Eva Mazza - Sex, Lies & Stellenbosch

Her cheek peeled reluctantly from the pillow. A union forged by drink and drool; the latter, an unglamorous snail-trail from the left corner of her mouth. Eyes wide open. What’s the time? Jen turned her body gingerly onto her side. Her phone read 05:00 am. The party was over! Crap! I’m in the dog box, that’s for sure . Only after she’d made the enormous effort to move her face back onto the pillow’s clammy wet spot to check whether her husband was asleep, did she remember she had locked him out of their bedroom. Double bloody crap!

Needing to pee, she sat up and waited for her head to catch up with her body before placing her feet on the floor. Using the bedside table to ease herself off the bed, she staggered stilettoed in the dark to the bathroom.

“Shit!” she cursed, butt sliding into the wet toilet bowl. She clutched the sides to avoid slipping any further. John always leaves the effing seat up! She flushed, then stumbled to the basin to splash water over her face.

The fear felt like ice.

What had she done? And where was John?

She chose to ignore her best friend Frankie’s string of WhatsApp messages. Probably apologising for being such a bitch. Frankie could go to hell!

Jen threw her stilettos across the room, unlocked the door and padded towards the lounge, tripping over the rug and nearly landing on her face on the way.

“I’m still drunk,” she moaned aloud as she collected herself, grabbing a bottle of still water from the fridge and gulping it down.

“John?” she called. “Are you there?”

No answer. She moved towards a shadow of a man asleep on the couch. Larry the Lecherous Lout. Stirring, he grabbed at her.

“You need to go home now, Larry.” Jen pushed his hand away and stepped outside. A gentle breeze stirred the hot air and she shuddered at the prickly perspiration under her armpits . Where the hell is John?

Candlelight flickered in the tasting room. All was quiet, but perhaps he was in there, asleep. An owl’s last call heralded the dawn.

Bloody reckless to pass out with a candle burning!

Jen moved towards the entrance, the candle beckoning her in. “John?” she whispered, gently pushing the door open. A man was seated on a bench in the shadowy far corner, his head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth agape.

Good God! It was like road kill. She couldn’t help herself; she didn’t want to look, but she had to. Revolted and intrigued, she stood there, incapable of moving, of anything.

The man’s one hand seemed to be cupped around a woman’s breast while the other held the back of her head.

“Yes, baby,” he groaned.

Baby!

And then it dawned on her. That man was her husband of twenty-four years! Jen do something. Anything!

“John?” Her voice sounded foreign.

Wide-eyed now, he looked straight at her. The idiot remained seated. He must be in shock.

There was an agonisingly long pause. Aren’t you going to stop her?

She must have communicated this telepathically because both their eyes shifted to the kneeling woman, commendably (or so Jen thought) using her mouth to effectuate her adulterous husband’s happy ending.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She had always imagined a stronger, more dramatic reaction to such a revelatory scene of deceit and treachery.

The woman’s head jerked away from her husband’s groin . Jen felt ridiculously relieved when she saw that John-John wasn’t standing at attention. He’s mine! Breasts spilled out from an unbuttoned top.

Distracted by the sight of the porn-star mammaries, Jen wasn’t yet aware to whom they belonged.

Then.

“Patty?” she asked, as if she had stumbled across her after many years. She turned to her husband. “Patty? The wine rep?”

It was John’s fifty-fifth birthday bash; a birthday that would have been overlooked but for Brigit, the eldest of their offspring and the apple of her daddy’s eye. It was Brig’s idea to surprise her father, yet as much as they’d tried keeping it a secret, he had found out. Brigit was disappointed, but Jen was happy the cat was out the bag; surprises weren’t something she was comfortable receiving, let alone organising.

Things had gone awry after the speeches; a pity, since the party had got off to such a good start. It was Jen’s fault entirely. If only she had stuck to her prepared speech. Well, it wasn’t really hers ; Brigit had written it. Blame it on the champagne and shooters. Maybe if she hadn’t drunk so much, she wouldn’t have reacted the way she did. Brigit had always said that Jen couldn’t take a joke, that she had no sense of humour. Tonight, I proved her right.

Looking back, Jen’s sense of humour failure could be traced to her gold stretch pants. Normally she paid no attention to Brig’s jibes. Since she could remember, Brigit almost always found her mother embarrassing, invariably resulting in some snide remark which she had learned to ignore. However, the eldest’s disparaging comments about her outrageously expensive too-tight pants had hit a nerve because, well, they were embarrassingly true.

“Oh my God! You’re not wearing that tonight, are you?” She asked in the demeaning tone reserved solely for her mom.

“Yes, I am,” Jen said, pouring herself into them.

John came to his wife’s defence, which was rather sweet of him as the two loved to tease her. “Brig!” he bellowed from the bathroom. He’d strutted through to their bedroom, bath-towel wrapped dangerously low around his hips, and planted a kiss on Jen’s cheek. “Mom’s aim is to look hot; it’s an age thing, hey love?” he teased, looking her over appreciatively.

“What is it with men and women in tight pants?” Brig ridiculed.

“No, it’s not my aim!” Jen lied as their daughter watched her struggling to close the zip. John moved in to give her a hand, which Jen smacked away.

The mirror reflected her delusional wannabe-hip forty-nine-year-old self in pants intended for someone decidedly younger. Maybe John’s birthday had triggered fears of her imminent fiftieth. She had told the shop assistant she was sick and tired of looking like a boring middle-aged farmer’s wife and the young woman had assured her the pants did the trick.

“Actually, my aim is to look hip.” She’d managed to get the zip up. “I’m tired of looking like a mom.”

“So, you decided to shop at Forever 21?” Brig chortled appreciatively at her own joke and, as usual, John joined in.

It was true, Jen wanted to look sexy. Instead, she looked like a desperate cougar at a university digs’s sex fest. She’d watched her husband as he prepped for the party. He’s effortlessly hot.

In truth, it wasn’t effortless. John spent three afternoons at gym and two mornings cycling or jogging through the vineyards, every week, without fail. It had paid off. Unlike many of his friends who had developed paunches, he devoted a lot of time to his appearance.

“More time than I do,” Jen had bitched to her book club friends.

“Count yourself lucky,” Shelley had retorted, and the rest of the group agreed. “At least you have something to work with. Some of us have to use our imaginations.”