This Is Where I Leave You

of his gelatinous gut, the effect of such an untimely intrusion would probably have sent him into cardiac arrest. So, all things considered, it was probably a good thing that I was in my own house. Except, that being the case, it posed a handful of troubling scenarios, the most obvious of which was that the woman writhing on the bed in a 18pool of her own sweat, inserting her French-manicured index finger like a dart into the bull’s-eye of her lover’s anus, was my wife, Jen. Which, of course, I’d known the instant I stepped into the room. But my brain was shielding me from the realization, giving me little random thoughts to process, just to keep me distracted, really, while, behind the scenes, my subconscious scrambled to assemble the facts and prepare a strategy for damage control. So instead of thinking, right away, Jen is fucking someone, my marriage is over, or something along those lines, my next thought was actually this: Jen never sticks her fi nger into my asshole during sex. Not that I had any desire for her to do so, especially now that I was seeing firsthand, so to speak, where it had been. We did some fun, nasty stuff from time to time, Jen and I - positions, props, creamy desserts, et cetera - but I fell squarely into that category of men who simply never feel the desire to bring their asshole into the mix. Not that I was judging the men who did. Except for the man who was currently impaled two knuckles deep on my wife’s index finger, one digit away from the one she used to flip the bird at the guy who had cut us off in the HOV lane last week, two away from the diamond eternity band I’d bought her on our fifth anniversary. I was judging him pretty severely, actually. So much so that it took me an extra beat to realize that he was, in fact, Wade Boulanger, a popular radio personality who, in addition to screwing my wife and apparently enjoying the occasional bit of anal stimulation, was also my boss.
    Wade is the host of a popular WIRX morning drive radio program called Man Up with Wade Boulanger. He talks about sex, cars, sports, and money. But mostly about sex. He consults on air with porn stars, strippers, and prostitutes. He takes calls from men and women who tell him in graphic detail, about their sex lives. He announces and then rates his own farts. He tells lovelorn, sex-starved callers to “Man up already!”
    There are T-shirts and coffee mugs and bumper stickers with the catchphrase. He is a professional asshole, syndicated in twelve markets. The advertisers line up like sheep.
    I’m not knocking it. I was his producer. I booked the guests. I oversaw the interns screening the calls, the I.T. geeks who run the website. I met with the station bosses about format and sponsorship. I liaised with legal, H.R., and advertising. I ordered lunch and bleeped the curse words. I’d been fresh out of college and working as an assistant at WRAD, a small local station, when Wade’s career was just heating up, and for some reason he liked me. When his producer was fired over a flap with the FCC, Wade hired me. We took long lunches after the show, whole afternoons spent in restaurants on the station’s dime, drinking dirty martinis and coming up with bits. He called me his voice of reason, valued my opinion, and took me with him when he moved from the local affiliate to WIRX. And when the show went into syndication, he threatened to walk when the station balked at my contract. Wade is tall and beefy, with dark, wiry hair and a cleft that makes his chin look like a tiny ass. His teeth are a shade of white not found in nature. At forty, Wade still references his fraternity brothers like they matter, still evaluates passing breasts out loud, still calls them tits. He is that guy. It’s easy to picture him in his frat-boy prime, chugging down beers to rounds of applause, humiliating pledges, slipping roofies into the red plastic cups of pretty freshman girls at keggers. There’s nothing in life, really, to prepare you for the experience of seeing your wife have sex with another man. It’s one of those surreal events that you’ve imagined at one point or another without any real 20clarity, like dying or winning the lottery. When it comes to knowing how to react, you’re in uncharted territories. And so, in the absence of any reaction, I stood there frozen, watching Jen’s face as Wade pumped away at her like the piston of a wide, hairy engine. Her head was arched back, chin pointed up to God, as