From fairest creatures we desire
It hadn't been a good year.
In January, I tried to redeem a bet I'd won over Christmas. A woman I liked had bet me she could not have sex on the first date with a man she liked; she couldn't, or at any rate didn't, control herself, and so she owed me. Specifically, she was supposed to sleep with me too. As gently as I tried to excuse her from paying off and as earnestly as she insisted that she would be good as her word, I guess she panicked or something, and stopped returning my emails. I never heard from her again.
In March, I went on a trip, an odyssey really, from New Orleans north. A lot of interesting things happened, but little that could be unironically described as "good".
In April, I got back to work in time to be betrayed by one of my best friends and thereby lose my job. I actually made money off the events, and got a better job, but it's hard to feel anything but bitterness about it.
Since then, it's been a treadmill at the new company, 70 hours a week for a boss who has won the Franz Kafka Mental Health Award three years running, and nothing more than tantalizing nibbles on the female front.
Then I attended a party on Christmas Day, the highlight of which was my going down on a hottie redhead lying on the hood of a parked car. It was like rubbing Aladdin's lamp, because in the five days since:
- I got a check for $1200 in the mail, because I was supposedly overcharged slightly by a bank in 1998.
- I was worried about replacing my decrepit 27" Sony when a friend of mine who was moving to France for a few years asked me if he could store his 65" flat-screen at my place.
- I won an iPhone in a contest (they're great, by the way).
- My boss sent out an email over the weekend saying that the company's revenue had doubled in December, owing solely to the work of the team that I lead.
- My wife decided to dress up all sexy for a party -- her new diet-and-exercise program has given her a really slammin' bod -- and then when we got home, put on something sexier and then took even that off.
- The next afternoon, that hottie redhead, Catherine, drove over to see me (a considerable distance, more than 70 miles each way) and we spent a few hours in back seat of my car; it was wonderful in all sorts of huge ways and in the minor way of marking the first time I'd ever had sex with two different women in 24 hours (indeed, I hadn't even had time to shower between them and was still wearing the same T-shirt).
If you had asked me a week ago how I would feel if I stopped, at least temporarily, being the straight-man for God's juvenile sense of humor, I might have have answered either that I would be ecstatic and giddy or panicked that I was being set up for The Really Big Prank -- I don't know, some huge public exposure of my private life, something like that.
But I'm neither. I feel warmly comfortable. Sure, there are a few problems: Catherine lives, as I mentioned, some distance away; her weirdo ex-boyfriend Matt is probably out to get me; she has an agreement with her husband Brian that she can sleep with whomever she wants so long as she tells him all the details (she confesses to being unclear on whether this is supposed to be a precaution of some sort or he's just getting off on a barely hidden cuckoldry fetish).
It's no problem. Somehow, it's as if the last 18 months have been training for these problems, a stretch on Parris Island before being sent into the combat of the actual affair. I am coolly laying out plans to deal with the issues I know about and am remaining alert -- calmly alert, but alert -- for new ones:
By complete coincidence -- I may title my autobiography "By Complete Coincidence" -- by complete coincidence, Matt is a very good friend of Andy, and Matt doesn't know it, so I plan to ask Andy to keep an eye on him. I'm going to try to keep some kind of tabs on Catherine's and Brian's relationship; if it blows up, the shrapnel could very well hit me. The distance thing is a serious logistical issue I'm going to have to work out.
But I can do this. I can. The big hurdle was the actual woman. The other men in her life, the children, the distance -- after all I've been through, I'm more than up to those small challenges.
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Maybe he's a better man than I am -- I guess it wouldn't be that hard.
The problem is, they do seem to be in love. I know that sounds superficially like a good thing, but a guy that is bored with his wife (bored enough to not care who she screws) is unlikely to go off the rails, do something crazy. This guy isn't that guy.
This guy is in love and love sucks. He might very well wake up tomorrow, panic, buy a gun, who knows.
I mean, I hope you're right (Catherine says the same thing) -- that he's fine with this, happy for her, all that. Doesn't mean I'm not worried.
to drive over here, or at least to ask me to visit over there.
And here's something weird: she doesn't like hotels. It's a sure bet she's not coming over to my house, but she says I can come over to her. Her husband
works out of the house, but apparently she can just explain it to him.
Again, maybe he's just a better man than I am, but if my wife asked me to step out for a few minutes so some dude could come over, when the dude arrived, I'd be in the driveway, with a baseball bat.
I've been kidding around about "better man", but I'm beginning to worry. I'm having a lot of trouble not projecting the jealousy I would feel on to him. Maybe I only feel jealousy (or would feel jealousy if I were in his situation) because I'm insecure, either about our relationship or about myself.
I just dunno. Everything is just so fucking new to me, I haven't go the slightest idea what to do.
Ariel and her husband are like that. Each goes out, does whatever, they come home, keep their mouths shut. (A big different being, I suspect, that for them, sharing the details would be merely distasteful, rather than painful, as it would be for me and my wife.)
Overall, it might be fair to say we are living in a careful constructed state of denial. Put that way, it sounds unhealthy, but I can't even imagine living any other way (Well, I can imagine one other way: some parallel universe where my wife wanted to have sex with me. Oh, and my cat could talk, that would be cool.)
And I am not blocking myself -- the only thing that's keeping me from driving over tonight to Catherine's house is the fact that she hasn't asked me.
Plus, it is just sex, in bed, nothing else. No kissing, no making out on the couch, certainly no talking about sex. What happened with Catherine, heavy petting in a party, has never, ever happened with my wife.
I wish I could thank my wife for being so reasonable about the rest of it, but even if she wanted to hear it (she really, really doesn't) I can't think of how I would express that part without also giving voice to the very real reproach I feel for her making it necessary in the first place.
Eh, this is the bad part. I don't want to talk about the bad part, what's wrong in my life; I want to talk about what's right. Specifically, how pretty Catherine is, how sexy and how charming -- and of course, how much I hope to spend some more time with her.
I feel sad saying it, but I wouldn't have married her knowing what I know now. I'm hoping that having a meaningful sex life will allow me to focus on the (many) positive aspects of my marriage.
Wow, mine would see through that like a pane of glass. She's very, very intuitive; the only reason I'm getting away with any of this is because she's letting me.