Fifty-Boy 7 An Ordinary Guy

Fifty-Boy

7

An Ordinary Guy

I'm an ordinary guy and I wish there was some original way I could say it, but I nearly evaporated like steam from a sewer, nearly faded like a Popsicle on a pavement in August, little ants with little straws sucking up my puddle, siphoning me away one pustule at a time.

I felt like a pregnant woman throwing up in the morning on a crowded subway at rush hour, like a dying guy decaying in the back of the bus, not able to tell anybody or ask for help. Everybody around can tell you're coming apart, but who wants to be near a corpse, somebody said, especially when it's still living and trying to talk?



Well, I was that corpse, that was me when I discovered she'd gone behind my back to arrange a meeting with this joker from the chat-room. I was wearing his windowpanes and he was trying on my wife.

Tease Me...

It was my own fault. I primed the pump. It was a risky game, but nobody made me play. Years before when she lost interest in sex and in me, after our kids came along, I discovered by a quirk that the thought of other guys finding her attractive turned her on. Previous to that I'd been very jealous. But when I saw that a little teasing and a little flirting resulted in my getting the benefit, I thought, what the hell, why not? So we made a game of it. But it had always been something we did together. Not that we actually did anything with a third person, we didn't. But we'd talk and fantasize and get each other going. I figured it was harmeless and I was in full control. I did the choosing and could cut it off any time I wanted to... Talk about naive...

One summer in Cape May we went to a crowded bar. It was packed. The band was cooking. The night was sweaty. She was wearing a tight black dress with heels that had no back and showed off her pretty feet and pink toenails and made you want to take her in your mouth.

I sat at the bar and watched. She made the dance floor sway. The dark tan and the low-cut dress gave a conttrast to the space between her breasts and the skin of her collarbone and neck that made it impossible not to stare, not to want to parachute into her valley, face first, and never come out.

The way she filled out the dress, the way it clung high and rode up her thighs, the way her body moved to the music. Super Freak... Brick House... How low can she go? How wide can she spread 'em? How far up do they go? The way she ran her nails along the body of guys who squeezed by holding their drinks over their head and pressing close, she'd look into their eyes like undoing Ulysses, bite her lip in defiance, smile and say she couldn't help it. Reggae madness, Tease me, tease me, tease me, til I lose contol...

Outside we couldn't wait til we got home. I had her in the car, in the front seat, in the back, and on the beach. We'd relive incidents like that over and over again throughout the year. She'd tell me stories about driving guys crazy at work. She'd tease truckers on the road, torment the husbands of her friends when we were out together, tell me about it while we made love, recount stories of lovers before my time, somehow, it kept things juicy. And in the winter, when we got bored, we discovered cyber-sex and phone-chat, harmless fun between the two of us. And when it was good, like the nursery rhyme; it was very very good, but when it went bad...

It wasn't complicated, how I discovered her secret. It happened one night when I brought her a Sangster's Jamaican Rum Cream over ice. She was sitting at the computer, chatting with her friends, when a guy with the screen-name Red Ripper said a single word to her, Rainbow, he typed.

I'd read somewhere in one of my spy novels, Spy Catcher, by Peter Wright, that there's a sort of empty room in the mind of any intelligence operative reserved for bits and pieces of things that don't seem to fit anywhere, don't make sense in context, things that raise unanswered questions, things like Rainbow.

Many times when I'd come into the room, she'd try to distract me, or it seemed to to me, hide what she was doing. It wasn't strange. I did it myself. I was embarrassed to admit I was looking at sites that featured men and women in sexual situations, trying to get ideas and story situations that would turn her on and keep her interested. I told myself, in the end, it was just to get her to play.

What I didn't want to think about or admit at the time, was when it came down to it, I was at a place where I really didn't care anymore, why or even if she'd lost interest. I just wanted to satisfy myself. I was tired of trying to figure it out on my own. I knew that she'd lost interest after the kids were born. I spent years trying to understand it and fix it, but nothing seemed to work, not letting it rest, not upping the ante. Whether it was me she'd lost interest in, or in men and sex generally, it got to the point where it didn't matter as long as I got mine.

But this particular night, I had my first hint that she had not lost interest in men or in sex generally, just in me. She was interested in him because the last thing he thought about when he saw the name Molly pop up on the screen was anything to do with family, responsibility, or understanding or fixing anything. For them it was the wild thing, just pure raucous sex. Anything else was not a possibility. This was a fling.

When he said Rainbow I could tell it was something I wasn't supposed to see. I didn't understand it, but I could sense it. It made me curious and it excited me. I was being excluded. I didn't want to think about why or admit it might be too late for me, admit I'd ruined it for myself with Molly. It was his turn, obviously. He was the younger man with the new baby and the cold wife, and Molly was the older woman, his pheromone-jones... the primal-heat

www.amazon.com/Fifty-Boy-Desmond-Jones/dp/0741420171