Read Online Wife Living Dangerously by Sara Susannah Katz - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sara Susannah Katz
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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
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
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