Hum: Stories Read online

  “Why do you think they capitalized The Lifestyle?” I said. “Is that code for something?”

  “Swinging,” Jim said. “Wife-swapping. You take mine, I’ll take yours.” He was concentrating on the ad, reading the fine print.

  I thought of Mrs. Thompson’s parting words—we’ll see how it goes. “Oh my God. Do you think the Thompsons—”

  “Yep.”

  “Do you think they think we do too?”

  “Looks that way.”

  Jim was in the best mood he’d been in since we left home. I imagined breasts, hands, hairy chests, a spidery tangle of arms and legs. Suddenly I felt nervous. I yanked the magazine out of his hands. “So how did you know what The Lifestyle means, anyway?”

  “I had this second cousin from Wisconsin. He was involved with that stuff.”

  “How come you never mentioned it before?”

  “I hardly know the guy. He told me about it several years ago at a family reunion. He was drinking bourbon and Coke and he was depressed and all, and it just slipped. What happened was, I said to Walt, ‘Sorry to hear about the divorce,’ and he said ‘I can’t blame Darlene. I have to blame The Lifestyle.’ Then he tells me how they used to go down to Boca Raton three times a year to partake. He said it was like some kind of smorgasbord. One minute you have a slab of Wisconsin cheddar in front of you, and the next minute, you’re in The Lifestyle, and whoa, there’s this platter with the Wisconsin cheddar, plus the double crème brie, the havarti, the camembert, the smoked gouda, the works. And suddenly the double crème brie looks better than the Wisconsin cheddar. Walt, see, he’s this pale, overweight guy, and he was the cheddar.”

  “That’s how he put it?”

  “Maybe he was the Velveeta. That’s not the point. Point is Darlene suddenly saw what life was like with the full cheese board.”

  I was thinking about Jim’s pale, fat second cousin Walt taking his skinny little wife to Boca Raton, and how there’d be all those tan men down there in their plaid shorts, with their muscled legs, their deck shoes, and how Walt must have regretted ever getting Darlene involved in all that.

  “Poor Walt didn’t stand a chance,” I said, putting my arms around Jim’s neck. The talk of broken marriages had made me feel affectionate. “Do you want to make love?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Does that mean maybe later?”

  “Of course.”

  In the old days, if I wanted sex all I had to do was unsnap my bra or pat Jim in a certain way in the small of the back or give him this, “Hey, I’m your wife” look from across the room, but lately there always had to be conversation, negotiation, deliberation. I couldn’t figure out when or why sex had lost its spontaneity, becoming some official act demanding diplomacy.

  “Okay,” I said. “What should we do, then?”

  “Let’s check out the beach.”

  A light breeze was blowing, and the white hotel rising against the bleached rock in the moonlight reminded me of some place I’d been as a child. The beach was deserted except for an elderly woman in a red swimsuit doing leg lifts on her towel. We asked her to take our picture, which she did, but then she insisted on taking the same picture several times. “Your eyes were closed,” she said the first time, then, “I cut your heads off,” then, to me, “Hon, suck your stomach in.”

  After returning to our room and showering we lay naked in bed watching a sexy show. The show was in Spanish and I couldn’t understand the words, but I could tell that the characters on the show lived lives of wild abandon, of great passion and sexual urgency. I started rubbing Jim’s back. “Seriously,” I said. “Would you ever?”

  “Ever what?”

  “You know. Like the Thompsons.”

  “It would have to be the right couple,” he said.

  I traced the spatter of light brown moles on his back. “How would you know when you found the right couple?”

  “They’d be about our age,” he said, “and good-looking, of course.” He rolled over and looked at me. “Like the Thompsons. Maybe we should call them.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  That night I dreamt of a famous young Hollywood couple. In the dream, they were sitting in our suite, wearing terrycloth robes. The man, dark-haired and tan, started kissing me. The woman, red-headed and softly lit, offered my husband a drink. She had very pale and lovely feet. She slid her foot up my husband’s leg, and then I woke. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that. I felt sad and vaguely frightened.

  ***

  The next few days we lounged on the beach, went snorkeling at the Santa Maria coral reef, and watched whales breaching as they journeyed, slow and slick-backed, from the Sea of Cortez into the wide cold Pacific. We drank a great deal of Tecate and margaritas, ate fried eggs with tomatoes and peppers, lobster tail and shrimp with molé sauce, thick tortilla chips dipped in guacamole. By the time we got back to our room each night we were too tired and hot and full for sex.

  On our final evening, nursing sunburns and a vague sense of malaise, we walked into town for dinner. We chose a little restaurant a few blocks from the beach, a thatch-roofed hut run by a man from Croatia. The restaurant was crowded with locals and tourists. A mariachi band was playing by the bar. We took the only available table, which was on the outdoor patio and close enough to the road that we could smell exhaust from passing cars. We had just ordered our drinks when my husband spotted the Thompsons down the sidewalk, walking in our direction.

  “Should we invite them to dinner?” Jim asked.

  We’d been in Cabo for five days, with only each other for company. By then we’d grown slightly argumentative and bored. “If you really want to,” I said.

  Jim got up and disappeared into the sidewalk crowd. In a couple of minutes he was back, the Thompsons by his side. Their faces were slightly burnt. She was wearing a strapless white top, and bathing suit lines cut across her shoulders.

  “Hello,” they said in unison.

  “Hi. I never got your first names.”

  “Steve,” he said. “This is Rebecca.”

  The waiter appeared with two more menus, and we ordered a pitcher of margaritas and the seafood sample appetizer. We talked about snorkeling and deep sea fishing, about movies and antique gramophones, the latter of which the Thompsons collected, about UPS versus FedEx. We were having ourselves a regular conversation until, three pitchers into the evening, Jim looked up from his chile relleno and said to Steve, “So tell us about the wife-swapping.”

  Rebecca looked at him as if he’d just spat in the communion cup. “It’s no longer called wife-swapping,” she said. “That ended long ago. Now it’s called The Lifestyle.” She was sitting next to me, and over the course of the evening her chair had mysteriously migrated a few inches in my direction. Every time she reached for her drink, her hand brushed my forearm.

  “It’s not just the name that’s changed,” Steve said, scratching his bicep. “The whole system is different now. The nuances are different. For example, a couple may get together and the man go with the man, the woman with the woman.” He put a hand on Jim’s shoulder when he said this.

  I was waiting for Jim to start laughing the way he does when he’s nervous, but he didn’t. He patted Steve on the back like they were the best of friends, like it didn’t bother him one bit where Steve was going with this.

  “Or one spouse may choose to sit out and watch the other three together,” Steve said. “Everything is a mutual agreement between two spouses, who choose their partners wisely, it is assumed, and together.”

  “Interesting,” Jim said. The waiter came at just that moment, and I ordered another round of margaritas. The question that was on my mind, the question I didn’t dare ask, was why they approached us on that first night, why they thought we’d be interested. Did we give off some subtle, deceptive signal that erroneously marked us as swingers?

  One hour and two pitchers later, Steve looked at me and said, “Would you like to jo
in us for a drink at our hotel?”

  I was trying to figure out how to politely refuse when Jim blurted, “We’d love to.”

  Rebecca and Steve went out to hail a cab, leaving us alone for a moment. “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

  “Lighten up,” Jim said, kissing me on the cheek. “It’s just a drink.”

  In the taxi, I took the front seat and stared ahead at the black road melting into the darkness, while the others carried on a lively conversation in the back. In the rearview mirror I could see Jim sitting between the Thompsons. Steve’s hand rested on Jim’s thigh, and Jim wasn’t doing anything about it. Once, before we were married, Jim had said, “In the sex department, there’s nothing I wouldn’t try once,” but I thought he was just trying to impress me.

  Soon we were at the Westin Regina in a room clearly designed for romance. Suite 127 had a high white ceiling and marble floors, a king-sized bed with red sateen sheets, a heart-shaped hot tub in the corner. We were all standing around trying to act casual, and Steve was looking grateful, and my husband was looking inquisitive, and Rebecca was looking at me, and, feeling that I had to defend myself, that I had to set things straight, I said, “The last time I kissed a girl was in the fifth grade. We were playing spin-the-bottle at Marnie Topeka’s house.” I remembered Doris with her closed eyes, her puckered lips, the look of sheer excitement on her face as she kissed me. The kiss lasted only a second, but after that I felt I’d done my duty, and I never answered her phone calls again, never went to another one of her lonely birthday parties.

  Rebecca stood by the door, her hand draped over the knob like a woman in a seventies-era advertisement. The moment we walked into the room, she had transformed into the poster girl for Miss Elegance Perfume. She walked over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Mary,” she said. “May I call you Mary?”

  “Okay.”

  My name isn’t Mary. I don’t know how she came up with it. I have to admit it made me feel a little more relaxed, though, being a Mary, as though I wouldn’t have to live with the consequences of whatever happened here. Whatever happened here would be Mary’s problem.

  “Good.” She had slipped her hand under my blouse and was tracing my spine with one finger. My skin felt very hot. “You should know, Mary, that we’re not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. Okay? This is all about what you want.”

  Steve moved toward me, and I was wondering if psoriasis was contagious, and I was half hoping they’d pull out an Amway brochure or a Church of Latter Day Saints pamphlet, and then we could all have a good laugh because this had been a big misunderstanding, and the Thompsons would confess, a bit awkwardly, that all they ever wanted to do was sell us shampoo or eternal life.

  But then, without a word, my husband began to unbutton his shirt, slowly and with purpose. He pulled it off, revealing his tanned skin. Then he sat on the end of the bed and took off his shoes, his socks. Down below, an ambulance raced by, sirens howling. Red lights slid over the walls, the dresser, the bed, the faces of those three strangers, eager and waiting.

  BOULEVARD

  On the day we met V., there was snow in the mountains. We were in a small town in Sweden, five days into a two-week vacation, seven months into our marriage. We were traveling through the Nordic countries by train, trying to make a baby. We hoped to have three children. It seemed like the perfect number, possessed of an innate symmetry—a beginning, middle, and end. My husband and I had both been only children, adored and lonely. Our parents were dead. We desperately wanted to have a family, to fashion from our gene pool a new and better history.

  The village lay in a valley dominated by a very blue lake. Our hotel had been written up in the Times as one of the most romantic hotels in the world. It had a small restaurant, with a fireplace and cozy wooden tables, where one could eat fresh trout from the lake. One night after making love, we went down to the restaurant, sleepy and famished. It was a bit early for dinner, and the room was empty except for the waiter and one other patron, a thin man with an oddly shaped moustache. He was drinking coffee with whipped cream; a partially eaten piece of chocolate cake lay on the table beside his elbow. We spoke to the waiter in the few Swedish words we had learned, but our pronunciation was poor and the thin man immediately pegged us. “North Americans,” he said, smiling.

  My husband gave him a little nod. “Yes.”

  “My compatriots. How are you liking this country?”

  “Very much,” my husband and I said simultaneously, although neither of us had any details to back up our assessment. We both responded to the awkwardness by taking our napkins from the table and spreading them across our laps. It occurred to me that we must seem like one of those couples that have become so melded in opinion and personality as to have the substance of a single human being, rather than that of two separate individuals.

  The man said, “I’ve been here for three years. It’s a splendid country, but a bit too clean.” He sipped the last of his coffee, stood, and asked, “Mind if I join you?”

  There was no way to refuse him. So we spent the evening with the stranger, who told us about his childhood in Michigan, college in New York City, and his subsequent hiring by the government. “You caught me at the tail end of my first posting,” he said. “Next week, I leave for Bucharest. You must visit me there.”

  “Definitely,” my husband said. I don’t know what it was about the stranger—some combination of confidence and desperation, perhaps, his utter refusal to accept any terms less than immediate friendship—but I knew that we would, indeed, visit him in Bucharest. And I knew, somehow, that our relationship would last a very long time, that there was no way of getting out of it, should we ever want to.

  That night in bed, while my husband slept, I imagined our trip to Bucharest. I would wear one of those front-carry contraptions, our baby pressed snugly to my chest, as we trod the desolate streets with our new friend, seeking some fresh adventure. I would read to our baby from Romanian children’s books. Years later, in college, our children would tell their friends about their adventurous upbringing, how they had been blessed with parents who traveled, how they had witnessed great political movements, nations in transition. They would talk of their eccentric Uncle V., the family friend whose relationship to their parents was never entirely clear. They would be able to tell these stories in many languages, and their faces would be the kind of faces whose nationality is not readily apparent. Our children would seem, to people upon first meeting, residents not of one particular country, but of the world at large.

  But things would not be so simple. We did not make a baby in Sweden or in Bucharest the following year. We did not make a baby in Tirane, our friend V.’s third posting. On each of our trips to his far-away countries, we set to the task with renewed vigor, hoping, perhaps, that there would be something in the water, that our bodies would respond in some magical way to the change in geography. Our bodies, I was prone to saying. My husband allowed me to say it; this was part of his ongoing diplomacy, the cordial way in which he approached our marriage. But we both knew the pronoun was merely a defense against my singular failing: my body did not respond. Not to the miracle of fertility drugs, not to the thrust and rush of him, my determined husband, year after year after year.

  Through no fault of V.’s own, at some point I came to associate him with the emptiness that defined our marriage. He appeared the moment we first began trying to get pregnant, and each time we saw him we were trying still. If he knew the depth of our despair, he never let on. I believe he viewed us as the ideal couple, a unit complete in ourselves, and I believe he envied our apparent romance, the false symmetry of our lives.

  ***

  Nine years later, my husband and I find ourselves standing on Roberto Diaz Street. My husband is holding a large plant in a heavy ceramic pot. V. is attempting to hail a cab while struggling with an enormous cactus. If we weren’t so tired and hungry, the vision of his small head peering from behind the massive cactus
would be very amusing.

  The wind upends a basket on the balcony across the street and sends a stack of newspapers flying. The papers flap down the alleyway like frantic gray birds against the backdrop of colorful houses. My husband’s plant is losing leaves, and there are no cabs in site. As we wait, a tall, dark-haired woman appears from a house across the street. She glances at us, then quickly starts to walk in the opposite direction. But V. has seen her. “Elena!” he shouts, moving the cactus in a sort of wave. The wind whips his cheeks to pink and lifts his fine brown hair into a kind of spiral above his head; it is not a bad look for him. At fifty-two, he looks more like a British pop star than an American diplomat.

  The woman comes over, kisses his cheek, and they exchange a few rapid words which I can’t understand. The woman seems distracted, as if someone more interesting is waiting for her somewhere. V. makes introductions, translating as he goes. “Elena is my very good friend,” he says. She kisses each of us in turn. Her cheek is warm, and I imagine a fire going in the brightly painted house from which she emerged. I imagine it is a house full of glass figurines, a house where lively parties are held, to which V. is not invited.

  A blue cab comes roaring down the street. My husband and I share the back seat with the plants. V. takes the front. As we’re pulling away, I can see Elena hurrying in the other direction on painfully high heels. A gust of wind catches the hem of her skirt and lifts it above her knees, revealing the pale backs of her thighs. V. gives a command to the driver, and then we’re moving rapidly past elegant shops with elaborate doors.

  “How do you know Elena?” my husband asks.

  “I found her through a friend. She’s a masseuse. She’s amazing.”