The Jezebel Remedy Read Online Free PDF Page B

engine and jumped out right behind her, all his clothes left behind as well, and he caught her near the brick sidewalk and grabbed her around the waist, then stooped and lifted her off the ground and onto his shoulder, her feet pedaling in front of him, herhead pointed back at the barn, and he carried her to the door and spun so she could reach the knob and let them in, the both of them laughing. “I think we ought to keep this celebration rolling,” he told her.
    “Why not?” she said, standing in the foyer shivering.
    Joe retrieved a bottle of grocery store chardonnay from the rear of the fridge, Lisa took a patchwork quilt from the blanket chest and moved the bathroom space heater to the den, and they buried themselves underneath the quilt and sat on the sofa in the heater’s orange glow and passed the bottle, slowly warming.
    “Hey,” Joe said, finishing a swig and wiping his wrist across his lips, “since I’m spoiling you with cheap wine and Lord Byron–quality romance, how about we slay the bottle and then order up some TV jewelry? Should be a hoot with a buzz. I’ll spring for a ring or a necklace from the jewelry channel. We’ll call the 800 number and buy you a magnificent gift. Random and off the cuff, kind of crazy-love stuff. Not often you get four-wheel sex and then sprint around in the freezing dark with no clothes. We need to memorialize it.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Yeah. Oh yeah. No doubt we’ll land a great deal too. You’ll be the owner of some gargantuan, freakishly colored, semisemiprecious stone that ends in
ite
and is about a grade away from polished riprap. The envy of your friends. I’ll even make the effort to find the remote and bring you the phone.”
    “Only after the bottle’s gone, okay? I want to make sure I don’t squander the purchase by being too sober.”
    Forty minutes later, Joe phoned toll-free and bought a “stunning” six-carat tanzanite dinner ring—retail price $3,500—for $415, and soon after they slid longwise on the couch and fell asleep there, awakened by Brownie pawing the door around four in the morning. He’d been forgotten to spend the night in the barn but seemed no worse for it. At sunrise, they dressed and ate eggs and sausage and drank coffee, and Joe had to jump-start the Mercedes because he’d left a door ajar and the battery had drained, but they agreed it was a small price to pay for superior sex and tanzanite glory.
    “Thanks for the effort,” she told him. “You’re a good husband.”
    “Effort? Huh? It was fun. My pleasure. What a weird thing to say.”

The rollicking night buttressed Lisa’s spirits for several days, but soon enough her mood dipped and things declined to mediocre and bloodless again, and when Joe brought the TV ring from the post office and stood beside her desk and opened the cardboard packaging, she teared up, simultaneously appreciative and disappointed. She thanked him, and meant every word, and raised slightly from her chair to kiss him, but even before he left her office, she was mad at herself, frustrated, ticked off because she felt selfish and whiny, unable—no matter how hard she tried—to pin down satisfaction for any length of time, less than content despite her excellent husband and damn-lucky circumstances, just another shrew with impossible demands and no cure in sight. “Don’t be such a bitch,” she mumbled to herself, the room empty now, the tanzanite blue and aggressive alongside her wedding band.

Traveling to work at the beginning of December, Lisa topped a knoll near several cracker-box brick houses and caught sight of three young girls, probably still in elementary school, prancing through a cheerleaders’ routine while they waited for the bus, their spins and struts and hucklebucks and crisp steps and invisible pom-poms remarkably well synchronized, their winter coats in a casual heap alongside a narrow asphalt driveway, their expressions stitched with concentration. She passed a vase of