Self-Esteem Read Free

seven-thirty.”
    “Okay,” he said, instinctively turning on his side.
    “Who called?” she asked.
    His voice trailed back into sleep. “I don’t know.”
    “Jim? Who was it?”
    “Wrong number, I guess.”
    “You guess?” She waited a moment. “Jim,” she said. “Jim,” she said louder.
    “ What? ”
    “How do you feel this morning?” she asked.
    Dorothy Crawford was still very attractive at forty-nine. In the last few years she had finally lost much of the weight she had gained after their son Cal was born. But this improvement didn’t matter much to Crawford. She could still be an unpleasant sight, especially when his eyes were bloodshot and throbbing. He was fond of her youthful demeanor, her magical adolescence, but he wasn’t fond of the morning interview she required each time he awoke from a night of heavy drinking.
    Crawford found the sight of her particularly nauseating that morning. It must have been that pink exercise suit, something an eighties porn star would wear.
    “How do you feel this morning? Getting out of bed today or not?”
    Dorothy had been pretty proud of herself lately. After going through a number of diet and exercise programs over the years, she had finally settled into one she could stick with long enough to see results. For the previous six months, she had been using a program called Swing and Sweat , which was where the faint sound of Sinatra had come from. Of course, it wasn’t really Sinatra, most likely an unknown lounge singer eking out a living in the exercise market. But from upstairs it was impossible to tell. Crawford only heard the faint sound of tunes he used to love — used to love. No longer could he put on a Sinatra album without having the unwanted thought of Dorothy in her pink bodysuit, bent at the knees, reaching in the air and swinging from side to side to the strains of I Get a Kick Out of You and Summer Wind . Not only had the exercise program tainted one of his favorite artists, truth was he also preferred Dorothy’s bigger butt.
    “ I said , how do you feel this morning, dear ?”
    His voice was muffled under the sheets, “I don’t know yet.”
    “I thought we were over this, Jim.”
    The word “we” meant it was time to roll over and face her.
    “Dorothy, please. I’ve had a lot of anxiety lately.” He sat up.
    “So have I,” she said, standing before him like a field marshal. “And so you had to get drunk last night, is that it?”
    “Honey, please.”
    “Don’t honey me,” she shot back. “What is it that’s so damn stressful anyhow?”
    Crawford looked straight ahead, straight through his wife.
    “I don’t know,” he mumbled, just before she stormed out, her pink bottom jolting with each step. But he did know. For one thing, he had been seeing Jenny again, and the guilt was just starting to set in. Dreams about the Garden of Eden — they always happened sooner or later.
    Jenny had done all those things he liked best, all those things he could never ask his wife to do. But Crawford thought of Jenny’s skills as a classy menu in a shitty cafe. The arching of the back, the parting of the lips, the panting of words like “Oh, Jim,” “Yes,” “Harder,” and so on. It was wrong, he knew. Wrong, wrong, wrong — like that one more shot of whiskey that seems like a good idea at the time.
    Best of all, though — or worst of all — she didn’t object to the drinking. In fact, she joined in.
    Oh, yeah , he thought, finally piecing together the evening.That’s what happened: after the drinking and the screwing they had a talk, a “discussion” as Jenny liked to call it. Right in the middle of the street she had yelled, “You’re not going to treat me like a piece of ass.”
    But even a public display of anger didn’t matter. Her apartment was in a commercial part of downtown Los Angeles and no one was ever around. It was one of those places where the streets always look wet, even when they haven’t seen rain in