Identity Thief Read Online Free PDF

thing kept quiet, naturally. No college wants to advertise: “Come to Acme U., where the professors have sex with students.” When they fired me, the cover story was that I wanted to “pursue other opportunities.” I thought about suing them since I had tenure, but the father of the grad student was a real blabbermouth, and it would have ruined my reputation forever if I made even the slightest wrong move.
    Esther and I decided to make a fresh start cross-country. I’d set up a private practice as a psychologist, while Esther would build a design clientele. Fortunately, money was not an issue. We sold our home and income properties for a decent profit, and I also had a solid monthly allowance from my trust fund. It wasn’t enough to buy Esther the Hope Diamond, but if business was slow, we could still get by. And, as it happened, business had not been slow at all for either of us. I’d invested my inheritance from my father wisely and conservatively. There was a handy retirement to look forward to. Our one child, Sabrina, recently finished her MFA and was teaching sculpture at a rarified liberal arts college. Finally, she was off the family payroll. Esther may have seen herself as Mrs. Martyrdom, but even when we first dated, I was never faithful to her. She knew what she was getting into. I happened to love sex. Excuse me for breathing. As a psychologist, I knew as well as anybody that supposedly this was indicative of deeper issues, and some people even would’ve called me a sex addict. But I didn’t buy into all that addiction talk. Everything was called an addiction. For openers, if there were three hundred million people in the United States, then logically it would follow that there were three hundred million television addicts.
    Really, the only problem was Esther. If she wanted to fool around with other men, I wouldn’t have minded at all. Occasionally, I wished for a different wife who was into couples swapping and that kind of thing, but that wasn’t for me, either. I liked casual sex, and I liked having mistresses. I didn’t want Esther involved in what I did with other women. In some cultures, that’s considered perfectly normal.
    However, mine was not one of those cultures. After years of suffering in what she erroneously called “silence,” Esther made her ultimatum. We would start over in a different place, and I would keep my pants zipped up at all times. Literally, at all times. Esther, you see, didn’t exactly suffer from nymphomania. She could’ve worn a T-shirt that read: “I have a headache.” We hadn’t shared the same bed for years. She claimed it was because she couldn’t be vulnerable with me, knowing what I was really like. Vulnerable, schmulnerable, if you ask me. Sex is ecstatic. It’s fun . What did being vulnerable have to do with it? To me, vulnerable was when you got robbed at gunpoint or had a fatal illness.
    I was a good boy for about two weeks. Soon, I started having lunch-hour quickies in hotels with girls who hung around hotels. I fooled around for a month or so with a divorced woman who lived in our neighborhood. One of my patients made a play for me , which I resisted for about five minutes before succumbing to my natural urges. Naturally, I did not neglect to say it was a normal phase of the process to be attracted to your therapist. She sensibly decided to terminate treatment, though in a mischievous moment I referred her to a lesbian therapist. (I later saw them holding hands at an outdoor table of a wine bar.) There also was another patient who ended her first session early because she said she felt attracted to me, which was flattering. And another who, after we got it on, threatened to blackmail me, which was not flattering at all. In the end, she said the whole thing was boring her, and she wanted to go live with some guy in Barcelona. She settled for a few thousand, and Esther was none the wiser.
    Enter Mrs. Goldstein—or should I say Linda? We had similar