© 2005 BY Andrew Wiggin

The Background

I'm no genius, but I'm not as dumb as my husband thinks I am. It's been my experience that most men are clueless about their relationships with women. And my present husband is no exception. He's my husband at present. It remains to be seen if he'll be my husband in the future.

Every man has something to hide, and every woman knows it. When George walks into the room with me, I know within thirty seconds if he's hiding something. It's an evolutionary imperative. Men evolved to be bread winners, strong silent types, hunters, aggressors (though most of them aren't very good at that). Women evolved to be in groups, to be gregarious, to be political.

To me it shows just how dumb men are. They insist on running all the countries, making all the decisions. And they aren't even good at it. They didn't evolve to be politicians. That's why we have all of these stupid wars. Men have been thinking with their dicks for millions of years. They are incapable of acting outside the control of their own testosterone.

Women are the true politicians. A woman doesn't let her face show any emotion other than the one she wants it to show. We can dial up an emotion designed to achieve whatever goal we need.

For example, if I want George to do something for me that he doesn't like to do, I can use my 'I'm upset with you' face. I don't have to say anything. Perhaps I act a bit standoffish, but otherwise betray nothing. Within a few minutes I can read the anxiety on his face. He knows he's screwed up, he just doesn't know what it is he's done. And he's afraid to ask me because he thinks that will only make matters worse: I'll know that he's so insensitive that he doesn't even know what he did wrong.

Before long he's so eager to please me to get off the hook that he'll gladly do almost anything I want him to do. After he's done whatever it is I wanted him to do all along, I remove my 'I'm upset with you' face. He's relieved because he got away with something though he's not exactly sure what it is he got away with.

This ploy wouldn't work if I used it all of the time. I have a number of tricks in my repertoire to make George bend to my will. As long as I vary their usage, keep him off balance, he never knows he's being manipulated and our marriage can remain on an even keel.

This might sound like I'm a manipulative bitch. But every woman has to use tricks like these or nothing would ever get done around the house or in a relationship. When was the last time a man ever volunteered to do anything? When was the last time that a man had a clue about what was going on in his relationship?

The helpless creatures have to be led to the water and still they won't drink unless we stick their damn heads into it. Women are the politicians. If women didn't control things in the household and in the relationship, their wouldn't be any household or any relationship. Men think these things happen by magic!

Which brings us back to my clueless husband, George. All men have something to hide and all women know it. Is there any man who doesn't have a stash of pornography somewhere? Today it might just be stored in the computer. But my George likes to pull out a video tape when I go shopping and jack off to the images of obscenely-disfigured women doing disgusting things to men with elongated sexual organs.

George thinks I'm an idiot. He thinks I can't read the little boy puppy dog expression on his face when I tell him I'm going shopping. I know perfectly well that by the time I get the car out of the driveway he'll be retrieving that video tape labeled Improving Your Short Game. As if I don't know what it is, where it is.

George believes in the 'hide it in plain sight' method. He takes a pornographic video tape, replaces the label with some boring instructional golf label and expects that no one will ever want to bother with it again.

Men are so innocent. There is something that happens in a house called 'dust'. This is a phenomenon few men know or care anything about. They think: 'hey, we dusted back in '97. That'll do for the next couple of decades.' Boys, dust happens! There are dead mites and flaked skin. Fabric disintegrates, books crumble. It's called entropy. Everything put together sooner or later falls apart. If it weren't for women dusting, before long floors would start to buckle and the dog would drown in an ocean of dust. I'm starting to wonder if entropy doesn't also apply to marriages.

So when I'm doing the dusting and I finally get around to the video cabinet, it's not hard to tell which videos have been used and which ones haven't. It's called dust, boys.

I notice that Improving Your Short Game is one of the cleanest videos in the bunch. George hasn't been on a golf course in a year and a half, ever since he hit that Harvey Johnson fellow entering the 19^th hole in the back of the head with an errant 4 iron shot from the 18^th fairway.

I know that George has had it in for Harvey ever since the County Club dance when Harvey 'put a run on me' as George so succinctly put it. Now I am a happily (so far) married woman. Just because Harvey Johnson makes a pass; just because when we dance he has Russian fingers and Roman hands (as we used to say in high school), it doesn't mean that I'm receptive to his rather crude advances. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself in those situations. George has no reason to be jealous. No revenge on Harvey is necessary, since nothing really happened.

But George has to go and hit Harvey on the head with a 4 iron shot. I was terrified that Harvey would sue us for fairway malpractice. I expected the police to come and arrest George for assault with a deadly golf ball. From that point forward I insisted that George give up golf. It is just too dangerous a game to be played by someone as volatile as George.

Therefore I must assume that the video might not actually be about golf. My curiosity was aroused, but when I looked at the video I can't say that my libido was aroused. Forty-something respectable women don't derive stimulation from videos of people with deformities performing obscene acts together.

I allow George his little foibles. Just because I know he's hiding something doesn't mean I should let him know that I know he's hiding something. It's politics, sweetie. If they think they are getting away with things, they'll be happier about themselves. And they'll be more likely to give themselves away when they try to hide something really important.

And George thinks I'm the idiot!

The Problem

Why don't men just wear signs on their foreheads when it happens: I'm GUILTY! George tells me almost everything without opening his mouth. It has something to do with body language developed through millennia of evolution, I suppose. It has something to do with the shit eating grin on his face followed by the gasp of realization of what he has done, followed by the furtive glances from him to me. Can I tell? Can I smell it on him? He's fooled me before on the small stuff. Can he sneak this one by me?

Let me tell you, he's never fooled me on the small stuff. I just let him think he has. And no, he can't sneak this one by me either. I don't know who she is but I already have a list of possible candidates forming in my head. He is screwing around on me. Or maybe he hasn't done it yet! Yes, maybe that's it. He hasn't done it yet, but he's seriously considering it. For the first time he's thinking about cheating.

Other things are happening which alert me to what may be going on. I call his office in the morning and he is not available. That has happened three times in the last two weeks. And yet I don't think it had happened three times in the previous two years. What is George doing out of the office in the morning? He's up to no good, I'll bet.

Now, I'm an easy-going woman. I put up with George's idiosyncrasies. I often ignore the looks he gives other women as we walk through the mall. I pretend not to notice when he farts in bed. I don't use sex as a negotiating tool. I've got plenty of other negotiating tools.

So what's his problem? It can't be me. It has to be him. It's some sort of mid-life crisis. He's forty-seven years old. He's been feeling some arthritis in his knees recently. Maybe his body isn't cut like it used to be (and George was never a hunk, for heavens sake). Maybe he needs some reassurance of the female kind.

On the other hand, I don't mean to be disloyal, but what does she see in him? I make love to him with an almost alarming regularity. We must do it several times a month. But I have to. I'm his wife. It comes with the job description.

She has no such obligations. She isn't married to him. Yet. That could be it! That might be her plan. She's luring him away from me with sex. Then when she wins him, he marries her, she'll cut him off just like any other normal woman. I should have realized. It's all politics.

How do I know, you ask? Besides the furtive glances, what other signs have I discovered that are giving away George's infidelities, past or planned? He thinks he can hide things from me. I'll admit there are places in the house that I won't go unless it is absolutely necessary. He knows that. That's why I go to those places regularly just to see what he might have stashed there. I don't want to go to those places, but I do because it's absolutely necessary.

The room at the side of our house with the very large door that our realtor jokingly referred to as a garage when we bought this home is one such place. If it were twice as big perhaps one of our cars could fit in there, next to George's tools, old boxes of memorabilia, and various and sundry junk that only a man would want to keep. It's dirty, dank, and dusty. And no, I do not dust the garage. If he wants to spend his time out there chancing allergies, he's more than welcome.

Still, it's one of those places he thinks that he knows that I never visit. Another such place is in the basement, the unfinished part where the heat pump and the water heater and the spiders are. No, I'll admit that I'd prefer not to visit that place if it weren't such a darn good place for George to hide things.

There are several such places around the house that George thinks that he has exclusive access to, the poor thing. Those are always the first places I look when I suspect that George is hiding something from me. That's where I found them.

They were a bottle of pills. Of course I was interested when I found them stashed in the back of a cardboard box filled with ten year old bowling trophies. (If that man thinks I will allow him to display those silly trophies on the mantle of my den, he is sadly mistaken.)

What kind of pills would a man hide from his wife? Well, duh! I occasionally receive spam myself offering Viagra, Levitra, and other such pills at direct-to-you prices. They usually come with a disclaimer: if your hard-on doesn't go down after thirty-six hours, call your doctor. I swear if George's hard-on didn't go down after thirty-six hours, I'd call the Guinness Book of World Records.

That's what these pills were. Some ridiculous drug to give a man a long-lasting and rock-hard erection. I knew immediately that he didn't buy them to improve our sex life. Our sex life needs no such improvement. I'm all the inducement he needs. I'm still pretty hot looking for a forty-something woman. I can still fit in to the same dresses that I wore ten years ago. If I hold my breath. Permanently.

So he didn't get the pills for me. He got them for her. She is going to reap the benefits of George's ever-lasting rock-hard boner. Men are such pigs.

I confess that my first thoughts upon discovering these wonder pills tended toward the dark side. I found myself searching the internet looking for anaphrodisiacs. Actually I didn't even know there were such things as anaphrodisiacs. But I had heard about saltpeter.

Saltpeter was supposed to have been fed to the troops during World War Two to cut down on their libido. At least I think I heard that somewhere. But a search of saltpeter on the net informed me that this was an urban legend. But it did lead me to real honest-to-goodness anaphrodisiacs.

Anaphrodisiac: An agent that lessens or eliminates sexual desire (according to Dictionary.com). Who would've thought that such things existed? The world is full of many strange and wonderful inventions. Anaphrodisiacs aren't one of them. Still, they have their uses.

My plan: replace the pills in his bottle of instant hard-on with instant soft-on. That would teach the son-of-a-bitch a lesson! Think he can screw around on me, does he? He'll never get another hard-on for the rest of his life!

Well, perhaps I was a bit crazed at the time. Before I actually placed an order for dick deflator, I realized it was a pretty low down thing to do, even to a cheating husband. Maybe you shouldn't be drugging people without their knowledge, even potential pond scum like George.

I remember one time early in our relationship. George and I had been drinking a bit and he whipped out his manhood, as it were, as a means of 'turning me on', I guess. It just struck me as funny at the time. He looked so silly with that thing sticking out from his zipper, him standing there in a pair of Bermuda shorts and knee-high socks. I began to laugh. And laugh.

I'm sorry, but I was drunk enough that I got into a laughing jag and just couldn't stop. George's erection did a u-turn and disappeared from view. George couldn't get it up for a month after that.

Christ, men have such fragile egos. And they sure as hell can't take a joke about their dicks! If I fed him this anaphrodisiac, George might become psychically injured and never get it up again. I want him to get it up occasionally. I thought better of using the dick downers.

Well, I had a fall-back plan, one that wasn't so blatantly anti-social. In fact, one could argue that I would be helping rather than harming George by this plan. I noticed that the boner pills looked a lot like vitamin E capsules. They were clear yellow small, roundish capsules. I did what any sane woman would do. I replaced the erection erectors with good old vitamin E. The way I looked at it, it wouldn't hurt.

And if he was going to have sex with this harlot he planned to see, he would have to get hard of his own volition: no chemically induced woody allowed. That'll teach him.

So there is my problem. My George, my formerly faithful friendly spouse, is contemplating cheating on me. I'm not sure whether to cut his balls off or beg him to be true. Somehow I must have a face for this occasion, a political position that will defuse things and get us back to normal. For the life of me, I can't think what it is.

The Confrontation

Today was the day. I had to confront him. Women are the politicians. They know that every problem has to be faced head-on. You've got to talk about things, even things like forty-seven year old fools contemplating infidelity.

But George came home before I was ready. I still hadn't decided how to handle this! On the one hand I wanted to grab him around the throat and just throttle him. But being the politically astute woman that I am, I could see how this might just exacerbate the problem. Was I really ready to burn my bridges?

Besides which, I am not sure he has already done it. He may be only guilty of adultery in his heart, and that didn't keep Jimmy Carter from getting elected. The ten commandments might not like it, but is it grounds for divorce? I hope not. George would have filed after every Brad Pitt movie I've ever seen.