The Love of My (Other) Life Read Online Free PDF

my hand. “So ugly.”
    “People love this stuff.”
    “People who don’t know better; they’ve been duped by the corrupt commercial art establishment to think that the only thing art has to do is hang on the wall and get more expensive!” It was everything that was wrong with the art world, which had cost me so dearly.
    “Down, girl,” Brian said. He took the skull from me and put it back on its base. “Someone will pay this much for it. A million dollars. Know what I’d do with a million bucks? Take you to Vienna. Mozart’s
    ’hood. You always wanted to go there.”
    There was no answer to his absurdity, and my own was showing its life-demolishing fangs. I stormed off. Brian followed me. When I looked back, he was gazing at me with a melting expression. I took a deep cleansing breath. “Brian, I keep telling you to go away. Why are you still following me?”
    “The thing is,” he said, and tilted his head in a bird-like expression of interest, “we’re married.”
    “Professor, if you really are a professor, I feel sorry for you, but—”
    “We are husband and wife. In an alternate universe. Lots of them exist. Imagine: there’s an alternate world where you love this art, where Cliff Bucknell is your idol.”
    “Impossible,” I scoffed. “Cliff is a loathsome, narcissistic, manipulative, deceitful user.”
    “No, in this other world, you’re obsessed with his work. In your eyes, it’s the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. There’s a universe where you own it. Maybe there’s even a universe where you love it enough to steal it,” Brian continued. He opened his hands expansively. “You can’t restrain yourself, your passions. The security cameras are out of order, there’s no guard and no attendant. So, in that other universe, you make the decision to slip it right into your bag.”
    “No way.”
    “It solves all the problems in your life, to possess this skull, which represents the pinnacle of beauty and wonder in the universe,” Brian said. He made one of his unrestrained gestures that stirred me to some distant, unresolved recognition, like a past life memory that could never be recovered—because I didn’t believe in reincarnation.
    “You are out of your mind,” I said, though I suddenly glimpsed a certain logic in his madness.
    Wouldn’t it just solve a lot of problems if I took the skull? It wouldn’t even be theft, really, for reasons I couldn’t help but remember.
    “Nope, just imagining the possibilities. Don’t you do that?”
    I glared at him and didn’t answer.
    “You have more gumption in my universe,” Brian observed. “Not gumption. Center. Self-possession.
    Something. You have bark but no bite here.”
    “I do not bark, and I do so have bite,” I said, a little archly, truth be told. I mean, I know I’m a pansy, but do I need to have some cuckoo homeless guy pointing that out to me? No. No, I do not need that. Besides, discretion being the more attractive part of valor, being a pansy is part of my ineffable charm. Such as it is.
    Of course, it does beg the question of why I haven’t been out on a date in over a year. I need to start running again and get my ass in shape … . It occurred to me that my imagination, wonderful as it was, was not going to tone my derriere.
    I was going to have to take action.
    “Nah, I don’t think so,” Brian was saying. “You seem lost and confused, actually.”
    “I am not. And this is your universe.” I marched back to the skull and stared hard at it.
    Brian was only a half-step behind me. He cupped my chin to turn my head to face him, then he assumed a lecturing posture and an authoritative tone. “One theory in physics says that every possible outcome happens with 100 percent probability.”
    I felt myself being stared at and turned my head just fast enough to see Frances Gates peering out of his office door. I waved at him: Please come out!
    Maybe he could rescue me from Brian’s lecture.
    Gates slammed his