Wife Living Dangerously (11 page)

The Rock Barn is empty as usual. Most college kids would rather not watch middle-aged guys play rock and grown-ups are too
busy juggling homework, baths, and bedtime to venture out on a Tuesday night. So it’s just me in my spandex pants, a craggy
bartender named Rooney, the guttermouth drunk in the black tube top, and two secretaries from Joe Patterson’s office, both
wearing elastic-waist jeans. Michael blows me a kiss as I toddle in on my high heels. Though The Rock Barn is dark as a cave,
Michael continues to insist on wearing his prescription sunglasses onstage. Barry Sanders disappears to use the men’s room
and I remember that his wife had mentioned something about a prostate infection.

There is a blast of humid air as the front door swings open. I assume it’s Marcia Simmons, Lucy’s Brownies troop leader. Marcia’s
husband Ned recently hauled his drum kit up from the basement and now threatens to play with The Blue Gilligans, another ensemble
of lawyers. At the last Brownie meeting, in which the girls made sock puppets for residents of the Cambridge County Nursing
Home, Marcia mentioned that she’d like to watch my husband’s band before she granted Ned her “blessing.”

It isn’t Marcia after all, but a petite young woman in denim shorts, rhinestone-studded platform flip-flops, and a gauzy peasant
blouse cropped above her belly button. She takes a table near mine and I can see that she has a heart-shaped face, a smooth
high brow, big eyes, and full, glossy lips. Most striking is her hair, waist length and dark, which swings as she moves to
the music. She is too young and attractive to be one of the regulars at The Rock Barn. I wonder who she is.

The girl can’t seem to keep her hands off her hair. She pulls it up and off her neck, then lets it drop so it cascades down
her back. She winds a section around her finger, then pushes it behind her ears. At some point she puts it in a high ponytail
using an elastic band she keeps around her wrist. I fleetingly imagine snipping off that ponytail with a pair of garden shears
and sending it to the wig-making company. The fantasy fills me with guilty pleasure.

The girl rests her chin in her hands and fixes her eyes on the stage. I inch my chair a bit farther ahead so I can see who
she is staring at. With a dull thud in my chest I realize that she is staring at my husband.

Bass guitarist and law librarian Walter Shope plays the final bars of “Ramblin’ Man” before Joe steps up to the microphone.
“At this point, ladies and gentlemen”—at this point I have to give him credit for maintaining the fiction of a real audience—“I’d
like to introduce our very special guest. All the way from Miami Beach, Florida, give it up for… Edith Berry!”

Then the young woman I’ve been watching rises to her feet, shakes her hair loose, and confidently bounds up to the stage.
Michael smiles as she lowers the microphone to lip level. The band plays the first dramatic bars of a song I recognize immediately
and with fatalistic surety as Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” Edith Berry begins to sing in a low, sultry voice. Now I don’t merely want
to snip her ponytail off. I want to cut off the entire head. I also feel I should protest the sudden shift in musical genres.
Hey, I want to scream, this is a rock and roll band. Somebody pull that girl off the stage!

Edith sits in for a second number, a song she wrote herself. “I smell you on my pillow,” she croons, “and it makes me crazy.”
Michael steps forward to take a solo, and Edith closes her eyes, swaying and nodding and occasionally shouting things like,
“Play it, Daddy” and “Yeah, baby.”

I want to jump on the stage and grab the microphone out of her hand. He’s not your daddy and he’s not your baby, I want to
say. Take your long hair and your low-rise shorts and your twenty-six-year-old body and go home,
Edith.

I applaud minimally (two quick claps, palms only) and watch my husband’s face as Edith steps down and strides back to her
seat. I can’t see his eyes through the sunglasses, but based on the angle of his head, it does seem as if he is ogling her
with lust and admiration. After the set, Michael jumps off the stage and ambles toward me. His bald spot is pink and shiny.

“How was I up there?” He gives me a sweaty kiss on the mouth. “Did you notice that little thing I did at the end of my solo?
I just came up with that. Did it sound okay?”

“You were great. You all sounded great.” I motion for him to take off his sunglasses. “Honey, do you mind? I’d like to see
your eyes when I’m talking to you.”

He complies and wipes his head with a paper napkin. “Hey. Julie. There’s someone I want you to meet.” He pulls me to a standing
position and leads me energetically to—you guessed it—Edith Berry, who gracefully extends a hand and dips her head.

“Much obliged,” she says.

Much obliged? I’m immediately irritated by this, and by the fact that Michael is exhibiting far more positive emotion than
I’ve seen from him in weeks.

“Little did I know when I hired Edith that she wasn’t just a great paralegal, but a fabulous singer too! And she looks just
like Catherine Zeta-Jones, except with longer hair, I think. Don’t you?”

Oh, no. Of
course.
This is
Edith
The Paralegal as in, I’ll need to call you back, hon, I’ve got
Edith
in my office and we’ve got to get through this case file by noon. It hadn’t occurred to me that Edith might be something
other than a middle-aged married woman who favored capacious denim jumpers and beige knee-highs.

“What a lovely, old-fashioned name,” I hear myself say. From the corner of my eye I can see the outermost edge of my permed
frizz bobbling as I speak. “Is that a family name?”

“Yes,” she says, raising her hair to fan the back of her neck. “My great-grandmother on my dad’s side. But most people call
me Didi.” She nudges Michael with her elbow. “Except for this guy. He’s so damn formal.”

Under the circumstances, formal would be a good thing and I should be reassured. Shouldn’t I?

Remembering my mother’s admonitions against jealous needling, I mightily resist the urge to ask Michael about Edith—Didi—Berry.
I keep my mouth clamped as we dress for work, say nothing when he calls me at the office to check in, don’t make a peep after
dinner.

But the need to know burns like a urinary tract infection and by 9:15, as Michael clicks through the channels in search of
news, I can no longer hold my tongue. “So…” I begin slowly, striving for a casual tone. “This Edith person. She’s got
a nice voice.” Already I am off to a bad start.
Edith person?
Who talks like that, except a desperate, jealous, tragically permed wife?

“Doesn’t she?” Michael says, eyes fixed on a badly colorized John Wayne; he is wearing mauve overalls.

“What does her husband do?” I ask, pretending to be fascinated by the label on my spider vein fade cream, for which I paid
fifteen dollars even though I suspected then what I know for sure now: it doesn’t work.

“Hmmm?” Michael is now intent on a SolarFlex infomercial. His thumb is poised on the channel down button, twitching, eager
for the next click.

“Her husband. What does he do? For a living.”

Michael looks absently my way. “Oh, Edith’s not married.” Click.
Bonanza
reruns. Click. Loud talking heads. Click. Cubic Zirconia. Click. C-Span. Click. Hockey. Click. Financial news with that blond
woman who always looks like she has spittle gathering at the corners of her mouth.

I can feel my mother sitting like Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder. Don’t say it, Julie-bell. Don’t say it.

“Engaged?” I ask, flicking mother-bug off my shoulder.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Do you believe in divine intervention? I did not, not until tonight, not until the good Lord led me straight to the Cambridge
County Mall, a place I normally try to avoid because it’s depressing, a strange hybrid of attrition and growth—Sears closed
down two years ago, and JCPenney is on its way out, but there’s a new Abercrombie & Fitch, and I’ve heard that the Body Shop
is moving in where the Disney Store used to be. There are always two or three big storefronts with butcher paper and
FOR LEASE
signs masking the windows, and another handful of shops bearing
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS—MUST LIQUIDATE
banners. The smaller stores depress me most, the pet shop where rueful overgrown puppies sit in their own poop, the dreary
uniform shop, and a place called Stephanie’s Treasures, with its homely porcelain dolls, resin dragons, “lucky” bamboo, and
license plate frames with phrases like, “We’re spending our kids’ inheritance!” and “Honk if you’re horny!”

So I never should have been here in the first place. But Michael is working late tonight, I am too exhausted to cook, and
in an atypical moment of consensus, all three kids wanted to eat at Chicken Charlie’s, so off to the mall we go.

As if in direct response to my current crisis of follicular confidence, I see a kiosk called “Marlena’s Hair Fantasies” where
hundreds of clip-on hair extensions hang from the kiosk’s wire frame like so many horses’ tails, platinum blond to jet black,
in every length and style. Short wavy ones, ultra long ones, curly sprays, spirals, and sleek shoulder-length bobs. These
hairpieces have come a long way since my mother had her “fall,” a long red mane that she kept in her middle dresser drawer,
stretched out like a dead thing amid the stockings and panties. Her fall required masses of thick hair pins to keep in place;
Marlena’s Fantasies were ingeniously attached to a simple plastic clip.

“Look, Mom! Bethany has one of these! She wears it to school! Her mother even lets her wear it swimming! Can I have one? You
can take it out of my allowance! I promise I’ll wear it every day! Please?”

I step closer to the booth and try to hide my delight.
This is too good to be true.

“Can I help you, ladies?” The kiosk is staffed by a high school student who is wearing a Marlena’s Hair Fantasy of her own,
a streaked curly blond ponytail that blends easily with her natural hair.

“Yes, I believe you can.” As I move closer I notice that the girl has one blue cornea and one that’s a black and white Playboy
bunny logo. She notices me noticing.

“Christmas present from my boyfriend. It’s like a contact lens.”

The girl slides off her stool and readjusts her wig. Her stomach swells out above her waistband like a beer belly. As if the
bunny eye isn’t sufficiently provocative, a rather large dream catcher dangles from a sapphire and silver navel ring. When
I was in high school, only girls with concave bellies felt entitled to wear crop tops. Now even fat girls seem at ease in
low-rise pants and “belly shirts.” Maybe it signifies a new generosity in defining the female body ideal. But maybe it’s a
sign that teenage girls in this part of the country are just fat and clueless; our state isn’t exactly a fashion mecca and
we have the third highest rate of childhood obesity.

Caitlin waits for me to say something on her behalf, but I am transfixed by a long auburn ponytail clamped above the cash
register. It is my old hair, thick and straight with streaks of darker red.

“Can I see that one?” I ask.

“Awesome choice, ma’am. That’s the Vanessa. One of our most popular ponies.” She unhooks the wig from its spot above the register
and points to a tall aluminum stool. “Have a seat. Let’s see here. First we put your own, uh, hair back and out of the way.”
She smoothes my massive shrubbery back with strong fingers and secures it with a rubber band and nineteen bobby pins, then
clips on the ponytail and offers me a green plastic mirror. “Ta-da!”

I stare at myself in the mirror. I am instantly transported back in time, before I’d impulsively entrusted my head to LuAnn
Bubansky and her satanic pink perm rods. My children stare reverently.

“It’s your old head!” Lucy cries out. “Mommy’s old head is back!”

I pick out a curly blond one for Caitlin and hand my Visa card to the girl. I don’t care if it costs me six hundred dollars.
I’m buying it. “I’ll take both.”

“Cool. That’ll be eighty-five total.” She reaches out to unhinge the ponytail from my scalp.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll wear it out, if you don’t mind.”

Oh, how I love this fake hair! It is thick and full of body, and it sways when I walk. I’ve taken to twisting a hank around
my finger, just like I used to do with my real hair. I’ve even chewed on it, to further the illusion. Michael will be home
in forty minutes. I can’t wait for him to see me.

“Wow.” Michael reaches out to stroke Vanessa. He nods his head in amazement. “Wow.”

“Like it?”

“Very much. I mean, I liked your other hair too, but this is, well, this is spectacular.”

“I know,” I say, giggling. “And it was only forty bucks.”

“Worth every penny.”

Michael succeeds in getting the kids to bed early and leads me from the kitchen, where I’m putting away dishes still hot from
the dishwasher, to the bedroom. He dims the lamp by his nightstand and slides under the covers.

“Come here. I want you snuggled up next to me.”

“Okay.”

“Wait. Take off your clothes. I want to feel you.”

I pull off my blouse, then unfasten my bra, watching him watch me. I slip off my pants, then panties, and as I begin to fold
everything neatly, as is my wont, Michael says, “Leave it. Get in bed.”

He knows I like it when he’s bossy, but only in this context. I wouldn’t be quite so receptive if he used the same tone around
the kitchen: Vacuum the family room. Now.

I climb into bed beside him and he continues the game, commanding me to lie back as he covers my body with soft, wet kisses.
Familiarity may breed contempt in some relationships, but in ours it has only produced better sex.

But I’m not stupid. I know that last night’s intensity had something to do with Vanessa. And whatever intimacy had been nurtured
during that brief interlude seems to have had no residual effect. Michael seems distant again today. He reads the newspaper
through breakfast, doesn’t call during lunch, gets home after nine, and falls asleep before I brush my teeth.