Wife Living Dangerously Read Online Free PDF Page A

salary, GREAT benefits package, flexible hours. It’s PERFECT for you, Julia. And you’re PERFECT
     for us. So? What do you say, Julia Flanagan? Do I go home and SHOOT myself or can I show you your new office? I think you’re
     WONDERFUL.”
    “That’s very nice of you to say. Not the shooting yourself part. I mean, everything else.” I smoothed my skirt primly and
     straightened my posture. I found myself drawn to Leslie Keen. Thrice divorced, feisty, and in perpetual motion, Leslie was
     a minor celebrity in the field of human sexuality. She had successfully marketed the Bentley as a brand name, extending its
     reach far beyond the enclaves of the academy and straight to the masses. She had her own call-in radio show and for a couple
     of years hosted a nationally syndicated TV program,
Let’s Talk About Sex.
Though she is fifteen years my senior, she could pass at a distance for a college girl, thanks to Botox, a forehead lift,
     and a diet limited to whole grains and fresh greens. Once when we were working through dinner and ordered in Chinese, Leslie
     ate only a tiny plate of steamed bok choy, no sauce. When I asked how she could possibly be satisfied with such a small serving,
     she smiled confidently and said, “Julie, it doesn’t take a lot of fuel to run this lean machine.”
    It does, however, take a lot of Dexedrine, as I discovered one day when Leslie asked if I’d stop by CVS on my way into work
     to pick up a prescription. When I handed her the bag she winked and said, “Let’s keep this
entrez nous,
shall we?”
    Working for a speed addict, I’ve come to learn, is like being one of those tornado chasers, ever watchful for foreboding cloud
     formations, always plunging into turbulence while everyone else is driving in the opposite direction. Leslie Keen is a rainmaker,
     the university’s most successful magnet for grants and private donations, but she is also at the center of the university’s
     most destructive storms. Three months ago she held a press conference to announce her endorsement of mutual masturbation as
     a form of safe sex for teenagers. At 2:00 A.M. over weak coffee in her catastrophically messy kitchen, I helped her craft a face-saving public statement when all she really
     wanted to say was, Fuck you, fuck that, fuck this whole fucking job; the following day I stayed late to field phone calls
     from angry parents, concerned politicians, and eager talk show hosts. And only last week I booked guests for her radio show
     when she was too wasted to make it to the office. “You’re so good to me,” Leslie sobbed into my shoulder, gin vapors wafting
     from her mouth. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
    Michael and I are spinning in our own orbits these days, two planets in two entirely separate solar systems. Tonight he misses
     dinner with me and the kids, doesn’t get home until 9:14, pauses to kiss me, then goes upstairs to tend to Homer’s cage, which
     he’d moved last week from Caitlin’s room to his study. (Caitlin, who’d lobbied hardest of all for a pet, hasn’t even noticed
     that the rat is gone.) My husband checks his e-mail and spends the rest of the night in bed clicking through channels.
    When Michael and I were still in that foggy-eyed stage of early marriage, we vowed that we would never retreat to solitary
     spaces. No matter what tumbled across our path, we would confront it together as allies. Other marriages became our antimodels.
     My divorced parents were one. His bickering folks were another. But the ultimate antimodels were Janet and Harry Hobart, veterinarians
     who lived across the street from our first apartment on Skerwin Avenue in Ann Arbor. After too many piña coladas at a block
     party, Janet admitted that she and Harry sometimes went for weeks without verbal communication. One frigid February morning,
     Janet slipped on the wet spot her husband had left after his shower, smacked her head on the bathtub faucet, and lay there