Free Want Not by Jonathan Miles Page B

8th, she noticed, there was a solid block of maybe twenty emails from Jane L. Becker. That Saturday, she remembered (because the days leading up to that Tuesday were engraved upon her memory in exquisite, even microscopic detail), she’d taken Alexis to her soccer game and then to West Milford for a matinee of
The Princess Diaries,
and Brian had stayed home to catch up on work. She wasn’t so much suspicious—at that moment, Brian was the winged angel she spoke to in the dark, the vaporous essence suffusing the pillow that she fell asleep spooning every night, that sponged her 4 A.M. tears—as she was curious about the abundance, so, randomly, she doubleclicked one of Jane L. Becker’s Saturday afternoon emails.
    I am completely worthless without your dick inside me,
it read.
I feel like a crackhead.
[A dick-head? ;)] God, I’m addicted. [A-dick-ted? Make me stop!]
Seriously. I can’t eat or sleep or work out or
ANYTHING
. All I’m good for is laying here thinking about you inside me. This is total torture. I’m suffering from withdrawal. What the hell have you
DONE
to me, Brian Tooney?
    To say she was stunned, as Sara later told her sister, trivializes the sensation—the overwhelming, airless, corporeal
suck
of it. The effect was like seeing the world turned inside out, and discovering that everything you thought you knew about existence was backwards and upside down. That trees caused pollution and smoking made you live longer and Santa Claus was real but also a well-known pederast: everything. Her stupor was so total that she didn’t even register pain. Fortified by that numbness, though aware she was committing a spectacular mistake, Sara read, then printed out, every last one of Jane L. Becker’s emails to Brian—from the earliest flirty messages (according to her email address, Jane L. Becker worked at Lehman Brothers; they’d met at a High Yield Bond Conference uptown) to the first, awkward postcoital note
(Are you okay? I’m really sorry if things got a little too, um, crazy last night. Call me?)
to the operatic, full-blown declarations that followed
(I had no idea what love was until I met you . . . I feel like Dorothy discovering Oz)
to the subsequent reams of hypersexed e-blather that caused Sara, weeping, and holding back her hair, to vomit into the wastebasket under the desk
(Sitting on your face last night was a whole lot better than sitting here in this CDOs meeting . . . whatever it is you do with your tongue, kiddo, you should patent it).
Precisely why she was printing them, she didn’t know, but she felt a pressing need to marshal hard, physical evidence—multipurpose, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, twenty-pound, ninety-four-brightness evidence, to be collected and examined and analyzed for some unimaginable but imperative prosecution. When Alexis woke up for school the next morning, she found her mother at the desk, never having slept, the overheating printer still whirring out page after page.
    As for Brian’s emails to Jane L. Becker, she read perhaps a quarter of them, and printed out none. She didn’t quite recognize the voice of the Brian who’d authored them—his collected love letters to Sara, all of them predating their wedding, would fill five pages, six tops—and for a brief dizzying moment, slipping off the plane of reality as if stumbling off a curb, Sara wondered if this wasn’t
her
Brian who’d written all this—that some intergalactic mixup had occurred, and this was
another
Brian Tooney’s computer she was digging through. Because how could he have possibly written
this
to Jane L. Becker—
When we opened the drapes yesterday, and stood there looking out over Times Square, I wanted to break the window and scream down at everyone, Look at this woman! Look at this beautiful naked beautiful fucking woman! Like a king, right? Jesus, you make me feel like some crazy king
—just seventeen minutes (it was all there, timestamped in his Sent Messages box) before including