Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 2. Whole No. 363, February 1974

A Night Out with the Boys by Elsin Ann Gardner[4]

The lights were dim, so low I could hardly make out who was in the room with me. Annoyed, I picked my way to the center where the chairs were. The smoky air was as thick as my wife’s perfume, and about as breathable.

I pulled a metal folding chair out and sat next to a man I didn’t know. Squinting, I looked at every face in the room. Not one was familiar. Damn that Russell! I didn’t belong in the gathering, and he had to have known it.

Adjusting my tie, the wide garish tie Georgia had given me for Christmas, I stared at the glass ashtray in the hand of the man next to me. The low-watt-age lights were reflected in it, making, I thought, a rather interesting pattern. At least, it was more interesting than anything that had happened yet that evening.

I was a fool to have come, I thought, angry. When the letter came the week before, my wife had opened it. As always.

“Look,” she d said, handing me my opened mail. It was a small rectangle of neatly printed white paper.

“It’s from that nice man down the block. It’s an invitation to a meeting of some sort. You’ll have to go.”

“Go? Meeting?” I asked, taking off my overcoat and reaching for the letter.

It was signed, Yours in brotherhood, Glenn Russell.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “I hardly know the guy. And I’ve never heard of the club.”

“You’re going,” Georgia rasped. “It’s your chance to get in good with the new neighbors. We’ve lived here two whole months and not a soul has dropped in to see us.”

No wonder, I thought. They’ve heard enough of your whining and complaining the times they’ve run into you at the supermarket.

“Maybe,” I said aloud, “people here are just reserved.”

“Maybe people in the east just aren’t as friendly as the people you knew back home,” she said, sneering.

“Oh, Georgia, don’t start that up again! We left, didn’t we? I pulled up a lifetime of roots for you, didn’t I?”

“Are you trying to tell me it was my fault? Because if you are, Mr. Forty-and-Foolish, you’ve got another think coming! It was entirely your fault, and you’re just lucky I didn’t leave you over it.”

“All right, Georgia.”

“Where would you be without Daddy’s money, Mr. Fathead? Where would you be without me?”

“I’m sorry, Georgia. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

She gave a smug little smile and continued. “You are going,” she nodded, making her dyed orange hair shake like an old mop. “Yes, indeed. You can wear your good dark brown suit and that new tie I gave you and—”

And she went on and on, planning my wardrobe, just as she’d planned every minute of my last fourteen years.

So the night of January eighth I was at the Annual Meeting of the Brierwood Men’s Club. What crazy kind of club had a meeting annually? A service club? Fraternal organization?

It was almost eight when the men stopped filing into the room. They were, with hardly an exception, a sad-looking lot. I mean, they looked depressed. A gathering of funeral directors? A club for people who had failed at suicide and were contemplating it again?

“I think this is all of us, men,” Russell said, standing on the dais. “Yes. We can begin. Alphabetical order, as always. One minute each, no more.”

Alphabetical order? One minute?

A sad tired-looking man in his fifties stood up and went to the platform.

“Harry Adams. She, she—”

He wiped his brow nervously, then went on.

“This year has been the worst ever for me. You’ve seen her. She’s so beautiful. I know you think I’m lucky. But I’m not, oh, no. She’s been after me every minute to buy her this, buy her that, so she can impress all the neighbors. I don’t make enough money to be able to do this! But she threatened to leave me and take all I’ve got, which isn’t that much any longer, if I don’t give in.

“So I took out a loan at the bank, told them it was for a new roof, bought her everything she wanted with the money. But it wasn’t enough. She wants more. A full-length mink coat, a two-carat diamond ring. I’ll have to go to another bank and get another loan for my roof. I’m running out of money, I’m running out of roofs—”

“One minute, Harry.”

Dejected, the little man left the platform and another man took his place.

“Joe Browning. She invited her mother to live with us. The old dame moved in last April. I can hardly stand my wife, but now I’ve got two of them. Whining, nagging, in stereo, yet. You can’t imagine how it is, guys! You think you’ve got troubles? You should have the troubles I’ve got. I get home from work five minutes late, I’ve got two of them on my back. I forget my wife’s birthday, my mother-in-law lets me have it. I forget my mother-in-law’s birthday, my wife lets me have it.”

He looked over at Russell, sitting on the platform.

“More?”

“Ten seconds, Joe.”

“I just want to say I can’t stand it at home any longer! I’m not a young man any longer. I—”

“Minute, Joe.”

And then it was another’s turn. I sat there rigid with fascination. What a great idea! Once a year to get together and complain about the wife! Get it out of the system, let it all out. And to think I hadn’t wanted to come!

Some guy named Dorsey spoke next. His wife had eaten herself up to 280 pounds. And Flynn, his wife had gone to thirty doctors for her imagined ills. Herter, his wife refused to wear her false teeth around the house unless they had guests, and Hurd, his wife wouldn’t let him go out with the boys, and Klutz, his wife had wrecked his brand-new sports car three times during the year, and Lemming, his wife gave all his comfortable old clothes to charity, and Morgan, his wife kept going through the house, finding his liquor bottles and pouring them down the sink.

And then it was my turn.

And the whole time I was listening to these men I was thinking, they think they have it bad? Really? Because none of them had a wife as rotten as mine. Oh, I guess we all think now and then that we’ve picked a lemon off the tree of love, to get poetic for a moment, but compared to those men with their crummy complaints I really did have the all-time booby prize.

I’d figured when Morgan got up to speak it would be ray turn next, so I rehearsed what to say. It wasn’t, you understand, that I wanted to impress anybody. But to be actually able to say it out loud, to tell the world what she’d done to me — pure heaven!

I took my place on the dais and looked at Russell.

“You can begin now,” he said kindly.

“Fred Norton. Her name was Annie and she was my secretary and she was twenty-three years old and I loved her more than anyone else on earth and I knew I always would and my wife who is cold like you wouldn’t believe found out and told everyone on the west coast what I’d done and said we’d have to move a thousand miles away from ‘that tramp,’ only Annie wasn’t a tramp and I’ll never in my life see her again and I still love her so much and my wife keeps bringing the whole thing up and I try to forget her because it hurts so much, but I know I’ll never be able to, especially with my wife reminding me all the time.”

“One minute, Fred.”

“I can’t stand my wife!” I yelled into the microphone as I left the platform.

Never in my thirty-nine and three-quarter years had I felt so good. Almost laughing from the deep pleasure of getting it all out of my system, I took my seat and half listened to the others. Owens, with his wife who told his kids he was a dummy, and Quenton, whose wife had gone back to college and now thought she was smarter than he was, and Smith, whose wife slept until noon and made him do the housework, all the way down to Zugay, whose wife made all his clothes so that he went out looking like a holdover from the Big Depression. Which he certainly did.

One guy, who hadn’t spoken, interested me. He was smiling. Actually sitting there with a big grin on his face. I was staring at him, wondering if his face was familiar, when Russell spoke.

“All right, men. Time to vote. George, hand out the paper and pencils, okay?”

Vote?

“Vote?” I asked the man sitting next to me, whose wife hid his toupee when she didn’t want him to go out.

“Sure. Vote for the one who has the lousiest wife.”

I scribbled down the name Fred Norton. After all, I did have the lousiest wife.

Glenn Russell collected the slips of paper and sorted them. In a few minutes he turned to face the men.

“For the first time, men,” he said, “a new member has won. Fred Norton. The one with the wife, you remember, who called his nice girl friend a tramp.”

Then he smiled. “Congratulations, Fred!”

I half rose, feeling somewhat foolish and yet proud. It was indeed an honor.

And then all of them, all the sad-faced, beaten-down men, gathered around me and shook my hand. Some of them actually had tears in their eyes as they patted me on the back.

Later, as we all went to the lounge to have a drink before going home, I found Glenn Russell at the end of the bar and went over to him with my drink.

“This is some deal,” I said. “It really, really felt good to get it out of my system. Whose idea was this club?”

“Mine,” he said. “We’ve met once a year for the last six years. I control the membership and I wanted you to be included this year. That wife of yours is really something, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “She sure is. How come you didn’t speak? Because it’s your club?”

“Oh. No, my wife passed away a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling suddenly awkward. “That guy sitting over there, the one who’s had the big smile on his face all evening, who the heck is he?”

“Gary McClellan? He’s the vet in our fair city.”

“Oh, sure, now I remember. Say, didn’t my wife tell me that McClellan’s wife died last year in some sort of horrible accident?”

Russell smiled broadly and patted me on the arm.

“Of course, old man! McClellan was last year’s winner!”