Saga of the Shrewd Wife Pt. 02

To be sure, my wife's having sex with Frank was a marriage breaker. They had no hope of my rationalizing, mitigating and accepting cuckoldry.

As I shaved, moreover, I remembered that my pathetic attempt at perverse humor as a counter attack had resulted in Sophie's simply accepting my insane terms. She was neither angry nor amused.

Devoid of emotion, her beautiful face had registered a postmodernist's shrewd Stoicism. I hated both. Postmodernists had authored the 21st Century's celebrated slut, and Stoicism had provided the obscuring evasions when necessary.

When had she acquired this baggage? Just the presence of a postmodernist set my teeth on edge; and I considered Stoics to be mischief makers, advocating an antithesis to my standards of the civilizing process.

Stoics were shrewd, and juries very seldom found Stoics guilty.

Suddenly Sophie was shrewd.

Reality dawned as I inspected the middle aged face looking back at me from the mirror. My wife had cucked me, but I would not remain cucked.

Like the buffoon that I loved to play at every opportunity, I had countered her absurdity with a nonsense scheme. Essentially, I had said in a semblance of a legal document that if she "fucked other men," she could continue to live with me and the kids only if she met five conditions:

1)Sophie would have sex with at least three men each Friday night and at least three each Saturday night. Her proof of compliance would be a $500 cashiers check from each tagged "Fucking Sophie."

2)Sophie would present weekly STD reports.

3)Sophie would occupy the master bedroom, and I would build bachelor's quarters on the back of the lot.

4)Sophie would never bring a man or sex partner of any description on the premises.

5)Sophie would attend church weekly and all events that involved Annie or Bud.

Attorney Nero Bloomsbury, my roommate in college who continued as a friend in later life, had drawn the bogus document, a nonsensical fool's folly. At the time, neither he nor I accorded the situation the gravity it required, a failure of dire consequence.

Stupidity briefly reigned. Instead of promptly disabling the ties that bind, I flippantly had pretended to accept the insanity while formulating some rules to govern her whoring.

Any sidewalk philosopher would have known that divorce was the only avenue.

All facets of my stupid response were prepositioned on the 99 per cent probability that Sophie, as the sanest of wives and most brilliant of lawyers, would perceive that she had no gambit. Return to sacramental norms would be her only option. Abject surrender would be her only window of opportunity.

My beautiful though pixilated wife would either apologize and abandon her rapidly emerging new orthodoxy or slam out the door and gallop off into Hades, never again to be seen. Gradually my mind had chosen the vision of her jogging in Hades.

That she would smile ruefully, sign the phony contract and accept the ridiculous terms had never occurred to me.

Almost immediately, Nero was attempting to rescind his agreement to participate in the sham. He had realized too late that Sophie could choose to disregard the farcical aspect and haul him before the Bar Association's ethics committee.

"No one would believe it was a joke," Nero fumed. "I drew them damned thing too perfectly."

Our prankish response to Sophie's hammering our marriage apart was so idiotic that I tried to call her later in the morning to ask her to lunch. Most certainly that would have been another mistake.

What was I thinking? Contrition effectively would be surrender.

Apparently, Fate owed me one. Sophie did not answer her page. How humiliating it would have been if I had asked her to lunch? What message would that have sent about my state of mind? Obviously I, too, was caught on the horns of the dilemma.

Fortunately, her PA inadvertently had divulged that Sophie would be out of the office all afternoon and could not be contacted. Like a stinging slap, the implications of that message had brought me back to reality.

Silly me! She was out "getting fucked."

Most assuredly, Sophie would not return to her office that afternoon. It was Friday. And she had said she was "going to get fucked" Friday afternoon. I doubted that she could get fucked all afternoon in the district attorney's offices; and, by Sophie's own declaration, getting fucked all Friday afternoon was her plan.

Of course, I must have been brain dead. Why would I consider taking my wife to lunch to calm the seas and assess the wreckage? She had shamelessly created the wreckage. Sophie had turned off the sun, not I.

Adding insult to injury, had my wife not betrayed me with that smirking academic gasbag, Dr. Frank Malone?

At least that was my roiling frame of mind as I shuffled toward the kitchen and came even with the open door to my wife's study. To my astonishment, there sat my wife, scrubbed and alert and wearing her recently cleaned and pressed lawyer's suit.

Sophie sat regally poised with eyes bright presiding over a meeting of the board of directors of The Tennis Club. She was the chairwoman. (When the day comes that she ceases to fuck and suck like Aphrodite, I will refer to her as a "Chair.")

As I paused standing in the open doorway to her home office, Sophie twisted in her Captain's Chair. After the briefest hesitancy, her face became instantly animated in a spontaneously genial smile. Her guests, the seven members of The Tennis Club's board of directors and their spouses, either ignored me or stared in a haze of doubt and anxiety.

Dr. Frank Malone sat glaring at me over his shoulder. Fortunately, the piece of academic feces remained silent. His piercing black eyes spike for him, however, blazing a challenging hatred. I was pleased. Perhaps his seething bile betrayed that Beatrice had done a number on his psyche when she amputated his butt and tossed it to the curb.

Instantly I perceived that this scene was carefully staged and orchestrated. Everyone within the circle of our well defined pool knew that they had devoted the night to flooding the sewers with their combined juices.

They were winning every skirmish. No one could have detected any vestige of the fatigue of all-night tag team sex. Nothing about the busy scene had betrayed that my wife might have whored all night.

Speaking to me without seeking privacy apparently was her variant of a subtle disrespect. I listened only for the dual purpose of gathering information and quenching my curiosity.

"We have urgent business to transact," my wife said, her eyes clear and alert. "We need to meet with Nero, and then we'll leave and be out of your domain."

Nero Bloomsbury was my attorney and friend of long standing. Most certainly I resented his coming to my home to provide a professional service for this crew. I contained my anger, however, for the moment.

"We had an incredible party," she said without prompting. "We had to stop and eat breakfast and get ready for our meeting."

"You should have been there, Grant," Frank said, almost snarling as he attempted to take command. "We pounded her pussy into a slimy mess until the sun came up, and we wouldn't have stopped then if she hadn't gotten excited about her new business venture."

"Tell me about your sex party, Sophie," I said, baiting them.

"As Frank said, my boyfriends pounded my pussy until just before dawn," she said, now impatient with me and becoming irritable. She had lost her enthusiasm for the conversation.

I could hope that she was only belaboring her joke, but I saw no basis for doubt. She was not joking.

Embellishing Sophie's succinct comment, Frank interrupted with a graphic analytical description of Sophie's vagina at various stages of their sex marathon. Pontificating theatrically, his eyes rising to the ceiling in exaggerated mockery, Frank speculated that during the night's "heroic fucking," he began to envision a new systematic philosophy of freedom.

This contrived academic perversion succeeded in compounding my humiliation. I cursed under my breath and choked off a response when I found my brain attempting to find a connection between the philosophy of freedom and their festival fucking.

"She had to douche three times before she could sit on her car seat," Frank said, grinning contemptuously at me.

Though she obvious attempted to suppress her insolence, she couldn't mask her amusement at my reaction. One thing was certain. Sophie had fulfilled her agenda of dusk to dawn uninterrupted rutting.

It was time for me to go. Sophie's body language told me she would soon explode in a fit of anger. She adjusted her Captain's Chair and turned away from me as she resumed talking to her friends and associates.

"I have asked my attorney to join us this morning," my wife said reassuringly to her board of directors. "Nero is an authority on merchandising law."

At that precise moment the doorbell announced the arrival of my friend and attorney, Nero Bloomsbury. My wife arose, glanced at my face and smiled as she passed me trotting toward the front door to admit Nero, the traitorous bastard.

Nero refused to meet my eyes as he and Sophie entered her study whereupon she attempted to close the door in my face. All the while smiling into my eyes as she leaned shoulder into the door as I blocked it with my foot. At length she released and moved back. She shrugged and returned to her Captain's Chair, a thin smile of determination pasted on her otherwise impassive face.

Sophie left the door open this time. Obviously, she had dimmed me out of her consciousness.

For a nanosecond, I considered ordering them out. The house was owned by my grandmother's estate and leased to me. But I resisted that impulse.

There sat Dr. Frank Malone, however, at the table to my wife's left as brazen as a statue of Lenin. Why not? Frank the Pit Viper was a Lenin look alike with the same ruthlessness and soulless brain.

Strange! All of the spouses of The Tennis Club's directors were present except me and Beatrice Malone.

Nero stood between Sophie and Frank removing documents from a briefcase and studiously spreading them in some order of priority. I knew that this was critically serious business when Nero meticulously polished his half lens reading glasses and set the frame almost on the end of his nose.

My former lawyer and best friend began to discuss the ramifications of starting a business, refusing to look straight at me. He knew that our bond of mutual respect had been broken.

All eyes shifted nervously to focus on the spouse of one of the directors when she abruptly interrupted Nero.

"Did you say we were all going to go to jail?" the woman asked Nero. They all gasped as one.

"Your having indiscriminate sex with each other and a select few on the edge of your tennis club's clique," Nero said slowly, almost didactically, "was not a problem until Sophie collected money from the tennis pros as payment for sex."

What Sophie had done with The Tennis Club's directors and the tennis tour's pros after collecting her fees, Nero explained professorially, was a violation of law. All of those assembled would be complicit if Sophie's selling sex were investigated and confirmed.

"In the formality of the law," Nero droned, pontificating laboriously, "Sophie became a prostitute."

Involuntary groans circled the table. They were all registering shock and incredulity.

But Nero had a solution for them.

"Taking money in exchange for sex is a crime," Nero said emphatically and peered over his glasses. "But having consensual sex individually or as a group in an orgy is not illegal."

For a moment, the elites of The Tennis Club became a clamorous mob. Relief was palpable. They were all talking at once but to no one in particular. Fear also was palpable.

"But I took money," Sophie interrupted plaintively.

"Don't get excited, dear," Nero counseled. "Remember that you are the prosecutor and as long as your boss, the district attorney, doesn't hear about your one night of sex for profit, you can relax."

"So! Do we abandon our plans for the business?" one of the wives asked, making no effort to conceal her anger toward Sophie.

"Not at all," Nero said, smiling tauntingly. "You simply do business within the law."

Now he had their undivided attention.

"Selling a condom is not against the law," he said triumphantly. He arched his brow and smirked, awaiting a reaction.

"Go on," Frank urged hesitantly.

"And as the seller of the condom, you set the price," Nero concluded victoriously.

"Eureka!" Frank shouted, already understanding Nero's legalistic scheming. "We sell the condom for $100 and..."

"I won't do it for a piddling $100," said Marion Angsley Jones, the most promiscuous member of the board and the club's tennis champion for ten years running.

"Why not $500 a condom and a free fuck," asked Dr. Frank Malone, preening in his assumed brilliance. "Sophie got no argument last night when she demanded and got $500 an orgasm."

Nero patiently complimented Frank for his mental agility. Mathematicians should make exemplary pimps, Nero chuckled as an aside.

"It's the 'free fuck' as Dr. Malone so prosaically puts it that makes my plan so ingenious and jurisprudentially infallible," Nero said, beginning to enjoy the group's shift to enthusiasm and admiration for his unequaled jurisprudential brilliance.

"Are you serious?" Dr. Euridyce Kahlee Farouk, the renowned optometrist, asked in hushed tones. "If what you say is reliable even by half, we'll be richer than a pot seller in San Francisco."

At that point, Sophie huffed and wiped sweat from her brow as she shoved her chair back and strode toward me. Just before she shoved me into the hall and slammed and locked the massive oak doors, her feverish red face flared red with a combination of triumph, contempt and perverse vindication.

Getting the coffee brewing distracted me; but in my now activated brain, new perspectives and conjectures formulated like storm clouds. Sophie's meeting of The Tennis Club's supremes and superiors had renewed my flagging personal strengths.

All of a sudden, my sophomoric joke was not so absurd. As I slowly assessed the content of their discourse, I began to realize that my whoring nonsense made perfect sense to Sophie and her friends. Sophie and her Tennis Club orgy producers were creating a perverse reality that made my loony fiction seem perfectly rational.

Before I had cleared the stairs, however, I realized that Annie, who had remained at rehearsal in her studio, had smoothly swept from Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto Number One to David Rose's timeless The Stripper.

My Annie was 26 going on 1,000. Preventing Annie's genius from making her an enigma was becoming problematical. Insights so profound that they occasionally shook my equanimity had always characterized her soul image and artistry; but of late I had become aware of an emerging pedestrian carnality.

Annie's being the perfected image of her mother only added to the strain of fulfilling my multiple responsibilities. Nature had designated me as Annie's father, business manager, keeper of her moral compass and intellectual advisor.

There was no way Annie could know what had transpired in her mother's meeting with Nero. Yet, her dialogue through her music told me to get prepared for another shock. Sophie's astounding change in her life's notation undoubtedly would have an effect in the lives of our daughter and son.

Upstairs in the conference room, my wife's little band of almost comic adulterous coconspirators was adjourning. Their excitement charged the air. Obviously, Nero's legalistic novelties had lifted their expectations to new highs.

Annie had resumed practice with Beethoven's Fifth.

My coffee was almost ready, and the aroma pleased me as I listened to Voice Mail.

Dr. Frank Malone had left a dozen drunken diatribes and threats after his wife had flogged him thrown his clothes on the lawn. Apparently, his wife, Beatrice, who happened to be my chief project assistant, had bounced his butt after I had addressed his infidelities in public, revealing that he was fucking my wife.

Briefly I reflected on my first thought when I saw Malone and Sophie in her conference room upstairs. Intuitively I knew that they had been together through the night. Sophie had not come home; and Frank in effect had lost his home. So the plot had thickened.

They were coming down the stairs in twos. Though I had known most of these Tennis Club officials two decades or more, not one glanced my way or spoke as they filed out the front door.

My phone vibrated and a message went to Voice Mail. It was Nero.

"Call me immediately," the pompous wuss commanded.

To hell with the traitorous fat ass! He only wants me to call so he can resign as my lawyer. My loyal friend of almost three decades smells gold mines of legal fees in my wife's pussy.

I'll pour myself a cup of coffee first, I sighed as I washed my cup.

And then I'll poison myself with some raspberry jelly rolls.

My Saturday morning coffee choked me.

There on the table where I always placed my coffee cup were three cashier's checks, each in the amount of $500. What in the name of Homeric orgasms had Sophie done now?

Nero had referred to Sophie's taking money from the tennis pros as payment for sex. Help me St, Michael.! My wife had qualified as a whore in the most important criteria. She got paid.

Under the three checks, Sophie had left a computer printed note stating that she had complied with my rules. With a sense of piety, she had described having had sex with three men who reluctantly had gone to their banks that afternoon to draw the checks.

Incredulously, I read her concluding words: "...after I do three more men Saturday night, I will qualify to remain in the family one more week. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! You are a wonderful husband. And you will never know what you have done for me. Your plan for us to continue as a family was a work of genius. My lovers were relieved and appreciative of your faculty for resolving life's most resistant of dilemmas.

"We need to talk. I know it will be late but wait up for me. Love you! Love you! Love you!

"Your devoted Sophie forever."

Staring in horror at the three cashier's checks had momentarily paralyzed me. These impressive financial instruments represented my wife's signature footprints into institutionalized whoring.

Annie had come from her studio to get coffee. Vaguely, I could see Buddy watching the scene from the end of the hallway.

Now the nauseating duo, Sophie and the anus odor called Frank, appeared at the door of the kitchen. Sophie grinned, a greeting made more grotesque in the idiotic assumption that "all was well" between her and me.

Dr. Frank Malone stood beside her, spine straight and stiff, glowing with the assumed superiority that always seemed inherent in mathematical wizardry. My wife ran forward, wrapped her arms around me in a bear hug and squealed in ecstatic delight.

"Everything has fallen into place perfectly, Grant," Sophie gushed. "You made it all possible with your brilliant plan that will be the format for 21st Century domestic intercourse."

"Yes, Grant, I agree with Sophie," Frank intoned. "With this new marital paradigm, you have assured yourself a place in the Social Sciences Hall of Fame."

"You think indiscriminate marathon fucking is a social paradigm, do you?" I asked the idiot sardonically.

"Dad? I agree with Frank," Annie intervened. "Let's suppose your plan for the homemaker to have seven paid sexual encounters each weekend became a norm or better yet a law. Voila! Your have eliminated the two most virulent causes of divorce."

EVERONE SAW MY GENIUS

EXCEPT ME

Sophie interpreted her daughter's idiocy for me. It seems everyone except me saw the genius in my nonsense. My denials could not compete with their excitement and enthusiasm.