by Phil Stern
I mean, look, we’ve all tried the intercourse-during-period thing. But sexting? If my daughter was clinically retarded I’d expect her to have more sense than that! There’s nothing even marginally normal about such behavior.
But the final question was the best. You just couldn’t make this up. I mean, if there’s a human being alive who could fabricate such a thing, they’d make a million dollars a day writing for late night television. This is the best, most stunning, outrageous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Ready? All right, here it is. The last girl wanted to know if it was normal for her boyfriend to be jealous of her tampon. I swear to you, that’s what she said. Apparently he wanted to be the only one, animate or inanimate, to fully experience her. At this even one of the doctors looked stunned, asking this girl if she was dating a mental patient. Mercifully, the show ended at this point.
Want my advice? If your kid asks permission to appear on some health-related tv show, just say no. You might stay sane, and your daughter could possibly keep her reputation, just a little longer.
Oh, on another note, I just got another rejection letter today:
Dear Literary Enthusiast,
While your submission to our agency is certainly very interesting, I don’t find myself in a position to properly represent work of this scope. Best of luck in securing representation elsewhere!
Sincerely,
The Please-Go-Away-You-Untalented-Fuck Literary Agency
Well, at least it gives me some semi-personal e-mail to read. I don’t know about you, but I often feel a little lonely when all I see glowing up from my inbox are stock scams, invitations from horny housewives, and some guy from high school I don’t even remember who wants to become my “friend” on some social networking site.
DAVE MILLER
Two weeks after the disastrous dinner at her parents, Jen and I became husband and wife.
Let me try to explain. When I was 13 years old, my own father ran out on the family. We lived in Troy, just outside of Albany. Dad worked full-time in a factory and drove a delivery truck on the weekend, but it was never enough.
It should have been okay. After all, I was an only child, and we were in one of those old, inexpensive houses dotting the upstate New York landscape. But Dad drank to excess, gambled, and who knows what else. My parents argued some. I never got the full story.
All I know is one Friday evening Dad never came home. A missing person’s report was duly filed the following week, but the cops didn’t do much, saying there was no evidence of a crime. They probably saw this kind of thing all the time.
And sure enough, three weeks later a letter arrived from Portland, Oregon. It was brief and to the point. Dad just needed to get away for a while. He’d send some money when he could, and might even come back someday, but he felt as if he were “suffocating” with us back in Troy. I can still picture, like it was yesterday, Mom handing me the letter. After letting me absorb it at my leisure, she then looked into my scared face and calmly announced we were now on our own.
Though Mom’s health was already failing, she immediately got a job. I tried to help out after school and all, but we still had to apply for food stamps, then finally welfare. Because of our financial situation, I got a full scholarship to SUNY Buffalo.
But I swore that I’d never to do anybody else what my father had done to my mother and me. And though the situation now was somewhat different, the principle remained the same. After a week of thoughtfully driving around the area, walking through the woods, watching children at play, and thinking of my own past, I returned to the Canton residence with an engagement ring. Whether rightly or wrongly, the die had been cast. I needed to step up.
Sometimes in life there are no easy choices, and you have to do the best you can with what you have. At the time, marrying Jen was the best I could do.
Was it the right decision? Probably not. In retrospect, I spent five long years trying to pretend that Jen and I were something that we never were to begin with. Was it better for our daughter Mandy? Maybe. I don’t know. But marrying Jen was something I felt that I just had to do. In that sense, at least, I was true to my own convictions, though I never shook the little voice inside screaming I was making a horrible mistake.
Thankfully we didn’t have a big celebration or anything, Jen’s father realizing the absurdity of a quicky, lavish wedding followed by a birth six months later. Such an event would only highlight what he was trying to avoid drawing attention to. My bride-to-be threw a massive shit fit, even by her standards, tearfully relating how she’d always dreamed of her dress, and the bridesmaids, and the cake, but Mr. Canton was having none of it. In front of everyone he finally snarled that Jen should have thought through all of that before getting knocked up. That ended the conversation rather abruptly.
So our wedding celebration consisted of a small ceremony in the backyard with her close relatives, followed by dinner at a fancy restaurant. (I don’t think Mr. Canton wanted to even go that far, but Jen’s mother insisted.) We honeymooned up in the Thousand Islands, which was actually kind of nice. To be honest, after all the tension and uncertainty of the past several weeks, Jen and I enjoyed getting away together. There was even a hint of our early relationship, just having a fun time both in the bedroom and out.
I even remember one boat ride, in and among the beautiful islands, where I actually felt quite close to her. There is something romantic about having a baby together, even under our circumstances. We held hands for most of the drive back down through New York State, and I sort of convinced myself this could all work out. Maybe. At least it seemed a little better now than it did before.
As a wedding present Mr. Canton let us move into a brand new home in Nyack his company had built. Jen’s father remained the technical owner, and we paid our “mortgage” directly to him. Of course, this really meant we were little more than glorified renters, a legal nuance Jen didn’t understand.
“But Daddy gave this home to us,” she protested, scowling at me across our new king-sized bed. “He said it’s ours.”
“But honey, he’s still technically the owner,” I said. “It’s not really ours.”
“But we’re living here, aren’t we? Anyway, what difference does it make?”
So I tried to explain about building equity and eventual sale profit, but she only got confused. Finally she just snapped at me that this was a wonderful house and I should be glad her father had procured it for us.
And, of course, she was right. We certainly couldn’t have bought a house on our own. I still resented the control such an arrangement granted Jen’s parents, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
But actually, Jen and I got along surprisingly well during her pregnancy. She seemed settled and focused, devoting herself to living a healthy lifestyle and fixing up the house for us and our unborn child. For my part, I was doing construction during the day (working for one of Mr. Canton’s contractors) while finishing up my SUNY degree at night. While Jen’s parents were still bankrolling most everything, I was determined to get a good job and support my growing family.
I had to quit the band, which was in the process of dissolving anyway. My old bassist, however, who I had personally chosen and helped along, wound up hooking up with a new band that went national. Every once in a while I’d hear one of their songs on the radio, or even see him in a video. That was pretty weird. I tried not to feel that I’d been denied my dream, though late at night, exhausted after a long day of work and classes, I’d lay next to my pregnant wife, wondering at what could have been.
About a month into all this, I went up to Buffalo to pick up my stuff. That was the weekend everything went so horribly wrong with Steve, Sophia, and Brooke. I still can’t believe how it all went down.
Hey Steve, let me say one thing here. Don’t include this part with your Life Project, or whatever the fuck this is. Just know that I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. More sorry than you could possibly know. That night drove u
s all apart, which was an unbelievable tragedy. In this world, you know, there are only so many times…I mean, just a few, isolated instances…where you really connect with someone else. And that was the age, man, and the time. But, you know, we were all so young and stupid. So I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Really, really sorry.
I could claim the pressure of my shotgun marriage and all, but I guess that would be an excuse, huh? I’m not sure. But just know that in a lifetime of regrets, that’s near the top.
So anyway, before I knew it, I was rushing Jen to the hospital in the middle of the night. Her water broke in the car and two hours later I was holding my baby daughter.
Staring into Mandy’s beautiful, brown eyes, I made a solemn promise. Having a child this soon hadn’t been in the grand plan, but from this moment on, I was going to be the best father and husband I could possibly be. My entire focus would be on them, and them alone.
Where my father had failed, I would succeed. Anything else was simply unimaginable.
Part Two
SOPHIA DANTON
About five years ago I wrote a series on marriage and infidelity. (Yes, I’m that Sophia Danton.) The “Mistress” articles caused quite a stir, bestowing, so the intellectuals said, a “rational” framework to a highly emotional subject.
Others called me a whore, saying it was no wonder I was still single, hating, as I obviously did, everything that was right and good about God and America.
To me the Mistress articles weren’t the slightest bit controversial. Actually, they were just common sense, the conclusions so obvious the pieces virtually wrote themselves.
I’m sure you’ve read or at least heard of them, but in a nutshell what I said was this:
Married women stay with their cheating husbands, particularly their high profile, influential husbands, for a simple reason. To them, the true marital “bond” is social and financial, with a vague emotional tie-in revolving around the first two considerations. The sexual bond, if it ever existed at all, lost its potence long ago.
In other words, these women feel far more threatened by the upheaval and insecurity of a divorce than any pain caused by their wandering men. In fact, these affairs can actually help reduce domestic tension by providing their husband with an acceptable sexual outlet outside of the marriage. This assumes, as is almost always the case, that long-term married couples have long since lost interest in each other sexually, yet the husband’s libido remains highly engaged.
Thus, as long as the affairs don’t threaten the marriage itself, or the woman’s social position through revelation or indiscretion, it’s a tolerable situation for everyone involved. Many marriages have existed this way for decades, loving husbands doting on their wives and families as tenderly as any faithful man would, while sexually gratifying themselves with the same fervor outside of the marriage.
Don’t get me wrong. As I made clear in the articles, these women don’t like the situation. They don’t understand their husband’s sex drive, and wish there were an OFF button somewhere they could just push. It leads to yelling and tears, and not a few threats now and then.
But in the end, what can they do? Divorce the cheating scoundrels, become the “former” Mrs. So-and-So, and watch their husband of twenty years openly squire his mistress about? Whatever alimony they receive would provide a less sumptuous lifestyle than the wife now enjoys. Her social position would be lost. People would stare and whisper. And laugh. There’s the dummy who couldn’t keep her husband from divorcing her for a 25-year-old secretary. Wow. Obviously she drove him to it, the frigid bitch.
So don’t ask why these women “stand by” their husbands when affairs occasionally break out into the open. Here’s a much better question. What would they have to gain by not standing by them?
Let’s say you’re the 45-year-old governor’s wife, for example. You’re on board and committees. You’re a somebody. The press gives you credit for your husband’s success. You go on trips abroad, have dinner in the White House. Your husband is rich, money will never be a problem again. You have two wonderful children, paragons of America’s youth. In many ways you’re held up as an ideal wife, your life what every woman should aspire to.
And then the affair is revealed. The girl comes forward, proof is offered. Your dumb fuck of a husband tries to deny it, only making the humiliation worse as the evidence mounts.
Sure, you could torpedo him. You probably want to very much. But you both go down together. You both move out of the governor’s mansion. You both are dropped from the boards, not invited to the dinners. The only difference is that he gets to resurrect his career, openly fucking whomever he wants, while you become The Most Humiliated Woman In America. It’s all gone, in an instant, never to come back.
Or….you stand by him, help him weather the storm. With your support, he remains governor. Life goes on. And even if he has to resign? He still has wealth and influence. Hell, the two of you might come roaring back in a few years, stronger than before.
To a great extent the wife and mistress have a symbiotic relationship. In fact, the mistress provides services furthering the stability of the marriage, through the performance of acts the wife no longer wishes to participate in. And through her toleration, the wife can even influence her husband’s choice of women, thus putting herself in a position to terminate any threat to the marriage itself. In this sense, the wife is in the power position.
That’s why a smart mistress will never try to break up the marriage. Because if she’s merely providing a husband with sexual release, the wife can deal with it. In this way the mistress can further her own social and professional goals, while providing the excitement and emotional independence younger women often prefer in their sex lives.
But if the mistress threatens the wife’s home, social position, or financial future? Then the wife will go to war, driving the mistress away, out of the relationship, her job, and even all the way out of town.
In other words, the wife/husband/mistress relationship can be a positive force within a marriage, given realistic expectations and proper behavior on everyone’s part. And in truth the wife’s known of, and accepted, her husband’s philandering for years. From a personal standpoint, it’s now about as shocking as getting the monthly cable bill. Hell, I’ve known of wives who befriend their husband’s paramours, sending them gifts and sanctioning trips. It’s all part of the deal.
Doing a round of interviews after the Mistress articles hit big, I was often asked if I had any personal experience along these lines. Up until now I’ve always denied my past. However, this may be a good forum to set the record straight.
After graduating college I decided to stick around Buffalo. I already had an apartment and nowhere else to go, so it seemed as good a place as any. Still, I was working as a waitress near City Hall, getting a bit depressed about post-college life. So I had a degree. Now what? At the advanced age of 22, my coed status revoked, now a struggling member of the workforce, I was beginning to feel a little old.
An aide to the mayor, Justin Reynolds was a youthful 38, looking sharp in his tailored suit. Sitting at my table a few times a week, he finally asked my name.
“Sophia,” he repeated, eyes resting on my own. “That’s beautiful.”
“My mother named me in honor of Sophia Loren,” I coolly replied.
“Well, you’re certainly attractive enough.” With a smile, Justin made a point of reaching into the front of my apron, without permission, slowly drawing out a straw. “There’s a gallery opening this weekend. Would you care to go with me?”
By this point it was a year after that crazy night with Steve, Dave, and Brooke, and I was very lonely. My relationship with my parents was still very rocky, perhaps permanently so. I was young and feeling out of sorts, and Justin was the established, older presence I craved. I suppose his boyishness made him seem less threatening. In any event, I found myself scribbling my number on a scrap of paper before I even realized exactly what I was doing.
&
nbsp; Of course, reality hit later on in my shift. “Listen, Justin, are you married?” was the first thing I asked when he called that night. He hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring, but still…
“Of course not,” he laughed. “What do you take me for?”
“A man,” I sighed. “You wouldn’t be the first married guy looking for a little fun on the side.”
“Well, I’m up for the fun part.”
Grimacing, I held the receiver to my forehead. What the hell was I doing? “But you’re not married?” I pressed, returning the phone to its customary, ear-pressed position.
“Nope. Though we could pretend I was if that would make you feel better.”
“It certainly wound not,” I chided. “And no kids?”
“None that I know of.”
Oddly enough, that was something Steve used to say. Stranger still, Justin’s use of the phrase washed away a layer of doubt. I agreed to meet him the following night.
Somehow Justin fucked me the second time we went out. Look, I knew he wasn’t into waiting for it. I saw the way his eyes roamed the dance club we went to that evening, resting on every young, attractive woman in sight, renewed interest flickering time and again. So we parked and walked up to my place, both knowing what was expected.
But still, that wasn’t my style. “So,” I announced, purposefully turning to block his entry into my apartment. “That was fun, Justin.”
He simply stood in the hallway, eyebrows going up a touch. “I don’t have to go, you know.”
“Listen, I may be young, but I’m not that easy.”
“Hmmm.” As you’d expect, Justin wasn’t at all put off by my bluntness. “I think you’re beautiful, Sophia.”
“Thank you, dear. Nighty-night.”
And here’s what did it. Rather than looking angry or disappointed, Justin merely shrugged, like, this bitch is wasting my time. Rolling his eyes, he then turned away, casually slinging a suit jacket over his shoulder.