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    The Spare Husband and Other Stories
    The Spare Husband and Other Stories
    The Spare Husband and Other Stories
    Ebook204 pages3 hours

    The Spare Husband and Other Stories

    By Angus Brownfield

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    About this ebook

    Some of Angus Brownfield’s collection of nineteen short stories are told with tongue in cheek and some acknowledge the regret that comes of learning through sobering experience. One narrator is faintly hysterical, another trying to avoid the rat race that looms in front of him by reliving his hot-rodding youth in an automobile that’s beyond his rusty skills. There’s a variety of styles and lengths, an air of the fairytale, a breath of the homily, the authority of the fable. Many of the stories are set in your backyard. Two of them are set in Mexico, one barely over the border on The Day of The Dead, and the other at the last stop before the sweltering Guatemalan border. And throughout Time matters, slipping away until it’s nothing or sliding into an infinite future.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngus Brownfield
    Release dateJun 26, 2015
    ISBN9781310806575
    The Spare Husband and Other Stories
    Author

    Angus Brownfield

    Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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      Book preview

      The Spare Husband and Other Stories - Angus Brownfield

      The Spare Husband and Other Stories

      by Angus Brownfield

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      ***

      Published by

      Angus Brownfield on Smashwords

      Copyright © 2015 and 2016 by Angus Brownfield

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this eBook.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please download an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this eBook and did not download it, or it was not downloaded for your use only, then you should return to the eBook retailer from whom it was acquired and download your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      This Book Is For Christy Brownfield

      The Spare Husband and Other Stories

      Table of Contents

      The Spare Husband

      Kafka's Heater

      The Deep Blue Sea

      One Night Stand

      The Broadband Jungle

      Need

      Iphigenia

      The Crossing

      The Birdman

      Where Am I?

      Sneakers

      Day of the Dead

      The Line That Deserted Him

      Universal Superficial Contagion

      Two Moons

      Galluping

      Coyote Sings Fox’s Praises

      The Hummus Dealer of Meknes

      A Lesson in Civility

      The Spare Husband

      "Always look both ways before crossing anything," Uncle Scotty told my children when they were four and six.

      They called him Uncle though he wasn’t really, not theirs nor mine, though old enough to be mine. The kids sat, wide-eyed and perfectly still, as he illustrated his admonition with the story of a buddy run over by a train the summer they worked together on a railroad surveying crew.

      The accident occurred along the California coast, where double tracks run more or less parallel to Highway 1. Near Goleta they run just above the beach and intermittently in railroad tunnels blasted through spurs of the Coast Range, where it meets the ocean in steep cliffs. Warned repeatedly by the crew boss to check tunnels for trains about to emerge, the kid and Uncle Scotty—only a kid himself, a college student earning money for his education—would carefully look for oncoming headlights each time they crossed the tracks.

      Sure enough, one day they were heading for the beach for a smoke break when here came a southbound freight train out of the nearest tunnel. It took some time to pass, Uncle Scotty losing count of the tank cars and boxcars after he reached a hundred. Finally, the tomato soup red caboose clattered past and Scotty’s partner stepped into the train’s diesel-scented wake the instant it was by, then, full of adolescent piss and vinegar, dashed onto the second track.

      He failed to look the other way. A northbound passenger train, hidden behind the freight train heading south, hurtled into the tunnel, carrying the youth’s body plastered for an instant to the locomotive’s blunt red nose. Uncle Scotty had hesitated a second before following his buddy across the tracks, just long enough to avoid the same gruesome death.

      And so he reached a venerable age where he was an oracle to two goggle-eyed youngsters.

      *****

      The essence of Uncle Scotty’s lesson didn’t penetrate my thick skull until too late. The essence was: life is full of instances where you look both ways before proceeding. Only it wasn’t trains I needed to look out for, it was women.

      Being struck by a woman, you insist, is nothing like being struck by a train. But allow me the analogy: it’s about not looking before you leap. Sure, the impact would depend on the woman, and certain aspects of it might be very pleasant, but getting run over by one woman while you think you’ve escaped another is a bummer. You can’t win. And when she’s catapulted you through the tunnel of love, there is not the mercy of death by massive trauma as you emerge.

      I’d known both these women a long time. One I’d known about as well as a young fool can know a woman, which, if you’re not one yourself, is incompletely at best. Carol Bishop, nee Wood, was my wife for half a dozen years, back when we were Uncle Scotty’s neighbors. We married young, believing we knew exactly where we were going— . . . young /we loved each other and were ignorant, as the poet says. We were, in fact, too young and too ignorant: after one year of bliss and five of mounting misery, all we knew was that we didn’t know diddly and would never learn as long as we were held together by the thin paste of lust and guilt.

      We split. Besides getting the house, the car and the children, she got broad of beam. I got alimony and child support, plus a certain wariness about permanent ties. Eventually she slimmed down, married again, stayed both slimmish and married, raised the kids decently. After a long period of estrangement, we became friends. I even became friends with her husband, Bruce.

      The northbound woman, Lorna Fabbris, was my wife’s maid of honor. Lorna was, my late adolescent mind convinced itself on first sight, the woman of my dreams: petit, vaguely Mediterranean in coloring, graceful of movement and agile of mind and tongue. She had great cheekbones.

      By contrast, Carol was tall, and though she claimed Scottish ancestry, it was clear a Viking or two had sneaked into her gene pool. Strawberry blond, toned by lots of swimming when I first met her: you could picture her riding across the sky with a band of like-shaped Valkyries, looking for slain warriors to scoop up and transport to Valhalla.

      Lorna and Carol were friends from the fourth grade, confidants in later years, when it helped to tell someone about your bastard husband or reckless son. The moment I saw Lorna, at the wedding rehearsal, I fell for her. I admonished myself as I went to sleep that night: You’re going to meet lots of attractive women in your life; get over it.

      But when Carol and I came back from our honeymoon, the sensation of confusion I’d felt on first meeting happened again. Lorna invited us over for drinks. After several rounds, Carol fell asleep on the couch; Lorna and I sat at the all purpose table in her all purpose living area, continuing a conversation most of which I’ll never recall. She could have recited the alphabet and I’d have lost each letter in a dark cave of desire.

      But one piece of slightly inebriated chatter I do recall. Just before I took my sleepy wife home, Lorna grew wistful. I wish I were coming home from a honeymoon.

      You gotta get married before you have a honeymoon, I said.

      Exactly, she said.

      You could be my number two wife, I told her, squinting slightly to keep my eyes from crossing.

      Thanks, but I want to be someone’s number one wife.

      Awww.

      The pleasant fantasy of a harem of two bounced around in my brain but soon came to rest as the reality of being a good husband to one woman crowded it into an area of my brain as miniscule as a pituitary gland. A good marriage required a good deal of work—or at least a good marriage in an age that seemed to make it harder and harder to be yourself and part of a couple at the same time.

      Lorna eventually did marry. We stayed friends, flirted at social gatherings, not so much that my wife or her husband—whom I liked, too—became upset, but enough to establish the notion that, were circumstances different, we’d have been Brad and Angelina, or (older than those two) Gable and Lombard. Thanks to scotch and the last vestiges of adolescence, we even smooched a couple of times when no one was looking. I learned about pheromones and concluded my nose was attuned to Lorna’s pheromones in a way not duplicated elsewhere.

      *****

      Leery of permanent bonds after the divorce, I played the field. At some point in my early forties, well off and not too well fed, I found myself not having to work at attracting women: success and self-confidence were the strongest aphrodisiacs of all. In my idealistic youth I’d vowed never to sleep with a woman who wasn’t a friend first, but I awoke, the morning after my forty-fourth birthday, in bed with a woman I should not have been in bed with at all, an employee of mine.

      I pulled in my horns. I persuaded the bedded employee to go back to college and finish her degree. I avoided further temptation. I tried my hand at writing a novel, and while I was no good at it, it occupied a portion of my brain heretofore employed coaxing women into bed.

      One day, my novel rejected by all the publishers I really wanted to be published by, Carol called me. After chatting airily—since we were no longer part of each other’s lives, how else would we chat?—she said, Lunch, Jack?

      Hmmm?

      Let’s have lunch tomorrow, she said.

      I’ve got a one o’clock—can we make it early?

      Eleven? Petrone’s?

      I said, You’re on.

      Petrone’s is one of those places that takes no reservations unless you’re a party of eight. They do righteous steak but the best grilled fish in town: tuna, swordfish or shark; they have a great bar, and half the fun of going there for lunch is standing in a packed crowd with a martini or a scotch highball, looking at all the Financial District types looking back at you.

      Something had changed about Carol. The strawberry blond was slowly morphing to ash blond, but that wasn’t it: she looked both worn and indomitable at once, a woman who suddenly had a story worth attending to, compelling pheromones or no. In the vanguard of the early lunch crowd, we had time for one drink before a booth was ready. We commented about the ways San Francisco kept changing while always staying the same. We reminisced about dinners at Fisherman’s Wharf, nightcaps at the Buena Vista, chilly cable car rides on foggy nights.

      In the booth we each ordered fish and a white wine. I said, That’s more than I’ve seen you drink at lunch; usually it’s iced tea.

      I need the alcohol; you always said it was the best analgesic around.

      Tennis elbow?

      No, Jack, I have a husband who’s dying.

      No way. Bruce was my age.

      Way, as the kids say these days. Pain and indomitability were warring in sad eyes a little bloodshot, as if she’d been crying on the way over.

      She went on to explain the two kinds of multiple sclerosis, the slow kind that lets you live another thirty years, and the kind that wipes you out in a hurry.

      I didn’t know Bruce had MS, I said, feeling stupidly out of touch.

      Well, now you know.

      I said, How are the kids taking it? John and Mardi were in their late teens, still immortal, immersed in studies and dates and, in Mardi’s case, first seed on the school’s tennis team. She took after her mother.

      They don’t know what to do. You might start seeing them more often, she said, a slight edge to her voice.

      And you?

      She polished off her wine and held the glass up as our waiter went by. I’m the principal caretaker. I cope. I could stand to see a little more of you myself.

      I’ll do anything I can.

      *****

      One thing led to another. It reminded me of my own mortality, seeing Bruce in a wheelchair. I adopted an airy demeanor around him and hated myself for it, but I couldn’t help it: he knew he had not long to go; I knew it, and he knew that I knew it.

      One night after dinner, which was a protracted and grim affair, trying to pace my eating to Bruce’s, Carol and I sat at the table, the dishes cleared, and sipped Port and nibbled toasted pecans. After a decent interval I excused myself.

      The front door open, porch light glowing yellow, she kissed me goodnight. The perfunctory kiss led to a smackeroo, a lot of tongue, at first ignored but soon reciprocated. She leaned into me. Out of an old habit I stroked her bottom. She pressed her pelvis into me and said, I can’t play games, Jack, I need you—in the most basic way.

      You mean, you want to meet me somewhere? Incipient panic met lust just below my solar plexus and produced a growl we both ignored.

      I mean, come and sit on the couch with me.

      But Bruce . . .

      I gave him his medicine. He’s good till four or five.

      I let her lead me by the hand. The incipient panic gave way to passion trying mightily to disguise itself as compassion. We did a lot of what we did as adolescents and I left at midnight, very rumpled, confused but surprisingly not disgusted with myself. I was being used, perhaps, but I was also being useful, filling a genuine need, not just having a recreational go.

      *****

      In the meantime, Lorna and David had moved to Southern California. I called her about once a month, we sometimes flirted over the phone, the kind of if only banter you have with an attractive woman when you’re having an affair with another one.

      By that time Carol was coming to expect my attentions, every week or two hiring respite care for Bruce and dining chez Jack, with each other for dessert. She would come to my door wilted and leave with her chin up, telling me what a true friend I was. Whether Bruce knew what was going on was something I dared not ponder, but it was a question always stalking the purlieus of my mind.

      In spite of perpetual, low-grade guilt, I liked my evenings with Carol. While her beam narrowed to something resembling her youth, her character, in spite of the cheating, seemed to expand. She had ideas, insights, she was more interesting than anyone I currently worked with. Somehow, despite pretty nearly round-the-clock nursing care, she managed to read (sometimes, she told me, reading aloud to Bruce). She had become something of a movie buff, too, and would parse delicious scenes from films as disparate as The Way We Were and Rashomon.

      I was out of town for a while, in Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly work, a little play. While down there I called Lorna for lunch, which she couldn’t make, having taken a job, of all things, running the kind of agency that supplied respite care workers to Carol and Bruce.

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