Wife Living Dangerously (17 page)

I sit in a canvas folding butterfly chair. Candace takes the wood ladder-back rocker across from me. She asks about my work,
my kids, and my brief history as a middle-school rock star. She listens carefully, nods and murmurs warmly, jots down a few
notes in a spiral-bound stenographer’s pad.

“Why do you want to perform, Julia?” Candace tilts her head, searching my eyes for clues to this fortyish wife’s sudden yearning
to sing onstage. “Here we are all these years after the Raspberry Sorbet. Now you want to put yourself out there again. What
are you hoping to get out of this? Why now? Are you thinking of a career change?”

“Oh, no, of course not, no.” I shake my head. “Nothing like that.”

“Well, are you doing this for yourself or for someone else?”

“Both, actually.” I am surprised by the intimacy and invasiveness of the question. “My husband. Michael. He’s in a band. And
I haven’t seen a lot of him since he started playing. So my friend, Annie, she’s a social worker, and she thinks I have a
nice voice, she suggested I sing. With Michael’s band.”

Candace makes a little face. I guess that was the wrong answer. “And what does Michael say about that?”

“Actually, I haven’t told my husband yet. I want to surprise him.”

“You sure you want to do that?”

“Very sure. The Rock Barn does an open jam every other Wednesday night. Michael’s band hosts it. Anybody can get up onstage
and perform with the band. You don’t need a special invitation. I thought it would be fun.”

“Is that what you’re hoping for? To have a little fun? Or did you want something more?”

Is this woman a vocal coach or a psychic? “Just fun.” I am lying and she knows it. “Something to do on a Wednesday night.
Change of pace.”

“Alrighty, then.” She’s not going to push the issue. She sits back and folds her hands in her lap. “Show me what you got,
girl.”

I punch the giant red play button and launch into “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” I try to affect a rock bitch quality, move
my behind a bit, play some air guitar. At “Fire away!” I cock my finger like a gun, which had seemed like a nice touch when
I tried it in the privacy of my basement but now I just feel like Queen of the Dorks.

Candace watches me closely, and when the song finally ends she invites me to sit down again. She smiles patiently. “Why this
song, Julia? What does it mean to you?”

I hadn’t thought of that. Hit me with your best shot. It means what it means. I don’t know. “Ummm, it’s, you know, a rock
song. Tough woman takes on the world. I guess.”

“Is that
you
? Is that
your
story? Tough woman taking on the world? Is this the big event in your life right now?” Candace asks in a warm and imploring
voice. “Think about it, Julia.
Hit me with your best shot.
Is that what Julia Flanagan wants to say to the world?”

I don’t know what to say.

“I need for you to listen to me very closely, Julia.” Candace angles her head and looks into my eyes. “A good performance
isn’t about shaking your ass onstage. It’s not about what you do with your hands, or wearing a wig. It’s not about having
the perfect outfit, or even the perfect voice. It’s about telling your story. You pick your song—
your
song—and you plant your feet and you sing out. You put yourself out there, honest and bare. You connect with your music,
you connect with your audience. Does that make any sense?”

“Sure it makes sense,” I say, quietly. I feel chastened and a little sheepish. But I am not ready to give up.

“Do you want to try it again?” Candace asks, gesturing toward my tape player.

“No, not now,” I say. “I think I need to find another song.”

In the category of living dangerously:
I lied to a waiter today. He seemed disappointed that I’d ordered only a glass of water instead of something alcoholic, I
told him that I was in recovery and hoped he’d respect my effort to get clean and sober. I am
sick to death
of waiters trying to shove their drink of the week down my throat. These stupid chain restaurants with their Margarita Grandiosas.
Do they get a commission for every margarita they sell? Do they get penalized if they forget to mention the margarita? If
I don’t order a drink, does that mark me as a geek, a cheapskate, a loser, a bad tipper? Sure, I could have told him the truth,
could have said that I’m just not in the mood to drink, especially since I have to drive home and be a mother to my three
children and if you don’t mind I’d like to be
sober
when I greet them at the door. But I felt so righteous when I told him I was in recovery, and the look on his face—mortified
embarrassment—was so priceless that I’d do it again if I could. Sometimes it feels good to lie, I am discovering. Sometimes
it’s really your only option.

In spite of my mother’s best efforts, I was never the sort of take-charge girl she hoped I’d be. I wasn’t a self-starter,
but I was a heck of a follower; not a maverick, but a dependable team player; not an iconoclast but a true believer in all
the fundamental things: God, love, marriage, family, hard work. I don’t mean to sound like a dolt. It’s just that I’ve preferred
to let others make the waves while I stand closer to shore, watching.

So it would surely have floored my mother when I pick up the phone to call Evan Delaney. I was marinating in my suspicions
about Michael and Edith. I needed to do this.

“I’m bored and it’s a beautiful day,” I say. “Care to join me for a walk? We could talk about the exhibit.”

There is a moment of stupefied silence and then Evan says: “I’d love to.”

He will meet me at the Bentley in fifteen minutes, which gives me just enough time to wipe off the smudged mascara around
my eyes and reapply my lipstick, “Saucy Wench,” a shade of red the color of taco sauce purchased on impulse during a premenstrual
moment, which is when I’m most apt to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise wear. I check myself in the ladies’ room mirror twice,
and then again, return to my office and wait. I arrange myself to my best advantage; collar pulled up along the jawline, hair
tucked behind my ears, shoulders back, legs purposefully crossed like a morning talk-show host to expose a shapely calf. I
am grateful for having chosen the slimming black knit skirt, the black ribbed top and black microfiber tights, a look that
shrinks my total perceived poundage by four at least.

I hope Evan can find his way to my office. Bentley fired its receptionist during the budget cuts of the nineties, and now
there is no front desk at the top of the wooden stairs, just a telephone on the floor, a half-dead diffenbachia, and a faded
gray cardboard sign: “Welcome to the Bentley Institute. Use the phone to dial your party’s extension.”

It isn’t what most people expect of the world’s foremost sex research institute. The room is empty except for a couple of
old display cases along the wall featuring some of the Bentley’s less controversial, and consequently less valuable, artifacts.
A copy of a love letter from a World War I army private to his sweetheart in Ohio, no sexual references. A collection of Japanese
snuff boxes engraved with geishas. An etiquette handbook about dating, circa 1950. A selection of early birth control devices,
including the patent for the first IUD. This is supposed to be the grand portal to the top sex institute in the world and
it looks and smells more like the office of a dentist who plugs away long past retirement age, a place that is static and
old and antiseptic, a place of small amber bottles, mortars and pestles, of mercury and alginate molds. As Leslie Keen has
told many an overeager graduate student, “We don’t celebrate sex here. We study it. So if you’re looking for sexy, you’ve
come to the wrong place.”

This is a useful fiction if one’s goal is to discourage the prurient, but it is, ultimately, a fiction, and not only because
the Bentley has the largest collection of dirty magazines and movies in the world, but because this place has been implicated
in one sexual controversy or another since the days of old Eliza Bentley herself, who was rumored to have enjoyed a succession
of young lovers, male and female, handpicked every year from the new crop of graduate students. In the late 1960s, the Bentley
hosted private “key parties” where selected staff and benefactors would view erotic films, get soused, toss their house keys
into a shapely brass urn, and wind up bedding someone else’s spouse. (I never really understood the practical mechanics of
this ritual! How do you know which key is whose? What if you pull your own key from the bunch? And what if you’re paired with
someone so utterly repugnant you’d sooner take a bullet in your head than touch his sagging body?) Seven years ago, Leslie’s
predecessor, Jorge Batunga, was fired after a group of prospective students and their parents, touring the campus, found Batunga
humping his male secretary in the dense woods behind Volk Hall. And only last year, Leslie was embroiled in a mess of her
own after she’d told a reporter, believing she was speaking off the record, that she preferred black men because “everything
you hear about their size, as it happens, is absolutely true.”

I hear muted footsteps in the corridor and realize that with a single impulsive phone call, I have summoned this delicious
man to my office. Evan Delaney, who only moments ago was sitting comfortably in his office across the quad, has now exerted
himself because of
me.
I pretend to concentrate on the safety instructions for my coffeemaker—do not operate in the bathtub—as he steps through
the door.

“I guess this is the place.” Evan smiles and gives me a sort of half wave as he ambles into the room. He surveys my office.
“Nice.” His wide-wale corduroy pants are the color of tobacco; they make a soft whooshing sound as he walks toward me. He
lowers his large frame into my leatherette swivel chair and rolls closer to me. “What are you working on?” The room feels
smaller now, and warmer, and the air electrically charged, like a hot dryer of clothes when I’ve forgotten the dryer sheet.

“Oh, this?” I feel as if I could bust wide open. My voice is pinched and high. My hands are as cold as those blue ice packs
I tuck into the kids’ lunchbox. “Nothing much. Writing up catalog blurbs.”

“May I?” He reaches out to examine the pair of figurines on my desk, an extremely well-endowed man and smiling woman, carved
as separate pieces but designed so they can be arranged, like a three-dimensional puzzle, in several different positions:
missionary, doggie style, 69. Fashioned from ivory tusk and delicately detailed, the figurines date back to the Qing Dynasty.

I watch Evan’s eyes widen as he slowly grasps the full import of this little puzzle.

“Hmmmm.”

“So, first I do the write-up, then we take the pictures. I’m almost finished, thank God.” I expect him to rearrange the pieces
all three ways, and he seems to know that this is an option, but he leaves them in their original position, with the man curved
over his lover’s back like a wrestler.

As Evan returns the figures gently to my desk, I sigh and say, “Two hundred eleven items, fifty words per item, ten thousand
five hundred fifty words total.”

“You make it sound like a chore, like you might as well be cataloging, I don’t know, automotive parts.”

The comment feels like the sting of a sweat bee, not awful but bad enough. Evan Delaney has discovered my darkest secret:
I am a bore. Put me in a room full of erotic art and I’m the one calculating the exhibit’s total square footage. I may work
for the Bentley Institute of Sex Research but could just as easily be sorting through anodized nails at Sherman’s Hardware.
My husband hasn’t shown any interest in me since I brought home Vanessa, and now I know why. I will never be anything more
than this, a paper pusher who happens to work at the world’s most famous sex institute. Or to put it another way:
If you’re looking for sexy you’ve come to the wrong place.

Evan is flipping through a draft of the paper I’m co-authoring with Leslie [a.k.a. I’m researching and writing all of it and
she’s sticking her name (16 point type) above mine (12 point type) on the cover sheet].

“What’s this about?”

“That’s my next project. You know the Kama Sutra?”

“Sure. I mean, I know
of
it. I’ve heard of it. But I don’t
know it
know it. I mean, I’m sure I know some of what’s in it, know how to do it, Jesus, you know what I mean.” Evan’s face is crimson
and I’m sure mine is too, but there is something so darling and sexy about him, I want to just scream.

I have to look away from that face. I page absently through the manuscript. “A lot of people think the Kama Sutra was the
only game in town, but actually, uh, there were lots of similar handbooks floating around long before the Kama Sutra.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the Handbooks of Sex by the Chinese Emperor Huang-ti. The Koki Shastra, the Ananga Ranga, the Kamaled-hiplava. You’d
be amazed, really. We didn’t invent sex.”

“We?”

“Not
we.
” I’m blushing again. “I mean, modern man. Woman. Hippies. Dr. Ruth.
The Joy of Sex.
Whatever.”

Evan gestures toward a volume on my desk, an early translation of the Kama Sutra. I lift it off the top of the stack and run
my finger over the gold embossed title. I hand the book to Evan.

He opens to a random section, reads a bit, and laughs. “Whoa. Wow. This is incredible stuff. Listen to this. These are the
ten degrees of love. Love of the eye—I assume that’s when you can’t keep your eyes off her—” He looks at me and I must avert
my eyes before my head busts open. “Attachment of the mind, constant reflection, destruction of sleep, emaciation of body
…”

“Turning away from objects of enjoyment,” I say, slowly and quietly continuing the list from memory, “Constant reflection.
Madness. Fainting. Death.”

“I’m impressed.” Evan smiles and continues thumbing through the book. “Ah. Okay. This is interesting. A man must sometimes
resort to another man’s wife. And, apparently, some women are easier than others. There’s a whole list of easy women here.”