Wife Living Dangerously (13 page)

Evan doesn’t say anything at first, just looks at me for a long time in a way that makes me grateful for Sotto Voce’s dusky
lighting because I know my neck is covered in telltale splotches.

“It was this weird historical anomaly,” he says, leaning forward. “Can you imagine a time when it was actually legitimate
to actively pursue another man’s wife? Among the aristocracy, this kind of behavior wasn’t just condoned, it was actually
expected.
”

“Why expected?” I ask, trying to ignore the bird in my chest that frantically beats its wings against my ribs. This is an
academic discussion, I tell myself, and I am a student. In fact, I should probably be taking notes. I cock my head and try
to look studious. And I try not to let my eyes linger on Evan Delaney’s chest, broad and hard beneath his ribbed sweater.

“In a way, it makes sense. The only real love back then was the love of God, divinely inspired, spiritually fulfilling. Now
comes this radical notion that maybe love could exist not just between man and God, but between man and woman. They called
it
ideal
love. But it wasn’t the kind of love you’d find within marriage. Marriage wasn’t about love, it was about mergers and acquisitions.
It was a business arrangement. Ideal love could only logically exist outside of marriage.” Michael signals the waiter for
another bottle of wine. I haven’t touched my chicken piccata. I am nauseous with guilt and attraction.

“If I were your courtly lover”—now I feel the earth give way beneath me even though Evan continues in a relatively pedagogic
way—“the fact that you’re married wouldn’t be an impediment to me. Your status as another man’s wife would, in fact, be a
prerequisite.”

“Fascinating,” I say, knowing in my heart that we’ve moved well beyond the bounds of committee business.

“Courtly love,” Evan continues, circling the rim of his wineglass with a fingertip, “is a lost art.” His eyes seem to linger
on my lips, which tingle and swell in response. “If I were your courtly lover, I’d exist to please you. I’d compose epic poems
in your honor. I’d joust just for your pleasure. I’d stand outside your bedroom window in the freezing rain only for a fleeting
glimpse of your face. You’d be the first thought in my head when I arise, and the last when I lay my body down for the night.
You’d be the center of my universe. And I guarantee, Julia, it would be the singlemost pleasurable experience of your life.”

The blood rushes to my head. I suddenly feel very warm and very woozy. I check my watch. “Oh. Gosh. I should go.” I grab my
pad and pen. “I promised Jake—that’s my son, I have three kids, he’s my youngest—I promised him I’d read him an extra bedtime
story tonight. He’ll never forgive me if I don’t make it home in time.” I am hot and confused. I stand to leave and feel my
legs wobble beneath me.

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive?” Evan steadies me with a strong hand and my arm burns in the spot he’d gripped.

“I’ll be fine,” I say, knowing that it isn’t the wine that has me in this state, but his hot gaze and the penetrating intensity
of his words.

Over the years I have developed an ever-expanding database of my husband’s snores. I classify them in the spreadsheet of my
miserable sleepless mind according to type, duration, rhythm. There is the Popper and B-52, the asthmatic pug, the ratchet
wrench, the freight train, and the draining bathtub.

Tonight it’s the Popper, the most maddening of all. At the end of each exhale, his breath is released between slightly parted
lips, creating a “pah” sound. Sissssss-pah. Sissssss-pah. Sissss-pah. Sisssss-pah. Unlike the B-52, which is vicious and loud
but short-lived, the Popper can last all night. I try to roll him over but he is immovable. In desperation I reach around
his head and try sticking a finger in his mouth to part his lips, but he defensively clamps them shut and resumes the sisssss-pah.
I’ve counted his snores like sheep. I’ve tried to imagine them as waves gently rocking me to sleep. I’ve pretended that the
snoring is a new form of sleep therapy. When I can stand it no longer, I drag myself out of bed, shuffle into Michael’s study,
and go online. I search the phrase “snoring husband relief.” There are 14,660 results, not including the boxed advertisements
along the margins. I click through the first ten, then find a site that calls itself “The Official Online Store for Victims
of Snoring Partners (VSP).” Here I find everything from two-dollar neon yellow foam earplugs to sixty-dollar white noise machines.
I order both, pay the extra for overnight shipping, stick wet toilet paper into my ears, and stagger back to bed.

I try to ignore Michael’s snoring and count my blessings instead. I remember all the reasons why I am lucky to be married
to this man. I love how he dressed up as Captain Hook for Jake’s second birthday party, even though it made all the kids,
including Lucy, flee screaming. I love the fact that he spent most of his career defending poor people, that he’s the first
to dance at weddings, and the last to leave parties because he always volunteers to help clean up. I love the way he wraps
birthday presents—horribly, but with sincerity. He kills big bugs on my behalf and is always at the ready with the back of
a shoe; I even called him out of a shower once to crush a menacing silverfish and he bounded out, naked and dripping and squashed
it with his thumb.

I must have fallen asleep eventually because the next thing I know, Caitlin is tugging my hand and yelling, “Wake up, Mom!
We’re going to miss the bus!” I’ve overslept and Michael has already left for work.

“We want a full accounting,” says Annie, snapping her fingers in the air. “Don’t hold anything back.”

A midseason gathering of the Beach Babes minus the beach. We assemble in Frankie Wilson’s newly remodeled basement. Husband
and kids have been banished for the evening from this subterranean hideaway, with its oak bar, limestone fireplace, and sandy
Berber carpeting. A brand-new snooker table sits in one corner, a gleaming air hockey game in another, and a big-screen plasma
TV shares a wall with a digital music system and at least three hundred CDs and DVDs. Then I notice the humidor and remember
that this elegantly appointed walk-out basement is Jeremy’s domain. Tiny like a jockey but strikingly handsome, Jeremy Wilson
is a pediatric enterologist with a taste for Cuban cigars and slick gadgets.

Confession: I used to like Jeremy more than I do now. I assumed that his ready investment in Frankie’s business ventures was
a sign of love and support, but now I have another theory: If Frankie is busy with
Fat Lady
magazine or her disposable frying pan liners or whatever entrepreneurial disaster she’s dreamed up, she won’t notice how
much time he spends at Starbucks with his energetic new receptionist, the one with the big eyes and big breasts and big lips
just like Angelina Jolie’s. I saw them together three weeks ago and even though they were only talking, something didn’t look
so kosher. Jeremy was leaning forward in his seat, his hands nearing hers on the table. I never said anything to Frankie because
I didn’t want to stir things up and besides, it’s really none of my business.

My friend has done her best to replicate the decadently caloric self-indulgence of our beach vacations by packing the refrigerator
behind the bar with Tequizas, heaping the coffee table with platters of flaky spanakopita, skewered teriyaki chicken, goat
cheese, and sundried tomato bruschetta. Dessert is port, chocolate truffles, and a shallow platter of fortune cookies waiting
for us on the bar.

“Somebody else go first,” I say, sensing what could be the beginning of a panic attack.

Frankie leans into me, wraps an arm around my shoulders, and gives me an encouraging squeeze. “Come on, sweetie. Talk to us.
Are you living dangerously?”

“You could call it that.” I take a deep breath. “You want to know how far I’ve fallen?” I chase an olive around my martini
glass with the tip of a crystal swizzle stick. “The cashier at Target charged me only $5.50 for overalls when I knew for a
fact they were $19.99 and I didn’t say a word. I ate all the marshmallow charms in the Lucky Charms cereal and when the kids
complained, I told them it must have been a defective box. And as Annie already knows because she CONVINCED me to DO it, I
bought the kids a rat and told my husband it was a dwarf Norwegian flat-coated guinea pig, which doesn’t even exist.”

“Bravo!” cheers Annie, clapping. “Huge improvement.”

“Anything else?” Frankie prompts.

“Yes.” I close my eyes. This is hard. Say it, Julia. Say it. “I find myself very attracted to someone.”

“The UPS guy?” asks Annie.

I can feel heat flood my neck and face. I immediately regret having started this. Saying it will make it real. My friends
will be happy for me and that will only aggravate my remorse.

“No, not the UPS guy,” I say slowly, surveying my friends’ faces and steering my ship of lies onto a new course. “I’m attracted
to a saxophone player,” I say, forcing what I hope will come off as a mischievous smile. “He plays in a band. And I’m his
only groupie.”

Annie throws a peanut M&M at my head. “Oh,
you.
I can’t believe I almost fell for that.”

“And how
does
it feel to sleep with a member of the band?” Frankie asks.

“Groovy.” I don’t mention that Michael and I haven’t had sex in a while.

“Hey. When’s he playing again?” Frankie asks.

“I suppose he’s okay. I mean, he’s having a good time and it makes him happy, that’s really all that counts, right?” I sound
far more virtuous than I feel. “The band plays again next Friday. One of Michael’s partners got them a gig. At the Crappie
Festival. All the crappies you can eat, just $6.99 a person. Bring your own beer.”

“My kind of party,” Frankie says, circling her finger in whoop-dee-doo fashion. “All the crappies you can eat. Imagine that.”

The Crappie Festival is one of the major events of the year, though I wish they’d come up with a better name. In the Great
Lakes region the very same fish is called white perch. The Latin name isn’t bad:
Pomoxis annularis.
But here in Indiana it’s strictly
crappie.
“What are we having for dinner, darling?” “We’re having a great big platter of fried crappie! Pick up a fork and dig in!”
Never mind that locals insist it’s pronounced
croppie.
It still looks like crappie to me.

“Sounds fun! You know, I was just thinking, we really need to do more of the county stuff,” Annie says. “I haven’t taken the
kids to a 4H fair in, like, twelve years. And we
totally
missed the rhubarb parade.”

It’s an ongoing issue, this great town-gown divide. Faculty and corporate types on one side, all clustered within city limits
in big houses and tiny barren lots, and the farmers and factory workers outside the city, in tiny houses on hundreds of lush
acres. Different area codes, different school districts, different ways of amusing ourselves. They have crappie festivals
and we have crappy classic rock bands composed of bald lawyers and one sexy paralegal I’d like to kill.

“Ooh! Let’s do it!” Frankie squeals. “It’ll give me a chance to wear my DKNY overalls
finally,
they’re just sitting in my closet
rotting,
I don’t even think I took the
price
tags off. And a straw cowboy hat, little red bandana, get that whole Ellie May thing going.”

“Ellie May didn’t wear overalls,” I say. “She wore short shorts.”

“Not an option,” Frankie says. “Hey, I say we make it a Beach Babes road trip!”

“I’m in,” Annie says. “I just want to hear Michael play again. I think I can do without fried crappies.”

I push back into Frankie’s plush sofa. “I think I’ve contributed more than my share tonight.” I am thinking of everything
I didn’t say. “Somebody else go.”

“Okay,” says Annie, reaching for a spanakopita. “I told Kelly London that my father’s family descended from Alexander Hamilton.”

“Did he?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? My father’s family came off the boat in 1937. That’s why my dad’s named Ellis. As in the island.”

Kelly London is one of those genealogy freaks, always blabbing about how she traced her family back to King Henry IV, and
how her ancestors came off the
Mayflower
in 1620 and how she’s related to William Bradford, leader of the Plymouth Community, and how her foremothers taught Indian
squaws how to make sweet potato pie.

Kelly London has never asked me about my father, but if she did, I would want to tell her that he died in combat before I
was born. I’d want to construct an entirely new genealogy for myself, a family history so spectacular it would make Kelly
London’s eyes explode in their sockets. As I build my lie taller and taller in my head I actually feel myself becoming that
person, a woman whose family history filled her with pride and prestige, a woman whose father died a hero, not a woman like
me, who doesn’t even know her father’s name, who carries family shame like a bag of bricks across her back.

“But don’t you feel guilty?” I ask Annie.

“Guilt isn’t in my vocabulary, sweetie, and I suggest you strike it from yours as well.” She props her feet up on the ottoman
and wiggles her long toes. “Isn’t this a great pedicure?”

We finish off the Tequizas and move on to Diet Coke, and now it is Frankie’s turn to check in. “I don’t have any dirty deeds
to confess, but I do have an exciting announcement, and no, I’m not pregnant.” Frankie retrieves the platter of fortune cookies
from the bar and passes it around. “It’s an idea for a new product.”

“Yet another innovation from the brain trust of Frankie Wilson, entrepreneur extraordinaire.” Annie views Frankie’s business
ventures with affection and amusement. “What is it this time?”

“You’re holding it.” She’s pointing at the fortune cookie. “It looks like an ordinary fortune cookie, but wait ’til you see
what’s inside. Go ahead. Open it.”

We crack our cookies apart and pull out the paper strips inside. Annie reads hers first. “‘Your unresolved family of origin
issues will come to a head this holiday season.’”