The Husband by Sol Stein Page B

each other. Does she know I am going up here to get laid?
    Would she like to get laid? She probably hadn’t thought about it. Was she thinking about it now that she and he were in the elevator alone?
    Peter looked her full in the face and was immediately convinced that she hadn’t thought about getting laid for a long time. She wasn’t unattractive.
    The woman got out of the elevator, flicking a look at him, and he suddenly realized why: he hadn’t pushed a floor button. He did, and the light went out. He got the light back on. He pushed the right button. Man, get ahold of yourself!
    He let himself in with a key kept not with his other keys but in his wallet, in a small envelope on which he had taken the precaution of writing a fictitious masculine name. To avoid getting caught. Why avoid getting caught?
    Elizabeth was lying on the floor, six or seven open books around her. She turned away from the one in her hand as she heard the door open. Her smile had a virtue no other had ever had for Peter.
    Some people have a ready smile, which they flick on to say, “I’m smiling, don’t worry.” It usually was a cause for worry, like a salesman’s “Let me be candid with you.” Peter remembered the school librarian with the perpetual smile—not for him, or over anything, or to anybody at all, just a permanent, frozen expression of pretended happiness. Peter knew an art director who, at age forty-five or thereabouts, had been told that he looked younger when he smiled, and that smiler was now impossible to look at with a straight face. It was indeed rare when a smile was an expression out of the ordinary, showing pleasure short of joy. Elizabeth smiled when she meant it and could not bring herself to smile otherwise. It was a liability in business; it put some people off but never anyone that mattered. Hers was the league of people who felt that a smile was an expression one should not cheat with.
    At this moment, Peter and Elizabeth were looking at each other, and he thought how rare that was, too, men and women who already knew each other taking the other in.
    He put his briefcase down and flung his coat over a chair.
    She was on her back now and slowly raised her legs until they were perpendicular. Then she slowly lowered them. Peter watched her as she repeated the exercise. Was it that her body showed through her clothes more than with other women? Was it perfectly proportioned, or was this another exaggeration, a way of his describing his feeling for her to himself? Ah, the old myth-making machine: my girl is the most beautiful girl in the world.
    Still, he thought as her legs moved up, then down, what a body.
    “You are a remarkable woman,” he said.
    It was superfluous to compliment a woman like Elizabeth.
    It was not superfluous to compliment any woman ever.
    When the kids were crawling and toddling around, Peter used to get down on the carpet with them, playing at their level. But as Jonathan learned to walk, and then Margaret, getting down on the carpet seemed undignified. Yet here he was, lowering himself to the carpet next to Elizabeth, and as he put his arms around her, his self-consciousness vanished. He was aware of the warm musk of her lips and mouth, her breasts against his chest, her pelvis thrust forward to fix the body-length bond between them. It was incredible how the whole of him, embracing the whole of her, was instantly and fully engorged. As he kissed her again, he had the definite sense that his organ was reaching out for her as if it had a life of its own, hurrying him along.
    His fingers raced to undress her, and himself. He felt the need of more hands, preferably nontrembling hands. How beautiful she was in her nakedness, small and perfect. He pulled her perfection against the bearishness of himself. Why did male desire demand the ultimate at once, and the female, like a soufflé, require gentling and patience?
    He kissed the echelons of her body. He stroked her, hoping for gentleness, barely