A husband and wife drive to Boston. The husband is sick. He takes extra-strong cold medication just before getting into the car, and all the way to Boston he worries that he is going to fall asleep at the wheel and crash into the median. Or maybe the husband secretly wants to crash rather than go to his father-in-law’s birthday party, which is what he and his wife are driving to Boston for. Anyway, he manages to stay awake, and they arrive at their hotel. It is just off the highway, a boutique hotel that got excellent reviews on the Internet. The husband and wife check in, they put on nice clothes, they go to the party. A couple of hours later, the husband drives back to the hotel alone. He changes into pajamas and gets into bed. He picks up Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” the book he brought to read on this trip. “Nature commands every animal and the beast obeys,” Rousseau writes, or wrote, in the eighteenth century. “Man feels the same impulsion, but knows that he is free to acquiesce or resist.” At this point, the husband realizes that he doesn’t want to spend the night reading Rousseau in bed, alone. He thinks about going downstairs to the hotel bar. It’s the kind of thing he never does—but ten minutes later there he is, sitting at the bar, reading his book. The husband is not trying to pick anyone up. His wife will be back in an hour or two, and besides, who would dream of picking someone up with Rousseau? Of all the authors you could try to pick someone up with, Rousseau is probably the worst. Or maybe Kant. The husband orders a hot toddy. The bartender, an attractive young woman with crinkly black hair, brings him the drink and they exchange remarks about it. Is that what you wanted? Yes, it’s perfect, the husband says. Good, I’m glad. The bartender smiles. The husband reads some more Rousseau. Upstairs, in his room, he was really understanding the Second Discourse, but down here at the bar he finds it hard to concentrate. The pretty bartender is scooping ice from the ice chest, and the husband can see her cleavage, maybe even the top of her bra. She goes away, comes back, scoops more ice. Finally, the husband asks her how it’s going. It’s going well, the pretty bartender says. What are you reading? Oh, the husband says, embarrassed, it’s Rousseau. For all his thinking about books and picking people up, he is totally unprepared to talk about the “Origin of Inequality” with the pretty bartender. Fortunately, she doesn’t ask about it. I love to read, she says. I read just about anything. Really, the husband says, pleased. Who are your favorite authors? My favorite author is Emily Dickinson, the pretty bartender says. The husband is caught off guard. He has read some Emily Dickinson but not for a long time, and now he can’t remember a single one of her poems. Ah, the bard of Amherst, he says. The pretty bartender, sensing the husband’s discomfort, willingly moves on. I’m taking a fiction class in college, she says. I don’t have to, it’s not required for my major, but I wanted to take it anyway. We read short stories. By who? the husband asks. Despite his spotty knowledge of Emily Dickinson, the husband thinks of himself as well read. We’re reading one now by Kate Chopin, the pretty bartender says. It’s called “The Story of an Hour.” Sadly, the husband must admit that he has not read this story. She’s awesome, the bartender says. There’s apparently a novel by her? “The Awakening,” the husband says. Have you read it? the bartender asks. No, not that, either, he says. The husband then recommends Flannery O’Connor, and the bartender makes a show of writing the name down on a strip of register tape. I love the grotesque, the husband says. What’s that? the bartender asks. It’s when you deform life to get at some idea behind it, the husband says. Behind life? the bartender asks. Yes, an idea behind life, like the last judgment of the soul, or Heaven and Hell. Which one would this be? the bartender asks, smiling, and the husband says, This bar? Purgatory would be my guess. Huh, the pretty bartender says. Just as they seem to be getting somewhere, though, the husband makes the conversationally suicidal move of bringing up Emily Dickinson again. She’s completely singular, he says. There’s no one like her! There is sweat on his brow, which runs almost to the top of his head. Yeah, the bartender says, and that’s the end of that. The husband returns to his Rousseau. The pretty bartender begins talking to another customer, a man wearing a yellow polo shirt. This man is a total sleazebag, although the husband doesn’t know it yet. I haven’t seen you here much, the sleazebag says. The pretty bartender tells the sleazebag that she has shifted her schedule. I’m in school now, she says. Oh yeah? What are you studying? Business, she answers, with a minor in communications. Is your sister out of the hospital? the sleazebag asks. Yes, she’s at home now, the bartender says, and at this point the husband’s cell phone buzzes. His wife is back from the party. Where are you? she asks. I’m at the bar, the husband says. He wants his wife to come to the bar, so the pretty bartender will see that he has a wife who isn’t bad-looking, even if she is a lot older than the bartender. The husband frowns at his book until his wife arrives, still wearing the low-cut black dress she had on at the party. The husband doesn’t understand why she would wear a dress like that to her father’s sixtieth birthday, but she does look good in it. She sits down between her husband and the sleazebag. The wife notices the empty snifter in front of her husband and asks, How are you feeling? Better, the husband says, although actually he looks kind of gray and worn. Everyone was worried about you, the wife says. My father gave me the name of a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s. He wants you to make an appointment. It’s not my heart, just a cold, the husband says, annoyed. He has a heart problem to which his wife’s family is always overreacting. And we don’t even live here, the husband grumbles. Why would I make an appointment with a doctor in Boston? It’s not that far, the wife says. We could stay with my parents. But why? the husband says. Why do we have to keep coming here? At this point, the young and shapely bartender reappears. It’s last call, she says, leaning toward the husband. Can I get you anything? The husband says, Yes, I’ll take another. Coming up! the bartender says. The wife looks ready to scold the husband, but instead she turns to watch the basketball game on the big TV mounted above the bar. There’s a short silence, then the sleazebag asks, Do you like basketball?, and the wife, turning to face him, says, Yes, I do. Where are you from? the sleazebag asks. New York, the wife says. So, the sleazebag says, the Knicks? No, the Celtics. My family is from Boston, the wife says. The sleazebag is obsessed with the Celtics, and he begins to talk about them enthusiastically. The husband is, in a funny way, impressed. The sleazebag says one thing after another about the Celtics without ever falling down the kind of conversational hole the husband fell down with Emily Dickinson. Like a windup toy, the sleazebag keeps going and going. And the wife goes along with him. She tells the sleazebag about her father, who freezes mouse heads in a laboratory at M.I.T. I’ve heard of him! the sleazebag says, but it’s clear that he’s thinking of someone else, or just lying. It doesn’t matter. As their conversation continues, the wife seems more and more impressed by the sleazebag. He owns a company that sells health insurance to small businesses. He has joint custody of two beautiful daughters. In short, despite being a total scumbag, a real bottom-feeder, the sleazebag knows how to present himself as a decent guy who would not dream of leaving his father-in-law’s sixtieth-birthday party early, and if the sleazebag did leave the party early because he wasn’t feeling well the wife would not find him at the hotel bar. He’d be in bed, or, more likely, in the hospital. The sleazebag inches toward the wife and says something in a low voice. The wife laughs. I should interrupt, the husband thinks, but he doesn’t know what to say, and also he’s now had one and a half hot toddies, plus a glass of wine at the party, plus the extra-strength cold medicine he took earlier. The husband feels woozy. He keeps his unhappy silence, hoping that his wife will turn away from the sleazebag and talk to him, but what actually happens is that the sleazebag gets up from his stool and says, Well, it’s been good meeting you. The sleazebag shakes the wife’s hand, and it looks as if her hand kind of lingers in his. Then the sleazebag leaves. The wife stands up. I left my shawl at the party, she says. I’m going to run back and get it. Will you be all right? Sure, the husband says. The wife hurries out of the bar. The husband can’t believe it—was she even wearing a shawl? The bartender, too, looks surprised that the wife has gone running after the total sleazebag. But what if this was how things worked with the husband and wife? What if they had an arrangement that they could sleep with whomever they wanted? What if they were brave, free people whose love for each other could not be damaged by a random hotel hookup? God, what if? The husband looks around. The slender and well-proportioned young bartender with naturally crinkly black hair is standing right there. All at once, as if by magic, the husband remembers the first lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson. “My life it stood, a loaded gun, in corners, till a day, the owner passed, identified, and carried me away.” The bartender’s eyes light up. Very good, she says, even though the husband has misquoted. The actual line is: My life had stood. So tell me, the husband says, what happened to your sister? The bartender says that her sister was in a car accident. Her spine was broken, and she has been in a body cast for months. She, the pretty bartender, spends half her time at her sister’s apartment, taking care of her sister’s toddler and also cooking for her sister and cleaning, which her sister, obviously, can’t do. The husband is moved by this story. Sister, work, school, and still she finds time to read Dickinson! He tells the bartender how impressive he thinks she is. I can barely hold down a job, he says, and as for writing, forget it. Oh, you’re a writer? the bartender asks. It’s not worth talking about, the husband says, but he wants to talk about it, so he does. He tells the bartender that he writes short stories about the confusion of life and the unknowability of the heart. Like Chekhov, the pretty bartender says. We read a story by him in our fiction class. Yes, the husband says, kind of like that, but I prefer Nabokov, with his unreliable narrators. The pretty bartender has not read Nabokov. It doesn’t matter, the husband says. The point is, the husband’s stories are too complicated for the average reader. I’d like to be famous like Chekhov, he says, but it’s not going to happen. You shouldn’t give up, the bartender says. Perseverance pays off! The husband grimaces. Thanks for the advice, he says. He’s finished his drink, and assumes that his wife will be back shortly. I should go, he says. It was nice meeting you, the pretty bartender says. I hope I’ll see you here again sometime.
The husband leaves the bartender, whose name, April P, is printed on the receipt, a large tip. He is satisfied. All he wanted was to have a friendly conversation with an attractive younger woman and then to go upstairs, read Rousseau, and wait for his wife to come back with her shawl. But when he gets to his room he feels differently. For one thing, there is now a strange howling sound, which is caused by air rushing from the corridor into the room, or vice versa. When the husband opens the door, the sound stops. When he leans against the door, it stops. As soon as he lets the door alone, it starts again, a wailing, as if this modern boutique hotel were really some ancient New England manse infested with miserable spirits. He tries to ignore the sound. He lies on the bed, fully dressed, and opens his book. But the other thing that has happened is that the husband is now completely disgusted by Rousseau. Screw Rousseau, that creepy pervert! The only reason he is reading the “Origin of Inequality” is that it’s on the syllabus for the Intro to Western Thought class at the remote little college where he teaches. What a stupid situation, the husband thinks—I’m being compelled to read about freedom! He feels woozy again, this time like he might throw up. He closes his eyes. The wind is still howling through the door. Another life, the husband thinks, I want another life! Then he rolls off the bed and puts on his shoes. He begins to brush his teeth, then something occurs to him and he spits out the toothpaste, grabs his jacket, and hurries into the hall. He takes the elevator downstairs and runs to the bar. April P is still there, wiping glasses. Forget something? she asks. No, the husband says. Will you have a drink with me? We’re closed, April P says, and in fact the bar is nearly empty. The only people left are a trio of old women in a corner and a man pouring hot water into the ice chest. We could go somewhere, the husband says. April P hesitates, but finally she says, O.K., give me a minute to change. She goes into the kitchen and comes out wearing a red V-neck sweater and a puffy black coat. They walk to the hotel parking garage and practically the first thing the husband sees is his own car, a fancy sedan. This raises the question, How did his wife get back to the birthday party? By cab? Or did the sleazebag drive her? Is the sleazebag with her at the party? The husband tries not to think about this, but it’s hard. Where to? he asks. April P directs him to an Irish pub, the same pub, it turns out, where he and his wife had dinner with her parents before the party. The husband and April P get the same table he had earlier, and also the same waitress. Welcome back, the waitress says, and obviously the fact that the husband is now with April P, who is a lot younger than his wife, makes an impression on her. The husband orders a beer, April P a vodka tonic. And now, unfortunately, the husband looks around with total bewilderment, as if he had just been dropped off on this planet five minutes ago. After an awkward moment, April P asks, How long have you been married? Eleven years, the husband says. What does your wife do? The husband tells April P that his wife is a doctor—a pediatrician, to be precise. Do you have kids? No, the husband says, no, we don’t. Then, without provocation, he tells April P a story about something that happened in this very same pub just a few hours earlier. He and his wife and her parents were eating dinner, and his father-in-law, the famous freezer of mouse heads, mentioned that he had bought a double plot in a cemetery. The adjacent plot is vacant, the father-in-law said, and he asked if he should reserve it for the husband and wife. Plots are going quickly, he warned them—the husband and wife would have to make up their minds soon. If we don’t act now, the husband says, we may lose the chance to spend eternity next to my father-in-law! He laughs, maybe a little wildly. All of us buried together in Natick or wherever, can you imagine? April P doesn’t say anything. The worst part, the husband goes on, is that my wife can’t say no to her father. He’s bossed her around all her life, and he’s going to keep doing it after she’s dead! The husband twists his cocktail napkin into an unhappy ball. I’m a fuckup, he says. No, you aren’t, April P says. At a loss for evidence that this is so, she says, You have a really nice car. So fucking what, the husband says, rudely. I’m nearly forty years old and I don’t know anything about Emily Dickinson, or Kate Chopin, or Stendhal, or Hardy, or Fielding! I’ve never read Turgenev! April P says, In fiction class, the professor told us that the important thing is to write what you know. What you know, what you know, the husband repeats, seemingly in some sort of agonized trance. The truth is, he says, my stories suck. The reason no one reads them is because they’re awful, they have no point, they go on and on and then, then they stop. The husband has a coughing fit. He puts his hand on his chest. You need to relax, April P says. Granted, the husband says, but how? April P has an idea about this. She stands up and motions for the husband to follow. They go to the bathroom, to the ladies’ room, in fact. April P takes a little plastic bag out of her overstuffed purse. What’s that, the husband asks, but he already knows, and April P doesn’t bother answering. She taps out two lines of cocaine on the back of the “Norton Anthology of American Literature,” which she is also carrying in her purse, for some reason. At this point, the husband mentions that he used to have a problem with cocaine. When he moved to New York, he hung out with a cocaine-friendly crowd, and by the time he met the woman who would become his wife he had developed a kind of serious recreational habit. It was his wife—the woman who would become his wife—who made him stop. With his heart problem, cocaine wasn’t just stupid, it was suicidal, she said. You’re making too much of my heart problem, the husband said. It’s just a benign arrhythmia. But he stopped anyway and hasn’t touched cocaine since. When the husband is done telling his story, April P says, Maybe this isn’t a good idea. No, the husband says, it’s a good idea. I’m just nervous. They each do a line. Another? April P asks. They do another line. Then they stand there, wiping their noses and looking at each other. The husband admires April P’s deep black eyes, her thick, crinkly black hair, her slim waist and full figure. You’re so beautiful, he says. Thanks, April P says. And you, you have toothpaste on your chin. Do I? the husband asks. He looks in the mirror. So I do, he says, then he starts laughing. The husband laughs and laughs, and April P laughs, too, without necessarily finding this as funny as the husband does, but anyway, whatever, the husband thinks it’s the funniest thing that has ever happened to him, he’s laughing and laughing about the white dribble of toothpaste on his chin, and when he finally stops his eyes are wet. Thank you for pointing that out, he says. Then the husband leaps forward and kisses April P, whose body is hot and full of instincts. A minute later they have their pants off. April P sort of sits on the sink and the husband sort of leans up against her, they have sex, and then it’s over. He’s pulling out, she’s wiping between her legs with a paper towel; they are splashing water on their faces, using antibacterial soap, the hand dryer. They lurch back to the table. For a long time the husband doesn’t say anything. Are you O.K.? April P asks. God, yes, the husband says. He orders another round of drinks. When the waitress has brought the drinks, he says, Do you know what that was? That was freedom. And now he starts talking excitedly about how Rousseau was wrong. Freedom isn’t the capacity to resist the voice of Nature; it’s the ability to go along with Nature, which is to say—he actually says “which is to say,” as if he were lecturing—the ability to do what you want. But April P isn’t listening. She is thinking about Jim LaMont, the sleazebag, and how night after night he came to the bar at the hotel and told her how beautiful she was, how much he wanted to take her out someplace nice and treat her the way she deserved to be treated. How he told her that she deserved a better life than the one she had, and he, Jim LaMont, was going to give it to her. How, finally, she had started to wonder if maybe Jim LaMont was right, if there was another, better life out there with April P’s name on it, a life she wasn’t living because she had been born in the wrong town, to the wrong parents, with the wrong sister. One night she let Jim LaMont take her to a steak house—she had the linguine—and afterward they went back to his condo. The elevator was out of service, and there was a smell in his bathroom, a sour fart smell like an ocean gone wrong. And the next morning Jim LaMont gave her a joke postcard: “Would You Rate Yourself Satisfied, Extremely Satisfied, or Hungry For More?” April P changed her schedule to avoid him, but tonight he has found her again, and he may not ever go away. All this time, the husband has been talking and gesturing excitedly. He is telling April P that she is the most beautiful person he’s ever met, not just physically but as a whole person. She is beautiful and amazing. He wants to run away with her, he says. He’ll leave his wife. They haven’t loved each other for years. April P says, You don’t have to tell me that, but the husband keeps talking, and eventually April P says, Stop, just stop. She doesn’t want to hear it from him, not while he’s high. So the husband stops. His heart is racing. He is sweating all over. I think I’m drunk, he says. Can we get some air? Sure, April P says. The husband pays the check and April P helps him to the door. They stand outside the pub. It’s bitterly cold; hard little snowflakes are freezing to the roofs of parked cars. The husband gasps. Let’s walk somewhere, he says. Whatever you want, April P says. They walk, and soon find themselves in one of those village-green-type parks you get in New England, with a pyramid of black cannonballs at the entrance and a statue in the middle. The husband hates these village greens, but he can go no farther. He sits on a bench. April P sits down next to him. The husband is panting, he doesn’t know why, he’s just suddenly short of breath. What’s wrong with me? he asks. April P shakes her head. She doesn’t know. She puts her arm around the husband, who leans into her shoulder. His face is pale and waxy. Thank you, he says, then he blacks out. April P sits with the husband for a while, watching him sleep. Then she lowers his body onto the bench and stands up. She dusts the snow off the front of her coat and walks back to the pub. She calls a taxi, which takes her to the hotel, and there she gets into her own car, a much abused hatchback. She drives all the way back to the town where she lives, the name of which you don’t need to know, although it is definitely not Natick. By the time she gets there, it’s three in the morning. Her room is a mess, her bed is unmade. April P thinks about going to sleep, but instead she puts on water for coffee, sits down at her desk, which is itself kind of a disaster, and starts working on a story. ♦
