Cheating

I am Aghast in Ecstasy. Outside, a mountain bird slides up and down its effortless scales, then, satisfied, gives it up and there is silence except for the slurping noise of her lips on my cock. The fear of waking her two small daughters, asleep in the same bed, who would find their mother's head being pressed (however tenderly) close to my groin, of my wife's wandering sleepily toward the bathroom outside the cabin and being treated to the sight of my leisurely pumping hips, the sound of her friend's contented murmurs--it is enough to unman Priapus.

But it doesn't. We go at it until I feel myself explode in a silent orgasm. We kiss, I pull my pants up from around my feet, we part. The children's loud breathing hasn't missed a beat, my wife may perhaps have moaned her passage through a dark dream of jealousy, but it was only a dream and she, too, sleeps. Once again, I have done the dance of secret sex and escaped--safe except for the long, uneasy wondering at the power exercised by my demon of the gonads.

I wonder: Is it possible to nourish an honest, loving and enduring relationship with Jan (who happens, happily, to be my wife) and somehow to do something with those stirrings that keep my prick wigwagging like a semaphore of the groin? Abstractly, I'd have contempt for a weak-willed man accepting a blow job from another woman in the same room with her children. A stiff prick has no conscience--nor does a well-oiled cunt--but there are limits. Yet I did it; when she reached for me in that moon-struck cabin, no consideration on earth would have kept my trousers from dropping.

It is a hurting struggle to balance commitment to a mate with sexual openness. My friends--especially the ones from New York--say "Cheat." And they give me the bleary, weary smile earmarked for childish provincials who think that either fidelity or honesty are real-world possibilities. My feminist friends backhand the man's pain--loving one woman, burning for others--and accuse me of begging for that well-beaten dead horse, the double standard. Susan says: "Men! When you're not whinnying about your conquests, you're whining about your pain! Well, what about Jan? Do you want her to sleep around?"

Hardly. My vision of happiness does not include my wife as the belle of the orgy. Even so, there is in my heart a reservoir that wishes for her the pleasures I find myself seeking and, once in a while, finding in sex with others. Sexual pleasures nourish me, their memories warm me. My teeth are getting longer; age is no illusion! It is happening to me! Still, I remember a green-eyed woman who looked up as I was fucking her and said, "You have the body of a Greek god." We had been hitting the wine ferociously, the girl was kind, the compliment was a cliché--still, the memory is good. Her words remain after the taste and the smell of her have dissipated and, in a mild and silent way, I hope that Jan has similar good sex to help carry her through the snoring, scratching, farting, belching, yawning mess that marriage insists on being on the bad days.

But I don't desire a double standard. What I would like is for us to be able to sleep with others and not tear ourselves apart because of it. We've experimented some with it, with dubious results. Now, this may be soporific stuff to those of you who have screwed one-legged teenage midget nymphos in the laundromat. I read your magazine-column letters, your psalms of lust without consequences. I salute you who can handle twosomes and threesomes, who can take on entire sweating, humping armies. With such casualness! But I have never met one of you, you rascals. I have met couples who have tried an open-bed policy. And I have met a corresponding number of lawyers and therapists who wing their winter's way to sun-stormed islands on the wages of failed sexual openness.

I even know couples who have pledged themselves to perfect fidelity and who seem to handle it with none of the clumsy waltzing Jan and I do. My friend Alicia says, "Oh, Alex wasn't jealous when I was in California on that trip with Jeffrey. We just don't sleep with anybody else." What a sweet, simple statement: We just don't sleep with anybody else. It doesn't rain frogs, either, but sometimes the creatures come tumbling from the sky anyway. Sometimes men and women stray. Sometimes I get hot for somebody else. Alicia and Alex are content, they say, but that sort of sexual placidity eludes my dopey groin.

I burn for other women, and yet I despise falling into that most dreary of sexual clichés, "the cheating husband." On the contrary, I am beguiled by the phrase "a faithful husband." What a nice thing to be. The phrase has for me the sweetness of water for the Bedouin. One doesn't hear much about faithful husbands these days. Nor about unicorns or carrier pigeons. And, bless them, there are no faithful husbands in this story, which is a true one.

•

Teresa's legs opened to me courtesy of Rolling Stone, and my affair with her provided Jan and me with that happiest of occasions: a crisis during which we acted decently toward all. Teresa was green-eyed, with a wicked, humorous twist to her lips and the high-breasted, round-butted body of a dancer. We'd known each other for years and in our town's queer scheme of things, there was enough panache to being published in Rolling Stone that I was in her bed within days of my article's appearance. Her sex life was vastly more entertaining than my own. "Mark likes to tie me to the bed and then fuck me three or four times. We go to a lot of orgies, but it's not as much fun as it used to be." She mentioned a local restaurateur's name and said that he sometimes gave her and her husband 50 bucks to watch them fuck. This storm of sex deposited no orgasms with Teresa; there was a certain air of work as I humped away long afternoons while she reminisced about an Arab lover she had left in Cairo.

I was cheating on Jan--we were in our fourth year of living together; two years later, we married--and Teresa and Mark were sexual blabbermouths; soon, my fear of getting caught and of possible retaliation by Jan convinced me I should tell her before someone else did.

So I confessed. Jan was superb! Hurt, jealous, worried, but understanding. "Are you in love with her?" No. "Do you want to keep seeing her?" Well, yes. "If you want to, I don't want to stop you. I just hope you won't hide things from me." Jan was decency incarnate.

Perfect, admirable candor was wrapped around our affair, and it was dull. Teresa and I coupled a few more times, then parted in wry friendship. During all this, Jan was superbly restrained, never once whacking me with a verbal rolling pin. She did have a date while on a visit to her Florida home and when I asked her what had happened, she replied, "Nothing--we kissed some, but he was too skinny. Turned me off."

Her canonization became complete then. If she didn't make it with somebody else after me and Teresa, then her desires must be on a superior plane foreign to mine. So I thought.

•

Already, I have gotten myself drunk in the purposeful way of the married man who is hot for another woman. If, I think, Jan would pack it in and go to sleep (and only sexual dread could keep her up this late), I could see what would happen with Jennifer. Jennifer's young man has long since gone to bed with a tits-and-ass magazine. My ginnish, woozy state is necessary for me to make the first light touch, let the first prompting, hot word come from my cautious mouth.

Jennifer, Jan's best friend since they roomed together at college, is a blue-eyed blonde bombshell with lovely, luxuriantly haired legs. She is 26, the same age as Jan, and possesses many of the entitlements of American life: an active, strong intelligence, money enough for options, looks that conform to a male vision of beauty. She chafes at the accident of genes that made her a cliché in men's eyes. Jennifer has chased orgasms for years with little success until recently. The hunt has taken her and her fellow, Ted, through individual and group therapy, sexual-vulnerability clinics, until, finally, she has cornered the elusive Big O through use of an inexpensive little machine of which I make a mental note for Jan. "I'm really getting into sex these days, and it feels great," says Jennifer. I can feel it: I've experienced some pantsbusting vibrations from her this weekend.

I really do want my wife to leave me alone with Jennifer. Finally, Jan concedes and walks tiredly back to our bedroom. Little do I know that Jennifer is afraid of being alone with me. "I was so turned on to Bill," she will tell my wife later. "I didn't trust myself to be with him." Everyone fears me. I am a terror.

Jennifer rises to go to bed; I follow her. Sniff, sniff! Bitch in heat I am. I have to see What Will Happen. A little touch Between Friends, and aren't men supposed to become more Up Front with their Feelings, easier about Touching? Words are available for these urges, you know. In the kitchen, we fence a little with our good nights and I wrap my ambivalent arms around Jennifer. As we kiss, I hope that my wife is sound asleep.

The kiss is shot through with lust and fear--the wired tension of the married man who can't make up his mind. There is a certain amount of tongue dancing, my hands skate around her back and ass, my telltale cock rises sleepily and dutifully. As I think of Ted alone in the back room, my desire is hottened knowing that Jennifer is just opening up sexually.

But when she signals a halt, I'm glad. We return to our mates and I congratulate myself, a little prematurely, on my iron will power for not having made a real pass at my wife's friend.

•

I went to Jan's jewelry shop the next morning and found her alone and silent, frowning, haloed by an excluding silence. I asked why and was genuinely puzzled when she said:

"You know."

"No, I don't."

"That hot kiss with Jennifer last night."

She had seen us reflected in the goddamned kitchen window. Oh, good Christ! Then I caught myself and remembered that not even a nervous wife could see inside our mouths to gauge the tongue action, nor into my fantasies.

"That wasn't a hot kiss. I kissed her good night. Big deal."

"It looked hot to me."

I tried some selective truthtelling. "Well, I am attracted to Jennifer. You know that. But we didn't do anything."

"Well, she told me this morning that she's got the hots for you. She says she's afraid she'll make a pass at you if you're alone together."

Unfolding bliss and terror! How sexy to know that this great-looking and intelligent--I was just realizing how intelligent--woman is lusting after my body. How detumescent, though, to get the news from my wife and have to control my drooling.

Jan continued, "I thought last night that you wanted me to go to bed so you could screw her."

A sudden depression swaddled me. We fell into a long silence. A glum one. No customers came into the shop, the air conditioner cleared its throat. We were afraid to look into each other's eyes for help or truth. When Jan finally spoke in a get-it-all-out-fast voice, she changed the way I see the world. She began:

"I haven't always been faithful to you. There was this time...."

She had always demonstrated an eerie faithfulness to ruttish Bill, a flawless adhering to me for which I admired her, not understanding. I longed for a similar spirit to come over me, I loved her for her patience with my wanderings, I resented the advantage she had over me. I congratulated fate on the quirky humor of hooking up a man with no capacity for fidelity with a faithful woman. It was a phenomenon, Jan was a phenomenon.

But now she began to tell me about her turn and, as she spoke, a queer flash of nostalgia ripped through me: I wanted to be a child again, rather than an adult in a world where the people you love do the things she was telling me about.

You were out of town. You'd gone to your mother's and you'd left me in the hotel because we were between apartments. I was angry about being left, and I also wanted to see what it felt like.

I was walking down the street downtown and this guy with a nice-looking body said something to me. Something like, "You're a fine-lookin' momma." I went up to him and asked if he wanted to come to my hotel room later. At first, he thought I was kidding, but I said no, I really wanted to fuck him. I gave him my room number and went on back.

As soon as he came into the room, he ran into the bathroom and took the quickest shower I've ever seen. Then he came out naked. He grabbed me without even letting me take my dress off--I was wearing the long blue one with red buttons--and he pushed it up around my waist, put it in and began fucking me.

His cock was very big. Very thick, the thickest I've had. I tried to suck it, but it was hard to get my mouth around it. He said nobody had ever sucked him before. He was about 18, I think.

It wasn't, very good, and I'm afraid you'll think I'm just trying not to hurt you, but he just shoved it in and out. I didn't come. We did it three times, I think.

One time, I asked him if he had any fantasies he wanted to act out and he said he'd never seen a girl masturbate. I was feeling hostile and didn't feel like putting on a big show for him. So I just did it like I do when I'm alone, quietly, just a couple of fingers, and after a minute, he said, "Is that all?" I thought that was funny.

We walked back to his apartment and he put my initials on, his bedroom wall, where he had the initials of every girl he had fucked.

She ended with an extraordinary remark:

"The reason I'm telling you this is so you won't feel guilty about fucking Jennifer if you decide to."

I couldn't say a word. I was busy with a complex silence: adjusting my cuckold's horns for size. Repressing patently hypocritical cries of "How could you?" Gaping at the vision of Jan laid back on the hotel bed, that long blue dress with the tiny red buttons bunched around her slender waist as the young stud pumped away inside her. Sweetheart, it is a heart buster, enough to crack my heart. You nourish and heal me, but this one hurts!

"I didn't tell you to make you feel bad. Do you believe me?"

Yeah, I believed her, but I also believed that her confession was aimed at my balls. (She said his were like mine, "big.") I grilled her on the stud's anatomy. His big cock terrified me, aroused me. Like most white guys I know, the size of a cock matters. Goddamn if I can tell if it does to women. Conventional wisdom is that it doesn't much, that the mind is the important sexual organ; but I've never heard anybody say, "That dude is hung like Einstein."

As she watched for my reaction, I told myself shyly: Bill, if you can keep from becoming the stereotyped cuckolded husband--if you can act halfway decently and controlled, if you can help Jan take a step forward away from knee-jerk jealousy spasms--if you can do all this, my son, maybe Jennifer will be wriggling on top of your cock this very night!

She was crying now. I barely noticed. I didn't care at that instant why she had told me the story. For with each word she had spoken, I had become hotter, my icy lump of depression swept away by the rush of excitement at thinking of her being screwed by a stranger. My body was a raceway of heat and fear--the feelings were perfectly matched, perfectly apace. I was enormously excited by and attracted to the very thing I and most men invest so much time and energy in warding off.

"I'm hot," I said. "I want you now."

She sprang up and locked the shop door and we went to the back room and proceeded to have a memorable fuck, one I will recall in my moldy years at the shuffleboard court. We had at it in a standing position; I made her go over the delicious, painful details again--how thick his cock was, how he moved his body. We had the lights out and as I fucked her from behind, as she told me of the stranger again, I said, "God!" Desperation was hot on the trail of lust and, of course, I was humping to the lash of raving panic, an animal-level idea that I had to fuck her now to be safe. My orgasm, and it was a dandy one, came thundering on the heels of rapid-fire flashes of fear that my penis couldn't match the stud's giant one. Impotence usually isn't one of my problems--virtually the only one I don't brood over--but as we fucked, the memory blows of the stranger's totemistic, mammoth organ, combined with the skewering realization (I was just beginning actually to believe it) that Jan had actually done it, kept me sweating and laboring, kept the fuck, though exciting, from being entirely carefree.

•

We cuckold each other in many ways. With boredom and indifference. By being lazy lovers. By failing to create the metaphors of lasting love for our mates. By accepting the cheap fix of novelty as a substitute for searching for a tough and tender love. My wife may forget that I find the curve of her hips irresistible. She may forget that she has become love's definition for me. I say to myself, my wife must remember that I look at her and see what I used never to believe in: a woman who trusts and loves me, whom I know and trust and love, who will never leave me.

Cuckolding ranks low on the ladder of love's failings. But its lowly position gives it a good angle for that agonizing kick to the gonads. As that revelatory morning went on and as I continued to play the saddened but sympathetic husband, pain played a boogie on my guts.

•

Back home, we are a tense little crew gathered in our living room to discuss whether Jennifer and I will bed down. Jan tells about informing me of her afternoon with the hotel-room stud. They gaze at me in wonder that I'm not a raving, weeping, cuckolded wreck. I smile at Jan. Gin has helped mold my benign Buddhistic calm. Too, I am floating in a euphoria of irresponsibility; perhaps those years of fantasizing about Jennifer will culminate in sweet fucking reality. Within a few minutes. I am up front, smug and drunk.

"I don't know what to do," says Jan. "I don't want to be a jealous bitch, but I am. Bill, I don't want to stunt your sexuality. I believe that it's healthy to want to do it with lots of people. But I just get very scared when it comes up."

She is not crying but is close to it, and Jennifer, seated on the floor alongside her, leans toward my wife and gives her a comforting clasp on the arm.

"Jan, I would never do anything to hurt you," Jennifer says.

Ouch! A grimy film of soot oozes down to obliterate my picture of me and Jennifer wrapped together.

"I've just been turned on sexually lately," she continues, looking deeply into Jan's eyes. "It really wasn't anything personal for Bill, I don't want to hurt you, Jan, and I certainly value our friendship more than a fuck."

The implication left hanging is that old Bill, goatish prick that he is, has gone on record as willing to hurt Jan, wreck all our friendships for a quickie. My imp of paranoia insists that this honesty bullshit was intended solely to defuse libidos. Possibly. A room with a lower libidinal count would be hard to find. I couldn't raise a hard-on with a ten-story derrick.

Finally, we rode off down the beach to find a restaurant. Jan and I sat in the back, isolated by the boom of Waylon Jennings on the tape deck. Jennifer and Ted made their separate peace in the front seat and Jan kept her hand in mine. As if on cue, raindrops started splatting the windshield and Waylon began singing:

"I've been a fool, I've been a fool, Forgiving you each time you doneme wrong.

I've been a long time leaving, But I'll be a long time gone."*

And I began crying in earnest. Real, live tears of grief at sexual betrayal. My woman letting another man put his dick in her. Such grief runs amuck, leaving rationality and considerations of sexual openness and honesty back on the living-room floor. At that moment, if the Devil or his representative chauvinist on earth had offered me a lifetime chastity belt for my dear Jan, I would have snapped the lock with joy. Satan is never around when you need him, though, so I cried and raged up and down the rainy dune-lined highway, so frightening Jennifer and Ted, who heard only intermittent blasts of my accusations and sobbing come streaming through the tape deck's blast, that they stayed on the beach until midnight, waiting for me to come down.

•

Trying to fuck your wife's best friend probably is not the best testing ground of an open sexual relationship. But there is no safe place to begin. "I don't know," says Jan, "whether I'd prefer that you sleep with somebody just for sex--one-night stands and all that. But if you slept with somebody really neat--intelligent, friendly, sane--that would really put me uptight."

We go round and round on this thing. Such energy directed otherwise would no doubt have cured cancer, revamped Amtrak and concocted a nutritionally valuable soybean martini. But life poses each person specific problems, and among Jan and my conundrums is how to create a love that doesn't deny a certain elemental liveliness. Cheating on one's wife transforms you into a sexual cliché; that's uncomfortable. But honesty is excruciating:

"I have the feeling you would never turn down any woman," says Jan.

"That's probably right, except ugly ones, fat ones."

"God! Do you know how that makes me feel?!"

"Shitty, I suppose. Me, too. But it's a moot question. Nobody propositions me."

"But if they did...."

She is saddened to think of me as such an easy lay. I'm depressed that getting laid is such a torturous process for those of us to whom the garden of sex consists of a few million thorns guarding a couple of dozen blossoms.

We resolve to be more honest. We swear we will let each other know when that familiar twitching begins as a friendly stranger's eyes compliment her slim good looks, as I try to decipher the cool, assured smile of the long-legged Australian teenager whose bikini fights for a hold on her bronzed perfect body. We hold each other, my wife and I do, and try to want what the other wants. We are arrogant enough to think we are special and the banality of cheating is lugubrious to us. We want to understand as much of each other as is possible; by now we know that nothing, no blockbuster revelation of desire or act, can blast our love. We are beyond the double standard, it goes without saying. Likewise, we refuse to let ourselves be spiked in the Iron Maiden embrace of monogamy.

We agree: Deceit is the assassin of love.

•

Last week, Jan and I and some visiting friends took the 40-minute ferry ride to a nearby island. On the way back, rain whipped down and forced us into the car to read the newspaper and, for me, to drink warm gin and tonic. Bored, I sprinted up into the passengers' lounge and fell at once into a flirting conversation with a blonde from East Tennessee State University. Obviously stoned, she welcomed the warm liquor and swayed against me as we squinted against the slanting downpour. "God, look at the colors in the water!" she said, leaning forward, so that her white blouse fell away, leaving me the lovely view of her small, high breasts.

"My friends in the car probably think I've drowned," she giggled.

"What kind of friends, boys or girls?"

"Three girls."

"Hmm, sounds nice," said I.

"You like those odds?" she smiled.

"I like to think about it. I'd probably peter out."

She laughed, I laughed. When the ferry began its slide into the dock, the married couple who'd been eying us with some doubt descended the iron stairs and the door slammed shut on the girl and me.

"We're all alone now," she said. "What do we do?"

"You know what we do now," I said. I pulled her to me and kissed her.

"Your wife. What will she do?" Her smile showed she didn't care what my wife would do.

"Kill me, probably."

We kissed again, told each other we were pretty and made arrangements to meet later that night up the beach. The arrangements weren't kept.

*"I've been a long time leaving." Words and music by Roger Miller. Copyright © 1966 By Tree Publishing Co., Inc. International Copyright Secured.