Connie emerged from
menopause fancying pretty much anyone in trousers, and intent on making up for
lost time. To age 53, she’d had only two lovers — husband Bob and the driving instructor under whom she’d
studied, nudge nudge. The problem being that, a few weeks after his 51st
birthday, Bob declared himself finished with sex, making it sound as though it
had been military service or a prison sentence. “I’ve done my share,” he said
as he tried to figure out where he could have left the TV remote. “Maybe more
than my share, in fact.” Connie was to understand that he intended forevermore to
enjoy less strenuous pastimes like watching footie and reading about military
history, which has fascinated him since childhood, though not to the extent
that he'd ever considered enlisting in the armed forces. Connie didn’t think it
fair that her husband’s new lack of interest in what they’d enjoyed calling the
dirty hula should be her own coital death sentence, and decided that the best
course of action would be a series of discreet affairs.
She began “working
late” a lot. She was her company’s regional sales manager for the whole of the USA, excluding those states (the New, West, and North and South ones) with
two-word names, and Maine, as she felt no more comfortable in a state with a
monosyllabic name. Bob occasionally winked and said, “And here it is not even
the holidays yet,” in a way that suggested he might have some idea of what was
going on, but didn’t mind. She would sigh and say, “In today’s economy, the
holidays begin after Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.” An Internet radio
station in their village broadcast what it called The Beautiful Music of Xmas
24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Everything went fine
until one of the three young forklift operator studs with whom she’d partied
fell in love with her, followed her home after one of their Travelodge
sessions, and presented himself, soggy with desperation and self-pity, at their
front door, informing Bob, who wasn’t happy about being taken away from England
gamely defending their precarious four-nil lead over Kazakhstan, that he was in
love with Connie, and would prefer Bob’s killing him there and then in a frenzy
of jealousy to going on without Connie, who was upstairs in the bath, listening
to Enya or The Corrs. To his great credit, Bob invited the guy — Rory, as it turned out — in
to watch the game with him, which invitation Rory thought it would be churlish
to decline even though he was much more a rugby fan than footie.
When Connie, with her
hair wrapped atop her head in a towel in a way Bob had always found oddly sexy,
came downstairs to find the two of them together, but England’s holding on for
a 4-3 victory had put Bob in a good mood, and it didn’t seem as though things
were going to get worse than awkward. “So I gather you two have been seeing a
lot of each other this holiday season,” he said, chuckling. Rory wasn’t in on
the joke, and glanced at Connie for help, but she was too busy wincing to
provide any.
Things got more
comfortable after a few minutes and some prosecco, and it turned out that Bob wasn’t
entirely unexcited by the idea of Connie’s having cuckolded him. After Rory
went home, in fact, he was all over Connie like a cheap suit. Connie pretended
to love it, even though he wasn’t nearly as good as Rory, or either of the other two
forklift operators, for that matter. As she enjoyed a post-coital cigarette and fretted that he might expect her to revert to monogamy, Bob confessed that back in
his teens he’d actually done a fair amount of sword-fighting (without swords, if
you get my drift, nudge nudge) with his mate Terrence, who’d shared his fascination
with military history.
No comments:
Post a Comment