Wife Living Dangerously (7 page)

“They’ve got a gig this Saturday and they asked me to sit in for a set.”

Gig? Sit in? Set? Already he’s using the jargon. I want him to do this, I really do. But I am also aware of an uneasiness
tugging at me. What am I worried about? I suspect I’ll figure that out in due time.

“Sure. Do it, Michael. It’ll be fun!”

He grins happily. “You really think so?”

I stand up on tiptoe and kiss his stubbly face. “Yes. I really do.”

He bends to rest the saxophone gingerly against the sofa and takes me in his arms. He is hard as a brick and insistent through
his Hanes and just as quickly I am ready for him. He tosses the cushions off the couch and pulls me on top; we try to move
quietly so as not to wake the kids who normally sleep late on weekends but not always.

It has been three weeks since Michael announced his intent to play with Barry Sanders’s band and tonight is their first gig
at The Rock Barn, literally, a metal pole barn on what was once the Pibley Goat Farm, all of which was bought by Copley Machine
Parts’ real estate division, parceled and sold off to various loud, clanky, greasy businesses: a transmission repair shop,
an industrial plumbing supplier, a tire store. The barn itself was purchased by the enterprising young Connelly brothers;
Bert and Bart had announced at a city zoning meeting that their place would be a “showcase for local performers.” While it
fulfilled the latter goal—no one of any national fame would consider playing there—it also failed at the former given that
“showcase” suggests a significant audience and The Rock Barn never pulls more than a handful of listeners, mostly sodden townies
who come for the cheap beer by the pitcher. I can still smell the goats.

I peer into the smoggy darkness.

“Julia! Over here! I saved you a seat!” Stacy Sanders, Barry’s wife, waves me to her table by the stage. Stacy is not yet
forty years old but she already looks like someone’s grandmother with her shelflike bosom and putty-colored orthopedic shoes.
I see Stacy at the occasional Weimar Bott gathering and we always wind up sitting together though we have had nothing in common
until now. Now we’re both with the band.

I order a Diet Coke and Stacy asks if they serve tea, which they don’t, so she politely requests a bottle of water. I see
that my husband is wearing his prescription sunglasses, a prop he chose at the last minute because “I need a trademark. I
can’t just go on stage like this, looking the way I always look.”

Barry steps up to the microphone. “Hel-
lo,
ladies and gentlemen. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to classic rock night at The Rock Barn. I’m the Buzzard, and
this,
my friends, is Past the Legal Limit!” He thrusts his fist above his head and the band careens into its first number, a decent
rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” which has no part for a saxophone but Michael plays along anyway.

“Let me tell you something,” says Stacy, leaning close and literally screaming into my ear so I can hear her over the music.
“This band is the best thing that could have happened to Barry.” She pulls a ball of yarn and two long wooden knitting needles
from a quilted tote bag. “Makes him feel like a teenager. And not just onstage, if you know what I mean. Better than Viagra.”

I try to block the mental image of Stacy and the Buzzard in bed but it’s too late. The band stops for a break between sets.
All the husbands find their wives except for Michael who stays onstage to fiddle with the amplifiers. He grins at me and I
give him an enthusiastic thumbs-up. In truth, his saxophone croaked like a thirteen-year-old boy heading into puberty, but
I believe it is my responsibility as his wife and best friend to encourage him.

“Barry, you’re sweating,” Stacy says. “Should I get you some water?”

“I’m not Barry,” Barry whispers. The armpits of his gray FUBU T-shirt are heavily ringed with sweat. “I’m the Buzzard. I
told
you.”

“Right. Sorry. Buzzard.” Stacy smiles patiently. “You want some water?”

“I like the earring, Buzzard,” I say, touching my own earlobe. “Very cool.”

“It’s magnetic,” Stacy whispers. “Barry would pass out if someone stuck a needle in his ear.”

Barry glares at his wife. “Do you have to do that here?”

“Do what?”

“What do you think?” He looks around. “
Knit.
” He lowers his voice. “It’s not
appropriate.
”

Stacy waves away his complaint with a patient smile and continues working her needles. “It’s a great ego boost,” Stacy tells
me later, once our husbands have reassembled on stage for their second set. “Just look at them up there. They even have groupies.”

She smirks and I follow her goggling eye to an old hippie shuffling barefoot on the filthy floor. She is wearing a black tube
top and a ruffled patchwork skirt, dancing near the edge of the stage with a beer in one hand. When the song is done, she
claps, spills the beer on her chest, and says, “Aw, fuck.” Michael looks at her, then at me, winces, and smiles a private
kind of smile, a husband-to-wife kind of smile.

Somewhere in the middle of a groaning rendition of “Free Ride,” I feel a hand on my shoulder. “Is there room for one more
at this table?”

“Annie! What are you doing here?”

“I thought you could use the moral support.”

Annie pulls up a stool, introduces herself to Stacy, and orders a beer. She’s wearing a dark denim jacket over a white camisole,
flared jeans, and cowboy boots. She looks up at the stage and smiles. “Well, look at
him.
A regular rock star.”

“Not quite,” I say, grimacing.

She slaps me lightly on the hand. “Be nice, Julia. He’s”—she curls her fingers into quotation—“following his bliss.” She slides
over and undoes the top two buttons of my blouse.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing? You’re with the band now. You need to dress the part.”

I redo one of the buttons. Even in the dim lighting I can see Annie scowling at me. “What?”

“You know what. Loosen up, Julia. You’re in a bar, you’re a grown woman, the kids are with a sitter, your husband’s up there
rocking and rolling. Or whatever. Just have fun for a change, okay?”

Michael joins us when the set is done. “You’ve got quite a following,” I tell him, tilting my head toward the beer-soaked
woman in the tube top. “Should I be jealous?”

He smiles. “Absolutely. How could you possibly compete with a woman of her beauty and grace?” He takes a sip of my Coke. “So
how did I sound up there?”

He sounded like a goose struggling to free itself from an oil spill.

“Fantastic, honey,” I tell him. “Amazing.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes, I really do.” Michael is beaming now and except for the bald spot he looks exactly like the boy I fell in love with.

Priapus, the son of Aphrodite, has an erection the size of a baseball bat. I am looking at a photograph of a fresco fragment
from the House of Vettii in Pompeii. Obviously I can’t get the fresco for the exhibit, but I can probably get a good reproduction,
printed onto a slab of stone. I make a note to call Jodi Mattson at the Field Museum.

I’m in the Whole Beanery trying to get a head start on the ancient sex exhibit, a collection of art and writing from the Greco-Roman
period slated as the centerpiece of the Bentley’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. It will be a sweeping exhibition
with depictions of the promiscuous Zeus, who routinely transformed himself into a swan or bull or eagle to gain sexual advantage
over women and boys; the
hetaerae
of Greece, the elite among prostitutes known as much for their intelligence as their sexual expertise; Aphrodite, the patron
goddess of the
hetaerae,
ruler over lust, capable of sending victims into destructive sexual frenzies; and Bacchus, the famed god of ecstasy and wine
who inspired drunken orgies so wild and lawless that authorities found it necessary to arrest participants by the thousands.

“You work at the
Bentley
Institute?”

I turn to find a man at the table beside mine smiling as if he knows me. It is the man from the parking lot, the professor
with the pink shell and three pennies and bedroom eyes. Evan Something.

“Yes,” I say, aware of a warm flush that has something to do with my pride in the Bentley and something to do with this man’s
lips. “I’m the assistant director.”

“Julia Flanagan. I remember. I’m Evan Delaney. I’m, uh, the guy who was in desperate need of change. For the meter, I mean.”

“Yes.” I am abruptly aware I’ve got pictures of naked Greeks and Romans scattered about the table. I sweep everything into
my briefcase.

“You don’t have to stop on my account.”

There is the beginning of a sly grin and I know what he is thinking. Everyone assumes that if you work at the Bentley Institute
you must have an Olympian sex life.

“That’s okay. I was just finishing up anyway. There’s only so much of this I can take in one sitting.”

Why did I say that? It wasn’t true. I have been known to sit in one place for six hours consecutively until my work is completed.
Leslie hired me because I’m a work-horse and we both know it.

Evan asks about my job and I hear about his frustrations teaching medieval literature to nineteen-year-old students who would
rather be back in their dorm rooms, sleeping or getting stoned or playing with their pet ferrets.

I notice the book on his table. “Ovid?”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, just gazes at me in a way that makes me feel vulnerable and shy. “Publius Ovidius Naso.
One of the greatest writers of classical antiquity. Exiled to the shores of the Black Sea. A poet. A lover. A soul in pain.”
He opens the book and turns to a page somewhere toward the end. “This is one of my favorites. From ‘The Art of Love.’ ”

Evan reads aloud, unself-consciously, in a mild and matter-of-fact way. Occasionally he lifts his eyes to meet mine, not salaciously,
but engagingly, and every time he looks at me I can feel my heart clench.

“In Cupid’s school, whoe’er would take degree

Must learn his rudiments by reading me,

Seamen with sailing art their vessels move;

Art guides the chariot: art instructs to love.

Of ships and chariots others know the rule;

But I am master in Love’s mighty school.

Cupid indeed is obstinate and wild,

A stubborn god; but yet the god’s a child:

Easy to govern in his tender age,

Like fierce Achilles in his pupilage:

That hero, born for conquest, trembling stood

Before the centaur, and receiv’d the rod.”

I realize that this is exactly what I need for my exhibit and tell him so. “It’s on the sexuality of ancient civilizations.
Greco-Roman period. Art and poetry. For the Bentley’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Very big.”

“Really?” He has completely shredded his paper napkin. “Huh. Wow. Hmm. Well. I’ll tell you what. How about if I Xerox this
and pop it in campus mail? You’ll have it by tomorrow.”

“That’d be great. Thanks.”

I have never been one for artistic abstractions and prefer a page of news analysis over a paragraph of poetry any day, but
I know enough to understand there is sex and longing in Ovid’s words and that there is something obstinate and wild in my
own heart, something I’ve worked very hard to restrain. I also I know that the tectonic plates of my stable life are beginning
to shift beneath my feet. I don’t like it.

Why is it that my house looks fine until we’re expecting company, at which point every flaw is in urgent need of remediation?
The drippy faucet in the kitchen, the overgrown ivy by the front door, the missing handle on the bathroom vanity. I am making
brunch for Michael’s senior partner Rick Wellman and his wife Lanie. If Lanie wants a tour of the house, the kids’ rooms will
have to be off-limits. In fact, the whole upstairs had better be off-limits. I can’t risk having either of them correctly
identify Homer as a rat.

While I race around to clean, Stan the Handyman is here to fix the broken cabinet door on the entertainment unit in the family
room. Like many local fix-it men, Stan came to town to study philosophy and couldn’t find a job even remotely connected to
his scholarly interests so he invested in some power tools and started hiring himself out to mechanically inept white-collar
families like ours and there are enough of us to keep him busy for the rest of his life. I don’t know much more about Stan
except that which I observe: he shaves his legs, eats teriyaki soy jerky, is slightly cockeyed, hums tunelessly when he works.
I also know that his mechanical skills are only a little better than the average person’s. Stan swears when he stabs his thumb
with a Phillips screwdriver for the second time and I vow never to hire Stan again. If I want someone who screams SHIT! every
ten minutes because he can’t get the screw holes to align, I’ll just give the job to Michael.

As the strata primavera bakes in the oven, Michael and I pull everything off the refrigerator—the kids’ artwork and Personal
Best ribbons, the photos, coupons, receipts, newspaper clippings. The telephone table is stacked with junk, so I swipe everything
into an empty Kroger bag for future sorting. As I do, I am horrified to see the Ovid poem that I’d carelessly left out for
anyone to see. I forget that the poem has every legitimate reason to be there. I am, after all, using it in an exhibit.

The house is immaculate by the time Rick and Lanie arrive for brunch, and the table looks like something out of a magazine
spread, with my grandmother’s blue and white dishes, a big bouquet of daisies, a glass pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice,
and cloth napkins folded and fanned out in goblets.

“Delicious meal, Julia.” Michael’s boss has me cornered in the kitchen while my husband chats up Lanie in the dining room,
telling her, I imagine, that she looks exactly like Elizabeth Taylor only younger and slimmer. I decide that Rick Wellman
would be handsome except for the distinct absence of vitality in his face that makes him look gray and brittle like an old
wooden puppet. It is as if someone stuck a hose in the side of his head and sucked the life out of him.