Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

“My end of the bargain?” I exploded. “I assumed my husband was a decent human being who wouldn’t do that to the woman he was married to. If I missed some obvious signs, it was because I wanted to believe you respected me enough to honor our marriage vows … or at least not crap all over them. And if you thought we had some sort of unspoken arrangement, that’s because you didn’t have the balls to ask me about it and find out for yourself.”

“You knew I wasn’t happy. I mean, I was never home, [acey. I was always working. And when I was home -”

“When you were home, you weren’t home,” I told him. “You were talking about work, making calls for work, getting ready for meetings related to work, thinking about work, or hell, probably thinking about Beebee. I’m not saying I was any happier. But at least I didn’t run off and sleep with some Cheetos-colored bimbo.”

“You don’t talk about her that way,” he growled. “Beebee cares about me. She listens. She cares about what I want, what I need.”

“Asking whether you want to be on top or bottom doesn’t mean she cares about you. Beebee’s looking for a meal ticket, Mike. She wants an easier life and, fortunately for her, you are more gullible than she could ever have imagined.”

“She wants to see me sail my boat, Lacey. She even came up with a name for it. The Liquid Asset.”

“You don’t have a boat, Mike.”

“Yeah, but she wants me to finish it,” he said petulantly. “She wants me to have a hobby, to relax. All you ever want me to do is work.”

“When the hell have I ever said that?” I demanded. “When have I ever insisted that you work more? If you felt pressured because we had to pay for the bass boat, which you wanted. Or the condo, which you wanted. Or the truck or the jet Skis or the club memberships - well, then maybe I could have gotten a job to help out. But you didn’t want me to work. It was embarrassing, you said. My job was to keep you going, to build this perfect, stupid life for you. That was what you wanted. Don’t blame me because you changed your mind!”

“Beebee’s what I want, Lacey. And I’m not being fair to her. I can’t keep making promises to her that I can’t keep.”

“Oh, you’re not divorcing me because of Beebee. You’re divorcing me because I managed to shame you as much as you’ve shamed me.”

“You won’t last five minutes without me, you know,” he sneered. “The house, the money, the credit cards. I’d love to see how you’re going to get along without my credit cards.”

“Aw, Mike, I wouldn’t worry about it. I recently liquidated some assets of my own, so I think I’ll have some pocket money for a while. Mr. Goote really is very generous.”

“Mr. Goote? Why would you go to Leo -” Mike gasped. “Your ring? You hocked your engagement ring? That was a - Do you have any idea how much that ring cost?!”

I shrugged. “Probably twice what I sold it for.”

Mike growled. “I’m going to leave you with nothing. No cards, no cash, no house, no car, nothing. By the time Beebee and I get done suing you, you’ll be living with your parents, working double shifts at the Sizzler -”

“Oh, go sting the BumbleBee,” I sniped, shutting my phone off.

How, I wondered as I stared out over the water, could two intelligent adults end up like this? Well, one intelligent adult. Why was it that other relationships had flourished and ours seemed to have stalled and died an agonizing, horrible death? Mike and I had been given all the tools to build a good life together. Both sets of our parents bumped consistently along the glass ceiling between middle and upper class. We had good orthodontia, summer camps, swimming lessons, new cars for our sixteenth birthdays. We graduated college without student loans. We got married at the First Baptist Church and our reception was held at the Singletree Country Club. The down payment on our sweet little starter house was a gift from my grandparents.

Maybe the problem was that we never struggled. There was nothing to bond us together, us against the world. We didn’t have to turn to each other and figure out what the hell we were going to do to pay the light bill or make the next house payment. We just coasted along. The thing about coasting is that it usually means you’re going downhill.

I knew we were pathetic excuses for adults. I knew we should have told our parents to back off and just let us be. But it was so easy to let the hard stuff, the bills, the worrying, the minutiae, be taken care of so we could focus on getting our lives up and going.

I screwed myself over. That’s the worst part. I did this to myself. I’d never lied to myself about the level of contentment in my marriage. I knew I was never blissfully happy. When I realized our newlywed life wasn’t the ecstasy-fest I’d hoped for, I thought, “Well, no one is completely happy.” And when I had to fight harder and harder to find the bright spots in my marriage, I thought there was something wrong with me. I had a beautiful home, a husband who provided for me, security, position within my community. Most women would have been thrilled with my life. I thought maybe I didn’t feel things the way people were supposed to. Maybe my expectations were unreasonable. I even thought about going on antidepressants for a while, but we just don’t do that in my family. Three Bloody Marys for breakfast was perfectly acceptable, but a Xanax or two showed character flaws.

To give a more explicit example, in eight years I’d never had an orgasm with Mike. Ever. Not even a promising twinge. I read somewhere that a good lover played your body like an instrument, listening for the right sounds and striking the ideal notes at the perfect time. Mike’s playing style was more like “Chopsticks,” hitting the same notes over and over again and nobody got any enjoyment out of it.

At first I was convinced it was because I was just too nervous that Mike might trick me into sex that I couldn’t relax enough to enjoy our “we’ll do everything but that one thing” phase. That was followed by our “let’s just get it out of the way so there’s no pressure on our wedding night” phase, followed by the “is that it?” phase. Just after we were married, I convinced myself that I was still too new to sex to enjoy it properly. About three years in, I finally realized that Mike Terwilliger was just lousy in bed.

By then, the mere mention that we might need to buy a book or get some counseling sent Mike into a snit that lasted two weeks. It wasn’t his fault that I didn’t respond to him, he said. If I would just relax and give in to some of his naughtier fantasies, I’d be having multiple orgasms in no time. Unfortunately, most of his fantasies weren’t all that naughty. He really thought having sex in our tent on a camping trip was living on the edge.

I convinced myself my problem was clinical, like I had some nerve endings disconnected somewhere. I even tried talking to my doctor about it, but Dr. Metzger, our general practitioner, had been treating me since I was four and was extremely embarrassed by the conversation. He used some Yahtzee metaphor I didn’t understand, something about scoring combinations and not expecting multiple Yahtzees in the same round, and then quickly left the exam room.

Of course, my self-diagnosis that I was dead from the waist down changed when I attended Genie Howett’s Pleasure Chest home sales party. Genie, who Mama had always called “fast,” had taken up selling various toys and lubes at home parties for pocket money. She announced this after her husband, Duke, cut up her MasterCard.

At the time, none of us were sure whether she did it because she enjoyed the work or because she wanted to embarrass Duke into opening another account for her. Three years later she was the regional sex toy queen managing five saleswomen. But this was her first party, a sort of trial run, before she launched herself on the public. While Duke was away on a duck-hunting trip, she invited about a dozen old friends to her house for “tapas, margaritas, and sex swing demonstrations.”