Home Brew

It suddenly seemed like every man in Daisy's acquaintance was brewing his own beer. At parties thrown by her girlfriends, husbands served the stuff up in jam jars and made a show of raising their full glasses to observe the filter of the light. Daisy almost never drank the stuff. She hated the smell. Home brew always carried an odor of undergrowth, like the homes of old people.

A few of the men pooled their resources and ordered a crate of expensive hops from Belgium. When the box arrived, they all dropped to their knees around it, and ran their hands through the mounds of cones, like movie pirates rejoicing over a chest of shining doubloons.

"Oh my god," said Daisy's husband, Brian. His tone was awed. "The smell. The fucking smell of it."

The men's excitement over their beer—about boiling temperatures, about the wort and mash—had a sexual edge that irritated Daisy. In college, at a movie, Brian had once leaned over and whispered in her ear, "The first time I saw you, I almost came in my pants," and abruptly slid his hand between her legs. The press of his fingers through the denim of her jeans had been uncomfortable, and the being in public had been nervous-making, but his want had been undeniably compelling. There had not only been an urgency but also a substance. That was the real stuff. This beer thing, by comparison, was clearly ephemeral, a game for boys, like trading baseball cards or collecting comic books or leaving out plastic barf to see how people would react. Daisy couldn't think of anything more boring.

After a recent weekend session with their neighbor Ed Hinchey, the king of the suburban beer makers—whom Daisy often encountered as he lugged his garbage bags to the curb, mash-speckled laboratory goggles plastered to his face, and who used a mammoth turkey cooker to make vats of ale in his garage—Brian had announced that he had never felt "like more of a man" than when he capped off the first bottle of his personal concoction, "Shockerbock."

Daisy didn't feel unwanted, exactly. They still had sex. They still laughed, about the way some animals acted human and the way their son acted like an animal. What was missing was that shared exigency, but a decade of marriage along—fourteen years if you counted from when they started dating—that was probably not so unusual.

Maybe desire was like a shirt: the threads had a way of loosening, and once they did maybe you could never quite pull them back into shape. Even a favorite and durable piece, a lambswool sweater knitted by capable hands, fell out of rotation after a few years and was replaced by other enthusiasms, newer garments.

Or maybe desire was like the insipid results of making beer with the same grain twice. One of the men at one of the parties had gone on about how it still made you drunk even though it tasted like nothing.

"Are you going to try it?" asked Brian. He held out the bottle of Shockerbock. Ed Hinchey had a special gadget for making beer bottle labels, and this bottle had a picture of electricity dancing on a lightning rod shaped like a rooster.

"It's infused with pears and honey. You know, like ambrosia. 'The Food of the Gods,"' Brian cackled. "Except that it will destroy your mind."

"You know I don't like beer," said Daisy. She started to reach for it anyway, but Brian turned, shrugged, and walked away sipping.

"More for me," he said.

Some months later she was digging around for the E-ZPass when an accordion of prophylactics spilled out of the glove compartment of Brian's car. Daisy, a high school math teacher, returned them and continued on to work. After the bell rang, she instructed her class to do the fourth exercise at the end of chapter 12 and left for the bathroom.

Her digital watch had a timer, which she set for five minutes, before taking two shuddering inhalations, and exploding into...