You Think It, I'll Say It(7)

Julie and Keith had met in graduate school—he was getting an MBA, she a degree in speech and language pathology—and they’d married while living in Chicago, which was where their two daughters were born. Their son was born after they moved to Houston for Keith’s job, and at first it amused Julie and Keith that they’d spawned a Texan. There were things about the white, moneyed version of Houston that Julie didn’t love and, even more, that she didn’t love herself for not resisting.

Already, by the time they’d moved, she’d stopped working. At the school where they enrolled the children, lots of mothers did drop-off in expensive exercise wear that flattered their svelte figures, then did pickup in the same expensive exercise wear; whether they had exercised in the intervening hours wasn’t clear. Their hair was stylishly cut and dyed, and some of them underwent cosmetic surgery procedures, procedures other than Botox, with which Julie had previously been unfamiliar: hyaluronic-acid lip filling and laser resurfacing and abdominoplasties. In the air she breathed, there was much football, hunting, and Christianity, though Houston was big and diverse enough that she could sneak away for a solo lunch at a Sri Lankan restaurant, or do phone banking for a pro-choice congressional candidate in a tight race.

In her younger years, when single, Julie had thought of herself as a big-boobed, curly-haired, high-spirited Jewish girl, and she had heard rumors of men who appreciated these qualities, but she had not encountered them personally; perhaps, she thought, they clustered on the coasts. By the time she and Graham started playing I’ll Think It, You Say It, she was no longer big-boobed (the one procedure she underwent, after nursing three kids, was a breast reduction and lift), not curly-haired (she had regular blowouts and tried to believe that the formaldehyde in the straightening lotion was offset by purchasing almost exclusively organic produce), and barely Jewish (Keith was Episcopal, and while Julie’s attendance at temple was spotty, they always celebrated Christmas). Also, she wasn’t really that high-spirited anymore, though neither was she unhappy. Keith worked long hours but made a lot of money, and he was rarely grumpy, often boyishly upbeat, and generally appreciative of the ways in which she exerted herself on behalf of their household. When initiating sex in bed at night, he’d say in a warm tone, “Is your vagina open for business?” Which, admittedly, caused her to cringe but was the result of a time years before when she’d had a UTI and told him her vagina was closed, so she was at least partly to blame.

At the Hutchinsons’ anniversary party, Graham said to her, “I hope you’re a huge bitch who usually manages to keep her bitchiness concealed. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

Julie laughed. It wasn’t that talking to Graham had made her feel lovestruck, not remotely, not then. It was more that it had made her feel big-boobed, curly-haired, high-spirited, and Jewish. Even if it was only by that point symbolic rather than literal, it had made her feel like herself.



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For many months—for the next year—Julie was fine. She’d look for Graham at parties or on the sidelines of athletic fields, but casually, not frantically, and sometimes they’d speak for twenty minutes and sometimes just for three or four. They never played the game in front of other people, including either of their spouses, but in some ways the suspension of the game created an even more pleasing undercurrent than actually playing it.

Once, at pickup after a seventh birthday party attended by both of their youngest children—Julie’s son, Lucas, was in the same grade as Graham’s daughter Macy—Graham sidled up to her and said, “I’ll think it, you say it?”

Julie smiled but shook her head. “There’s no time.” The party had featured a bounce house on the host family’s enormous front lawn, and already the children’s shoes were back on and goody bags were being distributed.

“Oh, please,” Graham said. “There’s always time for a quickie.”

“In that case,” Julie said, and she began quietly laying into the birthday boy’s parents, evangelicals who owned a national chain of highly successful fast casual restaurants. But Graham’s expression of possible amusement or skepticism made her pause, and she said, “Although maybe you disagree with me?”

“No, no,” Graham said quickly. “Unless I tell you otherwise, you should assume we’re in total agreement.”

There was something strange about the happiness this comment induced in Julie, and it took her until later in the day, long after her departure from the party, to figure out what it was: Despite the location of its origins, it had been a happiness wholly unattached to her children; it had been a grown-up happiness.



* * *



—

On the October night that Keith came home from work and mentioned that Graham and Gayle had separated and were getting a divorce—he seemed to consider the news sad but unremarkable, and was surprised Julie didn’t already know—Julie’s agitation was so immediate, extreme, and difficult to conceal from Keith that surely something untoward had been percolating in her all along. The upending of her equilibrium—it was disastrous and thrilling. She truly had not known it was still possible to feel this kind of physical excitement.

In bed that night, she lay awake hour after hour and considered the situation from every angle, vacillating between lucidity and craziness. She and Graham were, obviously, in love with each other. He had left Gayle for her. (Obviously, he had not left Gayle for her.) They needed to be extremely careful, to treat their attraction like a pipe bomb. Or maybe life was short and they owed it to themselves to take advantage of every precious moment, possibly by fucking in a supply closet at River Oaks Country Club.