My first thought was that I had wasted a good bit of time. Time thinking about Abby and Dewayne and their cheating and my lust about their cheating, which wasn't cheating, so does that nullify the lust? Probably not since it's already occurred, I.e. the lust, but it certainly nullifies future lust, at least as regards to them.
Then I started thinking about the whole concept of open marriage which was brought to my attention before I knew about their non cheating, which I was told and truly believed was real cheating. So now I felt a lot guiltier about having my affair with Lara than I previously felt, because I previously thought that Abby and Dewayne were doing each other before I met Lara.
Then I moved forward in the tedious thought process that I seem compelled to go through, that my whole analysis regarding open marriage and the benefits of it as opposed to cheating was suspect. But I quickly dismissed that as rubbish and the whole argument for open marriage remained valid, even though irrelevant in my own particular circumstances.
Moving on, I tried to quickly assess the damage that I might have caused my primary relationship with Abby, and then I thought that I hadn't done any damage because things were pretty routine between us since the encounter.
The encounter popped up in my consciousness and I thought what the fuck was that all about, and how could that have not been true, or true perhaps only in Kim's mind, but then why the fuck didn't Dewayne or Abby deny it then or later?
All of this was giving me a massive headache and I thought that I needed to take a walk, and then I realized that I was already on a walk. A walk with Kim. My old girlfriend. My old girlfriend who was now telling me that she could not let me lick the kitty anymore, even though I had only licked it theoretically, because her cheating jock husband, wasn't a cheater after all, and she was taking him back into her life, even though she never kicked him out, and she was probably glad she didn't kick him out because he had never fucked my wife.
I was pretty much through with the quick analysis. I usually do a quick analysis and then a more thorough analysis and sometimes even a painstaking analysis when time permits which is mostly on my two hour, six mile walk that I do every day, three hundred and sixty five days a year except on leap years when it's three hundred and sixty six.
At this point, I was exhausted, mentally. Kim was still there and we were walking and I would bet that my total analysis, the quick first one, took all of about two nanoseconds, which is pretty damn quick, but it seemed like an hour, at least.
That reminds me of Einstein's simple explanation of relativity for people like me who don't have, nearly, the mental capacity to begin to understand even the most fundamental part of his theory. He said that when your hand is on a hot stove, seconds seems like minutes, but when you are sitting with a pretty girl, hours seem like minutes. I really like what I read about Einstein because, besides being so incredibly smart, he also seemed to possess a fundamental understanding of what it is to be human.
The only beef I have with him is that he helped to develop nuclear bombs and I would have thought he would have understood how flawed mankind is and that handing that kind of weapon to mankind was akin to giving a five year old a loaded gun, except much worse because the five year old might kill himself but the bomb could kill millions. But then again maybe he did figure that out and also figured that if the good guys, i.e. us, didn't do it first, then the japs or the Nazis would wipe us out before we killed them.
So virtually no time had passed between when Kim told me she made a slight mistake and when I realized that no time had passed even though I had done a pretty decent first analysis in that 'no time gone by' gap.
I started wondering what Kim was thinking and feeling and if she had any regrets about the encounter and the accusations and how she had totally and irrevocably fucked up my life and potentially my marriage.
My answer to myself, about what she might be thinking and feeling was that she didn't give a rat's ass, not because she is a bad and unfeeling person, but rather because, in her mind, I was of course speculating here, she had just made a simple mistake, and anything done after that mistake was not really relevant.
And by her mistake, I'm not talking about the encounter or the accusations, I'm talking about Kim thinking that her only mistake was in misperceiving the relationship between the idiot and my lovely wife and anything that followed was a natural reaction to that misperception and therefore meant nothing. In her eyes. Actually in my eyes, thinking about what she was thinking.
I do that sometimes. I think about what another person is thinking and then project that thought back on the person I'm thinking about then I start to believe that they are really thinking that, when in reality, it may not be. In this case, I think it was true though.
Since I knew, or thought I knew, that Kim wasn't going to be taking any responsibility for anything that happened after her unintentional and trivial mistake, it made no sense for me to try and obtain any empathy from her for my subsequent plight.
What made sense to me, at this point, was to find out what information Kim had before the encounter and why it was invalid now. Then the little man said that maybe the new information was invalid and that, of course invalidated the supposedly invalid information, making the original information valid.
Still with me? So if the little man was correct in his assumptions, then Abby and Dewayne are still cheaters, we may have another, more serious encounter, and things are back to normal, meaning prior to Kim's just uttered statement. That would be good, but if so, I wanted that to be the final version, because my brain was beyond its limits in trying to go down the various paths. I wanted simplicity. I wanted my wife to be a cheater, but if not, I wanted to know for sure, that she wasn't.
Chapter 78: Kim's Information
So, what could have possible triggered Kim to think they were cheating in the first place, and more importantly, what could have triggered the rejection of the original trigger?
Getting into the mind of a woman is a difficult if not impossible task if you are a man. A straight man. Like me. I'm sure it's the same for women getting into a man's mind, but I suspect they don't try very often because they have all the power in relationships so why should they try to understand us in the first place? They don't need to, because they control us.
I once knew a guy who was an assistant basketball coach and he was very good looking, not that I was noticing mind you, but it was so obvious. To me. A straight guy. I can only imagine how attractive he was to women. And gay men. He once said something that has stuck with me ever since and it was a theory of his, but I'm sure he doesn't look at it as a theory but rather as a fact. I first considered it a theory, but having tested it so many times and having found it infallible, I'll grant, now, after about a decade of testing, that it is indeed fact and not theory.
It's just four words. His fact. It was said in reference to a situation, the facts of which are long forgotten by me, where a man basically risked and eventually gave up everything for a woman. He, the coach, in reference to this situation simply shook his head, in a knowing way, because it was his fact, and said "the power of pussy."
I've found that he was spot on. I read the papers and watch the news casts and look around and the evidence is overwhelming. Men risk and sometimes give up everything to get laid. Everything. Wealth. Families. Kids. Prestige. Power. Everything for a piece of pussy. That's a damn powerful thing that women have.
I think that was a necessary and prudent digression about the power of pussy because it underlies and colors everything that is happening in this saga.
Everything.
So when I tell you that Kim just basically glossed over the situation like it was a misunderstanding at a drive in restaurant and they had given her hamburgers with ketchup instead of mustard, which she had asked for, and when she had realized it and told them and they had cheerfully replaced them with ones with mustard and everyone was happy, you can begin to realize how the power of pussy comes into play.
Even though Kim had set into motion, with her womanly suspicions, which were in fact based on nothing a sane person would have considered credible, but she being a woman and a newlywed and in love with her husband considered rock hard evidence, a series of events that would change my life forever, I forgave her. Instantly. The fucking power of pussy.
How can you be mad at a woman, a spectacularly lovely woman, who had no evil intentions, no malice in her heart, who had just put together a few threads of innocuous behavior, between friends, Abby and Dewayne, biking buddies, members of a tight knit group, and blew it into a full fledged affair in her mind?
I forgave her and I still wanted to lick her kitty, even though I knew I never would, now, after the affair that had brought us close to that act at least in my mind, had turned out to be a non affair, thus negating her need for revenge, which I finally admitted, was probably her motivation for her letting me do it. And when I say letting me do it, we all know that's my take on this theoretical licking situation.
After forgiving her, which consisted of me just listening and not reacting negatively, she got in her car and headed home, no doubt to Dewayne where some serious licking would probably occur, now that he was out of the dog house where he never really belonged, it appears.
And I was heading back home, to my Abby, with the knowledge that she had been true to me, it seems, at least in this case, and that all my suspicions had been just that. And even the mouth to crotch kiss that I saw could be explained as perhaps a wince as she was moving out of Dewayne's way. And Edith's 'yes' when I asked her if she had seen the blowing crotch kiss could be re interpreted as 'yes I saw them with her face close to his crotch, but what's the big deal there?'.
And finally, Edith's letting me know about the inappropriate behavior could have been merely a woman's sixth sense gone awry by a scorned woman with her radar set so high that it goes off when a man just looks at a woman.
Chapter 79: Rethinking Open Marriage? Not
I like it when young people question everything. It's healthy. It's necessary. We don't want them to live our lives, do we? Don't we want them to stake out their own territory and write their own scripts about love and life? How boring would it be if they followed in our footsteps? Social change depends on their willingness to try new ways of dealing with things, casting out the old and tired but keeping those aspects of the past that are valuable and time tested.
Marriage is a good institution. But it needs some tweaking. I say let the young people tweak it. If they want to live the traditional life, let them. If they want to explore new avenues, let them.
Open marriage has been practiced, probably, from the very beginning. We just don't read about it on a daily basis. And we definitely don't talk about it. Maybe we should.
I'm now stuck in a peculiar place. I was convinced that Abby had opened our marriage, and after I got over the jealousy, I was on board. Big time. And then I found out that she wasn't doing Dewayne. So do I now go back and rethink the whole concept of open marriage? I don't think so. I've gone beyond the jealousy and found a sweet lust that exists on the other side.
What confounded me at first, when I found out that the two cheaters weren't, was why didn't they deny it? Why did Dewayne allow Kim to drag him to our condo in the first place? Why didn't they both stand up and say 'wait a minute'.
I think it must be like the politician who finally has the balls, sometime in the future, who, when asked by some reporter, "did you fuck so and so?," not in those words exactly, obviously, says to the reporter, "you know something, I want to be your publicly elected official, but what I do in my private life regarding my sexual life is of no concern to you or anyone else."
Abby and Dewayne must have been on the same page about that. They must have thought that their relationship, their friendship, was theirs and not Kim's and not my business. And defending that friendship was not their obligation and they were just not going to play that game.
So in a weird way, Abby really did open our marriage. Not sexually, at least not with Dewayne, but probably in a more profound way. She was basically saying that she is her own person and she can do what she chooses, and being married is not a sentence that she has to serve under me and my rules.
Chapter 80: The Really, Really Bad Dream
I'm not clear if dreams are real or not. I mean, they appear to be fantasy because you wake up and they are just memories and the real world as you know it returns. But maybe it's like the Buddhist or Zen koan I once read. Here is a description of it found online"
"In the third or fourth century BC, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly -- so vividly that when he wakes, he wonders if he may in fact be one. In that case, he reasons, at this moment I must be dreaming that I am a man, which would make me a butterfly all along."
Two points here. First, can you believe that people were actually thinking about that shit twenty five fucking hundred years ago? Second, are we absolutely sure that dreams are not real?
So back to the really bad dream and what I think it meant and how I hope to god it wasn't and isn't real, even on some other plane where I don't spend much time at all.
I was on some sort of amusement park ride which was about fifty stories in the air and that was ok, even though I don't like heights, because I was strapped in very tightly and even though it started swinging out over open skies, I was still ok and not very frightened. Suddenly I was in a bedroom of a very large old house and nobody else was there. I was disoriented and thought I might be dead so I decided to find a mirror thinking that if I saw my reflection in the mirror I would still be alive.
I found a mirror and saw myself and figured I was alive, which was good but I was still not totally right mentally. Then I found myself back in the house, having left apparently for some time, as you will see below, with no solid memory of what I had done or where I had been. All of Abby's brothers and sisters were either at the house for some sort of family reunion or were on the way.
One of the in-laws married to one of Abby's brothers was looking at my credit card bill which showed some charges, during my unexplained absence, that that I didn't remember charging. One of them was for $50 and said simply date. It was starting to come back to me that I had gone to a city and then I had a real bad feeling that I had hooked up with a pro and now that one of the in-laws had just announced that fact to about three of the other members of the family, I knew Abby was going to find out, and I felt pretty sick.
Next I was across the table from the pro, who I think was a woman, but I wasn't certain, sadly, and she, if indeed it was a she, weighed about two hundred and ninety pounds and had one half of a front tooth missing and I felt sad for her about that but I understood that she was in a rough profession and those things happen.
Then she started telling me about her really mean husband and all the really bad things that he had said about me and it suddenly dawned on me that the $50 for the date was just the beginning and I would be paying a whole lot more to call off the husband from generally beating the shit out of me, if indeed the husband even existed in the first place, but I knew I wasn't about to question that because the pro could do a whole lot of damage to me herself, or himself, whichever was the case.
Then she or he brought out some pictures of us together in compromising positions, and I didn't want to look too closely. Mostly because I wanted to keep assuming that she was a she.
I had a flash that the $50 charge for the date was because, in the negotiation process, which I am assuming is how these things work, I was trying to get the most bang for the buck, so to speak, as I generally do, and the pro knew full well that the $50 was just the opening price and the shakedown which was now occurring was where the real meat was. And she/he was right because I would have paid anything to get the fuck out of there, right then.
The elements and setting for the dream came from real life, as they almost always do for me. I had gone to my mother's house earlier in the day and looked at some old photographs, th
us the photos of me and the pro. We are going to a relative of Abby's house for Thanksgiving and that was the impetus for the old house where I found myself. And Abby and I, that same day, had watched a movie with a woman who had a really bad motherfucker of a husband, so we know where the pro's real life, excuse me, dream life, husband image came from.
I'm thinking that the whole point of the dream was a warning to me. I have never paid for sex and don't ever intend to, no matter how little I get on the home front. I don't judge people who pay or get paid, but it's just not something I want to engage in. And after this dream, I know I never will.
However what worries me is that I do like to drink, and in the dream I must have been pretty plastered to go to bed with a woman, that woman, I hope she was a woman, who outweighed me by a factor of two.
So maybe in addition to a warning about not paying for sex, it was a warning to lighten up on the drinking, which I will consider. After cocktail hour. Which is in about an hour. Or maybe I should wait until after Thanksgiving, which is only a few weeks away anyway. Oh hell, I need a good New Year's resolution.
I'm going to have to think about my relationship with the pro in the dream and see if there is a deeper meaning and warning about open marriage in general. I will say that I have learned that I only want to have sex with someone I love, and that includes only Abby and Lara right now. I think that is a major evolution in my thinking and emoting and I'm very glad about that.
Maybe the dream is the super brain trying to reinforce that way of thinking and it wanted me to know what it felt like in real time instead of just giving the information verbally, as in "George, don't fuck around with anyone other than Abby and maybe Lara for now," which would have been probably just dismissed by me as a random thought if given that way. But the god awful reality of the dream and what it felt like to be in that position of feeling like I had actually had sex with that person and then had to face the consequences was truly horrible. I'm so thankful it was only a dream.
I'm George, mwm, 52 Page 21
