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PART TWENTY-EIGHT |
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OF FLINGS PAST
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After the divorce, a former wallflower really blossoms
of TheColumnists.com
Divorce is never pretty, but, as divorces go, mine (ours) was almost painless--not fun, to be sure, but no lasting wounds. Mary and I are still pretty close, though it took a few years to finally reconnect as friends, recalling Woody Allen’s line: “I decided to give my wife a divorce--I figured it’s something she’ll always have.”
Released from my marital bonds and vows, I was now free to gambol in the green fields of the newly divorced, a wannabe stud horse put out to pasture. Those verdant fields of bachelordom seemed to stretch out forever before me after I left the judge’s chambers, but in a sense I was back in high school, just older and not much wiser.
One benefit of 14 years of marriage is, it demystifies women. At the same time, it makes the other women you notice even more desirable because, theoretically, they’re forbidden fruit. Maybe “demystifies” is not the word. Marriage makes women less scary, more human. It levels the playing field, or so it seems until you start playing again.
Women all remain partly enigmas, but post-divorce I was more at ease around them. Without ever realizing it, though, I was working the room even while married. My wife once accused me of always gravitating to the prettiest woman in the room. (Possibly, but I never saw her exactly swatting away the guys buzzing around her).
That’s the maddening thing about women--an astonishing number of them tend to be pretty, and guys tend to like pretty, which is not our fault. It’s nature’s way of keeping the species moving. If Eve hadn’t been pretty, males would have had to date frogs and lizards, bringing an abrupt end to homo erectus. And the pretty girls just keep coming along, far too rapidly to keep track of, let alone pursue--unless you’ve just been divorced.
To the newly liberated, everyone looks like a prize prospect--single, married, living together, old, young, rich, poor, stupid, disabled, any and all hues. Divorced women start eying plumbers, gardeners, FedEx guys and grocery store baggers, just as men begin seriously considering waitresses, bank tellers, meter maids and dental hygienists. (Yes, I actually dated a waitress, a teller and my hygienist; it beat flossing).
It is in this suddenly unchained state of mind--the land of the free, the home of the brave come-on--that you’re sure to make a total idiot of yourself. It’s easy to make a lot of false assumptions, among them that (1) you are irresistible and (2) women can’t wait to leap into the sack. In psychology they call this “projection.” New-agers call it “visualization.” You may know it better as fantasizing.
Suddenly I noticed other men’s wives in a new way--wondering if they were truly happily married or (like us in our last years) on the brink of breaking up, thus perhaps semi-“available.” Another marital lesson: You discover lots of couples in some form of troubled state and hear horror stories that Lisa and Frank haven’t slept together in 10 years, that Janice has a lover, that Mel has a woman in every major city, that Tim and Marlene belong to a swinger’s club, and that Carolyn is into rough sex. Who knew?
Open marriage and wife swapping was in vogue during the `70s, at least in magazines, where you read all sorts of lascivious tales of marital “arrangements” and “understandings.” A long-married history professor friend routinely had coed affairs, but he practiced academic safe sex: “Never until the grades are in.” One of his students had taught him, the faculty’s most conservative guy, the rudiments of S&M (“It’s not as weird as you think”). I was flabbergasted by news of such goings-on - and these were all married folks! What carnal delights must surely await single me, hotly pawing the dirt.
Two long-married guys I knew in New York had been serial philanderers, neither one discovered in 30 wayward years--wicked heroes to me, who was discovered the day after I phoned a woman I was merely smitten by. I’m a terrible liar, which saved my marriage--then anyway. One friend’s affair ended badly when he wouldn’t leave his wife for his mistress, who, in a page out of “Fatal Attraction,” sent the wife a letter mistakenly opened by her secretary, who kindly called my friend about the explosive note.
A guy I knew in a trial open marriage quickly learned that it worked much less easily for men than for women. When women learned he was married, open or not, they usually slammed the door--whereas most men are ecstatic to meet a married woman who’s available, with no strings. Ideal (until one of them falls in love and divorces).
My own marital state was monogamous (till the end was near), so when things broke apart I had a lot of lost time to make up for. I was married in 1966 and the sexual revolution began two weeks later. I missed it completely. My inner hippie was dancing in the streets while the outer husband could only watch--just like before I got married.
Growing up, sex never reared its beastly head at home, like most `50s families. I didn’t think of my parents as sexual beings--until I came across a photo of a nude woman in my father’s dresser drawer, buried beneath his handkerchiefs. By current standards, it was less revealing than a Victoria’s Secret ad, just a shot of a naked woman sprawled on a rug. It looked like a snapshot, not a commercial photo.
After my discovery, I often snuck peeks at the Mystery Girl, wondering if the woman was someone my father knew and how. I studied the photo, as I did the girls in Esquire and Playboy, for clues on how women were put together; school sex manuals were dryly clinical. Studying the Mystery Girl in my father’s drawer, I realized that it wasn’t the amount of flesh exposed, or even the pose, so much as it was the teasing, wanton look in her eye; that was instructional.
I was quite the non-gay divorcee, the poor man’s Casanova, an “Alfie” in training squiring a bevy of females of every kind (All names changed to protect the guilt-ridden): Terri, a widowed older woman with six kids whose husband had been stabbed to death by a prowler (was he still lurking?); Sally, a sexy blonde who seemed out of my league but was surprisingly accessible (this gentleman prefers brunettes but I don’t believe in discriminating); Laverne, a secretary to the science editor (who seduced me on her living room floor atop some vintage Life magazines her mother was throwing away); Nancy, a young intern whose marriage was in trouble (we met at a friend’s home on her days off and later rendezvoused in New York, me in a hotel and she with an artist friend in a warehouse loft in SoHo); Rachel, a married-with-kids staff photographer who threw caution to the winds (she imagined a double life for her).
Then there was Lois, a married woman I met at a party who was eager to hop to it in an upstairs closet; Zoe, a party planner happy to meet just for sex; singers Anna, Wanda, Dinah and Alice; Carol, a paralegal member of the Art Deco Society; Martha, a legal lawyer; and Nora, the flirty (soon to be) ex-girlfriend of a friend who played footsy during Scrabble games; Caroline, who said she wanted to see more of me or less of me; Toni, who said, “You’re supposed to fall in love with me”; and Josie, 30 years my junior, a brilliant but troubled girl of 25 who had skipped high school, read a book a day, threw temper tantrums, never had a boyfriend, lived with her parents forever and regularly called me at midnight with anxiety attacks about meteors falling out of the sky.
Don’t leave yet. Say hello to Joan, a horseback rider in a rocky marriage who took a writing class from me (we later met in New York); Katie, who interviewed me for an arts monthly she worked at (and, in the scary early days of AIDS, casually mentioned that she always wondered if her ex-boyfriend was bisexual); Samantha, a former San Francisco Ballet dancer-turned-acupuncturist who lived in a herbal-lined trailer; Robin, a chorister in a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe I mentioned in a review who wrote a friendly thank-you note that led to a memorable waterbed thank-you; Rhoda, a funny songwriter; Maryanne, a rich realtor whose coquettish daughter worked in my office and had a come-hither look; and Brenda, a chatty journalism student at my San Jose State alma mater who, after my speech to her class, looked me up in San Francisco and urgently called to say she’d left home and couldn’t reach her girlfriend in the city who promised she could sleep there and would I pick her up at the bus station and let her stay at my place until she could locate her friend, who never existed--as I learned about 3 a.m. the next morning.
Looking back on all those erotic adventures, it seems quite remarkable--not the number so much as the variety, although the number amazes this former wallflower--50-plus, from Anna to Zoe. For sleazy ego-gratification, I made a list of the women I had “been with” over a 15-year period. It sounds like a lot but not really --3.3 liaisons a year was pretty conservative in those wild and woolly 1980s to early `90s.
And I was, as I say, making up for 20 years of down time--a near-chaste youth and 12 faithfully wedded years. I haven’t, of course, enumerated the damsels that got away-- various near-misses, like Roslyn, who only agreed to sleep with me on top of the covers, fully clothed, when she locked herself out of her house; Paula, who had too much to drink and went right to sleep, like a good little girl; Margaret, who changed her mind at the last minute; and Caitlin, who tearfully borrowed $600 from me in rent money and then vanished forever.
I’m surprised I can recall them all so vividly, but even though not many of the liaisons lasted very long--with major exceptions--they all meant something to me, not just as conquests--in several cases, they were the conquistadoras--but as reliable, often fascinating tour guides who led me through the dark steamy jungles of the female world, Sexland, helping me discover (to quote one of them named Judy) “what all the fuss is about.”
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon illustration fuses Hummel's Nachman head to the body of a character from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This special extract from a work in progress is published by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted here Oct. 1, 2007.
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