Body Language Read Online Free

We’d try this for a solid year. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be a commitment to buy some time. After a year, we’d reevaluate the arrangement. By then it should be obvious what we need to do. Maybe circumstances would allow us both to settle happily in either Dumont or Chicago. Maybe we’d extend the arrangement. Maybe we’d explore other options we haven’t thought of yet.”
    I stopped talking, as there was nothing else to add. All that mattered now was Neil’s reaction. I waited.
    He turned to me and rested an arm across my shoulder. “Some ‘arrangement.’ You don’t ask much, do you?”
    “Neil, I could flop big-time up there, but I have to find out if…”
    “Shhh,” he stopped me, pressing a finger to my lips. “I know you need to do this. You’re working your way through some sort of midlife guy-thing, and the last thing I want is for our relationship to be a casualty of this crisis. I don’t much like the ‘arrangement,’ but I’m willing to go along with it. Like you said, we’re buying time. I can deal with inconvenience for a year. What I can’t deal with is the thought of not spending my life with you.”
    How could I react other than to pull him into my arms? I nuzzled his neck and told the back of his head, “I love you so much. I really don’t deserve you.”
    “No, you don’t,” he agreed. “You’re the luckiest man in the world.”
    News spread fast that I was leaving the Journal for—of all places—Dumont, Wisconsin. Roxanne Exner was first to get wind of it, hearing it directly from Neil, and she wanted more details. So she suggested that we meet for dinner at Bistro Zaza, a loud, trendy, but good Near North restaurant that had of late become our favorite haunt.
    Parking at the door, giving my car keys to the valet, I entered Zaza’s with Neil, asking him, “Will Carl be here, too?”
    I was asking about Carl Creighton, a recently appointed Illinois deputy attorney general, formerly a senior partner at Roxanne’s law firm. When Carl entered political life, he left the firm and promoted Roxanne. As of that Saturday evening last October, they had been romantically involved for about a year. Neil and I often wondered aloud whether they would take the plunge into “the m -word.” Roxanne had never struck either of us as the marrying type, so we rarely breathed the actual word, referring to it in code.
    Neil answered me, “Rox didn’t mention Carl, but I assume he’ll be here tonight. It seems they’re always together now.”
    The man at the host’s podium, black-garbed and sunken-cheeked, greeted us like old friends. (I couldn’t recall having ever met him, but then, I was forever confused by the help at Zaza’s, who all looked like cloned models from some depraved perfume ad.) He escorted us through the noisy metal-raftered room toward the booth where Roxanne and Carl awaited us. We leaned to kiss Roxanne; Carl rose to shake our hands. We all got situated around the table, ordering drinks from the man in black.
    “You look fabulous tonight, Rox,” said Neil. And indeed she did. At thirty-seven, she was successful, smart, stylish—and sober. She’d sworn off drinking nearly three years ago, not long after introducing Neil and me. The new challenges she had recently undertaken at Kendall Yoshihara Exner obviously agreed with her, and she sat there radiating a confident smile that, worn by anyone else, might appear smug.
    She nodded a wordless thank-you for Neil’s compliment, then returned it. “Again, it seems, I’ve stumbled into the good fortune of being surrounded by three devastatingly attractive men.”
    Her statement had the ring of hyperbole, but I realized as she said it that she was sincere—we did look good that night. At thirty-four, Neil was the youngest of us, and the advantage of his years was augmented by his designer’s eye; he always seemed to dress with an instinctive appropriateness to the occasion, as evidenced by the combination of