The Forever Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page B

younger but now was completely out of reach.
    There was sex with Danny, of course. But that was easy. Anyone could have sex with Danny, she often thought. In fact, anyone had.When she met him, he’d admitted to her that theirs was his fourth affair; he was good at this. And he had a reasonable excuse, because his wife was far less interested in sex than she was in food, which she sometimes wouldn’t eat at all and other times consumed in huge quantities then purged from her body in various ways. They had an entire plastic bin full of different kinds of laxatives, Danny told Carmen, because she had to switch brands whenever her body became used to one and refused to budge. She vomited only once or twice a week—as a last resort.
    Danny couldn’t touch Mega’s body without her shuddering and moving his hand, complaining about the roll of fat on her thighs or her stomach or wherever else he happened to land. This decimated his erection every time, he told Carmen, who had tried to smile as if it were perfectly normal to think about him getting hard with someone else, even his wife. Carmen had never come right out and told Danny how infrequently she and Jobe had sex, but as her husband grew more skeletal it seemed obvious. While Danny’s wife wanted to waste away but couldn’t, Jobe’s skin was becoming pulled tight around his bones, like Saran Wrap.
    Raindrops danced just a couple of feet over her head as she dialed Danny’s number. “Hey,” he answered immediately. She could tell that he was smoking from the wet, rubbly quality of his voice.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    “Shed,” he answered. “I’m going to burn this thing down some day.”
    “That would be hard to do in this rain.” She watched drops ooze like tears down the small, pointed windows. “It looks like it might never stop.”
    “Carmen’s Ark?” Danny laughed. “Do you think God is angry, wiping the world free of sinners?”
    “If he were, we’d hardly be the ones he’d save,” she said, and Danny laughed again, though she hadn’t meant to be funny.
    “I’d ask if you want to meet me, but I don’t know where we’d go in this storm.” He seemed suddenly to crouch closer to the phone.“It would be nice to touch you. I’d lick you and make you come, then leave right away. Run away through the rain.”
    Carmen slid one hand up along her thigh. Danny electrified her with his dirty talk, and his habit of sometimes doing exactly as he said: working her up quickly, bringing her to climax, and disappearing before she’d even had time to open her eyes. The first time they were together she’d felt as if he were an incubus or a spirit, something she’d conjured up for the purposes of satisfying her the way her husband did not and allowed to dematerialize as soon as she’d gotten what she wanted. But that only made her want him more.
    “Speaking of places to go.” Danny cleared his throat. “I’m a little short this week. Mega’s been on another spending spree. I know it’s my turn, but do you think you can cover the hotel on Tuesday?”
    “Oh, we can just …” Carmen paused. She’d been about to say
come here
, but now she was trying to imagine the two of them in her house, Jobe’s absence looming over them, a tangle of bodies but where? On the kitchen table? The couch in the den where Luca sat to watch TV? In the bed she had shared with her husband for nearly twenty-one years? “Yeah, I guess I can cover it. I’m expecting a big insurance payment.”
    “Really?” She heard the flare of his lighter and the indrawn breath of another cigarette. “How big?”
    The answer was $5 million. She saw the numbers flash in her head, all the zeros lined up. Jobe had insisted on buying the policy back when Luca was three or four. Their son would always need care, Jobe reasoned, and if he were to die before his parents—before coming into his inheritance—Carmen would need money. From the beginning, it seemed, Jobe had been