a slow talker, as ponderous in his way as Emily in her thinking. He was a tenured professor, with a special interest in English poetry of the eighteenth century, and it was plain that he liked to have an audience. He savored each word, speaking deliberately, with long, controlling pauses in-between. It had seemed to Anne recently that he was casting about more frequently and at greater length for the word he wanted, but you mustn’t interrupt with a suggestion of what that word might be. The six friends were all polite, but some of them had been known to nod off when Robert held forth. There was that famous evening when everyone but Anne did so, and he never noticed, he couldn’t have; even Robert would not have gone on talking with his audience sound asleep. He probably mistook their silent immobility for enthrallment; he was a man given to positive interpretations.

In that, he was a fitting partner for Emily, for Emily was a happy-go-lucky person. She had grown up with a sister and three brothers, so had learned very early not to try to control things. She didn’t even worry much about her weight, the extra twenty pounds she meant to lose some day. She wore big shirts she got from the Sears Women’s catalogs and, under them, tops showing an indecent amount of cleavage. Her skin was lovely, with very few wrinkles, and her dark, wavy hair had so little gray she didn’t even bother to color it. She felt that she had stayed looking so young because she’d been on hormone replacement therapy for so long; she had refused to let her Primary Care take her off it. Her breasts would sag, her skin go all lizardy.

What do you need breasts for if you don’t care about sex? Anne asked, in her brusque, bossy way that some people found rude. She herself was almost flat-chested, with nipples like mosquito bites, George used to say.

Robert loves my breasts.

Anne thought about that; it was one of the things she kept hearing later, preserved, as it was, in the quick pang of inadequacy. It made her wonder whether her flat chest was the problem with George. Not Paxil. Breasts. And what about Robert? Would Robert be turned off too?

Deborah had no such doubts. She knew Bucky liked her, liked her company, her body. If he didn’t, she wouldn’t have put up with his boorishness for a minute. Lord, she didn’t need a lover. She just wanted to go to movies and concerts and out to dinner.

But I thought you said you must never start with a dream, says Jane’s mother, because Jane doesn’t want to start with Anne and George; she wants to start with the dream she had last night. It feels real and true, and she wants to retell it. If she and her mother are going to collaborate on this project, she wants to start with herself and her mother.

The dream has nothing to do with George and Anne, or Robert and Emily, or Bucky and Deborah. It is a revelation about the sports arena of the future: rink-size stadiums whose hardwood floors are polished to a high, frictionless gloss. Instead of skates you’ll wear special socks with little ball bearings on the bottoms that enable you to glide around the stadium without effort. In her sleep, Jane recognized that the overhead would be lower than with an ice-rink or roller-drome, and there would be less chance of anyone’s getting hurt. All that’s needed is some venture capital.

Even in the dream, she knew she had none, but that doesn’t make her any less joyful.

She tells the dream to her ex-husband, who phones every few months to see how she’s faring. Usually his calls coincide with weather extremes—tornadoes, hurricanes; this one seems prompted by the untimely snowfall that has buried eastern Massachusetts. He is living these days in Florida and wants to gloat. He says the proposed skating rink should be called a Sock Arena and have ocarina music in the bandstand. This makes Jane smile the first few times she recalls it, and it makes her think she remembers why she married him. But he is so much more pleasant now, so much friendlier than while they were married. They’ve been divorced for eight years. He hasn’t remarried either.

He says, What do you think of the war?

Jane says, You know what I think of it.

It is only Day 4, and already a U.S. Patriot missile has shot down an RAF Tornado. A reporter has been killed by friendly fire. Nobody says how many civilian casualties there may be. The war, on TV, doesn’t seem real. Jane can’t remember if the first gulf war seemed real or not. Full of dread, she turns on the news as soon as she gets home from teaching, even though she doesn’t want to know what happened that day. It is no comfort to think that television won’t really tell her.

Her mother is adamantly opposed to Jane’s dream. She is opposed to their being characters in their own novel.

But Jane is strong-willed too. She says, You know, you can’t just go on and on like that, telling us about first one character, then another. It reminds her of the first story she ever wrote, in which six or seven characters were described at length,