Complex Creatures & Their Tormenting Needs
When is adultery acceptable?
The Cherry Oak Desk
Here's how the scene's set up: your beloved husband who you've been very happily married to just got bumped up in the company with a generous raise and a bigger office for all the dedication he's brought to the job these last few years. He can't wait to get home and give you the great news! You'll finally be able to upgrade to the types of cars a power-couple like yourselves should've been driving all along! Maybe he'll even begin thinking of that next step and start looking into adding on a nursery to your already perfect dream home you've lived in for the last X-amount of years. Or maybe there'll be more time to spend together now that more money will be coming in. Life is perfect! Everything is perfect! You are living the storybook fairytale you always knew you'd have, from as far back as you can remember, you willed this fate for yourself.
What you couldn't possibly know at the present moment is that in your husband's new office is also the new desk that's made entirely out of cherry oak making its maximum supported weight nearly a dozen times that of the two half-naked bodies currently atop its smooth surface. Of course, you'd never even heard the name “Jennifer,” let alone know she'd been recently hired as a new project manager or secretary or whatever, it really doesn't matter if she's the new janitor for all it’s worth. The reality is that she's eyeballed your husband from Day One. He's an average-looking guy with decent hair and a nice-enough smile. He doesn't hold doors open but doesn't let his yelling at the waiters get too out of hand when he has to send food back at restaurants either, so he's got his good qualities too. Above everything though, is the simple fact that he's a man in a newly-acquired position that comes with a bit of power, with a bit more pull and influence than his last one had. Top that off with the fact that he didn't turn away when Jennifer bent down the other day to pick up the notepad she'd "accidentally" let slip out of her hands and right to his feet and there you have your textbook example of unsuspecting prey.
Man Into Animal
Though this scene's just an example highlighting how quickly a “perfect” and “sturdy” life can be torn to pieces, it's also realistic and accurately representative of many more marriages than we probably want to admit. The point we're going to examine isn't the wife's delusional dreams of having attained the perfect man, but rather, that man's acceptance of that same delusion. They bask in a shared mania; that power puts a person above the need for a moral compass. They don't need to see where the bar's set, they are the bar. The deeper problem and the crux of this reflection into the human psyche is what that delusion eventually does to an otherwise, levelheaded person.
It turns a man into an animal. In an instant, he loses all self-control and every ounce of self-respect. He manages to spit on his wife's loyalty, his reputation that he's worked years at building up and his own dignity all in the same breath. It's almost artful, to possess such selfish, destructive talent. Almost, but not the slightest bit admirable to be considered quite “art.”
I realize how easy that scene is to write though. Men in power almost always let their egos spin out of control and the inevitable cheating on their wives is almost cliche at this point. So how about the wife herself? Or worse yet, how about the mother? Yes—the mother who's so far removed from the bored housewife trope that it's painful to even let our imaginations go down this path. Thankfully our thresholds have Olympian impenetrability and our sense of sympathetic understanding will guide us along.
10 Minutes of a Lifetime
What's the mother of three to do when in the midst of her ridiculously hectic schedule, she too, allows herself just a measly ten minutes to grab some midday coffee and the chance to catch her breath? Deny herself the most petty of pleasures? The small shop is packed yet she spots the lone chair that's still available in the back corner. Our exhausted woman with the chipped nails, the unflattering “Mom Jeans” and the pair of plain tennis shoes she wears to run errands with shuffles forward and sits down with an unassuming smile and starts sipping her caramel macchiato, trying in vain to clear her head of what else needs to get done today.
Just ten minutes of quiet time to herself, that's all she needs to walk out of here recharged and ready to continue on with her day. All is going well until she lets her eyes roam around the room, looking at the random college kids poking away at their laptops to the teenagers wearing green aprons working behind the counter and finally to a lonely mirror placed on the wall across from her, set facing her direction, dead-on. A pause, her gentle stream-of-consciousness now broken. The reflection looks back at her with the same wide-eyed disbelief. She stares in silence with a nonthreatening focus until finally, sighing a long, loud exhale of pure dejection before dropping her eyes back down to the floor.
No wonder she's gone untouched for these last few years. He'd stopped holding her hand in dark movie theaters let alone wrap his arms around her until she'd fall asleep, like he used to long before the kids ever showed up. Nowadays they'd say their ‘good nights’ with such monotonous delivery that it'd make her insides want to convulse, like metal nails scraping across endless chalkboard. After they'd separately crawl into bed, it was every person for themselves. She'd be left to fend the approaching darkness on her own, again. They weren't the team from their first years together. When they'd be each other's soldier, watching each other's backs, guarding for anything that'd stand in the way of making the other smile as often as possible. They'd stand up for each other, even when it was hard to. Even when they'd bicker themselves, they'd never let anyone outside of their marriage know or see any sadness. They kept it private. They only wanted to exude positivity to their friends and the world around them. Their business was their own and nobody else's. Their heavy and active sex life too. Nobody else's. Their closest friends would never guess, even in a million years how this depressed blob of a middle-aged man used to take his neckties after coming home from work, throw her on the bed after a few long kisses and wrap it around her eyes, tightly tying it behind her head. What difference something as small as a makeshift blindfold made back then. He'd let himself become feverishly engulfed in that passion, that carnal lust that they used to be able to see in each other. Now? He'd probably deny of anything ever happening. How that's the kind of disgusting things these kids are up to today. An eighty year old slumped man in a mid-fifties shell.
All For Naught
So why should she go out of her way to get her nails done? Who'd notice anything at all? Who would she be dying her hair for anyway? Even if she wanted to do it, nobody would ever notice. The background noise of the coffee shop which she hadn't even paid attention to since arriving was getting on her nerves now. Stupid caramel macchiato! The one thing she lets herself have during the day and these idiot kids can't even make it taste halfway decent?! She didn't need to check her phone to know that the ten minutes she needed had been up long ago—it was time to leave. This was a silly idea to begin with. Who drinks coffee in the middle of the day when she still had the dry cleaning she hadn't even picked up yet? Stupid. Stupid waste of time! That's all this was. She walked out through the front doors with an agitation she didn't have on her way in. Lesson learned. No big deal. Tomorrow she'll skip this entirely and the next day and the day after that. Why would she even deserve her ten minute coffee break anymore? She's been repulsing to touch for years, coffee was the last thing she deserved.
Hopping into the driver's seat of her car, she pushed the engine on and before being able to throw it in reverse and back up and away from the parking lot, she felt an oncoming wave of bottled up hatred. It was so sudden and took hold of her ability to choke down anymore tears that she accepted the inevitable and let herself burst into a ball of uncontrolled sobbing. Hands covered her floodgate eyes and soon was soaked and an even bigger mess than before. She hadn't noticed the man sitting in his car directly across the parking stall in front of her own who was now stepping out and walking over to her slowly with a concerned look on his face.
Knight in Shining Armor
At this point he doesn't need to have any tissues on him specifically. All it takes is for him to simply approach. No matter what follows next is irrelevant to that first decision he made to interact with a complete stranger. His presence has now become a permanent part of her life, no matter how insignificant it seems at first.
So maybe he offers to find a napkin for her in his car. She thanks him though reassures him she'll be just fine. It doesn't look like he has any so insists that he'll be right back. That he's just going to run and bring her a few from that coffee shop nearby. She tells him it's no big deal—he tells her not to be silly. Two minutes later she sees him in her rear-view mirror walking back with a small stack of napkins and a large cup of coffee in his hand. He thought maybe she'd like to catch her breath before going on her way and that he wasn't sure how she took her coffee so just got her a caramel macchiato instead. It's always been his go-to drink so figured it'd work just as well as anything else.
He then stands by her driver's side window for the next three and a half hours getting to know this woman. Getting her to laugh, to tell him about where she grew up and sharing stories from his marriage which ended up in divorce nearly a decade ago. They talk. And talk and talk and he makes her feel something new. He tells her how he'd love to be able to do it again soon, next time over dinner. She doesn't quite understand, she'd been upfront with him about having a husband and three children. He is sincere. No hidden agenda. Everything as it truly seems. He gives her his business card so that she doesn't feel any pressure to give him her information just yet.
Before parting ways, he slowly holds out his hand, waiting patiently to take hers, shake it, and while letting her know what an honest pleasure it was to make her acquaintance, he brings her hand to his lips and kisses it goodbye—chipped nails and all. She blushes like a second-grade schoolgirl, naturally.
This handsome man gets in his car to leave, pulls out of the stall and before taking off into the sunset, gives her one last wink while smiling. Our woman is left sitting in her seat, grinning, fiddling with his business card in her hands. Knowing she should just rip it in two, throw the shreds out her window and just go on her way. Just leave this parking lot and not let herself make something out of nothing. She sits and thinks and doesn't even realize how she's no longer concerned with how long ago her ten minutes were up. Sitting, fiddling with the card.
Decisions, Decisions
What happens next is for you to decide. It doesn't really matter. The truth is that for the next ten or twenty or how many ever years it turns out being, they'll undoubtedly be filled with fiddling. It'll be both—part anxiety, part excitement. Mostly though, it'll be the feeling of having someone take notice whenever she gets a manicure, or buys a new dress, or does something extra special with her hair. The nearly-forgotten feeling of being loved again, being needed will always keep that fateful card in her fiddling hands.
It's weird because I can't blame this poor woman. Her husband truly does sound like a jerk who doesn't deserve her in the slightest and I was just coming up with him on the fly. I feel for this lady. But can we really put her in a class outside of the husband from our first scene? Aren't they both committing the same transgression? Isn't the trust that one is throwing away as if it were a piece of trash the same emotion that the other is mistreating as well?
These are things that we'll all come up against in our lives. Human experience isn't so black-on-white though. We live our entire lives in a constant spectrum that's filled with endless shades of grey. We can assign morally upstanding people as judges and have them point their own weighty fingers in the faces of those who betray us. Until we're in these people's shoes though, it's as good a guess as anyone else's. Until we've got Jennifer’s seductively long nails slithering down to our belt, unbuckling it, and letting ourselves cross into a territory where turning back from is unheard of, we can't say for sure how hard or easy a decision it must be for the man with the nice desk that's just begging to be christened. Or until we reach a level of such self-hatred and pity that the last person we'd expect to have the ability of picking us back up, dusting us off and in-fact, placing us on an even higher pedestal than we've ever reached before, is a complete stranger with amazingly broad shoulders who walks with his head held high, we're doing nothing but throwing darts in the dark, trying to hit the center of a moral compass.
Shades of grey, always.