Insatiable
My wife is hunting for another man.
I watch her as she circles the ballroom, her black hair pinned up with a diamond clip I gave her three years ago. She's flaunting her body in a black silk dress that caresses every tanned curve. Her form has achieved perfection under the auspices of an army of professional trainers, and one doctor with a dab hand at cosmetic uplifts. Sometimes I wonder if my wife has slept with any of them. She denies it on those rare occasions I've broached the subject. I swear to you, I swear, on the life of my madre, I have never, ever...
It amuses me that she takes oaths on her family when she wants to assure me she's not lying. She wouldn't swear on her precious madre's life tonight if I confronted her about what she is doing. We both know the truth. Dressed in the finery I've bought for her, she is prowling, panther-like, surveying the young, single, handsome men. There aren't many who could afford admission to this gala, a fundraiser for some high-minded cause. No matter; my wife is sniffing around the waiters. Most of them are aspiring actors, just making rent at the moment. Just my wife's type.
There are many here who wouldn't blame her. My wife is, at thirty-eight, a frighteningly beautiful woman, one of sharp intelligence and keen wit. And she is generous with my money, pouring it into charities and needy cases. The people in this ballroom love her and despise me. Look at that twisted old bastard, I can hear them whisper. Old, ugly, obese, and married to a goddess. What could she possibly see in him? Besides the money, of course. But no amount of money could be worth that.
It's in the way they look at me, the contemptuous glances, the disbelieving stares. They think me lucky. If only they knew how little my wife actually cares about pleasing me. I'm the first to admit, I'm not easy to please. My health problems and surgeries have put me in a place beyond where Viagra and its related miracles can help. I am married to the most beautiful, desirable woman I've ever seen, and at most she indulges me two, perhaps three times in a year. The rest of my days, I am forced to watch her. She rarely lacks for company.
She catches me now, gazing at her. Her full lips purse, as if something bitter has landed on her tongue. She narrows her eyes, turns, and attempts to melt into the crowd. I'm too slow to go after her. Even with an aide at each elbow, I run the risk of toppling if I move too quickly. Instead, I settle for watching her naked back and curvaceous backside snaking away from me. The crowd fills in behind her, but even as she retreats, I see the diamonds I bought for her winking at me.
It takes me weeks to realize that my wife has found someone new. I don't know where he came from — my bodyguards said that she left the charity ball by herself, that she slept alone that night. Of course, she could have gone out the next morning and found just what she was looking for. My wife has slept with dozens of men, and yet she is very selective about the ones she crawls into bed with. She won't sleep with one who is married, or even with one who is unmarried but has children. Of course, this is just my observation; perhaps I've missed the exceptions to her rule. And yet, I don't think so. My bodyguard Sam, in whom my wife occasionally confides, once asked her why she fled from a man's apartment almost as soon as she went inside. There were pictures of his children, she told him. Funny how that would be her wake-up call, a reminder that she was doing wrong. My wife was raised a Catholic in Honduras, and no matter what she says about not believing in the church or in priests or in the ritual, there's some piece of religious dogma lodged in her brain that she can't shake loose.
Whatever it is, it doesn't stop her from eventually finding what she has searched for. This new man is cut from the same cloth as the last. He's an overly muscled, dark-haired specimen, with brooding eyes hiding the vacancy in his brain. The photographs my detective has taken are so detailed I can see the cleft in the man's chin. Something burns under my skin as I look at him. So that is what my wife has chosen. This is the man she's giving herself away to. My hand trembles as I take a second look at the pictures.
"I know a good divorce lawyer," my detective tells me, his voice low.
I almost laugh. My first wife found herself a maestro of an attorney. He never managed to touch my offshore assets, but he cleaved the fortune he found so perfectly that the division would have shocked Solomon. I married a second time, but I'd learned my lesson. When that wife tried to leave me, she ended up on a deep-sea diving boat, and no one ever recovered her body. I didn't even ask my third wife to sign a prenuptial agreement. I don't want a divorce, and I don't want to dispose of her in the ocean. Even though she barely speaks to me or acknowledges my presence, I still feel something for her.
"No divorce," I tell my detective. "You are not to mention this to anyone."
After he leaves my office, I sit alone, staring at the photographs and feeling my anger surge. I want to tell my wife how ridiculous she is, what a silly creature of habit she has turned out to be. Her latest toy is a carbon copy of the one before, and the one before him. Next time, try for a little variety, darling, I want to say, but I know that I will never get those words past my lips.
Instead, I call for Sam and tell him where I want to go. He gets an aide to help me into an SUV, then sends my driver away and gets behind the wheel himself. Sam has worked for me all of his adult life, and he knows how little I reveal in front of most of my staff. But I trust Sam with my life.
"You okay back there, Mr. Kennett?" he asks me as he drives. "Too hot, too cold?"
I shake my head. "She's sleeping with someone new," I say, watching Sam's face in the rearview mirror. His brown cheeks don't flush, but his mouth sets into a grim line.
"I thought so, Mr. Kennett. But you know I don't like to spy on your missus. Never feels right to me."
"It's fine, Sam. I understand." I put my head back and close my eyes. When I wake up, Sam has parked the vehicle on a rundown residential block.
"Welcome to Bushwick, Mr. Kennett."
I turn my head, trying to take it in. "This is Hart Street?" My detective gave me the man's address, but the neighborhood is dirtier than I'd expected.
"Uh-huh. The building you're asking after is that one." Sam points to a three-story townhouse indistinguishable from its neighbors. "Knickerbocker Avenue, the main drag, is back that way. You want some time alone?"
I do, but I don't want Sam to leave me alone here. I stare at the townhouse, willing my wife or her new lover to appear. I feel the heat under my skin again, and my heart pounds. I could catch her in the act. Upstairs in the house, someone fusses with a curtain. That could be my wife, I think, but there's no diamond ring on her hand. In the early days of our marriage, before my body began to fail and my needs became so difficult to meet, my wife would make love to me wearing nothing but the jewelry I'd bought for her. She loved things that glitter, and I loved indulging her. When I think of that now, those easy, uncomplicated days, tears come to my eyes. I would give anything to have them back.
I don't know how long we sit there before the front door opens and my wife steps out. She is alone, and even though I cannot see her perfect face clearly—she keeps her head down—I know that she is sad. She is doing wrong, and she knows it. I watch her retreating back as she hurries along the pavement. She always seems to be moving away from me.
Two weeks later, I hear inklings of news from my staff. They whisper that my wife broke things off with her new lover, but ran right back into his arms when he wouldn't let her alone. There is a buzzing in my brain now when I think of the two of them together. This can't go on indefinitely. Briefly, I think about going to my wife and giving her an ultimatum, but I am afraid to, worried she will make a decision that we'll both regret. Instead, I make a dramatic gesture I know my wife will not misunderstand. Without telling her, I fly her dear madre from her luxury condominium in San Diego—the one I bought for her, and where I pay for a staff of three to care for her, even though madre is not an old woman or a sickly one, and she would be happier cooking and cleaning for herself—and I bring her to my home in Greenwich.
The house is so massive that I could have a dozen guests wandering around at all hours of the day and never bump into one twice. It is big enough that my wife and I can live separate lives, yet keep up the pretense of a marriage. And yet my wife discovers my surprise instantly. They embrace and kiss and chatter at each other in rapid-fire Honduran Spanish that I've never been able to understand. Madre is overjoyed; my wife is happy to see her, but she is not happy with me. In fact, as her green eyes meet mine, I feel her loathing. She knows I'm trying to control the situation with her lover and, by extension, her. My heart cringes and I worry that she will leave me. I hate how she treats me but I cannot stand the thought of her going away, abandoning me.
My wife disappears with madre. Later, Sam tells me they've gone out to a show in the city. Madre loves Broadway musicals. While they're out, I have my secretary call my wife's favorite jeweler, and he stops by with armed guards. Inside his cases are treasures that would once have made my wife cry for joy. I choose a platinum collar with a massive emerald pendant at the front. Thinking of my wife in it, the emerald dangling into her cleavage, excites me so that it is hard to breathe.
I think about giving it to her when she comes home. I am certain that she will come to see me, now that her beloved madre is in the house. But my wife surprises me. While I am sitting in my den, she comes to the door but doesn't step inside.
"I'm going to the country house next weekend," she announces. Something defiant stands out in her voice. Before I can answer her, she rushes away.
My wife takes her lover to the country house immediately after her mother leaves for San Diego. It is early Friday afternoon, and I sit in my house, trying to stay calm, but I cannot. I think about my wife, lying in her lover's arms, and I want to tear everything apart. My brain is fevered and my mouth is dry. I can picture them together so clearly. Finally, I give in to my worst impulses. There are security cameras in my country house, and I can watch all that goes on from my computer. My wife has taken her lover into our bed. When I switch the camera on she is on top of him, riding him as if he were a stallion, and within moments she is screaming in pleasure. When she drops to the side I can see him, and I realize he is a stallion, endowed in a way I could never match. At that moment, every nerve ending in my body fires and shakes. It is like being reborn. Before, I was a cuckolded husband, shamed by my unfaithful wife. Now, I am a demon, fueled by bloodlust and bent on revenge.
I tell Sam that I want to go to my country house. He takes the wheel of the SUV again, and two of his trusted lieutenants sit in the vehicle with us. All of us are silent. These men have worked for me for years, and they know exactly what is going on. I watch my wife and her lover on a computer screen, the volume muted; then I surrender to impulse and turn the sound on, and up. Her incoherent cries are the only sound in the vehicle.
My wife's silver sportscar is parked in front of the country house; she must have collected her lover immediately after dropping off madre at the airport. How convenient, having airport and lover so conveniently located in adjoining boroughs. Sam goes inside the house—there's no staff at the country house—and gets my wheelchair. He knows my legs are shaking now, that I can't stand on my own. He wheels me inside the house and I can hear my wife's screams. Oh, how she puts on a good show. Sam takes me upstairs in the elevator while the other two men take the grand staircase; they position themselves outside the master bedroom while Sam wheels me into the room next door. It's empty, except for the glass of the two-way mirror, which allows me to spy every transgression. I always think I want to watch, until I see her in front of me, in ecstasy with another man, and fury devours me.
"Now!" I yell. "Take him now."
Sam calls to the guards and they storm into the bedroom. My wife grabs the sheet and tries to cover her beautiful body. Her lover is stunned. "Who the hell are you?" he demands, and I can see for a moment that he would make a rather satisfactory leading man. He would deliver lines— Make my day; Bring it on—with conviction. But if he knew what was in store for him now, in the basement of my country house, he would break down like a lost child. When he sees the fire heating iron pokers and the rack that will break his spine and the meat hooks on the wall, he will know instinctively that he'll never leave the basement alive. And he will realize, belatedly, that my country house—so perfectly remote for an illicit tryst—has miles of woods around it in which a body can be buried without ceremony and without notice.
One of the guards gives him a quick hit with a taser, just enough to stun him, to make him pliable until he's trussed up for my amusement in the basement. They cuff his hands behind his back, then drag him from the bedroom. "We'll take the elevator," one says.
"Easier that way," Sam nods. He looks at me. "I'll step outside for a moment. Anything I can get for you, Mrs. Kennett? Sir? Okay then. Just holler when you want me, Mr. Kennett." He closes the door behind him with a soft click.
"I want you to come downstairs with me," I say. "I want you to watch what I do to him."
She is wiping her eyes with her hands. "No, I will not. I will never, never do that. You can make me do many things, but you cannot do that."
"Perhaps I should call my staff in San Diego, have them bring your mother right back east. Would you like that, darling? Would you like anything to happen to your precious madre?"
"You are the devil," she cries. "You have already got what you wanted." She gasps a few ragged breaths, forcing herself to be calm. "I must take a shower. I am a mess. Look at me." I do, and I see the mascara smeared under her eyes, her face already blotchy and puffy from crying. I need her to be perfect.
"Fine," I relent. I pull the emerald necklace from my pocket and hand it to her. She won't reach for it so I toss it lightly onto the bed. "I want you to be wearing that when I come back upstairs."
The look she gives me is pure hatred. But she says, "Of course."
I call for Sam to take me downstairs. I'm almost ready to make love to my wife now, but first I need to watch the other man die. I can never have enough foreplay. My wife only indulges me two or three times a year, after all, and I plan to enjoy every second.
-END-
