Wife Living Dangerously (27 page)

When the Candle of Truth is passed to me tonight, my friends watch with voyeuristic anticipation but they feel guilty because
they bear some culpability in the mess that has become my life, having challenged me to commit bigger, darker, and more daring
misdeeds. I’m no longer the dork, the baby, the novitiate. I’ve outdone them all.

“Michael was working late again. With Edith Berry. Who’s still singing in his band, by the way,” I begin slowly. “And, as
you all know, I was still mad at Michael for forgetting my birthday, and he’s always working late or playing with the band,
and I never really recovered from The Rock Barn thing, when he walked off the stage that time.” I checked for empathic nods
and clucks that were, as expected, forthcoming. The context is critical. The context is
everything.
I need to remind myself and my friends that none of this would have happened if Michael hadn’t started with the band, with
Edith, the late nights, the forgetting.

“I arranged for a sitter and phoned Michael to let him know I’d be working late too.”

My friends look like Girl Scouts around a campfire, wide-eyed and bracing themselves for a heart-stopping tale.

“And at first, that’s all I’d intended to do, just work. Leslie Keen was leading another one of her Sex on the Seas cruises.
I was supposed to do her PowerPoint presentation. ‘From the Kama Sutra to
The Joy of Sex.
Sex manuals through the ages.’ But I couldn’t focus. I was restless. Usually, I just churn it out. I might as well be writing
about mayflies. But tonight, I don’t know, it was different. All those naked people having sex in all those weird positions.
It was making me, you know…”

“Horny?” Annie is perched on the edge of the sofa, elbows on knees, her sneakered feet planted firmly on the sisal rug.

“Yes.” God, this is hard. “So I decide to take a walk. To clear my head. I’m outside now, on the quad, and I’m all alone.
I look up and there’s one light on in Volk Hall. Second floor, third office from the left.”

I pause, remembering how I’d stared up at Evan’s office and wished on it like the evening star. I had never felt this way,
so full of sadness and yearning and desperation. I wanted to be held and kissed and I wanted so much more than that, and yet
I knew that these basic pleasures, which I have come to believe are the
entitlement
of every living creature, were out of my reach, which only made me feel more despairing. Star light, star bright, first star
I see tonight . . .

“And then Evan appears at the window. He just stands there, looking at me. And somehow I know that I have no choice but to
be with him.”

Annie is smiling. Frankie is twisting the fringes on her blanket and doesn’t look up.

I take the stairs two at a time quickening my pace with every landing. Evan opens the door just as I raise my hand to knock.
My heart is hammering wildly against my ribs as his eyes meet mine, and he says nothing as he takes my hand and draws me into
the room. There is no cautionary inner voice to quell my driving desire, no conscience, not a single rational thought in my
head. Just pure, raw hunger, a visceral force unlike any I’ve ever experienced.

Evan reaches to remove the fake ponytail and drops it to the floor. “Your husband is a fool,” he whispers.

His kisses are hot and hard and deep. My skin feels scorched against his, and I decide that if I am to die for my sin, let
me die burning in Evan Delaney’s arms. In an instant our clothes are in heaps at our feet, and I am staring at the top of
his beautiful head as he runs his full lips and hot tongue over my breasts and belly, then between my legs. My body arches
as he probes and strokes, the softness of his mouth against my body feels like my first taste of pawpaw, the tropical-tasting
fruit that grows wild in Midwest shade and yields sweetly to teeth and tongue. He brings me to an intense climax not once,
but twice, then hoists me onto his desk, and now he is standing before me, Evan Delaney, full of heat and blood. We fit together
perfectly.

He keeps his gaze locked on mine as he moves and whispers, “Oh. Julia. What you do to me.”

After a while he shudders and sighs and is done. I keep him inside me for a few moments, holding him close, feeling his chest
heave against mine.

“So, you’re having an affair?” Frankie asks.

“Actually, yes.”

Frankie throws her hands up to her mouth and gasps, then notices that Annie doesn’t look particularly surprised. “You knew?”

Annie nods.

I explain to Frankie that I hadn’t felt comfortable telling her because I knew she was raw from Jeremy’s affair and thought
it was unlikely she’d offer the kind of support I needed at the time. “You’re probably right,” Frankie admits.

I continue. “Evan and I had arranged to meet again at his apartment the following Saturday. He had prepared dinner but we
never made it to the table.” The evening unfolds as I’d expected, clothes torn away and tossed to the floor, hungry pawing
and hot kisses.

But this time, Evan says, “Excalibur and I have been waiting for this moment.”

I am sure I heard wrong. “Excuse me?”

He smiles at me. “Excalibur.”

I realize he’s talking about his penis and suddenly it is as if someone has switched our soundtrack from Barry White to the
Chicken Dance. My desire is draining away. I try to get myself back in the mood, try to focus on the heat of his stare, the
enormous erection that probes urgently between my legs, the delicious scent of his body, the way his hard butt feels in my
hands. I kiss his soft mouth and try to get the feeling back. But the naming of his penis makes me feel silly and embarrassed
and, as Eve must have felt, shamefully naked.

I let Evan kiss me a few more times, then push my hand down between us, blocking his entry. “Evan. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

“You said what?” Annie is staring at me.

“I told him I couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t do it. The spell had been broken. I had to get out of there.”

“Good for you,” Frankie whispers.

Annie shakes her head. “So you ended your affair? All because he gave his penis a name?”

“Yes. No. I mean…” I search for words that might explain my sudden withdrawal from the man I had craved for months. “The
fact that he gave his, you know, a name, it sort of broke the spell. It gave me the time I needed to really
see
what I was doing. Really
consider
about the consequences. So then I started thinking about Michael and how great sex used to be and how much he loves me and
that I want to be his wife forever. I know it sounds corny.”

“It doesn’t sound corny,” Annie says.

“I just couldn’t go through with it. I pulled back and thought about what I was about to do, and whether I was ready to deal
with all the turmoil and pain and loss that comes with an affair.” I pause here to glance significantly at Frankie.

“I thought about my kids, and what it would be like for them to not have Daddy around, to shuttle back and forth between two
households. I knew it would destroy them. But most of all I thought about Michael back home, who isn’t perfect but he’s my
husband and you know what? He’s really trying. The man is trying.”

As I watched Evan between my legs I had something like a near-death experience, scenes from my marriage passing before my
eyes. I saw how Michael proposed to me, on one knee, dressed in his volunteer fireman uniform with the truck outside my house,
lights flashing. I remembered the look on his face when each of our children was born, the way he cried and the way he kissed
me. I saw the two of us laughing and screaming as we sledded down the hill behind the house after the kids decided they were
too cold and tired to endure another moment in the snow. How he carried me downstairs and to the car when I was pregnant with
Jake and suddenly started bleeding, how scared he was about losing the baby. I thought about the dinner he made for me when
I got the job at the Bentley, how he’d sent the kids off to their grandparents and lit the dining room with what seemed like
a thousand candles. I even saw the Fishy Shirt episode, Michael desperately trying to please me with his birthday surprise.

“I couldn’t go through with it, Annie, I don’t know how else to explain it. So I put my clothes on, I apologized, I explained
that I wanted to work on my marriage, gave him one last kiss, and ran all the way back to my van. I haven’t seen him since.”

“Wow,” whispers Annie.

“But you know what? Honestly? I don’t regret a minute of it. Not a single second.” And it was true. The affair had unlocked
something in me. Something wild and beautiful. Joie de vivre.

I go on to tell them about when I get home from Evan’s apartment, and I find my husband sitting at the kitchen table alone
eating cold cereal. My goal is to get up the stairs to the bedroom without talking to him but he stops me.

“Jules?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I talk to you? Please?”

I’m sure he knows something. I’m sure I must smell of sex. I keep my distance. “Sure. What’s up?”

“I’m so sorry, Julia. About everything. About working too much, and forgetting your birthday, and spending too many nights
out with the band. I’ve been a lousy husband, Julie, and I want to make it up to you. Please. Tell me you’ll let me make it
up to you.”

“Where’s all this coming from?” I remain at a distance, still convinced that Michael would detect the scent of another man
on my body.

“I had a session. By myself. With Dr. Walcowicz.”

“You did?”

“Yes, I did. And Dr. Walcowicz made me realize something. She made me realize that I haven’t been straight with you. I haven’t
told you the truth.”

Uh-oh. Here it comes. My husband is having an affair with Edith Berry. Okay. I can deal with this. Stay calm. Breathe. It’ll
be fine. In fact, it could be very nice. I can convert his office into a sewing room. I can take showers and not worry about
running out of hot water. I’ll never have to hear his snoring again, not the Popper, not the Asthmatic Pug, none of it. Lots
of men have affairs, lots of women are divorced. I’ll get a good lawyer. I’ll get Alexis Merriweather’s lawyer and leave Michael
without a pot to piss in. But what if I can’t cope? What if I lose my mind and become one of those bag ladies outside the
public library, pushing all my worldly possessions in a stolen Kroger supermarket cart?

“The truth is, I’ve been miserable. I hate my job. The hours. I hate being away from the family. I hate being away from you,
Julia.” He takes a deep breath. “I want to go back to Legal Services. I want to be able to leave work at a humane hour every
day. I want to be a husband to you, Julia.”

“What about the house?” We couldn’t possibly pay the mortgage on his Legal Services salary and what I make at the Bentley.

“So we’ll move into a smaller house. I don’t care about the goddamn house, Julia. I care about us.”

There’s something so reckless and exciting about his proposal that it makes me almost giddy. A smaller house, a new job, our
old life. But then Michael’s face is overcome with such gravity, I expect him to announce that he is dying of prostate cancer
and wants to make the most of whatever time he has left. But that’s not it at all.

“When I saw you with your… your colleague in that shop, I knew in my gut that there was something going on. Between the
two of you. I could see it. For all I know, you’re having an affair.”

My body goes rigid. I wait but say nothing.

“And, honestly, I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

To my husband’s credit, he doesn’t ask me if I did, in fact, have an affair with Evan Delaney.

“But, Julia. Whatever it is you’re doing, I need you to come back to me. You are my wife and I cannot imagine my life without
you.” Michael stands up, shoulders slack, arms beckoning, palms up, all defenses down. As my husband hugs me, I can still
feel Evan’s tongue between my legs. I am tired and confused. I go upstairs and take a scalding shower. I am asleep by the
time Michael comes to bed.

“Jesus, Julia.” Annie passes me the bowl of M&M’s. “So, are you ever going to tell him? About Evan?”

“Are you crazy?” Frankie looks at Annie in disbelief. “What’s she going to tell him? ‘Darling husband, I thought you’d be
happy to know that I had sex with this hunky English professor but I couldn’t do it again after he called his penis Excalibur.
Aren’t you proud of me?’”

Actually, I
had
considered telling Michael some version of the truth, not only to clear my conscience, but to initiate a broader conversation
about the state of our marriage and his murky relationship with Edith Berry. And, frankly, I wanted Michael to know that another
man—a real man, a charming, articulate, passionate man—found Mrs. Julia Flanagan, rapidly aging suburban mother of three,
intensely desirable.

“Don’t tell him,” Frankie says softly, staring into the candle’s flame. “It’s over. Just leave it alone.”

“I disagree,” says Annie. “I think you should put your cards on the table, Julia. This could be a transformative moment in
your marriage. Your pain. Longing. Loneliness. Put it all out there. You could have continued an affair. But you chose to
walk away. I think your husband needs to know that.”

Along with four catalogs, a few bills, and the usual low-interest credit card offers, I find a pink envelope in the mailbox,
recognize my mother’s loopy script, and slide my finger under the flap. “This birthday greeting isn’t late. It’s just early
for next year!” A smiling cartoon chef wearing oven mitts withdrawing a three-tiered birthday cake from the oven. Inside,
a yellow Post-it note. In the careful and heavy-handed print my mother reserves for important messages, Trina has written:
Charlie Gillespie. (317) 631-3182. He is your father.

Now that I finally know, I realize that I no longer care. I slip the note in between the pages of the Hammacher Schlemmer
catalog and toss it with the rest of the junk mail into recycling.

Thirty-six days since I left Evan Delaney and Excalibur Michael and I are still in counseling with the terminally unfashionable
Dr. Walcowicz, whose techniques no longer make me laugh because they work. She instructed us, for instance, to go back to
our old neighborhood in Ann Arbor and stand outside the house on Skerwin Avenue where Janet Hobart died on the bathroom floor
while her husband lay oblivious in the next room.