“Don, can we talk?”

I’m Don, actually Donal (no ‘d’ at the end) O’Malley, detective with the city PD for more than twenty years. I’m a good detective but I’m still unpromoted. Not that I can blame Captain Docherty, since I must admit that my mind tends to wander, especially during an investigation. The lady (I use the term loosely) asking the question, is my wife of twenty-four years, Helena (with an ‘a’ at the end).

“Sure, babe, or we could cut to the chase and get naked in bed.”

Helena is an enigma. In many ways she lacks self-confidence but, thanks to her mother, she has the arrogant air of a Spanish grandee. She is now forty-three and she is as lovely now as she was when I first met her when she was seventeen. Her hair was black and glossy. Then, her skin was naturally beautiful and her figure was slim. Now the hair color and gloss are the result of a weekly visit to the salon; make-up has replaced nature as the source of her beauty; and she has stopped looking below the neck. Her boobs have remained small but have drifted south and her bottom would look better on a much larger woman.

“Don’t be frivolous, Don. Just getting naked isn’t enough anymore. Our marriage has got a bit stale. I love you even more than the day daddy walked me down the aisle, but we have lost the excitement. Anne says...”

Anne is Helena’s best friend at work. If she ever appears on a tv quiz her specialist subject will be divorce. She has gone through three of her own together with several assists. Recently she has selected my wife to be her new wing man in her endless search for Mr. Right. I switch off while Helena continues to relay Anne’s views on happy marriage.

“Why don’t we talk in bed – after we have sex?” I ask, leering at her.

Even if she was interested, she cannot break the promise she made at lunchtime today. After so many years, even a lousy detective would know what his wife was thinking. I keep reading stories where a husband is blindsided by his wife’s affair despite the many clues she dropped; I detect the first hint. What Helena wants to say is that she intends to spend the weekend with Erik Spencer, a work colleague, young enough to be her son if I had impregnated her when we first met. She solemnly promised Erik that I was cut off from sex. It seems they play with a different deck. I thought a vow (as in marriage vows) trumped a promise.

“Don, I’m being serious. If you love me at all, please just sit down and talk to me.”

“Well, I waited until we were married to get into your panties, so I suppose I can wait until we’ve chatted before we take the discussion to our marital bed,” I magnanimously offered.

I was in at the very start of Helena’s romance with Erik. She and I were the other couple when Anne invited Erik to dinner in her apartment. It was obvious from the outset that Erik had no interest in his date but was enamored of my wife. By the time we took coffee through to the living room, Erik and Helena were openly flirting and Anne could barely contain her rage. I refused to be her consolation prize and I think it was that made her determined to destroy my marriage.

“Don, you know I love you to bits. I fell for you the moment daddy and I visited you in hospital. More than anything, I want us to be together into our golden years. But you must admit that our marriage has become stale.”

She stopped and looked at me pleadingly. Over the years, I have tried to meet her more than halfway. She comes up with an idea and I help her develop it and achieve her goal. Most of the things that bother her are of no importance to me, like the color of the drapes or the hemline of her dresses. I stand firm on things that really matter, which usually centered around some scheme of hers which would have harmed or embarrassed our two kids. Now they have left the nest, there is very little need for me to intervene between Helena and her latest craving.

It’s true that I was in hospital when we first met, an unworthy hero. Her father is the manager of a small bank which was being held up by a couple of crooks when my partner and I got the call. I was in uniform in those days, so we rolled up in a black and white. I was making for the door of the bank when the bad guys came out, saw the patrol car, and began shooting. I fired nine shots, three of which hit the target; my partner fired four times before the gun jammed. One crook dead, the other wounded – good outcome.

It was after they fell that our troubles started. My partner was reprimanded - a jammed gun is a big no-no. I had fired from behind a parked pedestrian car. I had no idea the driver was in the vehicle until he opened his door, knocked me over so I banged my head on the pavement. I was being treated for concussion when the bank manager visited bringing his seventeen-year-old daughter. He was running her to dance class, but she refused to stay alone in the car while he made the duty visit to the officer who had saved the bank’s cash.

“I blame your work. We used to talk all the time and then rush upstairs. If you smiled at me like you do at that Erik guy, I’d be as hot for you as I was on our honeymoon.”

I had been enjoying winding her up with my irrelevant remarks, but I really needed to get this show on the road. Both Helena and I had agendas for this discussion. She wanted me to accept her weekend of sex as a prelude to an affair. I wanted her out of my life for good. Erik had bought the tickets for a spa hotel which was her reason for urgency. I had resigned my position with the police department and was moving five hundred miles west at the end of the week. The difference was that I knew every detail of her plan and she knew nothing about my intentions.

“Why would you mention Erik? I hardly know him. It’s you I love, Don, and I want to make sure our marriage lasts and doesn’t just sink into the sand.”

The metaphor of sinking into the sand is in Helena’s DNA. Her mother, Isabella, has constructed an alternative reality conjured out of romance novels about Spanish nobles. Her father, like her husband, was a bank manager who, while he didn’t reach the heights, earned enough to keep his wife and daughter in the style of the Spanish court at the time of Christopher Columbus. Isabella convinced herself and her daughter, my wife, that the family were of royal blood cruelly deprived of their inheritance by wicked cousins.

Life must have been scary in medieval Spain with every other noble child being kidnapped by aforesaid wicked cousins and left in the forest to be a snack for wolves. There sems to have been a steady trade in millers and foresters, collecting such infants and raising them as their own. Living in this unlikely world blurred the lines for Isabella; any means that led to the desired objective were legitimate. I first suspected on my wedding day that not everything Helena and her mother said was strictly true.

When we met, Helena had magnificent black hair that reached her waist. After we were engaged, I was allowed to stand behind her in her parents’ living room, brushing her shiny tresses while she watched tv and chatted to her mum. That was as intimate as we got since she had vowed that she would be chaste on her wedding day. I found out that was a lie a year after our second child was born. It was another year before I became aware that she made decisions without even thinking of consulting me. From then on, my love died, I remained for the sake of our two kids.

“Have I got the name wrong?” I politely enquired. “I understood you were spending the weekend with Erik Spencer at the Heyday hotel and spa.” Helena’s face flushed under her make-up while her mouth opened and closed much like a freshly landed fish.

I was in a bar with a colleague when my youngest was nearly three. We had got on the subject of health costs, and I noted the huge increase in the cost between the births of my two daughters. He had not noticed a like change in very similar circumstances. The next day, I checked the detailed bills from the hospitals and there it was, in black and white: tubal ligation. Both girls were born by caesarean section. Helen had decided to have her tubes tied without mentioning it to me.

It would have been less of a blow if we hadn’t discussed contraception during her pregnancy. I offered to have the snip which Helena rejected with horror: “I need you to be a man. Can you picture the derision if a fighting bull trotted out to meet the matador without his cojones?” She called off any further discussion until she had consulted her mother. When we resumed relations after the birth, she assured me that the problem was fixed. There was no sign of an insert, so I assumed she had an IUD or was taking the pill.

“It’s not like you think, Don. Just let me explain so you understand that it has nothing to do with my love for you.” She recovered more rapidly than I expected. I guess she expected she would have to explain this and had probably rehearsed her reply with Anne. “It’s mainly to support Anne. Like that dinner date we had with her and Erik, remember?”

Getting her tubes tied wasn’t the first unilateral decision. On our wedding day, I was astonished to find that Helena’s beautiful hair had been cut to a brief bob barely reaching her ears. “I promised it to Father Liam as a wedding gift.” Why not tell me? I was astonished to find that natural hair of that length was almost as valuable as gold ounce for ounce. Later, when her mum got smashed, I heard another version. Long hair was part of the battery of devices to catch a husband. Once I had exchanged vows there was no longer a need for long hair. “You men have no idea what a pain it is to manage the stupid stuff.”

“Shouldn’t it be you and me with Anne and her beau? Perhaps she’s hoping you flirt with the new man and leave Erik to her. She was certainly mad with you for flirting with him at the dinner party.”

Father Liam turned out to be interested in more than Helena’s long hair. When my youngest was almost two, he was brought into the station in handcuffs, a victim of a mixed marriage. The mother had been a member of the good father’s flock since childhood and had attended his confirmation classes. Her husband was not a Catholic and did not understand the need for the father to use his ancient prick for spiritual guidance. Father Liam acknowledged that he might have broken civil law, but he pled not guilty since he was obeying God’s law.

Confirmation was not just to prepare the spirit. A girl had to learn to become a woman able to care for her husband, keeping the family together and raising lots of little Catholics. Neither oral nor penetrative sex were natural and so had to be taught. Emotions can run high, so the safest teacher was the parish priest, sworn to celibacy. His defense might have swayed the jury until a grandmother was interviewed by the police. She, her daughter and granddaughter had all been confirmed by Father Liam.

She acknowledged that in each case the purpose was to prepare the girl for marriage. All went well until the interviewing officer asked her if she had enjoyed the sex. “It’s the best sex I’ve had in my life, and I’ve buried two husbands. I’ve been back often so the father can give me a refresher course”. Her lawyer objected but the damage was done. All the while I had been repressing my sexual urges, fobbed off by brushing her long hair, Helena was having twice weekly sex romps with a celibate priest fifty years older than her.