The Husband by Sol Stein Page A

been that she had breasts and hips. He suddenly realized that Amanda had settled in his lap, not the way a stranger sits on the edge of a chair but in a way that brought a maximum part of her body in touch with his.
    “Is this the way you mean?” said Amanda, and she kissed Peter, not on the mouth, thank heaven, but softly on the cheek.
    “Wow!” said Jack, startled and somehow pleased. “Rose, my hostess, under the circumstances you’ve just got to reciprocate.” He took Rose by the hand and led her to a chair at the other side of the room, plunked himself down in it without letting go of Rose’s hand and said, “Now you sit right down on Jack’s plentiful lap.”
    Rose looked at Peter. Peter looked away.
    Rose sat down on Jack’s lap.
    “Isn’t this wonderful?” said Jack, his voice having gained the platform again. “Now strike up the band. I want a girl, just like —”
    “Stop wiggling, Jack,” said Peter. “Rose’ll fake an orgasm, and it’ll go to your head.”
    “Peter!” exclaimed Rose, genuinely shocked because she hadn’t been aware at all that Jack was wiggling.
    “Oh come on now, everybody, we’re having fun!” said Jack. “Let’s sing! I want a girl, just like …”
    Slowly, hesitantly, they all joined in, and throughout the house there now resounded the voices of Jack, Rose, Amanda and Peter, singing.
    “ I want a girl, just like the girl that married dear old dad. A sweet old-fashioned girl with heart so true, a girl who loved nobody else but you …”
    It was Rose who first noticed the children on the staircase in their nightclothes.
    “Jon!” she said.
    “Maggie!” said Peter.
    “Ahem, did we wake you?” said Jack.
    The adults started to disentangle themselves. Amanda got out of Peter’s lap, straightening her dress, and Rose was already up and away from Jack, floundering in dreadful embarrassment.
    Peter, softly to the children, said, “It was just a little joke.”

Chapter Three
    On the way to Elizabeth’s apartment, Peter found himself ten steps behind a blond girl whose hips moved in a rhythm that excited him. He walked rapidly, despite his heavy briefcase. As he overtook the girl, the anonymous and interesting blondness changed; in profile she had a rather ordinary face. What was all the excitement about?
    He knew, of course. Elizabeth had brought a sense of spring and sexuality back into his life. Now he found himself looking at women as women, not in the fraudulent manner of ogling and whistling—the male way of pretending maleness to other men—but looking at individual women he had never seen before, as if each was someone one might indeed go to bed with. He gave each credit to start with, then took the credit away if he found them unattractive in voice or walk or manner or holding onto some other man in a declarative way. The surprise to him was how many kept the credit, including older women who, he noticed, were likely to have a quick sense of their own sexuality, or the frisky younger ones whose youthful assertiveness was more stimulating than their overkempt bodies, or even women he knew but had never before thought of as possible bedmates. How much fair game there was in the world!
    The legend in America was that the women castrated the men, but Peter now knew that to be inaccurate. A good deal of that overt dominance was the result of dismay, the woman in effect saying to the man: if you’re not cock-of-the-walk, I will be; there has got to be a cock somewhere.
    Since the advent of Elizabeth, Peter found that in the community of females there was a sense of his cockiness. Some women, he was beginning to find out, had an immediate response to the electricity a man felt inside himself. Where had his been so long?
    Peter swung the glass door to Elizabeth’s apartment building forward with more energy than called for and just made the self-service elevator in which a fortyish woman, armed with groceries, was already pushing a button.
    They looked at