Unwifeable(61)

“Can you believe this Tiger Woods thing?” he says with an angry straight face. “What kind of a scumbag cheats on his wife?”

I laugh, hate myself, feel aroused, and hate myself some more.

Any moral high ground I ever held over the Other Women who fooled around with my ex-husband is wiped out. Everything I’ve done—everything I’m doing right in this moment—is unjustifiable, unredeemable. It provides such a surprising sense of relief, too. It feels like freedom. No burdens. No moral questions. Say yes to every bad idea and accept that you are a bad person. You can’t get lower than that, right?

But eventually my conscience does catch up. I ask the Married Man if we can just be friends. No, he tells me. He’s not interested in that.

This makes me angry in a very specific way. Why do I have to lose out on this guy’s friendship when I try to do the right thing? Fuck it. I’ll just make things even worse then.

So instead of shutting it down, I bring my three-way companion Bianca into the mix.

“Want to get a hotel with me and my friend?” I text him one evening after one of our most recent trysts at the St. Marks Hotel. His reply is instantaneous. When and where?

I’m riding high now on just shrugging off any kind of consequences or responsibility. Because, I mean, society is so fucked-up and a guy who I thought was the perfect husband is cheating and the gun control problem and 9/11, so why bother, right? Everyone is terrible and we’re all going to die. When you make everything into this big awful incredibly gallows humor joke, you can pretty much justify anything.

“Let’s go shopping,” I suggest to Bianca. We stroll into American Apparel, and the young gay clerk keeps bringing us boring outfits until we finally tell him what’s up.

The clerk smiles. “Three-way with a married guy? I know just what you’re looking for.”

I buy a sheer body stocking and Bianca gets a barely-covering-her-ass blue mesh dress. Now fully costumed, we meet the Married Man at the Standard in the East Village.

“I told my wife I was at Avatar,” he says.

As I kiss and undress Bianca, I ask in a nauseating infantilized voice, “How do you like the movie?”

We all get stoned, and it is fun for about a minute. But when he begins fucking Bianca, it’s like I have disappeared completely. Of course that happens. What the hell did I think would happen? She’s fresh meat. So after a few minutes, I just bolt completely.

A few weeks later, Bianca comes to see me perform at Jon Friedman’s Rejection Show at the Bell House in Brooklyn, and she comes up to me at the bar, glowing and flush with the scent of sex.

“Dude,” I say. “Did you just come from seeing him?”

Bianca beams and says, “We have a new place. The Liberty Inn!”

I snatch my phone and send the Married Man a text with just the name of the hotel and a question mark. He doesn’t write back, which is unusual.

It is Valentine’s Day. His wife found the phone. His wife read the text.

I have just completely devastated this man’s marriage.

Neither Bianca nor I ever see him again.

Of all the shitty things I’ve done, I think hurting his family is perhaps the worst of all. But I also very much believe that it is the hiding of our secrets that create our sickness. There’s no excuse for what I did. There’s no excuse for what he did either.

It wasn’t all for naught, though. Because I am positive that after that disaster, the Married Man never cheated on his wife again. Most men never do—when they realize just how close they have come to losing everything that really matters.



* * *




FORTUNATELY FOR MY career at the Post, I have nothing that really matters.

One day I get a more-urgent-than-normal email from my new editor.

“Let’s discuss a nutty adventure story that’s come up,” she writes. While I highly doubt there could be any adventure that’s nuttier than the state of my current personal life, my editor quickly proves me wrong.

It turns out everyone in the media is talking about the an- nouncement of “Markus,” the very first legal male prostitute in America. Markus just gave an interview to Details about his thoughts on his role, an interview in which he, no lie, compared himself to Rosa Parks and Gandhi. They’ve stopped letting him do press because of this, so instead I book an appointment posing as an excited sex tourist.

Within the next seventy-two hours I have made a flight and car ride, eventually arriving at the tiny dusty yellow brothel known as Shady Lady Ranch in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Markus comes out to greet me, wearing a blue satin shirt, and guides me into a humble suite with a little Buddha statue. Then he asks me for $500 and tells me that we will first need to “inspect each other in the shower to make sure there are no discrepancies.”

Holy crap. A shower immediately? I’ve already decided I have no interest in sleeping with this guy. Hookers just don’t really do it for me. I’m all about the ego fuck, too, when it comes right down to it. But who am I kidding? I’m not going to blow this assignment just because I don’t want to stand naked in the shower with the guy.

Dignity? Never met her.

The two of us stand together awkwardly in the water, and I do a barely glancing “inspection” of this twenty-five-year-old Alabama native with an eight-and-a-half-inch dick who looks a bit like Steve-O. I know how the sex worker industry works. They keep tighter standards than most guys you meet online. Markus looks me up and down and shares his assessment.