Wife Living Dangerously (6 page)

So all my life as an attached woman I have been hypervigilant for signs of an affair though Michael never gave me any, not
until his relationship with Susie Margolis was over. Perhaps I missed the clues because in my imaginings about Michael and
his inevitable extramarital romance I always pictured a woman who embodied my own fantasy of a feminine ideal. Michael’s lover
would be younger and taller than me, more confident, more intellectually engaged. She read the
Atlantic
and
Harper’s
and possibly
The Nation
because she was passionate about politics and still young enough to be idealistic about the left. Michael’s lover would have
big white teeth and narrow hips and skin that tans, never burns. She would be a swimmer. A diver, actually. And he would sneak
away to her meets and watch her lean diver’s body arc into the pool like a dolphin’s, propelled by sexual vigor, youth, and
muscle. She would meet him at his office, damp and smelling of chlorine, and they would have sex on his desk in full view
of the family photographs.

Susie Margolis was none of these things. She was like the nursery rhyme teapot, five feet tall with a barrel of a torso and
knobby knees. Her hair was vaguely brown, shoulder length, parted to the left side, graying. Susie was a clarinet teacher
who gave private lessons and played with the Cambridge Community Pops. I’d see her occasionally on Saturday mornings at the
farmers’ market, skinny legs crossed at the ankles and tucked under the black metal folding chair. For these performances
she dressed in the customary dark skirt and white blouse like the other musicians, but ordinarily she wore her husband’s T-shirts
and sweatpants that strained across her buttocks and clung closely enough to reveal dimpling. Always practical, Susie chose
function over form. Her eyeglasses, outdated in their enormity, gave her the widest possible field of vision but made her
look owlish and old. Her best feature was her nose, straight and fine with sleek nostrils that flared imperiously when she
was trying to make a point.

Susie didn’t seem to worry about the things that worried me. Calories, for instance; her signature casserole was decadent
with whole milk ricotta and melted mozzarella and slices of fried eggplant saturated with fragrant olive oil. Susie had a
somewhat salacious gap-toothed smile; when she laughed she poked her tongue between her teeth and tossed her head back, surrendering
her whole body. She wore shorts and sleeveless tops in the summer without self-consciousness, her full flesh glistening and
aromatic with coconut oil.

Susie was David Margolis’s wife and David had been Michael’s best friend since seventh grade at Benjamin Franklin Middle School.
Five years ago David had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and by the time doctors finally put a name to his
symptoms, the disease had appropriated his body, progressing from fasciculations and pratfalls to muscle atrophy and incontinence.

Michael spent his weekend afternoons at the Margolis house helping with the household tasks David could no longer handle,
putting up storm windows and hauling firewood and moving the TV from the family room into a downstairs bedroom where David
was spending more and more of his time. When Michael stopped initiating sex I did not blame him. Who would want to have sex
after spending all day with a dying man? It never occurred to me that Michael might be falling in love with the dying man’s
wife.

I sometimes entertain the notion that my husband didn’t fall in love with Susie herself but with her distress and her appreciation.
In that household under Susie’s grateful gaze, Michael was a man of valor, a hero, a knight. Michael wedged himself into the
cabinet under the kitchen sink to investigate and repair a leaking pipe. He dragged oxygen tanks into the bedroom and more
than once carried David from one room to the other. Susie rewarded Michael with bespectacled eyes that shone with gratitude
and respect. And later, as I imagined it, she rewarded him with her body, generous and unflinching.

It wasn’t an act of sex, as Michael had explained it to me.

“It was more like an expression of relief. David was so sick. He suffered so much, Julie. And when he died, the suffering,
it was finally over, you know? Jesus, honey, I can’t believe it myself. I never did anything like this. I never even considered
it. We were just so relieved and happy. For David. It was just that one time. Please. You have to believe me.”

“You were happy for David so you had sex with his wife?” I pulled another tissue from the box of tissues impregnated with
aloe. “Are you out of your mind?”

Three hours ago we were standing in the drizzle at David’s grave site in Resting Slopes cemetery dropping handfuls of cold,
damp dirt onto the pine casket as Rabbi Sheila Dumas recited prayers exulting God’s glory. I watched as my husband took his
turn with the dirt, and then, passing Susie Margolis, touched his hand to the small of her back. It happened so quickly I
probably wouldn’t have noticed had I not been watching Michael closely, studying his technique with the dirt before my own
turn; I’d never been to a Jewish burial and was afraid I’d do something embarrassingly wrong.

When I saw him touch her that way, I knew at once that he’d had sex with her and I started bawling, which no one found odd
given the context. In the car on the way home, I asked Michael straight out if he had slept with Susie Margolis and straight
out he told me that he had. I felt Jake twist and kick in my womb.

“Let me out of the car.”

“What? We’re on the highway!” Michael hit the automatic door lock and gripped my arm. “Please. Julie. Look. Oh, my God. I’m
so sorry! What I did was wrong. I’m not proud of myself. But you can’t get out of the car in the middle of the highway. You’ll
kill yourself.”

“I
want
to kill myself!” I screamed, crying, coughing up phlegm, wresting myself from my husband’s grip.

“Why?” Michael screamed back. “Because I had sex with Susie Margolis? I’m the one you should want to kill. Are you CRAZY?”

Short answer: yes.

Never had I felt so overcome by an impulse so extravagantly desperate. I wanted to tear at my clothes, pull my hair, claw
at my skin. I wanted to fling open the car door and leap into traffic. I felt fat and homely and I felt stupid for missing
the indicators, all of which now seemed perfectly obvious. The long evenings and overnight stays, the chatty e-mails and phone
calls at 10:00 and 11:00
P.M
. I felt the weight of pregnancy, not just the pounds but the iron anchor of motherhood that would keep me stuck in that house
with this man when all I wanted to do was fly away, light as a sparrow into the sky. I never thought I had anything in common
with Susie Margolis but now we had this; my husband had fucked her and me both and it made me sick to my stomach.

“You’ve got to pull over. I’m going to throw up.”

“You’re not going to throw up, Julie. We’re almost home.”

I tried to swallow back the mass of eggs and sausage that had pushed its way up my esophagus but it was too late. Michael
lifted his foot from the gas pedal and tried to kick a white plastic Walgreen’s bag in my direction. With another fierce wretch
I threw up on the bag as well as his foot.

“God, Julie. I’m so sorry.”

Back at the house I raged against Michael and he absorbed all of it, slump-shouldered on the edge of our bed. I hated him
for having a life outside the asphyxiating confines of domesticity, a life that included not just work and approbation of
clients but now this: affection, appreciation, gratitude, and sex. I wanted every bit of that for myself. I decided then that
I would go back to work as soon as I could enroll Jake into a good day-care program. It didn’t even matter where I worked.
I had to get out of my house. Three months later I held Jake to my breast with one hand and circled classified ads with the
other. That’s the week I got my job with the Bentley.

The Susie Margolis incident, as we would come to call it on those rare occasions when we called it anything at all, was treated
as a malignant anomaly, a squamous cell carcinoma, caught and cut away before it could advance. Convinced by my husband that
the affair was a singular and entirely unexpected expression of grief and release, I agreed to forgive. We would never mention
the Susie Margolis incident again. Michael became even more attentive and affectionate. Susie married a tuba player a year
later and moved with her new husband to Arkansas where they both found jobs with the Little Rock Symphony.

I spent the following year extracting my due; the balance of power had seesawed in my direction and I planned to make the
most of it. While my husband worked relentlessly to regain my respect, I spent enormous amounts of money, ordering new bedding,
shoes, and shearling coats from catalogs, a home theater, new living-room furniture. I felt entitled to detach at will, offering
minimalist responses, initiating nothing. I allowed myself great expanses of masochist rumination; details Michael refused
to provide I fabricated for myself: the movement of Susie’s soft body, his hands on her hips, the feverish rocking, the way
he held her afterward.

Then one day, in the middle of breakfast at Denny’s as Michael buttered an English muffin and the kids chased each other around
the table, I realized that I would never leave my husband. We had three children and I had no intention of being a single
mother and besides, I loved him deeply despite everything. I felt something inside me click back into its default position.
I was done living my life in reaction to the Susie Margolis incident. My husband was a good man. It was time to forget.

Now I realize that I had never really forgotten, just pushed the episode back deep beyond the temporal lobe, beyond the stubbornly
nostalgic hippocampus and into an area of my brain that was eager to forget or to begin with had never possessed the capacity
to remember. Denial served a vital function for me that year, and not just because it enabled me to love my husband again.
It gave me the stamina to impel myself out of bed every morning, feed my children, and function at work. Denial was my ally
and constant companion, my most reliable hedge against self-pity, and I welcomed it into my life, until that night at Frankie’s
beach house, when I’d taken the oath to live with more joie de vivre.

Now a new memory comes paddling up to the surface. It is mid-July, a week before David is diagnosed. Susie and David are at
the house for a barbecue. After they leave, I mention, albeit unkindly, that I’d love to give Susie a makeover.

“She’s a real Glamour Don’t, you know?”

Michael shrugs. The “Glamour Don’t” designation means nothing to my husband, but he gets the gist of it.

“I think she’s just fine the way she is. She’s no fashion model, but she’s got joie de vivre.”

S
unday, 6:49
A.M
. At first I think it is the miserable honk of a clogged carpet sweeper, then I discover it is Michael on the saxophone. He
has lugged his old instrument from the upstairs crawl space where it had languished for the last thirteen years alongside
my stationary exercise bicycle and the knock-hockey game we bought because we thought it would be fun to play together. (It
wasn’t, by the way. Michael and I don’t do games very well. He is too competitive and I take things too personally.) I count
three more honks and propel myself out of bed. The family room is still dark and the saxophone case lies open at Michael’s
feet as if he is inviting spare change.

“What’s going on, sweetie?” I ask, squinting at my husband through my grainy, sleep-deprived eyes. Michael stands barefoot
in his saggy white underwear and the Super Dad T-shirt the kids bought him for Father’s Day two years ago, his tarnished alto
saxophone suspended from a black leatherette strap around his neck.

“I’m thinking of joining a band.” His eyebrows are raised hopefully, an embarrassed smile plays at the corner of his lips.
“A rock band.”

“That’s nice, honey,” I say, hoping I don’t sound as skeptical as I feel. “Which band are you thinking of joining?”

“They call themselves Past the Legal Limit. Curt Cartwright started it with some other guys at the firm. Barry Sanders, Joe
Patterson.” Michael lightly fingers the keys on his saxophone, producing the dull tap of felt on brass. “They used to play
big band music at nursing homes and the VFW, but now they’re into classic rock and they’re getting better venues.”

“You mean bars?”

“Bars, clubs, that sort of thing. They play once a week wherever they can find a gig, and they host the open mike every other
Wednesday at The Rock Barn.” He gives me a moment to digest. “Anyway, they’re looking for a sax player. I ran into Barry Sanders
in the men’s room and he asked me if I’d consider playing and I told him I’d think about it. I mean, I know it’s been a while
since I played, but it shouldn’t take me too long to get up to speed. What do you think?”

I look at my husband with his thin arms and pale spindly legs and I suddenly feel such sorrow for him. Michael works hard
for our family and asks for so little in return. I’ve wondered at times if he might have anhedonia, a clinically diagnosable
aversion to pleasure. My husband takes the dark meat, the chipped plate, the broken umbrella, the store brand shampoo. He
gave up tickets to a playoff game to cover for Joe Patterson in court (while Joe was getting a hair weave). It was Michael
who held our place in line for Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney World so the rest of us could eat lunch. When the other
lawyers go out for drinks after an especially difficult victory, Michael always comes home to me and the children. He has
never known the joy of driving a brand-new car, has never had a professional massage, has never accepted a gift or compliment
without resistance.

He fiddles with the mouthpiece and looks at me. “So? What do you think?”

In other words, Can I go play with the other boys? Can I? Can I? Huh? Huh? Pleeeeeeeese?

“Absolutely,” I say, and I mean it. For years I’ve pestered Michael about carving out some leisure time for himself and I
know he regrets giving up the saxophone. “When do you start?”