Wife Living Dangerously (21 page)

“Hey. You made it.”

I turn slowly toward his voice. He is beaming.

“You must be Jake.” Evan towers over Jake like a redwood, and realizing this, drops to his knees and extends his hand. “I’m
Evan. I work with your mother.”

Now that’s a fine lie, I’m thinking. Evan Delaney does not work with me; the courtly love project doesn’t make us coworkers.
I don’t correct him, just stand there holding Jake’s clammy little hand, trying to look motherly and trying with all my might
to forget what it was like to feel Evan inside me.

“Hi, Jake’s mom.” Evan rises to his feet and grins.

“Hi.”

Damn my fair skin, these cheeks that flush and burn with the accuracy of a pregnancy test. “It’s nice to be here. It’s really
… different. It’s so, you know, bikerish.” God, could I possibly sound like a bigger geek?

“That it is, Julia Flanagan. That it is.” His eyes are twinkling. He thinks I’m adorable, I can tell. It seems like a long
time since anyone thought I was adorable. Evan returns to Jake’s eye level and gestures toward a 1970 customized Triumph Tiger,
gleaming black with a fiery iron cross painted across the fuel tank. “How’d you like to sit on one of these choppers?”

Jake looks at me for approval and, receiving it, turns back to Evan. “Uh-huh.” He smiles shyly and raises his arms so Evan
can hoist him onto the Triumph’s black leather seat.

Evan is gripping Jake with both hands. “Take a picture, Miss Julia.”

I dig the camera out of the backpack, snap one picture, wind the hard plastic wheel forward, and take another. I am impressed
by the fact that Evan is more focused on keeping Jake stabilized on the bike than posing for the camera. Jake is glowing like
a Chinese lantern.

“Look at me, Mommy!” he calls out. “I’m a motorcycle guy!”

“You sure are, honey!” I resist but eventually surrender to the urge to compare my husband to the man who has just won my
son’s everlasting devotion. Michael, I guiltily acknowledge, would never take Jake to a motorcycle show because Michael doesn’t
like motorcycles and the idea of spending two hours in a room full of bikers would be unbearable. On the other hand, I quickly
remind myself, his children are well fed, warmly dressed, and amply educated. When they are dirty, he bathes them without
complaint. If they are tearful, he consoles them with stories of his own youthful catastrophes or tales of Joe Doody and the
Planet Shmalla. He has taught them how to clean their rooms and why they should save their allowances. Michael is an excellent
father, I remind myself. And I am happily married. I am happily married. I am happily married. I am happily married. I am
happily married. I am happily married. I am happily married. I am happily married.

“Who’s this?” Michael is standing in the kitchen in a ripped Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, holey underwear, and suede slippers.
He squints at the photograph in his hand. I suppose I could have hidden the pictures, or picked out the ones that included
Evan but I’ve left them scattered like playing cards on the kitchen table. I have nothing to hide.

“Who?”

“This guy. Here.”

I don’t look up right away. “You mean that person with Jake? By the motorcycle?” I’m aiming for a casual, disinterested tone.
I am scrubbing a Jell-O stain off the kitchen counter. When plain dish soap doesn’t work, I switch to the abrasive cleanser
with bleach and stay focused on my task. I finally remove the stain with a Brillo pad and bleach and try not to think about
the fact that this resistant red stain came from a food product.

“Yeah. The guy by the motorcycle. With Jake.” Michael is dangling the picture in front of my face.

I remove my rubber gloves and study the photo as if for the first time.

“Oh. Yeah. Uh-huh. That’s Evan Delaney. He was on that committee with me. You know, the Mendelsohn mural committee. Remember?
Anyway, we’re doing an exhibit. Leslie got some grant money.” I resume my scrubbing though there’s nothing left to scrub.
“And, well, Evan knew that Jake’s into motorcycles so he invited us to the expo. At the convention center. Two weeks ago.”

“Cool. Did Jake have a good time?”

“I guess.”

I wake in the morning and am filled with the singular knowledge that someone in the world thirsts for me. This simple fact
propels me out of bed, informs my wardrobe choices, gives me the motivation to go to work every day even in the gloom. I carry
Evan’s desire with me like a secret jewel. It radiates and warms me. It keeps me perpetually on the edge of arousal. At odd
moments—reaching for a teacup from the kitchen cabinet, correcting Caitlin’s math homework, lacing up my sneakers—I find myself
replaying incendiary moments: Evan’s furtive smile during a Mendelsohn mural meeting, how his eyes linger on my lips when
I talk. I lie in bed and imagine him standing in the door frame contemplating me with those sober eyes and every part of me
aches to wrap myself around him. Evan Delaney, the fact of him, makes everything else in life bearable, not just my marriage
but life’s small injustices, the dry cleaner’s failure to remove a mustard spot from my beige wool skirt, the fact that AOL
continues to charge me a monthly fee even though I canceled my membership two years ago. Evan’s desire for me is a gift, an
affirmation, a refuge. I cannot, I will not, give up this drug.

But with this elation comes a sadness deeper than any I have ever known. When I break from my reverie I am filled with black,
bottomless despair. Evan might as well be a gorgeous hologram: vivid, lifelike, out of reach. I am a married woman with three
children and a husband who loves me. I cannot continue this affair.

I now have forty-seven vintage cookie jars. Most people spend a lifetime accumulating this many jars; I collected mine in
twelve weeks, primarily during late-night eBay binges but occasionally during the day, on my lunch break, from the office,
and always at those times I felt tempted to daydream about Evan Delaney.

My preferences are shifting rapidly and with no discernible pattern. First, cartoon characters: Dumbo, Mickey Mouse, Felix
the Cat, Bugs Bunny. Then I feel myself drawn to elves: Elves on tree stumps. Elves in schoolhouses. Elves under mushrooms.
Without warning, I suddenly crave cats and dogs dressed as clowns, with rosy cheeks, big frilly collars, wicker handles. Now
I find myself powerfully attracted to animal jars made in Japan in the early 1960s. I have amassed an impressive assortment
and decide that this must be my ultimate calling, to be the world’s foremost collector of these friendly, big-eyed beasts.
Some are wearing crowns, others beanies. Most are holding either lollipops or cookies. All are smiling. I cannot seem to resist
them.

When Michael is working late at the office I log into eBay, immediately search “Japan vintage cookie jars” and up come the
tigers, the pandas, the lions and rabbits. My fingers twitch as I scan the listings, enlarge the photos, look up market values
in my cookie jar guidebooks. I study my rivals’ bid histories with the diligence of an FBI profiler to predict whether my
adversaries are likely to “snipe”—to outbid me in the auction’s final seconds. I look at their past auctions to determine
if they’re bargain hunters or big spenders; how high will they be willing to go, and am I willing to go higher? I do a bidder
search to learn how many auctions they’re currently participating in. Does my opponent indiscriminately scatter lots of little
bids among many different auctions in the hope that something will take root, the way I once tried to make a wildflower garden
by tossing fistfuls of seeds on a windy day? Or does she focus her efforts on a single jar? I take all these factors into
account as I post my bids and monitor my auctions. I discover a feral quality in me. The girl at Camp Wakkasee who’d rather
sit alone on damp grass than play capture the flag is now a bloodthirsty competitor. I will not be defeated.

I am running out of space. I put the jars along the sideboard in the dining room and atop the Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen.
I line them up like chess pieces on the entertainment center in the family room. I calculate that I can fit twelve of them
on a baker’s rack I found in the Pottery Barn catalog, so I buy the rack and install it in the front hall, though the dark
green enameled steel doesn’t really match the delft blue rug and goldenrod walls.

My new passion provides an unintended benefit. The cute UPS guy driver is at my door almost daily. He used to drop packages
on my porch, ring the doorbell, then run like hell back to that truck, a technique I’m sure they learn in UPS school since
they all seem to do it, even the chubby ones. Now he stands at the door and has to wait for my signature because these aren’t
place mats from Pottery Barn, these are vintage cookie jars, they are insured, and they always require my signature. The transaction
should give me time to fully appreciate the beauty of his hindquarters. But the UPS guy’s visits hardly raise my pulse now.
It seems that I have room enough in my heart for only one extramarital fantasy and besides, I’m more excited about the thing
he has for me, the wide-eyed panda swathed in newspaper and bubble wrap. I wonder if the UPS guy senses that something has
changed between us. I don’t even bother to wear makeup when I know he’s coming. Sometimes I answer the door in my sweatpants.

Michael does not notice the jars at first, not even when I’ve placed one in the middle of our kitchen table. It is one of
the dog clowns, more like a harlequin, really, and I use it to hold cellophane-wrapped peppermint candies, the red and white
kind they give you with your check at the Italian restaurant. Michael also does not notice the elf-on-a-stump I’ve put on
our bathroom vanity to hold cotton balls. Only when my collection has reached critical mass—for Michael that would be forty-nine
jars—does my husband finally say something.

“Hey. Where’d these come from?” He has just arrived home and is setting his briefcase on the floor against a steel curlicue
at the bottom of the baker’s rack. I watch as he discovers my collection by degrees, first one jar, then two, then the shelf,
then the whole rack. He steps back to take it all in. “How long have we had these?”

“Oh, a few weeks, I guess. I got them on eBay. I always wanted to collect something. I thought it’d be fun to collect cookie
jars.”

“Hmmm.” Michael looks as if he’s detecting a faint, disagreeable odor. He gives the jars a few more moments of scrutiny. “Why
do they all look so…
scary
?”

“Scary? You really think so?” I hadn’t considered “scary” as a possible descriptor. Tacky, yes. But most people would probably
say they’re cute. Surely someone must have thought they were attractive enough to mass produce. But the more I study them,
the more I realize that Michael is right. Bulging eyes. Gaping mouths. Giant swollen heads. They are leering at us. And they
are terrifying. “I think they’re kind of cute,” I say.

Michael tugs at his tie with one hand, unbuttons his shirt with the other. “If you say so.” He kisses me on the mouth and
reaches around to squeeze my rear. “If it makes you happy to collect these things”—he slips off his shirt and drapes it over
the banister—“then by all means, honey, collect to your heart’s content.”

“Really?” I am startled by his support.

“Absolutely.” He is already in the kitchen, aiming the remote at the TV screen. “Everybody should have a hobby.”

All my friends loved my mother. She’d let them smoke Newports at our rented house and she’d let them make out with their boyfriends
in the basement while I watched TV alone in the family room. This was six years after we moved away from Liberty; no one here
knew my mother had been a check-bouncing drunk who did nine weeks as a trash picker on the side of the highway. By the time
we’d settled into our new neighborhood, Trina had gotten mostly sober, found steady employment waitressing, and was going
for her real estate license. As far as my friends were concerned, she was the coolest mom in the world, someone who knew about
boys and sex and listened without shaming. My mother gave my friends pedicures, taught them to French inhale, let them try
her beer, ice cold in a frosted Mickey Mouse mug from the freezer. We’d sit on the back porch and dangle our bare feet over
the railing, Mom making perfect smoke rings and telling my friends about her failed romances, with Raul, who bilked her out
of seven hundred dollars in a phony real estate deal, and with handsome Jim, the blond Unitarian pastor who said he’d leave
his wife but never did.

Trina’s mother Grace, who died when I was a baby, was a Mormon, rigid as cheap shoes, and she was a pincher.

“She’d grab a hunk of me and clamp down like lobster claws,” Trina told us. “I went on a diet when I was twelve and lost all
my baby fat just so she’d have less of me to get hold of.”

A week has passed since Michael first noticed the cookie jars. I wonder when he’ll notice that my heart is somewhere far away
now. And I wonder when he’s going to confirm what I’ve suspected, that he and Edith Berry are falling in love.

I am sitting with my mother at the round pine table in her small kitchen. The chef jar is still there, sitting on top of aluminum
cabinets that have the color of a smoker’s teeth. I vow not to mention Edith Berry, who is stuck in my head like a brain tumor,
slowly growing in significance and threatening to affect my ability to function. I’m not in the mood to hear one of Trina’s
lectures on the ugliness of jealous women.

I’m not sure why I tell my mother about Evan Delaney; I’ve never consulted her before, not even when I was a newlywed trying
to thicken gravy for Thanksgiving dinner, which she bailed out of anyway, in favor of going skiing with Theo, the Greek salesman
she’d met at the craps table in Las Vegas.

“Is he handsome?” my mother asks, nibbling the end of her thumb the way she always does in the presence of, or when contemplating,
a good-looking man.

“Very.”

“Your father was handsome.”

I wish she hadn’t said that. I want her to either tell me every single thing about my father or nothing at all. She rarely
talked about him and I knew enough to never ask. It was as if my mother had drawn a magic circle around herself, a nonpermeable
membrane through which no information about my father seeped out and no inquiry dare seep in. I mentioned him only once when
I was twelve, full of prepubescent self-righteousness and angry because my mother was out on a date and missed my solo in
the seventh-grade choir’s performance of “Dona Nobis Pacem.”