Call Me! (4 page)

I know what you’re thinking: calling it my job doesn’t make it right.

True.

But a job’s a job, and this one pays the bills. You see, I pay my own way in the marriage, which means half the mortgage, half the utilities, half the groceries, and so forth. I make my own car payment, buy my own clothes. I even kick in some extra money to help with Ben’s son. I do this because I don’t have the heart to take, take, take from Ben, while giving nothing in return.

By “nothing,” I mean sex.

When I stopped being sexually available for him, we had a discussion. It took me a bucket of tears and lots of prodding on his part before I finally admitted I didn’t find him attractive “in that way” anymore. I begged him to forgive me for that. He did, instantly, and asked me to stay with him anyway. I told him it wouldn’t be right. I’d make him miserable. Told him he deserved better. He said he’d rather be miserable with me than happy with someone else.

He meant it better than it sounds. Although Ben’s a professor, and words are his tools, communication isn’t his strong suit. He often says meaningful things that get lost in the translation. It’s a Ben thing. You wouldn’t understand. Unless you knew him better.

At any rate, when he asked me to stay with him I said, “The least I can do is pay half the expenses.”

He wouldn’t hear of it, but I insisted.

“Any other demands?” he said.

“I want two nights a week for myself.”

“Excuse me?”

“Two nights to myself. Each week.”

“What, you want me to stay in a hotel?”

“No. I want to leave the house, leave this life, two nights a week.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought this all out.”

“Actually, it just now came to me.”

“There’s another man,” he said.

“No.”

“No?”

“I promise.”

“What will you do every week on these two nights?”

“Different things. But the other five nights I’ll be available for you.”

“But not
sexually
available.”

“Not sexually, no.”

“Define available,” he said.

“When I’m not working a case I’ll buy groceries, cook dinner, go out with you to your functions and fund-raisers, or to dinner, plays, movies, whatever. I’ll run errands, help you entertain friends and colleagues. I’ll help you grade papers. I’ll—”

“I get the point,” he said. “And I assume on these two nights a week you’ll be available to have sex with other men?”

I looked him in the eyes. “Ben, I’m not looking for another man.”

“But if one happens to show up? One you can’t resist?”

“If that happens, we’ll have another discussion.”

“Before you date him?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“I won’t cheat on you. I promise.”

Ben didn’t know about my decoy work back then and still doesn’t know I occasionally get paid to lure strange men to hotel rooms. Ben might consider this dating, but I have no problem separating my decoy work from my social life.

“Which nights?” Ben said.

“You pick.”

“Monday and Tuesday. That gives us the weekends.”

“Done.”

He said, “I believe you.”

“Thank you.”

“If you wanted the weekends, I’d know you had someone else.”

“Because someone else would demand my weekends?”

“Exactly.”

“You can live like this? Having me as a roommate instead of a wife?”

“I’ll manage.”

“How?”

“After the third year of marriage, twenty-five percent of married couples sleep in separate bedrooms.”

“They keep statistics on those sorts of things?”

“They do. And most wives want less sex with their husbands every year, especially after they’ve had kids. Eventually, sexual frequency for married couples is statistically nonexistent.”

“But for us it’s already nonexistent.”

“But we get along great,” he said. “And you gave me three wonderful years of sexual memories.”

I smiled. “Those were fun times. But, the two nights I’m gone every week from now on?”

“What about them?”

“I don’t want to talk about them.”

He pauses.

“Fine,” he says.

“Really?”

“I won’t ask what you do if you don’t ask what I do.”

We laughed and shook hands on it, like two moguls closing a business deal.

“WHAT ABOUT BIRTHDAYS?” Ben said.

“Birthdays?”

“I think it’s customary for wives to give their husbands a blowjob on birthdays, and have sex on Valentine’s and anniversaries.”

I frowned. “Maybe this isn’t going to work out.”

“Forget the BJ’s. How about sex? Three days a year. What do you think?”

I wonder why it’s so hard for me to accommodate him. Ben’s a handsome, wonderful man who adores me. This is the man who saved my life by loving me when I was in the depths of despair. This is a man who’s willing to live under the same roof without intimacy, a man who’s capable of trusting his wife to be gone two days a week without requiring any explanation for her actions or whereabouts. Still, I knew I couldn’t do Valentine’s Day. That’s a day for lovers.

He looked at me with hope in his eyes.

It was pitiful.

“How about a hand job?” I said, enthusiastically.

He frowned and turned away.

“I’ll give you the two nights each week,” he said, “and let you split the marital expenses. But your business is touch and go, so I hope you’ll allow me to pay the bills if you ever find yourself short.”

“If that happens, I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”

He nodded, still facing away.

“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“I do love you,” I said.

“I know.”

“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

I paused.

He turned to face me.

“I’ll do the sex thing, twice a year. Your birthday and our wedding anniversary.”

He laughed. “The sex
thing
?”

“Poor choice of words,” I said, expecting him to make a nasty remark and tell me to kiss off. But he surprised me.

“I’ll take it,” he said. “Sex, twice a year.”

I nodded.

“You promise?”

“Yes.” Then added, “As long as we’re living together.”

He studied my face a moment, then said, “I can live with that.”

And that’s how it’s been for the past year. Every Monday after breakfast I drive somewhere.

Usually Nashville.

And every Wednesday I drive home.

I check my watch. Four-thirty. Ben will call shortly after five to let me know if he wants to go out for dinner and drinks or have me whip something up. I’m not a great cook, but compared to his first wife, Ben says I’m Julia Child.

Ben and Erica had a terrible marriage and a worse breakup. There are always two sides to these stories, but the one I heard and believe is Erica was obsessed with having a baby. So once a week for months (while I was an innocent fourteen-year-old junior high school student), Ben Davis dutifully ejaculated his sperm into donor vials instead of his wife. This, because Erica’s fertility doctor determined Ben’s sperm count was low, and had mobility issues. Erica and her doctor decreed Ben should refrain from any activity that offers sexual relief outside the fertility clinic, in order to create the strongest possible sperm count.

But it didn’t help.

Ben’s inability to get his wife pregnant led to arguments during which he complained about their sex life and she ridiculed him for being less than a real man. When he stopped going to the fertility clinic she never slept with him again. For three years Ben ignored rumors she was cheating, but that changed when she turned up pregnant with Tuck Wilson’s baby. Tuck’s wife, Carol, discovered the affair, bought a megaphone, and dogged Erica in public places announcing, “Erica Davis is cheating on her husband with Tuck Wilson, her tennis instructor!”

At Fairwick Gym, Carol yelled, “The woman in the yellow tank top with the fake boobs is Erica Davis. She’s having an affair with my husband, Tuck Wilson. I have two babies at home. What kind of home-wrecking bitch would do that?”

When she brought out the megaphone and called Erica a “dick-breathed whore” in the Glen Aden Mall in downtown Cincinnati, Carol was arrested, and the affair became public knowledge. The “Megaphone Mama” became an internet sensation, and Ben and Erica’s marriage was fodder for talk show hosts all over the world. The publicity proved too embarrassing for Ben’s employer, Riverton College, and Ben found himself without a job. This, plus Erica’s complete lack of remorse for the affair, brought the marriage to a swift end.

Shortly thereafter, Erica lost Tuck’s baby. But the crazy twist is, she and Ben had prepaid for six additional treatments, and she used Ben’s frozen sperm without his knowledge. Wouldn’t you know it? The fifth treatment worked, and Ben’s former wife was with child.

His child.

Erica hoped for a reconciliation, but Ben was having none of it.

What no one knew at the time, he had his eye on someone else.

Me.

As I said, I met Ben during a particularly difficult time in my life. By then I was seventeen, he was thirty-one. I’d been in hiding for two years, and private tutors helped me get my high school equivalency. My mother hoped I’d go to college, but I was unable to face the world.

We were living in Cincinnati, looking for a college tutor.

Ben was a recently divorced man, reeling from an internationally publicized breakup. He was also an unemployed college professor who had placed ads all over town looking for work tutoring students. My mom saw the ad, gave him a call, and he became my college tutor.

A year later, he became my husband.