The Hungry Husband

Norman Singer

ONE

David Fortune was having a wet nightmare. To wake up shrieking and ejaculating at the same devastating split-second was petting rather wearing on the nerves. Luckily, he and his enchanting blond wife Linda believed in the militant hygiene of twin beds. Consequently, she never got a peek at his swimming sheets until the next morning, by which time both the Fortunes and the sheets were comfortably dried-out and starchy looking.

But tonight the sweet agony of his cries had awakened her, which meant that he had to be ready with a few consoling lies: sweat plus anxiety, old paranoid fears about losing their magnificent home, his brilliant career as an insurance executive, neither of which were the product of his own initiative, but had been generously forced on him by an overloaded father-in-law.

"Oh David, don't tell me you're having that same nasty dream again," said Linda, slipping out of her bee and rushing to his side. Her high, pendulous breasts wobbled gorgeously beneath her silken nightie, and as David eyed their crests, he wearily wished she hadn't sworn such fervent allegiance to the Health Department on the day they'd taken their vows.

"Yes, it was the same dream, dear," he said as she switched on the small lamp near his bed. "Same old hobgoblin threats to our future…" He gazed up as the light reflected on her face, and at once felt the deep sense of relief which his wife's sculptured beauty inevitably brought to him. With a sigh, his trembling ceased, and the hidden mound of his erection, which had been bulging like a covered-dish under the sheets, now sank slowly downward. Once more the atmosphere in their bedroom reflected the safe limbo-plateau of a suburban marriage: David and Linda, those bright young neuter-weds up the block. Two pals bunking together in the night, two campfire chums rubbing their fungus-repellent Ids together to build the fires of caution.

Nevertheless, for David there was never a tonic so potent as the sight of Linda playing nursemaid in the middle of the night. Even with the golden ripples of her hair caught up in those atrocious pink rollers, and her pretty, sensual features gleaming with skin-cream that smelled vomitous and sweet, the over-all repugnance still meant security to David Fortune, meant 'home.' He now decided that at twenty-seven she looked just the same as the day he'd married her. How accommodating of the dear girl to have frozen his original image of her, although he knew that deep inside Linda couldn't really be just the same-not after giving him three exquisitely-formed children, all of whom had been beautifully scented and deodorized since birth. He had to be fair about it; aside from producing off-spring, there'd been many other changes during their eight years together…

… Name one, said the nightmare-voices…

Well, their fantastic five-bedroom, four-bathroom house had been given two pictorial displays in Town and Country and was all paid for. And only last year he'd studiously watched those workers put in his pool and patio, with only the most minimal assistance from his filthy-rich in-laws. At twenty-seven, he was a junior executive at All-Planet Insurance Company, the best known firm of its kind in the world, and everybody knew it was by the sheerest coincidence that Linda's father happened to be the president of this corporation. Of course, going into the insurance business had never been his most burning ambition. As a kid, the world of the jazz musician had always been his special goal; God, how hungry he'd been to study the French Horn! He'd hoped to go on tour, giving recitals, concerts. Brand-new concept in sound.

David and Linda met in the third grade and, at first sight, fell passionately into a habit-pattern that was to anaesthetize them for nearly twenty years. Despite the marked difference in their parents' bank-balance, these two children of the Fates remained as constant to one another as Damon and Pythias. And to David, it had ah ways seemed so "right" to be seen with the spectacular-looking Linda Montclair, that he never had cause-or the good common sense-to search elsewhere.

"You dreamt the house was on fire again?" Linda was saying now.

"Yes," he said, preferring this lie to the shattering truth; but also welcoming this chance to tease his wife, who never knew it was happening, that sweet, sheltered frau. "ft was ghastly. There was this enormous epitaph in huge blazing letters across the roof: 'Here Lie David Fortune and Family. They Couldn't Wait to Die, So They're Decomposing Now!' "