Closet Prude

(continued)

By Wayne Scheer

The reason I'm not mad at Linda is because we had a good marriage for about ten years. It's just too bad it took us another ten to finally admit the good times were all in the past. It's like the old oak tree that grew in front of our house and appeared healthy. It would leaf out every spring and lose its leaves every fall, until one day it just keeled over. I hired some people to dig out the stump and they said that the taproot had rotted. "The tree died years ago. It just took time before it realized it."

But we raised a wonderful daughter together, and Wendy is as close to me as she is to her mother. She's away at college and doing well, despite our break-up. It'll be strange when she comes home this summer and has to divide her time between us, but we'll work it out.

My guess is Clyde will be out of the picture by then. He's just a bastard who took advantage of a vulnerable woman in a dead marriage. For far too long Linda and I had just been going through the motions, probably for Wendy's sake, although neither of us admitted that. There was no great epiphany that announced the end of our marriage, unless you call Clyde an epiphany. We were in bed one morning when Linda said, "I'm unhappy."

"Me, too." I listened to myself breathing, wondering what more there was to say, until Linda spoke.

"For the past two months I've been having an affair with Clyde." Her voice was so far away and sad, I almost said, "I'm sorry."

Instead, I asked, "Do you want a divorce?"

"Yes," she said, and she buried her head in my shoulder. She cried while I held her and I cried, too. Then we got out of bed and looked up divorce attorneys in the Yellow Pages.

As Gina and I ate our spaghetti, she asked me if it hit me yet, the
shock of realizing what's happened.

"You're going to feel like shit because you were dumped," is how she so delicately put it.

I assured her I was fine and was dealing with the divorce in my own way.

"I'm putting in more time than ever at work," I told her. "And I'm actually enjoying it." I'm a financial advisor and, to be honest, in the past I'd always been a little lazy, steering clients towards safe products that my company advised. "Lately," I said, "I've been researching new products and taking some risks. Work is more creative than ever."

"Bullshit." That's what Gina said. "Getting yourself involved in work is good to an extent, but you need to be careful not to get lost in it."

I was about to get defensive and tell her to fix her own life, but
before I could speak she took me by the hands and said, "What you need is a fuck buddy."

"Say what?"

"What you need is a friend you can call up in the middle of the night and say, 'Come over and fuck me now before I get depressed and do something dumb like call my ex-wife.' Sort of like an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, only sexier."

I was having trouble taking this seriously. "Or like having a hooker on my speed dial," I said. Gina looked up from her spaghetti unamused.

"You never met Sean, the guy I met just after my divorce. I told you and Linda about him."

"You mean the guy who turned out to be married?"

"Yeah. I didn't say he had evolved much from the hunter/scavenger species, but he was my fuck buddy." She paused to push her plate to the other side of the table, beyond arm's reach. "He'd come over and fuck me until I was so sore I could barely walk the next day. I'd call him at his job and tell him how depressed I was and he'd be here that night with a bottle of J&B and a pack of condoms."

I think I may have blushed. I know women sometimes talk this way to one another, but men aren't usually privy to this side of female conversation.

Gina, however, kept right at it.

"My mother wouldn't have approved, but I always felt better after about my third orgasm." She stood up to clear the table and added. "Until I found out what a shit-faced bastard he was, of course."

My head was still reeling from the "third orgasm" comment. I began wondering what Gina must be like in bed and if I could keep up.

I helped her with the dishes while she put up a pot of coffee. I had never really been attracted to Gina before — there was something about her dark hair and her small Italian frame that reminded me too much of the women in my own family. But I missed the familiarity of rinsing dishes and handing then to someone else to put into the dishwasher. Even after she told me to sit down and she'd bring the ice cream, I stayed to clean the counter top and the drains in the kitchen sink. As she reached for the coffee cups, I noticed how tight and round her ass was and how her breasts still appeared firm, even though I remembered her fortieth birthday had passed a few years earlier. I recalled Linda saying to me once after trying on bathing suits with Gina, "Her boobs still bounce. It's amazing what not having a child will not do to your body."

I poured myself some coffee and Gina brought out a half-opened box of ice cream and two spoons. "I hope you don't mind," she said, "but I don't want to get more dishes dirty." It was such an intimate gesture, I almost cried. I followed her into the living room and sat on her well-worn couch. I wondered if the sofa I bought for my condo would ever feel this comfortable.