Forever A Philanderer—Prologue

“All movements go too far.”

– Bertrand Russell

MARCH 2014

DAIN GALDIKAS DIDN’T HAVE TO WATCH LONG: glistening perspiration, thrashing of naked limbs, the thrusting of a pelvis, soft moans and unrestrained squeals, the calling out of a name that wasn’t his.

He closed the lid of his laptop. There was Betty Boop, and there was Betty Bitch. Dain’s wife had just unequivocally become the latter.

Dain began to suspect Betty was having an affair a few weeks ago, when their sex life changed.

After ten years of marriage one expects subtle changes in marital relationships as well as relations. But Dain had worked hard to keep his marriage fresh. He kept in the forefront of his mind what it was that first drew him to Betty. He maintained date nights, brought home flowers for no better reason than Betty loved them, cooked occasional meals because, frankly, he was better in the kitchen than she. He rubbed her feet at the end of the day, and did little things for her because he understood that marriage wasn’t for him.

If that sounds strange, that marriage wasn’t for Dain, consider that successful marriages are those where both partners understand that the contract is for the other person. When one partner sees it as about themselves, when one begins to take instead of give, the deal is doomed.

Foreplay began with Sunday breakfast in bed, loving words throughout the day, a caress here, a kiss there, a candlelit romantic massage in the evening; it was all about Betty… and the anticipation.

Prior to their wedding, a marriage counselor asked Dain how he would feel about Betty telling him “no” to sex. He replied that he didn’t expect to have to ask. Given the aforementioned foreplay, Dain suspected that he’d know whether Betty was in the mood – “the rhythm’s gonna put the woman in the mood, now you definitely want to…”

It was in giving that Dain received: the warm and sensitive man every woman claims to want only to, as Dain just learned, dump him in the end for the bad boy.

That didn’t happen with Betty, that Dain sensed she was taking or that she was taking him for granted. But something changed in their physical relationship. It was subtle: her touches seemed decidedly more obligatory – the mother’s lesson imparted to the new bride on the morning of her wedding: “Sex is a necessary evil, dear. It’s your duty to spread your legs and allow him to get the dirty deed done; the sooner you get pregnant, the sooner he’ll leave you alone in the dark” – and she seemed to retreat from his touch, as well as his caress in the sanctuary of their bedroom.

When he noticed that she was arriving home from work later and more often, he asked her if everything was all right between them. He wasn’t a mind reader, nor did he consider himself breviloquent, a man of few words. Other men might be bashed for not talking, divorced for not being the man the woman married after spending twenty years trying to do just that, change him; but not Dain. If Betty wasn’t getting something from him that she needed, and she didn’t communicate to him what that something was, then he felt accountable for asking. She replied that everything was fine. Then, instead of telling him, “Thank you. You’re a dear for asking,” she only sighed. So he pushed her – not hard, a simple nudge, a virtual touch on her shoulder:

“Everything okay at work? You’re coming home later more often.”

Betty sighed again and told him she was stressed. “I have a project that’s nearing deadline. It’s not going well.”

“Well, if there’s anything I can do to help,” Dain said.

Betty remained silent and went to bed early, turning down Dain’s offer to massage away her stressful day.

Convinced her sighs were hiding something, and dreading what he might learn was behind them, Dain hired a private detective to follow her after she left work. It didn’t take long. On the morning after his second night on the job, Dain got a call from Deke the private dick:

“You’re not going to like it.”

Dain gave his own sigh into the phone, then told Deke to stop by his office to present the evidence.

After Deke left, Dain dropped the disk into his laptop’s drive and watched, amazed by the clarity of Deke’s video, shot with his cell phone through the window of a seedy motel on Eight Mile Road near Woodward Avenue – an area of town noted for its topless bars, purveyors of triple-X rated DVDs, streetwalkers, and filthy motels for which patrons paid by the hour, and where Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith, Jr. in 1995 launched his rap career as Eminem. Dain’s mouth went dry as his suspicions were confirmed.

You’re not going to like it was a gross understatement.

What Dain hadn’t counted on was that Betty’s lover was another woman.