Trojan Horse

As he got into the truck to leave his marital home for the last time, Randall Hansen tossed the HANSEN brass nameplate into the storm drain, hearing it bounce across concrete before falling into the murky water below. That metallic skittering radiated through his future and his past as a symbol of finality and the loss of hope, summarizing all of his fears of loneliness and worthlessness as well as the thought that, now broken, his life would never be whole again. He pulled the door of the truck shut and drove away quickly.

Seven years later, as he stared into the dappled kaleidoscope of the waves caught in sunlight, he reflected that what truly broke his heart was language itself. Suddenly words like “love” and “trust” were only symbols, batted about by people in daily life like the girls on the beach patted back and forth volleyballs, televangelists spoke about the love of a seemingly absent deity, or the carnies on the shore called out “cold beer here.” He no longer trusted any word to have meaning.

It all started on a more promising note. Randall remembered looking up as a shadow fell over his arm at a faculty party. “I read your paper,” said the tall thin girl with golden hair. “Comparing Austen and Celine? Ballsy move.”

Randall found himself at the English department evening forums for the past month, hoping to meet more women. Eventually he cornered Wendy Putnam by accident, bumping into her shoulder, and was proud of himself for how quickly he recovered with an apology, introduction, and offering to get her more of the screw-top wine they served at faculty-sponsored events. She surprised him by knowing who he was, something odd because she ran in social circles both above his, and less interesting and edgy than his.

“Wait, you actually read the paper? I’m impressed,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone did that. I thought the thematic parallels were enough to write on.”

“You convinced Professor Gonzalez,” she said. “And me, come to think of it. They’re both apocalyptic, and they hide their pain with humor.”

They made small talk then, chatting about the class and “college life,” which is basically gossip dressed up as some kind of psychological assay of their fellow students. It went well, and he left with her phone number.

Letting time tumble forward, an older Randall found himself in a different predicament. Gwen — she preferred this more elegant version of her given name — washed a coffee mug at the sink in their condominium near downtown. They had been married for seven years, and had two years ago talked about the possibility of having offspring. His business restoring classic turn-of-the-century homes had taken off, while her internship had ended with her achieving a placement in the cancer center downtown. Everything was moving upward, just like in those magazines he read in high school which told him about the movers and shakers making waves in the new economy. He had just opened a bottle of Warsteiner and was sticking the old key-style bottle opener back in the drawer.

“You know, not every man does it that way,” she said quietly.

“Like… what?” asked Randall.

“You open the drawer, take out the bottle opener, then close the drawer. Then you use the bottle opener, then open the drawer again to put it back. You could just leave the drawer open.”

For a highly verbal person, he did something unusual in that moment: he said nothing, but instead took his beer to the old wooden door across two filing cabinets that he used as his desk. He recognized that life was like a castle that he saw once in a dream, where touching any candle brought him back to the foyer, no matter how far away in space and time he had been from that moment. Her criticism, mild and insignificant even among their periodic verbal tiffs, took him to the same place he always found himself lately when he considered Gwen, a dark and limited space.

Between that conversation all of those years ago and the discussion of the bottle opener today, Gwen and Randall had experienced many good years. First he invited her out for a drink, then she came back to his antique dorm room for heavy petting, which on the third date devolved into raw lust unleashed while Enya played softly in the background. This was serial monogamy, where you tried to be faithful to your partner and not too slutty, but you moved from one to another. After that night, Gwen asked if he wanted them to be exclusive, and in the afterglow of a shockwave of orgasms, Randall said yes.

At this point they became boyfriend and girlfriend, which meant that when Randall was not in class or at a specific event, he was expected back at her dorm room, which was in the newer and fancier dormitory designed to be for less party-minded, more serious students. This was their junior year at the University of Texas, which is just about the point where the work switches from the same stuff they had in high school to simplified but memorization-intensive college material, and both of them were quite busy. At the semester close, he asked her for her number at home.

Randall worked the whole summer for Davis Construction first as a gopher and later as a carpenter. He had a knack for the kind of high-precision woodwork that a century prior had been the norm for upper middle class houses. He called Gwen every other night and on the off nights checked in via Facebook back when people still used that and MySpace. He was several beers into one night when he saw a picture pop up tagged with Gwen’s name, a blurry party where people seemed to be wearing little clothing. In the morning it was gone. Just a glitch, but he remembered the name Steve Callahan. The next night, he called her up, and her mother said that she was in bed early. He never mentioned this to her.

Nonetheless when they met again at school all was forgotten, since young people never know how to spot patterns beneath the skin. They fell into a comfortable relationship where he stopped by on the weekends and on his way home from his on-campus job, but otherwise, they had a lot of time to themselves since they were both working on theses and setting up careers after graduation. During spring break, they rented a cabin on the beach at Corpus Christii using his dad’s credit card and spent every day sleeping late, making love, and then going out to have drinks with friends in the nearby tourist zone where dollar beers were a nightly event.

On the last Saturday before the term resumed, Gwen strode boldly out of the shower and lay nude on their bed. She was half Polish and half English, so she had long gold ringlets from her distant Turkish and Jewish ancestors from the Polish side, but a strong chin from her English forebears. “So we’re going to graduate soon,” she began.

“Leaving me already?” joked Randall, covering up his own concern that this might be the case with a jovial tone.

“No, but I got an internship in Galveston,” she said. “Not many publishers there.”

“Great, I’ll get some kind of day job while I work on the great American novel at night, then,” said Randall. She thought about this for a few moments and then said, “okay.” By that point, he was already on his knees before her spread legs, curling the tip of his tongue into her while he worked her clitoris with the meat of his thumb. As her breathing accelerated, he noticed that his six and a half inches of girthy fury had intensified from copper to steel, and he mounted her in the order she liked, first gently and then working up to a rapid thrusting which presaged his explosion. She on the other hand felt like the universe had melted and was flowing into a vortex made of her sensations, and she cried out with a call both helpless and violent, then came surging on his turgid dong as he impaled her with increasing ferocity. The world shattered into whiteness, then black, and she came back with a swooning gasp as her orgasm subsided.

Later they lay there and he nudged her. “Were you going to leave me if I couldn’t make it to Galveston?” he asked.

“You’ll never know,” she said, turning over. Then a few seconds later, she rolled back. “Of course not, silly. I keep hoping you care about me enough to stick around.” Her parents had divorced during her first year of college, and abandonment and trust issues were a sore spot for her.

“Well I was hoping,” Randall began, then waved off. “We’ll talk about it another time. Just remember, you’re the woman for me.” She giggled.

They rocketed through graduation and she began a one-year internship at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, where she hoped to get enough experience to transfer to the University of Texas Health System in Houston in order to get her medical degree. Randall had been steering himself toward law, but never felt a real attachment, and then saw the sheer number of candidates pumped out of law schools and backed off entirely. Instead he spent a week in their apartment poring over newspapers and internet sites, looking for opportunities in the market, instead of chasing the job market. Eventually he realized how much of a good business his summer job had been, or would have been if they steered it toward restoration instead of renovation contracting.

Sales took off like a rocket, and he began to remember “free time” as something that existed only during college years. He brought home a big rock on a ring, popped the question, and she jumped into his arms, all smiles. They had a storybook wedding at Blue Hole, a place of great natural beauty near Austin, and honeymooned in Aruba using frequent flyer miles from college and a cash-back rewards program on his American Express card. Gwen appeared radiant, which was fortunate because she captured everything on Facebook and Instagram in high-definition glory. They came back, sighed, and dove back into their careers.

She found a group of coworkers who believed in her idea of holistic medicine and quickly became one of the new names to watch at the medical center. As his business took off they bought a three thousand square foot home in Pearland, evenly between his work sites on the coast and her desired future job in the health center area of Houston. She made it through a one year internship, three years of medical school, and a year and a half of residency before getting a job as an assisting physician for a top-notch hospital in the medical district located just south of the museums but north of the ghetto area of the lower half of that big city.

The day after the bottle opener discussion, as he called it in his mind, he found himself on a job site on the Western side of the mainland, fixing up a house that had once been quite elegant but after four generations of neglect, looked more like a tenement. The once-noble house had been divided into six units, each with its own bathroom, and painted white from top to bottom every season, so that now any detail lurked under inches of Walmart paint. A fast-thinking executive from California had purchased it and wanted to bring it up to San Francisco standards.

“What’s up with the paperwork?” his friend Marc Khan asked him the next morning as they carried their coffee and tape measures to a new job site. They were reno-ing a four-story Victorian-style wood home that had lived through every hurricane after the Big One of 1906, which transformed Galveston from the leading city of Texas to a backwater now known most for drunken revelry and a large state prison complex.

“It’s just a legal pad,” said Randall. “I need to keep track of my thoughts.”

“What, are you getting old? We’re just hitting the big thirty.”

“You are,” said Randall. “I’ve still got a year to go, and a lot of life to live before senility hits. Naw, just some back-of-the-envelope white boarding.”

Both of them had taken to their business — Architectural Necromancy, Inc. — with a zeal that surprised the former slackers for whom schoolwork came easily. There just were not that many jobs for English majors, nor did either want to ever see the insides of a university again. While all of their friends cut and ran to dot-com startups and NGOs, the two former roommates put to work the skills they had learned in a decade of summer jobs on the island. Randall felt a little thrill each time he took a venerable house or business, ripped out the decades of bad cheap renos, and rebuilt it to the standards that a newly-gentrifying, remote-working population desired. If you can spend a million dollars for a home, might as well make it one older than you, the new audience thought, but they liked even better the pitch that Architectual Necromancy provided: all of the modern conveniences, none of the glitches, and still the appearance of a turn-of-the-century behemoth.

All that day while he measured tolerances and assessed wood health, Randall kept the pad by his side, jotting down a few points of interest that might reveal the hidden hallway of the castle of his experience and destiny:

1. For the first time, she was openly sarcastic about him, but she normally avoided conflict. Conclusion: she was trying to convince herself of his inferiority.

2. Her job had become more demanding with her promotion, but later became even more time-consuming. Conclusion: something else was occupying her time.

3. He no longer heard anything about her coworkers, as if she wanted to keep them a black box. Conclusion: she wanted secrecy.

4. She was no longer investing as much into her appearance around the house. Conclusion: she valued his opinion of her less.

5. She was not avoiding him, but dove right into reading or work when at the house. Conclusion: she wanted to avoid intimiate interaction or maybe conversation.

Having dated in the past, Randall felt that he could exclude all other explanations except that that she was ready to move on. He reflected that people rarely knew what they wanted consciously, and instead usually acted to remove all other options, allowing them to fall forward into their remaining choice as if it were destiny. This way they were blameless for doing what seemed inevitable, and if it went well, could call themselves “lucky” instead of accidentally making the claim that they made analytical choices better than the average equal person.

He dug through his memories for some form of consistency. Perhaps a year ago, she had started wearing more makeup to work, and bought herself some fancy professional clothes to wear to work before she changed into her scrubs. At that time, she had become more focused on smells: he noticed that she began using more perfume, showered at odd times, and even had breath mints in her purse. She spent more time alone in the bathroom, and built her schedule around not being home, so that working late and leaving early to work out had become normal. Even more, she adopted a routine where she would come home, kiss him on the head, ask him the same four questions about his day, and then go off to shower, dress in comfortable clothes, and use her computer.

His mind again unearthed the Spring Break conversation, and he thought he heard the sound of metal falling into a storm drain as it leapt into his mind as if alive, but perhaps it was just a rusty car passing in the street. He recalled a discussion from his intro to psychology class, like his intro to philosophy class at college a required “general education” tick-box, where the professor had discussed projection. When someone cannot deal with their own actions, they project them onto others, like scapegoating but more complete, seeing the other as the source of the action. The professor, an obese single woman in her 60s who drank a case of wine a week, mentioned that in close relationships, people were often so focused on their own behavior that they would attribute it to others. He had often wondered how much Gwen’s “do you care about me enough to stick around?” shtick was simply her own projection, trying to figure out if she had too much invested in him to leave.

Randall had few complaints in his marriage. They had date night once a week, since she often barreled through paperwork with a glass of white wine — always one, but the size of the wineglasses used kept increasing; he wasn’t sure where she found the recent bucket on a stilt that seemed like it would hold half a bottle — and took one vacation a year, religiously. He had no complaints from her in the bedroom, and yet he found that over the past six months, he was the initiator on all but one occasion, right after she got back from another overnight shift at the hospital.

“You know you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he said.

She just smiled, but it was a small smile, using only half of her face, sort of like there might be just a tiny amount of smirk mixed in. “Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.

He attacked her with a brief kiss, then when she responded, plunging his hand down the front of her panties before tearing them and the sweatpants down to her ankles. “Oh, Randall,” she said surprised, but then became excited. “I could never resist a quickie with you.”

She kissed him briefly, then bent over the sofa and lifted up her little round bottom, made tight by jogging and hours standing in surgical wards. She pushed back toward him as he entered her with a grunt, aiming at the thirty-seven degree angle he needed to nail her g-spot. “Mmmph,” she said in that voice she had which always entranced him, both a worldly husky whisper and the excited near-squeal of a little girl. Her voice deepened as he bottomed out in her, making his thrusts into complete strokes into and out of her, then tightening the distance as they both approached the point of no return.

“Oh, I’m so close,” she breathed, ending in a little hum and the strong voice she used to command patients. “Give me just a few more… now!” she gasped, and he felt her clench down on him as a spasm traveled the length of her body. Energized by the new resistance, he pistoned harder as he felt himself stiffen to maximum hardness and expand, then collapsed on her as an effervescent orgasm rose from the base of his testicles and burning like fire rocketed through his prostate and shaft, spurting into her as he collapsed on top of her. They lay there for a few minutes, concentrating on breathing, and then she got up quickly.

“I’ve got to get this paperwork done by morning,” she said, closing the bedroom door behind her as she made her way to her home office, a little nook off of the living room with her laptop, phone, and a giant stack of medical books and forms.

Over the past few years he felt the onset of the intellectual maturity that comes with experience, having run his own business for long enough to learn to spot patterns beneath the skin. A contractor who is evasive about timing, never has the right supplies, and frequently has to deal with emergencies is actually working for someone else, and using Randall’s company as a backup; he cut those contracts as quickly as possible. A supplier who suddenly never has anything in stock but is always willing to do cash deals has financial problems, usually drugs. A carpenter who does good work but never shows up on time actually hates his job and will be in an office within six months. These patterns repeated, and Randall did not like the pattern he saw with Gwen.

He moved systematically, as he always did. A quick trip to his local electronics supplier and he had two cameras that he placed catty-cornered in the den, one inside a rather ugly ornate lamp and the other on the sill outside the window. He recorded enough of her using her iPhone to be able to see, using the two angles to triangulate, that her passcode was 111411, a date which meant nothing to him or maybe something easy to type. Then he purchased a duplicate iPhone and installed some dubious software on it.

She normally carried the phone with her, but when a neighbor stopped by to talk about the rising crime at the edge of the neighborhood, Randall made his move. His hand dove into the purse and extracted her iPhone, but the code failed. Frustrated, he almost walked away but on a whim fished around in the capacious front pocket, and came up with a second iPhone. The passcode unlocked it and he quickly arranged to clone the text message, email, and social media history of the phone. It would take some time to download from the cloud.

The next morning, he took his truck on a detour from a supplier to visit Langsal. Perhaps his oldest friend on the island, Langsal made his living through boat tours for which he hired chatty college students to narrate, and Randall had met him in this role before he got permanent work with Davis Construction. Langsal spoke little, but had seen just about everything the world had to offer, which was as he slyly reminded them, why he lived on his boat and worked as little as possible.

“How’s it hanging?” Randall asked.

“World’s still evil and no one will see it,” said his friend. “What’s chewing on you?”

“My wife’s hiding a secret life,” said Randall, and explained what he knew.

“That’s really too bad. She’s very pretty,” said Langsal. “It’s either an affair, a criminal enterprise, or a fake identity because she’s on the run. I don’t think it’s that last one since she went through college and all, but maybe. She’s got no reason to run a criminal enterprise, unless you see her suddenly having a lot more money. So, most likely, it’s an affair.”

“Gosh, and things were going so well,” Randall began.

Langsal continued: “You have to ask yourself if you want to know. You’re just starting up, maybe it’s better to let this go. If you go the legal route with a divorce, you are going to end up with your assets split and paying alimony on top of that, which means you will always be poor and she will get paid to hang around with her lover. That’s how the law works, take from the rich and give to the poor, and it’s always going to see women or any disadvantaged group as ‘poor.’ Even worse, you’re going to figure out what she’s up to, and you’ll fall in love out of her quickly. Love can’t coexist with a lack of trust, or a strong disgust, and in my experience when women decide to cheat, they find some pathetic obvious scumbag to do it with. The thing is, though, she wants out, so if you wait her out, she’ll probably leave on her own.”

He added, almost parenthetically, “Now me, I couldn’t live with a cheating woman, or a criminal woman, or someone who isn’t trying to work with me to make us both live the best possible lives. Your wife is either an ally in dark times, or an enemy within the gates, a Trojan Horse who is there to get inside your defenses and take you for all that you have got. I took another option. Most people want to either scorched Earth, which works if you have a pre-nup, or take her back if she promises to never do it again, which fails because ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’; you know, the same thing applies to liars, thieves, gamblers, drunks, and other people with mental problems. Most women who cheat have some kind of mental problem, in my experience. It’s like they get under stress, get a little older and can’t just push through like they did when they were 21, and suddenly out pops the latent schizophrenia, borderline personality, psychopathy, or sociopathic indifference. Something just breaks. If that happens, you sure don’t want her back unless you want to wreck all of your life just taking care of somebody who is never going to get better.”

Randall walked through the rest of the day like a zombie, doing the repetitive but intricate tasks he always did almost perfectly because he was paying attention with only part of his mind. That night, he read up about cheating spouses.

The first series of narratives he found were called BTB, for “Burn The Bitch.” Most of these seemed to be written by alcoholic older men who had lost everything in a divorce and were trying to invent a little myth about how things could have gone better, where the good guys win instead of the courts giving everything to the bad people. He read a typical story:

 

 

Mark Haskell came home early from his trip to Washington, D.C. A licensed CPA, he was six foot two inches and 190 pounds of sheer muscle under a dad bod that he exorcised with daily six-mile runs, and had a seven-inch penis. On impulse he had skipped the last seminar because he had undertaken it as part of his professional training a month before. Walking in his back door quietly, hoping to surprise his wife of 24 years with the champagne and roses he had bought, he stopped short in the foyer. Both male and female clothing led in a line to the bedroom from which he could hear the sounds of passion.

He took out his iPhone and started filming. “Oh Dan, fuck me harder!” screamed his polite, reserved, conservative, and cautious wife. “Ram it in my shitter! Make me gulp your cum! Do all the things that my weak boring wimpy CPA husband will never get to experience!”

Dan, who worked as a dishwasher at the local Burger King, flipped her over and crammed his six fat inches deep into her rectum. “Do you think he knows that you fart my semen on his cockhead all night long? Your husband is a tiny-dicked wimp and he will never get to UNNNNRRRRGGGHHH” he said, unloading his genetic signature deep into her bowels.

Mark had seen enough. He turned off the iPhone and went out to his Mercedes. He called his lawyer: “Dave? Yeah, it’s that thing we talked about. Scorched earth. Take everything. Have her served at his place” — he whipped out his iPhone and found where her car had been earlier — “at 1615 Douchebag Terrace.” Then he called his bank. He cancelled all of the credit cards, cashed out his 401k, sold his business for $1, took her name off all accounts, and had them ship his safety deposit box to the branch in Nome, Alaska. Then he called his best friend Jake Corleone and asked to cash in one of the favors he owed for keeping some shady businessmen off the IRS darklist. Then he called the movers with a special request.

Chloe Haskell was basking in the afterglow of another afternoon of strenuous lovemaking. She had never married her husband, but had always planned to use him as a source of money and then take him for everything he had in the divorce. Neither of Mark’s children were biologically his, and she had experienced 640 lovers while he was busy slaving away to put food on the table and buy life insurance. She thought she had her cake and could eat it too. Suddenly two balaclava-clad black figures burst in the door. They punched Dan in the jaw twice, then fired up a chainsaw and removed his penis, which they handed gracefully to her before raping him to death with the chainsaw. For good measure, they broke his knees, and then departed.

Screaming, Chloe went downstairs. Everything in the house was gone and a moving truck was just leaving. A thin man with a sere face rang the doorbell. “Chloe Haskell? You have been served.” He took her picture and left, giving her a manila envelope stuffed with a divorce agreement and a DVD of her nocturnal activities. Then her phone blew up as all her friends, coworkers, acquaintances, schoolmates, and family received an email detailing the affair and pointing to the video of her getting anally reamed by Dan that had been mysteriously uploaded to sketchy internet porn sites. Everyone at the ladies auxiliary botanical club called up to cancel future engagements.

She tried to run to a hotel, but her car was gone! It had been in her husband’s name. Her credit cards didn’t work anyway. “Mark, what’s going on?” she said to her husband as he came in the back door.

“Chloe, I’ve got a restraining order. You have to stay 500 miles away from the house at all times. I’ve called the kids and they told me that they were never mine, so I deleted their contacts from my iPhone. You have no money. The business is worthless. Just sign the papers. I loved you once but you tore out my heart, and I can’t love a woman I can’t trust, and I can’t trust you because you’ll do it again and again, so just sign the papers and we’ll get on with our lives.”

“Mark, it’s not what it seems!” Chloe cried. “I love you and only you! It was just the one mistake. I was lonely… I was bored… I felt like I was getting older and ugly like the twisted hag that is my mother. Cynthia down at the gym said that most guys get turned on by this, and you would accept me back with open arms, and because I had just been shot in the forehead with a .338 Lapua round, I believed her. Maybe it was a Martian slut ray. In any case, please take me back. There’s got to be some way we can get past this!”

“NO!” screamed Mark. “I gave you every chance. You were my everything. I gave you everything. You took everything. You tore my heart apart. I am a martyr like Jesus, suffering like Mother Theresa and Gandhi, and victimized like Martin Luther King Jr. I have suffered and now you will suffer. All I can say is fuck you, I hope you die, and get out of my life, and then die.”

Chloe went to the attorneys. They explained that she could fight and get half of what Mark had, but he’d sold the business and her cars, so she had nothing. Crying, she took a job as a dishwasher, sold her body relentlessly, and perished of cirrhosis a few years later. As she died, she farted a giant impacted load of Dan’s semen, but Dan was dead and the case was closed as a mob hit. Her last words were, “I had everything, the best man and the best life, and I threw it all away for just under seven hundred meaningless love affairs. The fault is all mine, and so must the misery be. Woe is me, truly.”

Mark filed alienation of affection suits against the restaurant where Dan washed dishes and ended up with a small fortune. He ran off to Mexico and lived on a boat, where he met Cindy who measured 36-28-32 and gave head better than Chloe ever had, and she would let him use her backdoor (he later learned she was an adult entertainment dancer). The day he got the phone call that Chloe was dead, Mark shed a single tear, but that was only because he stubbed his toe while trying to ram his seven-inch cock into Cindy’s lower digestive tract.

 

 

“Christ, what is this nightmare? The courts would never let you sell a business for under value and not go to jail for faud. Alienation of affection suits only work in very conservative states, and the bosses have to encourage the affair and be aware of it. Cops investigate chainsaw killings, and she would have just got a pro bono or contingency lawyer. I’ve never read worse tripe in my life!” He clicked another page, this time to an RAAC (Reconciliation At Any Cost) story:

 

 

Dan Reynolds was a successful man. He had spent the past twenty years working non-stop on his invention, an ultra-high-speed garbage disposal which could grind up all of your regular trash into liquid and flush it down the pipes. Now, in just a few weeks, his company would go public and he would be a multi-billionaire. But when he came home early from work to tell his wife Claire, he heard the stereotypical sounds of horrific lovemaking.

“Me Tarzan, you Jane,” said the large hairy and fat man pumping up and down on his wife’s anus. Dan recognized her boss from work, Preston Winston-Salem IV, an old money scion who owned the law firm where Mary made sure the conference rooms were stocked with donuts and cleaned the toilets with a toothbrush. She got exactly twenty-four dollars a day after taxes from her job, but recently she had gotten another $3 per week thanks to her relationship with the boss, who resembled an obese monkey with a short stubby cock that was leaking a thick off-white ichor.

Flustered, Dan simply dropped the roses, imitation Medici diamond bracelet, and champagne he had brought for his wife.

“Oh no, it’s not what it seems like, Dan, I promise!” said Mary. Preston took one look at the mild, meek, and disspirited husband before him and screaming “Stop him, he’s assaulting me!” before diving through the second-story window.

“Mary, I asked only one thing,” said Dan, tears flowing over his face like the Nile and Potomac joined. “All I asked was for your love, and that includes trust, and of course fidelity, since I don’t want to die of AIDS like everyone in these horrible law firms seems to despite AZT being readily affordable.”

The next week they filed divorce papers. The judge, Seamus Callahan O’Leary, was a devout Catholic who believed in the sanctity of marriage, so he ordered them to have 365 counseling sessions. Dan kept his silence until the third one. “She keeps apologizing, promising to never do it again, and talking about how much this has ruined her life, but she has nary a thought for me,” he told Cleopatra Ortez, their psychiatrist. “Never once does she admit what she did wrong, or have regret for anything other than getting caught.”

Ortez nodded. “What do you think of that, Mary? Actually your hour is up. Next time, I want you to role-play as Templar Knights and discuss this.” The following week they came in wearing costumes appropriated from Monty Python And The Holy Grail. “I guess I just can’t trust her, since obviously she doesn’t care about the effects of her actions on me,” said Dan. “You’re right, I’ve been so uncaring!” said Mary. “I just got lost in my needs for a few years. Can you take me back?”

Dan thought with his wallet and not his heart. If he lost the cheating slut, he would have to pay a lot of money to get rid of her, and then even more money to acquire a new cheating slut. Not to mention that their kids called her “mother.”

“If he takes you back, Mary, I want you to do anal,” Ortez said. “That’s the only way we can get this to work.” Dan and Mary were reconciled and lived together for another fifty years during which time Dan felt free license to chase any strange tail he found anywhere he roamed. We have no idea what Mary did; she learned to hide it better. Ortez got $1200 a session, subsidized by the taxpayers. Apparently no one learned anything but there wasn’t a divorce so everyone is happy even if Mary walks funny some mornings.

 

 

“Oh no, this is even worse,” Randall said. He bopped over to Psychology Today for what he hoped was a more sober and mature view. He only made it a few paragraphs:

 

 

The frail and complex male ego suffers when it is deprived of absolute domination over the female, since the externally-focused male ego measures itself through property, possession, and conquests. Voluntary cuckolding, or wife-sharing, breaks down these barriers in the male ego and therefore liberates the male to become progressive, open-minded, and free of the pathology of toxic masculinity. Should your wife stray, remember that she is meeting her needs that you cannot, and therefore will be a healthier, happier, and more pleasant spouse when you welcome her return.

 

 

“Well, that’s nuts. Let’s see what The New York Times has to say.”

 

 

Studying over sixty years of marital data, scientists today concluded that marriage was an obsolete institution. “Its origin in property rights leads to conflict because of the natural tendency toward polygamy and polyamory present in humans since our glorious Simian ancestry,” said Win Yee, lead scientist at Baylor Medicine’s Human Sexuality Laboratory. According to Yee, the sexual patterns of our nearby relatives like the Bonobos more accurately reflect the desires of the human individual and therefore, the lifestyle appropriate to humans. “If we could bring back our hominid ancestors, we would find them all single or as single parents, living in urban apartments, eating lots of carbohydrates and drinking twist-top wine,” said Yee.

 

 

At this point, Randall discontinued this line of research. He wandered over to see Langsal after work, and they shared a cold Spaten on the boat deck. “It’s disheartening,” said Langsal. “To me, it’s a no-brainer that if you want a family and a career, you need fidelity in marriage, the woman most of all, since without it, the man’s going to head out to Epstein’s Island for some fourteen-year-old lovin’ in a heartbeat. It’s like going into combat or business. You need someone on your side always. If they fail you, you will never rely on them again. Divorces are destructively expensive, basically trading off your retirement in order to subsidize some woman because the government doesn’t want her to end up an impoverished prostitute.” He paced the deck of his old spare parts houseboat, cobbled together from the discarded parts and wood that were plentiful near the opulent marinas.

“I don’t even know if I want to divorce her,” said Randall.

“You don’t even know if she’s cheating. But if she is, do you want her back? I didn’t, and being an attorney –”

“Wait, what?” said Randall.

Langsal chuckled. “I have lived many lives long ago. I guess I haven’t told you all about that. Well, maybe you’ll stop by again sometime. I don’t like talking about myself, much, but yes, I’ve been an attorney for most of my adult life. The law is like Maslow’s Pyramid, with some big concepts at the bottom all the way to specifics up top. One of those basic principles is that you cannot defraud someone else by selling off all your stuff, in advance of a divorce. But an even bigger concept is that the law never punishes people for incompetence. You can’t give away your business, but you can lose it and then sell it. That’s just ordinary incompetence. You can’t burn down your house, but if they keep finding dead hookers in the basement, it’ll sell for a quarter of its normal price. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. You have to find out first if she’s cheating on you. If she is, I can’t tell you what to do, but I can say what I’d do…”

Saturday he attended an early dinner with his family. Gwen came along for appearances, he thought rather unkindly, then noticed a wistful look on her face. For the first time, he had hope, meaning that she might just drift away from him, sparing him the ugliness of a divorce. It might be the best, he thought, since she was treating their marriage like the serial monogamous relationships they had in college. New semester, new boyfriend. Never having been fond of the people who preached “maturity” to him as a youngster, Randall resisted the idea that he was showing maturity in his approach to marriage while Gwen was stuck in the collegiate or high school mode, but he could see the difference.

“Please pass the salt, Randall,” said his grandmother, snapping him out of his thoughts. How long had he been staring at his plate, a mixture of lonely, bored, and simply detached from the process? He realized that he had been thinking about this problem for too long, and that thinking about any problem replaces life itself when the problem is insoluble. People drift apart; one of them must do something to break the relationship, relying on the other to have a tantrum to which they could react in turn, forcing the matter along to its conclusion. What if he simply did nothing? Then he would be a cuckold, a weak man taking the abuse of a woman he no longer wanted but was afraid to leave.

He slid the salt shaker over to his grandmother, a diminutive woman with faded hair but bright, alert blue eyes. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Mr. Randall. Is it work?”

“Um… yeah,” said Randall, glad for the gift. “Just a lot of troubling events lately, people letting me down.”

“Aha,” his grandmother said. Her eyes lost their twinkle, and became soft, but seemed to open up to infinite pools of ambiguity. “People being people. The good ones try not to, and they screw it up less than the rest, but let’s face it, most people don’t do anything but screw everything up. You’re holding back the tide of ineptitude and mental disorganization. Keep the good ones, I guess, and toss out the rest.” She seemed more contemplative than normal.

“That’s good advice,” said Randall, taking back the salt shaker and passing it to his Dad. His parents had the most unexceptional marriage ever. They seemed to tolerate each other, but enjoy the company, and have low aspirations. It seemed that for his mother, a comfortable home and happy children meant she was content. His father seemed focused on career, having some close friends, and being able to pursue his hobbies, but clearly enjoyed the moments they spent every day, holding hands on the porch or gazing into each other’s eyes over coffee. It would make a bad rom-com, Randall thought, but then again no one seemed sad, and everyone had things they loved to do in life, much like how his grandmother still kept her garden immaculate and thriving despite the cricks in her knees, pains in her hip, and less energy than she used to have. It seemed boring but non-threatening, the life they led.

As he was leaving, he felt a soft gentle hand on his sleeve. “You are maturing so fast, Randall,” warbled his grandmother. “I’m glad of it. Young men are impetuous, you know. They decide they should be doing a certain thing, so they find something that fits into that picture, and then backfill in all the details until it seems consistent. They think themselves in love when they are in lust, or when a woman seems picture perfect for their lives. As they mature, they leave these things behind, although sometimes it seems like the other way around. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think I do,” said Randall, his voice carrying an uncommon weight.

“You’ll do fine,” she said. “Follow your heart, even if it leads through dark places. You’re a good boy.” She kissed him on the cheek.

When they got home, Gwen hopped out of the car and disappeared inside. Randall parked, took out the trash, and then looked up sadly to see what he expected, his wife perched on the sofa in the corner in the den, looking at her phone, wearing sweats, and sipping out of a giant glass of white wine. He went to his office to clear out emails from the day, and when he returned, the lights were out downstairs and he heard the click of the door above. Another night on the sofa, and the most loving he got was from an elderly lady with an open heart, unlike the hard one he seemed to be married to.

He slid the cloned phone out from a stack of papers. He was not terribly suprised to see the name Steve Callahan in the text messages, so he scrolled down to see when the messages began. Her latest phone was only a couple of years old, as was this one, and the messages began at about the time it was purchased. He was dismayed to see that the communications began with a discussion of their previous tryst. How long had she been doing this? The phone was registered as a pay-as-you-go burner cell, which to his mind suggested a serial cheater rather than a sudden affair. Steve used his regular phone, but Gwen had been keeping this secret since the beginning, as if there was a long-term plan he did not want to know about. She had a second Facebook account under her maiden name, WhatsApp, and even Tinder.

Scrolling through Facebook, Randall saw pictures of parties to which he had not been invited, weekend boat trips he had not known about, and lots of workplace pictures featuring handsome but shifty-looking Steve Callahan, who appeared to be some kind of trauma nurse with a Rolex. Randall remembered how many times Gwen had gone up to Dallas to visit her mother when she was sick, or gone back in to work at the last minute on a Saturday, and he cursed his trusting nature. He was busy, why wasn’t she so busy? One of the pictures gave him a clue: despite having her medical degree and a fancy title, it seemed that Gwen spent most of her time doing the grunt work. In the background, the other doctors were having a huddle in the hall, while Gwen was sewing up what looked like a minor injury. Perhaps holistic medicine was not turning out as well as she had hoped.

He had just about closed down the account when he saw a final name, Cathy Cudahy, who he remembered from their college days as a slightly flighty girl who never seemed to get too far with her studies but was popular on fraternity row. She and Gwen had been friends, but now he saw exchanges between them going as far back as the phone recorded. These took on a typical tone:

Cathy: So how’s it going?

Gwen: I’m having a good time. Just a little nervous.

Cathy: He’ll never catch on. He thinks you hung the moon. You have to think of your own needs.

Gwen: He wants children, but he’s always busy at work.

Cathy: Just let him raise Steve’s kids. They look similar enough.

Gwen: Guess I have a type.

Cathy: You found a good one to be your sugar daddy. Give me his number when you split.

Gwen: I feel so dirty sometimes.

Cathy: Don’t. You’re doing your part to overthrow the patriarchy. Live a little!

Gwen: What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

On some level, Randall had hoped to find something that made him think he had married someone other than a heartless gold-digging career-oriented opportunist, but now he saw things clearly. Gwen cared about middle class respectability and comfort, but something as ephemeral in her mind as “love” or “trust” was not on the agenda. She was going to cheat until Randall threw her out, then take him for all that he had. Another thread came up:

Gwen: What do I do if he finds out?

Cathy: You get half of the business, alimony, and half of all assets during the marriage. Wait for his grandmother to die, maybe there’s money.

Gwen: I don’t know if I want a divorce.

Cathy: You won’t stay married forever, playing like this, unless you hook up with a swinger.

Gwen: I could live with that.

Cathy: There you go. Ride the Randall train till it crashes, then come out with us to the Polygon Club.

Gwen: Steve and I could just go as a couple.

Cathy: He doesn’t have a wedding ring. That’s part of the thrill, and they don’t like cheaters (STDs).

He felt himself folding inward. At first, the rage suffused through his veins, but he turned it off when it felt good, because at some point anger becomes self-pity. Then he felt frustration at the futility of it all. He wanted to scream obscenities at her and tell her that she ruined his life. Then he wondered: did he care what she thought? She had ripped out his heart, stabbed him in the back, and played him for a fool.

Randall used the Vipassana breathing techniques he had learned once at an anger management seminar, and when he came out of that trance, he had no emotion. He was pure emptiness, and with that, he achieved cold crystal logic. Then his creativity came back and he had a plan. As he remembers it now, this was the first time he heard the metallic sound, as if his mind were scrolling ahead to what became inevitable at the moment that his rage calmed and his determination took over.

On Wednesday night Gwen came home early to find him wearing a full suit. “Did someone die?” she asked, and he laughed inside at her completely tone-deaf approach to other people. The glittering little sociopath had no regard for any feelings or futures except her own.

“No, I just got back from the lawyer,” said Randall. “I’ve got a few things for you to sign.”

“What kind of… things?” asked Gwen.

“The first one is a new life insurance policy. It pays out double if either one of us dies by accident, but nothing if we die by criminal acts, our own or those of others. This way, if I have a workplace accident, you have something to live on forever. It’s at a million five.”

Her eyes lit up there, so he passed her the second. “This one I need to secure a second loan for the business. It’s a post-nup, basically saying that the business is off-limits, and it limits the amount either spouse gets if the divorce is caused by their action, like abandonment or cheating. Basically, this secures your income from me if I do something stupid, and lets me get a new line of credit for the business.”

“Why do you need that?” she asked.

“I’m buying a house. A second house. I’m going to fix it up right and sell it. Since I’m buying it personally, this agreement doesn’t cover it, but if something were to happen to me, you’d keep all of your income and then thirty percent of our shared assets less the business.”

She looked at him quizzically, searching his eyes for awareness of any of her subterfuge. Randall had shotgunned a couple IPAs for a reason. Half-drunk, he could only appear honest.

“Take your time, have a lawyer or friend read them. We could end up very rich if this house deal. I’m kind of psyched.”

He handed her the papers and staggered off to his office. Since he was a carpenter, it had been no effort to wall off the windowless corner of the laundry room, about twenty square feet, where he did all his business. He now had a locking door “for insurance purposes,” as he told her apologetically, and could make the rest of his plans invisibly. He remembered what Langsal told him: the law punished obvious fraud, but almost never cracked down on stupidity, incompetence, and everyday greed. Everything he did had to happen before he officially knew of her infidelity.

That Friday, Randall went early to visit his wife at work. “Oh hey, Cathy, I didn’t know you worked here,” he said to the girl behind the desk. She seemed shocked that he remembered her, refusing to believe that he could have seen Gwen’s second social media life. Despite all of her bravada, Cathy was an insecure girl. He could see the faint traces of acne scars on her face, and was willing to bet that under her scrubs there were stretch marks from her battle with weight gain. He always wondered why Gwen hung out with such an obvious loser, but now he knew. With Cathy, Gwen could embrace her dark and inept side. With Randall, she had to keep it under wraps, and it was killing her to keep up the pretense.

“Oh… uh… Randall,” she said, and then her eyes flicked up and over his left shoulder, going wide. “She’s not here right now,” she dissembled.

“No problem, I’ll wait,” said Randall. He walked down the hall to his left, skipping any door with a number, and then leaned up against the door labeled SUPPLY. He could see Cathy reaching for her phone, so he whipped out his own burner phone and dialed his wife’s secret phone. Seconds later, he was rewarded with a ringtone in the closet and scuffling, hurried sounds. Cathy moved her fingers rapidly over her own phone, her face suddenly very pale. The sounds inside stopped. He waited for another ten or fifteen minutes until he heard Gwen being paged on the overhead. Then he dialed Marc on his regular phone and began a long and detailed conversation about a future project. Finally, a doctor came out gesturing wildly to Cathy, who shrugged hurriedly, and Randall peeled off and headed out the nearest door. He thought he could hear the supply cabinet open up as the outside door swung shut behind him.

Having turned up the pressure, as Langsal suggested, Randall went home to meet the home inspector. Frantically waving a radon detector, he claimed that he had picked up traces of the radioactive gas in the garage and master bedroom. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, the inspector “confirmed” the results, and found a few cracks in the floor that suggested the foundation was breaking up as well. Randall had picked a known scam artist who made his money finding problems with homes, then signing up homeowners with his brother’s remediation company. Randall paid for the report that would knock half of the value off the house, but begged off on signing any contracts. His goal was to do as Langsal suggested: burn it all down.

“Right now, she’s comfortable, since she can have both husband and lover,” he had said. “You have taken care of everything for her, so she can have her cake and eat it too. But what if things get unpleasant at home? With one hand, you want to increase the pressure on her so that she panics and makes a hasty decision, and with the other hand, you want to make her home life less comfortable than being with her lover in his condominium downtown. When you make your home life unprofitable for her, she will go where the money is. She can’t refuse to sign the post-nup unless she wants to admit cheating, but she will get over the loss of all that money quickly since she will have her lover, and start immediately doing the same thing to him. Mosquitoes, leeches, raccoons, and liver flukes never change their ways, and neither will she.”

Then he visited Marc. First he explained what he had seen that day at the hospital, and then he outlined his strategy. Marc was game, and immediately registered another DBA under which he could do restoration work. Randall would be an employee of that concern, and it would pay him less than the wage that he would get at McDonald’s. Architectural Necromancy, which had a good reputation, would quietly pass along business referrals to the new business, allowing Marc to have a solid income while Randall barely made it by. To an outsider, it simply looked like a bad business deal for the less competent employee, who now had to work cheaply for his boss because he wasn’t able to charge the rates he had at the previous company.

Systematically Randall walked through the house, appraising items. Other than her three-year-old Lexus, they had nothing of much value. He dropped off his stamp collection to his grandmother, since he would be forced to sell it or buy it again to give his wife half of its value, but this was a minor item worth only a few thousand dollars. He opened up the Keurig and disconnected a wire to render it inoperable, dropping its value to near-zero, then slid a magnet wrapped in tape into the television over the ribbon connecting its circuit board to the screen. He was rewarded with a fuzzy, erratic picture. This left her car.

Stopping by the business, which was little more than a corrugated aluminum garage on a large unfinished lot, he drove a rented truck through the mud at the edge of the lot until he was sure that both license plates were covered. Stuffing cotton into his cheeks, he pasted on a moustache and slid a pair of oversized sunglasses over his eyes, then drove to the hospital. Employee parking was in the same parking garage as customer parking, so he drove until he spotted her car, then pulled into a spot opposite and slammed the car in reverse. Remembering to relax his muscles instead of bracing himself, he backed up just a little too quickly, slamming into her bumper. He had to do it twice before he heard the comforting BAP which meant her airbags had fired. Then he drove the truck back, hosed it off, and used steel wool to remove any traces of plastic and paint from the bumper.

At this point, his trap set, the prey-turned-predator waited.

Gwen blew in the door, her hair astray, tension on her eyes. “Hi honey, how are you?” said Randall warmly.

“Terrible,” she wailed. “Some idiot hit my car today, and when I called the insurance, they said it had lapsed.”

“Lapsed?” Randall said incredulously. “Oh no, let’s check… damn, they emailed us a month ago, and it went into the spam folder,” he said, scrolling. “I sold my truck to the business, so I just wasn’t watching out. I’m sorry. How bad’s the damage?”

“The bumper is toast,” she said. “All the airbags have blown. We need a body shop.”

“Uh, not right now,” said Randall. “I just put all of our cash into the business so we can get that new loan and take it to the next level. I’ve got several clients lined up, mostly from California. You’ll have to put it on a card, but mine are all maxed out.”

“Crap!” she wailed, and for the first time he saw both the little girl and the enraged crone in her. He did not mention that he had been steadily spending like mad on equipment, insurance, and advertising for the business. If she looked, she would find nothing in his 401(k), nothing in his regular bank account, and only a few hundred in their shared account.

“Yeah, we’re going to be a little broke for a few years,” he said. “Well, maybe five years. Not too long. This is a long-shot gamble but baby, it’s going to pay off big!”

She looked at him with incredulity, and for the first time, she believed all of the nasty things she had been saying to Cathy. “We’re broke?” she asked.

“Well, except for your paycheck,” he said. “I put it all into the business. Go big or go home!”

And so it went for the next several weeks. She drove a rental, denting her paycheck substantially, since she did not want to spend the many thousands to get the Lexus fixed. He drove the truck, now owned by the business, so he could not loan it to her, since as a non-employee she was not covered on his policy. The television was on the fritz and he kept the air conditioning at a high temperature, making their house almost unlivable. When she complained about anything, he started talking about their glorious future with the business, when he was home at all, which was rare. In fact, Randall had absconded with the den sofa and taken it to the business, where he could sleep in air-conditioned comfort. She never noticed he was gone.

Nor did she notice, the following Wednesday, when he came in and asked Cathy about her, using his status as her husband to get into the inner areas of the hospital. Figuring that a cat does not change its stripes, he waited by the supply closet until an employee stepped inside to grab a box, then slid his foot into the door. He stuck his phone on a shelf in the supply closet with the motion-activated video on, then taped over the door bolt so that the door would not lock. Scanning the coast, he then went down to the cafeteria and ordered up a bottomless pot of coffee. Keeping his head down, he read a recent novel that he had bought at full price in hardback, then went upstairs and retrieved his phone. He was not disappointed.

The video captured one other nurse grabbing a box of gloves, then pulling the door shut hard despite the tape. Then, twenty minutes later, the video resumed when Steve Callahan entered. He sprayed something scented in his mouth, then cleared the table at the back of the small space. Minutes later Gwen entered, pulling him close for a deep kiss. “We don’t have long,” she said, unzipping him and vacuuming his penis into her mouth.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Sooo good. Waow. Amazing, babe.” When he was uncomfortably rigid, he flipped her onto her back on the table, and without preamble, ploughed his mushroom-headed purple love hammer into her waiting feminine cavern. Now it was her turn for superlatives: you fill me so much, that’s the spot, unbelievable, and so on. Finally they reached a crescendo, their grunts and moans interwining as he unloaded in her and her legs did that little twitch that Randall knew from experience meant an actual orgasm. Steve slid heavily down next to her, and she took off a sock to clean up.

“You really are the best ever,” she said. “Hey.”

“Yeah?” he said, conditioned much as Randall now knew he once was, to cater to her needs.

“The hubby’s being a bit irritating. You mind if I spend the weekend?”

“Mind? That’d be great! Don’t bring any panties,” said Callahan, before he slid from the room.

Randall drove home and made a call. That Thursday evening, he finally got Gwen to come with him to the bank to sign and notarize the post-nup. She had realized by now that the great money fountain would not be forthcoming in the short term. He spotted a text message thread where Steve assured her that a post-nup had none of the power of a pre-nup. “A good attorney will get it annulled,” he said.

On Friday, Cathy called him at work. “Hey Cath, what’s up,” he said breathlessly, as if he had been lifting objects. In fact, he was in the lounge area he made at the back of the workspace, deeply immersed in a game of Call of Duty with Marc.

“Um, Gwen’s staying over this weekend,” she began.

“Oh right, she told me,” said Randall. “Does she need a ride?”

“No, but, uh, she needs some clothing,” said Cathy. “Do you mind if I stop by?”

“I’m not at the house right now –”

“That’s OK, she gave me her key.”

Randall signed off but remained thoughtful. Cathy was calling to make sure he was not there, which meant she was at the house. This meant that she was snooping for something, or at least trying to spy somehow. He waited until that evening, and then walked in the door as if he were drunk, staggering to the study. He unplugged the router from the cable at the wall, meaning that any device connected to it would register an interruption in internet service. Going into each room, he checked the devices plugged into outlets and came up with two additional plugs. Tracing the wires, he found two wireless cameras.

“Sneaky, very sneaky,” he said to himself. He went to the garage where he emptied out two boxes. It took him another half-hour to photograph and print on 8.5×11 paper the view that each camera had. Cutting out most of the end of each box, he taped the photograph over the open area, then stuck the camera in front of it. He pointed the boxes toward the center of the room so that the overhead light illuminated each cutout, then left the light on. It was a hack, but it wouldn’t need to hold long anyway. He screwed the cable back in and waited for the regular blinking of lights to resume on the router. No phone call came through.

Two trucks rumbled up to the house that day. First, a corporate moving service which quickly boxed everything he owned, and second, a moving van which moved in someone else. He had found a realtor who specialized in corporate relocations and, for the small discount of half the value of the house, had sold it in exchange for buyer performing remediation. He knew that the realtor suspected that radon would not be an actual issue in an area where none of the homes had basements, but he was obligated by law to disclose anyway. He got out with enough to pay off what they owed on the house and little more. He hauled all of his crap to the business, then dispatched the moving van to Steve’s address, helpfully provided by Cathy.

An hour later his phone trilled with the special ring he had installed for Gwen. It was the “The Witch is Dead” song from The Wizard of Oz, a movie he hated when he was a child but now appreciated further.

“Hey hon, what’s up?” he asked. Marc could hear furious rapid monologue on the other end. Randall winked.

“Yeah, we had to sell the house,” he said. “I needed financing for the business. I’m looking for apartments now, just staying with my parents. There’s room for you too. Your car, yeah, I turned that in at the dealership. They gave us about four grand for it. Well, it was either that or fix it, which was most of the price of the vehicle. You have your rental still, right? Great, so that’s sorted. Yeah, I’m looking at studio apartments so we can save as much money as possible. Oh yeah, I sent your stuff along to the address Cathy gave me. She said it was your aunt, or an old college friend or something. There’s not much, and we can move it to the apartment in carloads as convenient. I know it’s awkward, but I really need all the money for the business. We had a fall in order and I need to make up payroll and insurance, or we’ll never get the payoff. Per month? Uh, it’s clearing about $1500 per month now, but that should go up within a few years, maybe five or even seven, but it’ll go up, I swear it. Oh, you have to go? OK, well, let’s talk when you get back. Love ya.”

Marc felt himself sweat as he looked at the man before him. He had seen eyes that dead once before only, in the face of a former special forces operator he met in the oilfield. There was nothing visible there. All of the energy was conserved, and the face was impassive as if it were masked. When Randall told him what Gwen had been doing, Marc expected rage, anguish, maybe even appeasement. Instead he saw an ineffable and infinite coldness, like a machine with simple instructions carrying out a mission that would destroy it. He looked away.

In fact, Randall had done a great deal of grieving. After he visited the supply closet the first time, he knew in his heart a few things:

A. Gwen is cheating on me with Steve Callahan, her old summer flame from college.

B. He works at the hospital and they have been doing this a long time, probably for my whole marriage.

C. Gwen will never give me what I want, which is a pleasant home life, love, trust, affection, and a family.

D. Instead, she will take everything I have so that she can keep having Steve or several Steves in her life.

E. If I divorce her, I lose everything. If I ruin everything, she leaves and I can rebuild.

F. This is a small price to pay for the monstrous, stupid error I made in marrying the girl who made me orgasm the most.

He stopped by his grandmother’s condominium several weeks later. “Grandma, I can’t fool you. My marriage is toast: Gwen is cheating on me with a coworker, has been doing it for some time, and has zero intent of ever giving you grandchildren.”

“Oh, you poor child,” said the elderly woman, her blue eyes aflame. “How long have you been carrying this hurtful secret?”

“I… I’ve only found out gradually,” said Randall.

“At first, I was shocked. I just couldn’t do anything. Marc sent me home because I was useless. I didn’t eat for the next week, and barely slept. I looked terrible. I only got up and showered in the hope that she would change her mind and love me again. I started going to the gym, but other than that, I couldn’t do anything. I paid my taxes late because I just couldn’t concentrate.”

“That came to an end once I heard them, ah, you know, doing things in the supply closet at work.”

“A supply closet! How romantic! He really knows how to show a girl a good time!” They both laughed, but when his chuckles faded, Randall had eyes full of tears.

He continued. “After that, I went into denial. I just refused to see it. I started being more romantic, working out harder, cooking for her, doing everything I could to bring out the best. But in my heart, I had doubt, and not the bad kind like you have before a test, but the kind that tells me I was just in an illusion. It broke like a fever after a few days.”

“That sent me into a pattern of soul-searching. I felt like it was my fault, and in my guilt I went looking for what I did wrong. I didn’t buy her enough flowers, or take her out for enough dates, or tell her I loved her enough. But then, I remembered how when she came back one summer, she was being sociable to this Steve Callahan guy back then. At that point, I knew. She’s always been a bit self-centered, and it gets her ahead in her career, but it makes for an isolated marriage. She was able to ‘compartmentalize’ and have a work life and a home life, and the two did not overlap. He was her ‘work husband,’ to use the current term, because they worked together so much. He introduced her to the party scene downtown, and a new group of friends who are all doctors with money, fast cars, cocaine, and so on. I couldn’t compete. I keep trying to build the business so we have a steady income stream, children, retirement, insurance… all those things that she needs, even if they’re boring.”

“Oh, indeed. The things a grown-up girl needs, not a college girl,” said his grandmother. “What happened then?”

“I started trying to figure out a way that it could work. If he had her for the week, maybe I could have her for the weekend. I could forgive her if she gave him up now and came back to me, or gave me a ‘hall pass’ so I could have an affair if I wanted in the future. All this stupid stuff went through my head, grandma. I really was developmentally disabled for a few days. Then the anger hit me.”

“At that point, I had figured out that I provided a good life for her, and she had told me to go ahead and build equity in the business. She just wanted to take more in the divorce, you see, because she knew that as the timeline goes on, the chance of getting away with cheating approaches zero. She spent all her money from work on herself while I paid off the mortgage, and she wanted half of the house. She cut me out from affection, and, uh, marital relations and stuff, long ago. I heard them talking about me, grandma, and how weak they thought I was. How stupid I was to fund their little fling, and how much fun it was to pull one over on me.”

His grandmother nodded and tutt-tutted.

“It got dark then, grandma. These were not your grandson’s proudest days. I basically lived on the sofa. Marc let me slide on work because my head wasn’t there. He was furious with her. He said I went from being the best artisan he has ever known to being a useless, self-pitying lump. I was so embarassed I dodged his calls for days. He apologized and told me to get well. I told him I thought she was the one. He said what everyone said, just get back together with her, it’s easier and cheaper than a divorce. But I couldn’t. If I got back together with her, I would always be watching the phone, counting the hours she was away. I would have to become the policeman of my own marriage. And there would be no joy in it. I got even more depressed.”

“I thought about many things. I considered killing myself and leaving the stiff in the living room, so she’d come home and see what she had done. But then the logical half of the brain kicked in. She’d just step over me, laugh at how pathetic I was, and have a roll in the hay (sorry) with her lover before calling the cops to remove the carcass. I realized in that moment the mistake I had made. I confused her energy, her sexuality, and her capability at schoolwork for the signs of a real person, but in fact, I got a sociopath. I don’t know if she always was, or was just a selfish narcissist by nature. Maybe her parents spoiled her. But she’s bad news. There’s no way I can love that, or even go back to it. I needed it gone from my life.”

“At that point, I got up and showered. I went for a jog in the park, and there was this group of people in self defense class, all chanting out ‘I will not become a victim’ and raising their fists. I saw in that moment, like looking through a prism into different rooms in my future over many years, two things: first, that this marriage was dead and nothing I could do would save it, and second, that I couldn’t get out of this by being like a normie and getting a divorce.”

“That’s my boy,” said Grandma, beaming a little. “Don’t take that shit lying down from that little hussy. Give ’em hell.”

For the first time in many days, a genuine smile broke over Randall’s face. “Oh, I shall.” He explained how the business was bankrupted, since it stopped taking orders long ago and was passing those onto Marc’s company. Not only that, but he had loaded it with debt, and was working for Mickey Dees wages. He detailed how the cars were sold and the house liquidated, and how all of the housewares were gone. How he had all the stuff moved out. How he had pressured her at work, but not gotten her fired. How he had avoided all of the silly alienation of affection lawsuits, and basically done nothing illegal, since the car he wrecked was his own, and all of the bad financial decisions he deliberately made were in pursuit of more money, just incompetently. He mentioned how he had filed final tax papers on the business, effectively dissolving it, and shut down the facility. All of his workers had moved over to Marc, who had given them a hint of what was going on.

“I am beyond anger, Grandma. I am beyond sadness. I am at the point that they describe in the old koan, ‘If you meet the Buddha and he obstructs your path, kill him.’ I have no feelings, no soul. I am pure nothingness, sweeping in, and I will burn it all down to be rid of her.” He then described the post-nuptial arrangement that, out of fear of revealing the affair, his wife had signed.

“She’s going to move out, and she’s not going to know what hit her,” he said. “She’ll move in with Steve, and have all of her stuff there. She won’t find me, since I won’t have an official residence. I’ll close down the business and live like a hobo for a few months, but I’m going to wait for a year to pass, and she’s going to want to marry him then. Or another stooge. I can feel it in my bones. The parasite needs a host. She’s going to sue me for divorce on the grounds of separation, and I have the pre-nup and no assets, so she’s going to ask for nothing. I just have to wait.”

His grandmother thought carefully. “There is another option,” she said. She picked up the phone. “Heloise? It’s been too long. Listen, sweetie, I have a favor to ask. Is Tricia still in town? It’s unorthodox, but…”

Gwen lay stretched out on the bed after another massive fuck-fest. She had given him her mouth, ass, mouth, and vagina in sequence, and Steve’s head was swimming with so many hormones and pheremones that he would agree to anything. They had been living together for three weeks, since her useless deadbeat husband had apparently run his business into the ground, sold all of their stuff to pay it off, and now based on a call she received, was in rehab.

“Steve, I’ve been here a week, and I –”

(He thought giddily about how she never, ever built a sentence around anything other than her needs, her wants, and her feelings. He would never kick her out however because narcissistic girls were the easiest to manipulate. As long as she had what she thought she was owed, she would never question his other affairs, including with Bambi, Cindi, and Maxwell.)

The phone rang. “You’d better get that,” said Steve, thinking about doing a bump of coke in the next room before he came back to rail this silly bitch in her anus again.

“Gwendy? It’s Rand,” said the far-off, hollow voice. “Listen, I — are you still there?”

“I’m here,” said Gwen. “Randall, is that really you?”

“Yeah, honey, it’s me!” he said with sudden exuberance. “Lishen, I’m so, so, so sorry about the way thingsh worked out. I tried so hard, to make the business work, so you could have all the things you want, but it’s just gone tits up, and everything’s in the shitter, and –”

(Steve covered up his laughter. My god, this white trash comedy just kept getting better and better! And this made his position stronger, he thought: Gwen was his now, and even if she strayed, she could do nothing if he did.)

“Randall,” said Gwen efficiently. “What — do — you — want?”

“Uh, Traci, can you tell her?” he said, and she could hear that he was farther away in the room. A female voice came on the phone.

“Gwen, sugar, it’s Traci. I’m here with your ex-hubs, and we’re flat out broke. We were just wondering if, you know, for old times sake, you could see it in your heart to wire us some cash…”

Gwen looked at the phone. “Where are you?”

“Vegas, Baby,” said Traci, then howled at the moon. “We’re getting hitched and Rand’s got a job on an oilwell in Mexico.”

“Mexico!” said Gwen. “He’s got a job?”

“Well, sort of,” said “Traci.” Tricia was reading off a page in her mom’s friend’s living room. “He’s on standby. He’s gotta pay off this thing, a lean or something.”

(Steve fell off the bed laughing.)

“A lien?”

“Oh yah,” said Traci. “They put a lean on his income because the loan to his business was personal. Well, the last one. The one before wasn’t.”

“And the business?” Gwen strung out the last word into a sentence.

“Oh. Sorry, sugar. I know you two worked on that. It’s fucken toast. Soooo, we just came to Vegas to, uh, let off some steam, and whaddya know, Rand popped the question.”

“But we’re still married,” said Gwen.

“Oh. Well, that’s too bad. Rand, hunny, she says you’re still married.”

From across the room, she heard Rand hollowly and drunkenly say, “Nuh-unh. It didn’t come up on the computer thing. She must’ve anullified it back in Houston.”

“I sure didn’t,” said Gwen.

(He shot her a look, as if to say, “well, what are you waiting for?”)

“Well, they’re not stopping us here,” said Traci. “I want to be Mrs. Rand Larsen as soon as I can. But we’re in a bit of a tight spot. I know you guys were close, and he says you still have some of the stuff from the house, so is there any way you can wire us a couple hunred bucks so we can get a Greyhound back to Detroit?”

“Detroit?” said Gwen. “You live in Detroit?”

“Well, Kalamazoo,” said Traci. “You know, just a little outside the city. We just need an overnight bus.”

(Steve rolled his eyes. What’s going to show up next, Kid Rock and Dog the Bounty Hunter?)

“Is that true, Randall?” Gwen enunciately politely. She found this little tart, tramp, whatever she was to be quite irritating, and played up her college-educated origins. She wanted this woman to feel the pain of being a trailer-dwelling low-life for the rest of her days.

“Yeah, honey, it’s legit,” Rand breathed into the phone. “We was just having a few drinks, and I seen your name on my phone, and thought well she always had a big heart, maybe she’ll help us out of this li’l jam.”

Gwen rolled her eyes. He was obviously totally wasted if he contorted his mind into believing that.

(Yeah, right, thought Steve. These two con artists were perfect for each other, except pencil-dick couldn’t keep a woman, not when a sexual magnetism hurricane like Steve Callahan was on deck!)

“Um, how can I say this? ‘No.’ Let’s try that. And never call me again. I’ve never seen anyone fall as fast or as hard as you have, Randall, and I want nothing to do with you. I’ll send the divorce papers to your parents and please just sign and get out of my life. I’m embarrassed to ever have known you, and whatever wandering vagina you’re associating with now.”

“Baby wait–” said Rand, but the line dropped dead.

He wiped his brow with the back of a hand and turned the phone off. “Think she bought it? You were magnificent, by the way, Tricia.”

His grandmother beamed at him.

That sound, those light impacts of falling metal, shook him out of his reverie. He had been at the shore’s edge again, staring into the microturbulence of the dark water of the gulf. So much had changed. The sound of the nameplate dropping no longer struck him as a sad event, but the beginning of his liberation from language. His only true heartbreak, now that he looked back on it with a clear mind, was how much he trusted words, gestures, symbols, feelings, and sex.

He realized now that the only way to get out of the world of language and symbols was to escape to disinterest. Most people, if someone expresses anger, automatically express hurt; Randall wanted simply to not express. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, and for him, the entire question provoked disinterest, at least for a long time. Why bother with the symbols that people used as if they were meaningful, then treated as arbitrary and irrelevant when it suited them to do so?

At first, he felt that something of great value had been taken from him. His rage showed that he still cared; once that evaporated, he found himself wondering if what had been taken was in fact a loss. Eventually, he came to a point of total disinterest, where he could look at his marriage as clinically as if he were rebuilding a pump assembly in a midcentury home, or trapping network traffic on his computer. He simply had no belief; he looked at how people acted, not what they said they were acting to do.

In Gwen, he saw a very selfish little girl who had adopted the worldly and disaffected pose of an older woman in order to stop caring about his love for her own strategic advantage. She loved him, when it brought her what she wanted right then, but that love turned off when she wanted something else. He always thought of love as not universal, in the sense of “we are all one soul,” but all-binding, meaning that when he cared for someone, he cared for their needs, feelings, desires, and hopes as if they were his own, or maybe even treated them as more sacred than his own.

To Randall, love of a person was indistinguishable from other forms of love, like love of a good symphony, love of nation, or finding a connection in a good book. These things transcended all else. His love with Gwen did not, at least on her end, which made him a sucker from the start to the finish. The whole thing was a write-off. She used the same word, “love,” and perhaps “trust,” but she meant something entirely different by them, and this eventually came out when she loved Steve’s penis more than Randall’s faith in her.

At the end of the day, love means setting “my happiness” aside for mutual benefit, not simply in a material sense but a spiritual one. Love is not convenient or easy. It takes effort like a job and skill like art. He would not want his daughters to behave like Gwen did not only because it was disgusting, but because it cut them off from a vision of the world where love can conquer all because we set aside our selfishness and act to form bonds and improve each other.

Marriage is more than a contract. It’s because you’re not just a possession that loyalty, trust, and purity matter. Love involves respect, and respect requires trust, or at least some kind of consistency. That in turn requires a goal other than the “maximizing my happiness in the moment right now” that he had seen with Gwen. Love is sacrifice, and the sacrifice is made gladly because something greater is created, a union of people which involves honest trust and belief in the goodness of the other, and therefore that they should thrive alongside oneself.

As he started into the water, Randall realized the final lesson of this debacle, which was that the mistake was all his. He trusted language, specifically language uttered by a parasitic sociopath with a pathology of self-pity, instead of trusting his heart, which had doubts that he did not yet know how to recognize. The Gwens of the world try to configure their lives so that external events and objects force them to do the right thing, but the only way to really get right is to have discipline and love in the heart, neither of which Gwen possessed.

“Fish biting?”

“Not really, but they’re keeping me entertained.”

“You have a good one, buddy.”

He stared into the water again. His life had taken a much different path after he burned everything down. He destroyed his home, his possessions, his business, and his standing in the community, but in the end Gwen sent over the divorce papers according to the post-nup that she was afraid not to sign. She started out thinking she could force him to want out, but by becoming the beast, he forced her to want out, and then he took full advantage of her confusion and escaped the suffocating, toxic marriage.

Randall recalled a statistic that only 6% of arranged marriages fail, while over half of all marriages — many on their second, third, or fourth try — failed. He should have always asked his grandmother for advice. When he hung up on that phone call, he couldn’t stop himself, and he hugged Tricia. It felt good, but his penis stayed flaccid. At that point, he found himself in a different world, so to speak, than the one in which movies, music, books, friends, and even parents told him love was found.

“Why don’t you two young people go get a cup of coffee? Heloise and I need to talk strategy,” his grandmother said, pushing a couple dollar bills on him. He raised his eyebrows to Tricia. They took the work truck, both having been completely stone sober for their acting debut. Tricia pushed his hand open and checked the two slightly musty dollar bills there. “She’s from a different time when this would have bought a night of coffee,” Randall explained.

“She really loves you,” said Tricia.

“My grandma? She’s wonderful. Survived a world war, Great Depression, and loss of the husband she hoped to see every day of her life. Watched her kids and now grandkids make mistakes. She’s always trying to just nudge us back on course. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

“It’s an odd name, Randall.”

“Just go ahead and say whatever’s on your mind. Just kidding. It is an odd name. My Mom picked it out of a book, and when I didn’t grow up to be like the character in it, I think she lost some interest in me. I couldn’t measure up to the image. But you don’t look like a Tricia.”

“It’s short for Patricia, my middle name. My first name is — oh heck, I’m not telling you,” she said.

“That bad, eh?” said Randall. “We’re at my favorite caffeine bar here. Does this work for you?”

“I’ve never had someone ask that before. I think it’s great. If you like it, it can’t be all bad.”

She thinks I’m a man of taste, chuckled Randall to himself. They both took their coffee black and dumped milk in it. “No sugar?” he asked her.

“If this were a book, it would mean that my character isn’t sweet,” she said.

“Or that you’re sweet enough as is,” said Randall. “Wait — forget I said that, or you’ll never respect me again.”

The chuckle burst out of her without warning, without command. It was what it was, and had no other meaning. The spontaneous response even surprised Tricia.

“Your friends never call you ‘Pat’?”

“No, ‘Pat’ sounds like an ambisexual or something. I want a girl’s name, but not a girly name. I settled for ‘Tricia,’ but once I get my master’s done, I may simply chuck all of these names and start over.”

They talked for a few hours before he took her back home, but he found himself appreciating the wisdom of grandma again. Tricia did not seem like his “type,” since he consciously believed that he should date blonde girls. Instead, she had honey-colored hair, evenly between brown and gold, with little highlights of red. She was tall, and he always liked women with high portability, and had a smaller bust and hips that he expected. Most might see her as mousy, but after she told him the topic of her dissertation, he saw no mouse therein.

“You seriously compared the Vietnam war to the Mongol conquest? Who were we, the Mongols?”

“No, the Chinese were. They wanted to make Vietnam a vassal state and rule it through a despotic but highly-efficient bureaucracy. Too bad for them that they did not realize that the Vietnamese Communists were first in favor of Vietnamese independence, and only secondarily Communists. They did as little of their homework as the CIA did.”

“I can find no fault with it. In fact, it would make an interesting book.”

She nodded. He continued, “But you didn’t come out with me because you knew I was an English major.”

“No, I went along because I trust your grandma,” she said. “Well, that and…”

“And…?”

“And one of my friends works in California, and she saw the house you restored down on the island. The inlaid wood and intricate moulding, the built-in shelves, and all of those leaded windows. I know a lot of English majors, but very few who could also work with their hands, and stay in the right historical period.”

“History was my minor. My longest paper compared America after the Civil War with Athens during the wars with the Persians. I think I got a ‘B+,’ mainly because I drew some negative conclusions about our future here. I figured I’d do better restoring old houses. That is a form of living history, staying with us today.”

He drove her back to Heloise’s house, a stately two-story with colonial columns. Uncertain, he simply said he would call her soon. She handed him a napkin on which, two hours prior, she had written her number.

(“That’s not a bad sign at all,” said Langsal. “She knew you would want it after just a few minutes talking. There’s more to this girl than meets the eye.”)

Randall found himself conflicted because he felt no sexual spark. With Gwen, he wanted to tear off her panties and ravish her from the first time he saw her. With Tricia, he felt no sexual stimulus, but a weird confused feeling which said that if he did not call her back, he would feel like life lost some of its light. She interested him. Luckily for him, he was re-assessing what he knew of love at the time. Before his days on the boat, he thought love was like an obsession or rush, tied closely to sex. Now he felt the two were separate but perhaps converged.

He went back to the boat, an old Catalina sailboat he was in the process of restoring, on which he slept like a rock as the years of tension drained out of him. If you want to know what love is, he thought, love is giving up this life to live with some woman somewhere and make sure she has everything she wants. Shortly before he drifted off to sleep, he realized that he would need to get another phone, since Apple products were part of the fancy world of BMWs and Keurigs that he had gratefully left behind, and he wanted no link whatsoever to his past life and his failed love.

The next day, as he sanded wood and then rubbed it with a series of fragrant oils, he recalled his lovers.

 

 

 

• • Violet, a little sex maniac who had inducted him into the ways of lust during his last year of high school, when they were both 18 and “technically” adults but still children in terms of self-discipline, thinking, and experience. He wanted to love her, but she made it clear that she was going to marry an artist and live in New York someday, so he let the relationship die painfully during his first semester at college.

 

 

• • Anne, less of a sexual dynamo and more of a good friend, to the point where eventually they parted because the relationship would never really be exciting. They got along like a married couple who had already given up. He missed her sometimes.

 

 

• • Natasha, or “Tash,” who was the most sexually adventuresome, having had three-ways, gang-bangs, one night stands, and even BDSM experience. Sex with her was like homework, although exciting homework, but when the semester ended, she expected him to move on, so he did.

 

 

• • Aubrey, seemingly a good match for his mind, but was reticent about sex, having had too many men (boys, really, at college) “dine and dash,” so she was looking for something long-term. As a result she first was clingy, then dismissive, and seeing that as a lack of interest, he wandered on.

 

 

 

Gwen both impressed him as someone who could stay on top of the current trends in intellectual life, and a sexual dynamo that he hoped to enjoy for the next fifty years of his life. He saw their compatibility as if it were in a photo: his light brown hair and blue eyes matched with her curly blonde ringlets and light brown eyes, her advanced degree and aspirations in the medical field corresponding to his desire to be a professor someday, and their similar social groups, social status, and intellectual ambitions also lining up. In theory, she was The One.

He had no idea what to make of Tricia. She was about as sexual as a turtle and cared nothing for intellectual trends or high-profile careers. In fact, she stunned him on their second coffee excursion — he hesitated to call it a “date” — by saying that she didn’t trust books much. “Learning is something that you do in your mind, just thinking about things,” she said. “Books can tell you facts and opinions, but you can’t make a life out of them. In fact, most seem to simply confuse me, leading me away from my own path, since I cannot follow the path of anyone else.”

The sexual spark he felt with Gwen, Violet, and Natasha was missing; Tricia simply did not excite him sexually or socially. He found her ideas interesting, and liked spending time with her. On the other hand, he sure thought about her a great deal, and he felt like anything he said was an offering, hoping that she would think well of him for it. This in turn roiled his mind and stomach, since here he was again, using symbols and gestures to manipulate others. She didn’t wear blue jeans, listen to NPR, or watch television. Her phone was five years old and cracked. She thought most academic theory was the ravings of ego-inflated idiots.

However, little about his new life excited him. He enjoyed working on old houses, hanging out on his boat, catching up with literature from a generation ago, running through the park, or hiking the many trails on the island. For the first time in his life, he felt self-sufficient. He laughed at the stereotype of the “strong independent woman who didn’t need no man,” but as he reflected on it, he was the male version, the autonomous male who didn’t need no woman. Tricia felt it, too, and didn’t push.

“So,” she said, stretching out her hands to grasp his fingers. “We’ve been doing this for awhile.”

“Coffee?” he asked.

She gave him a look that said to knock it off. “OK. I was never sure if these were date dates, or just… dates. You know, friendly.”

Tricia flipped a lock of hair from behind her ear, looked to the ground, and then fixed him with a serious gaze. “Why do you sand the old wood on those homes?”

“Well, for many reasons,” said Randall, glad for a topic that the male mind could identify. “I want to take off the old paint, prep the wood, see how bad the rot is, get ready for oiling –”

“Right,” said Tricia, speaking from the realm where women — being more intuitive, and less forward-looking — reign supreme. “Multiple reasons. You’re doing several things at the same time. So are we: we are out on friendly dates, but we’re looking to see if there’s something more there, and I’m asking you how it’s going.”

Randall paused. “Tricia, I –” he lost his ability to form a topic sentence.

“Well, it’s okay if it goes nowhere,” she said brightly.

“Tricia, I — well. It’s not going nowhere. I don’t know where it’s going. I’m a bit confused, but that’s not unusual, since very few things are really clear and very few of those are worth spending time on. I can say that… I would be really sad if these stopped. I don’t understand it, but I look forward to talking to you. It’s weird, we’ve never even kissed, and, hunh, well, I, uh, really like seeing you. Whether it’s a friend or not is up to you.”

She envied men, Tricia realized. To live in such a world of ambiguities, and yet be at home there. “We’re always going to be friends,” she said. “Let me continue with the house metaphor. It’s like having a good home, and adding on a wing, or adding central air or something. We can be friends, but maybe something else.”

Randall looked at her uncertainly. “Like… dating?”

“No,” said Tricia, and his heart fell. She cleared her throat. “Like seeing if you care enough to decide to love me, and then getting married. We can ‘date’ after that.”

“Isn’t that backward?” he said.

“No, it’s dating that’s backward. You get that little signal in your reptilian brain from orgasm, get washed in oxytocin and dopamine, and then you decide that you love her because she just made you ejaculate repeatedly. So you start going out, and any time you run into problems, she just spreads ’em and you go into la-la land.”

“Oh,” said Randall. “Like my first wife.”

“Or my first husband,” sighed Tricia, “but in reverse. I thought he was just the most amazing man, such an intellect and so physically strong, and so I thought I could snare him. I spread ’em, and as we were lying there in the afterglow, I thought we had an agreement. We were going to love each other. But to him, the deal was just for the sex. I had to sweeten the pot and urge him along. He did it, and we got married, but then after awhile, we just… fell out of love. Because we were never in love, just in love with an image.”

Where men are slow at assembling details for implication, they are lightning quick at taking that knowledge to a conclusion. “Right, so you want to do it the other way: fall in love first, then worry about sex stuff.”

Tricia nodded. “I could easily love you,” she said. “It’s a matter of letting myself do it, and exerting myself to understand you and appreciate you. Already I think you’re one of the few men I have met who seems to have a solid head on his shoulders, and actually enjoys life enough to not see me as a mere trophy, tool, toy, or slave. But, you’re not alone. I’m having coffee with six men, currently, and they are all exceptional, in their own way.”

Randall found himself surprised at how much that disturbed him. “Six?”

“I’ve kissed none, and obviously gone no further. I have learned from my first disaster marriage, the years I wasted in dating. We’re adults now. Adults get married, and have families. That requires stability, and love. My grandma Heloise always said that you should marry someone like you. Same religion, race, social class, ethnic group, politics, and from the same neighborhood if you could. You know, Heloise and your grandmother have been in love for years.”

“Like lesbians?” Randall asked, shocked.

“No, like friends. They love each other as strongly as a married couple, and they depend on each other as much. There’s nothing sexual about it. Sex is something you do when you are in love because it brings you closer and leads to family. You could do the same with knitting, like they do. They get together, talk, and they appreciate each other. Heloise would trust your grandmother with her life. How many people can you say that about in your life?”

“But sex is important,” he said. “It’s how you know you are important to someone.”

“That didn’t work for me,” she said. “Sex is a symbol of how important you are to someone, but it’s not the same as the real deal, which is enjoying spending time with that person when you’re not awash in hormones and neurotransmitters. Your ex, did you like her? Were you friends? The sex took up all your time, and then you never got to know her. Trust me, I did the same with my ex. I too paid too much attention to the television, the radio, and what my friends said. I thought that all masculine men were hyper-sexual beings. Then I went back to what I know, history. Marcus Aurelius, Daniel Boone, Leonidas, George Washington, Arminius, Davy Crockett, Steven Austin… do you think they spent a lot of time in bed? No, they were out there doing things, putting their stamp on the world and looking at it and thinking, ‘Darn, I did something really good today,’ just like you do when you restore these houses or even play bad Led Zeppelin covers on that butt-ugly acoustic you truck around.”

“You heard me singing, and you still came to meet me tonight?”

“Yeah, I went down to the boat, trying to get up my nerve to talk to you, but I couldn’t,” she said. “I needed more time. Time to recover, and time to organize my thoughts.”

Randall nodded. “I accept your terms,” he said. “I am going to assume that everything you say is correct, and act on that assumption, simply because I don’t want to stop having coffee with you. Or talking with you. I don’t want you to go away, and since it’s not legal to kill those other five guys, I’m going to beat them.”

Time rambled on as it always does. He liked living on the boat because he could pull up roots and move if the neighborhood went bad. Langsal told him the same thing. After loss of his wife, first career, and a child in the crossfire of a gang fight, he had no desire to be tethered to the land. Little men controlled the land, spreading their power through fear, he said. A real man takes to the sea, or finds another planet to adventure on, because whenever things get settled, the merchants and bureaucrats take over, dividing up nature and putting price tags on everything, then impoverishing everyone with taxes and insurance until soon the whole society radiates fear.

“You can feel it, out on the ocean,” he said. “There’s no fear. The background hum is gone. It’s just you and eternity, big skies and empty nights, and you have to figure out your own shit by your lonesome, because no one is going to come along and give you entertainment, pussy, money, or legal papers to distract from the void within. You have to make peace with the void, because it’s probably not really a void, and we’re all going there someday and have to know how to navigate that stygian sea as well as the cerulean one we sail here on Earth.”

Taking charge of the situation, Randall upgraded their coffee dates to a French bakery that served excellent rich coffee with real cream. It was quieter, with no collegiate-level indie-rock and trip-hop gyrating through the speakers, and people wore “real clothes,” not tshirts and jeans. At some point, they talked it out and the decision was made to become exclusive with the idea of spending a year together to see if they were marriage-worthy.

Tricia surprised Randall by showing up at his boat on a Saturday morning wearing khakis and a light cotton shirt with a floral print. He could see hints of a sensible but stripped down bra under it.

“Let’s go shopping,” she said. She drove them to a grocery store. “Now imagine that I’m going to be having dinner with you all week,” she said. “What do you need?”