Identity Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

was like handing someone a gift, and then after they opened it, saying to them, “I have a gift for you.” Subtle she wasn’t. A control freak she was.
    “Are you pretending my finger is your husband’s?” I asked, giving her a taste of her own medicine. “And I don’t mean just his finger.”
    It was fortuitous that precisely at that moment, we both came.
    Afterward, she sat up, reaching for her panty hose. “You don’t like me at all, do you?” she asked, her supple leg extended in midair as she yanked up her stocking.
    “You don’t like me . You only think you’re supposed to.” I zipped up my wool suit pants over my boxers. “You’re projecting your disdain onto me.”
    She gave her hair a quick comb out with her fingers, fastening her blouse at the same time. “I don’t get what you mean.”
    “Yeah, you do. You think what you’re doing with me is bad. That makes you a bad woman. You convince yourself you quote-unquote like me, which transforms you into a good woman. A victim of love and all that bullshit.”
    She slapped me hard across the face.
    Just as suddenly, as if she had multiple personalities, she put her hands to her mouth, horrified by what occurred. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I overreacted.”
    I rubbed my jaw where she slapped me. “You always overreact. You wouldn’t know what to do if you didn’t overreact. On your tombstone, they should write, ‘She’s overreacting.’ But I’m used to it.”
    “Oh, you . . . ” She tisk-tisked, as if resigned to her fate. “Honestly, the things I put up with.” For an instant, it was like we were a married couple ourselves.
    I put my thumb under her chin and gave her a quick kiss. “You need to go.”
    “I know, I know.” She distractedly reached for her coat and purse.
    There was a knock at the door.
    “Dr. Falcon,” said my receptionist. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but your next patient has been waiting now for ten minutes.”
    “Bring her in.”
    “It’s a he , remember?”
    “Oh, right. Bring him in.” I turned to my female patient who had occupied the past hour of my time. “Same time next week, Mrs. Goldstein?”
    “Yes, Dr. Falcon. Thank you. I’m really making progress.” She winked at me. It was such an obvious, arch wink that she might as well have put up a billboard announcing to the world that we were fucking. Fortunately, my receptionist was one of those modest, not very bright people who had the decency to realize she wasn’t very bright, so she never paid attention to anything that wasn’t part of her job description.
    My next patient was the biggest schmuck I had ever met in my life. It was always the same song and dance about how nobody liked him because he was superior to other people. “My good looks intimidate people,” he would say. “And my intellect.” I’m not the best judge of male looks, but he seemed to me to be pretty much an average looking young man, and as for “intellect,” he read science fiction. Big deal.
    Yet even had he been the most riveting conversationalist I had ever encountered, my mind would have been elsewhere. Mrs. Goldstein was becoming a major pain in the ass. My wife, Esther, said she would leave me if I cheated on her again—and what is more, that she would take me for every penny I was worth. Esther herself made good money as an interior designer. In the year since our hasty move cross-country, she’d already landed several upscale clients. But, she said, it was the principle of the thing. The principal of the capital interest was more like it.
    What Esther didn’t realize, of course, was that when you make an adult feel like some teenager on probation, it isn’t long before he starts doing exactly what he isn’t supposed to do. She thought she was being so patient and understanding to give me another chance after I got in hot water for having an utterly consensual affair with one of my graduate students back at the university. The school wanted the whole