Conversations 07

It's been a while. Early onset arthritis in my hands kinda helped the delay.

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"How long have you been fucking him?" I asked, as the chaos swirled on around us.

Margot stared at me, as tense and on edge as a cat meeting another cat in an alleyway. Her eyes darted here, there and everywhere.

"Why did you hit that man?" she shouted. She needed to, to be heard over the noise of people excitedly swirling around to take a look at the man on the floor, and me -- the guy who put him there.

"Because he told me he fucked you. I didn't feel the need to let him get away with it."

"But he never said a word to you!"

I sighed. It seemed we were going to have to go all round the houses to get to the truth on this.

I took her arm and drew her out onto the balcony. The view out over the city was good, but my attention was elsewhere.

"Johnny, what's this all about? You just stood up and hit Frederick for no reason." Damn it, why won't she allow me a level of intellect that understands signals and not just words?

"It wasn't 'for no reason'. I'm not some psycho who goes around hitting strangers for no reason whatsoever. I told you. It was for fucking you, my less-than-faithful wife."

She turned the tap on, blubbering through the tears. "How can you say that? How dare you? I have never..."

I cut her off.

"Yes you have, and lying to me now isn't going to make anything easier, so why don't we just let it all out and hopefully feel better about this shit-storm you've dragged me into?"

"Why would you say that? I've always been completely honest and true..."

"Stop it!" I shouted. "I've known you've been stepping out on me for weeks now, I just didn't know the who of it until tonight. Until that fucking arsehole told me."

"But he never said a word..."

"He didn't. But he still said it just as clear as day."

"I don't understand," she wailed.

I was going to have to wait around anyway, until the emergency services turned up -- police, ambulance and maybe even the fire brigade or even the army; it all depended on who had been called - so we might as well get through it. I told her to wait there, putting enough sternness into my voice that I knew she would comply, and went to get us drinks from our table and that lovely little cigar case that had the cutter and lighter built in from the suit jacket I'd hung on the back of my chair. I loved that case just as much as I loved its contents -- had done ever since Margot had given it to me for my birthday the previous year. When she had been promoted to department manager shortly after that, I had bought her a lovely sapphire and emerald pendant. We liked giving each other things we had extensively and exhaustively searched out.

When I returned, she had sunk into one of the metal wire chairs that dotted the hotel balcony which ran alongside the conference room her company had booked for the evening's award ceremonies.

As I pulled up another of those monstrosities and sat down beside her, she tried to get started.

"Johnny, I..."

I raised a finger at her, signalling her to wait. Then I drew out a cigar, clipped it and lit it. When it was glowing nicely, I turned to her.

"You've been fucking around on me for the past three weeks, maybe more. Probably more. You thought you were hiding it, but you weren't. It was your stories that gave you away."

She looked incredulous. "What do you mean 'my stories'? What are you talking about?"

I gave a ruefully bitter laugh. "The stories you and your women friends tell when we all get together."

We were still quite young, had been married six years with Bethany, our three-year-old daughter, and had a lot of friends who were very much like us -- yuppies I suppose is the best word, although I don't like thinking I am one.

So every weekend, we would all hang out at one or other of our homes, or head to the lake or park for a barbeque and drinks. And in the natural course of things that always seems to happen at these get-togethers, the men would slowly congregate together in one group and the women in another.

And each would regale the others in the group with stories about their partners. The men would basically bring each other up to date on what was going on in their lives, conversations they'd had with their wives, decisions made, plans put together for future vacations or places they'd discovered that their children might like. Then the conversation would swing away to business, politics and. Of course, sport, with little byways into 'remember when...', trying to make each story more interesting or funny than the previous speaker. We all had pretty good senses of humour, and blasts of laughter would foghorn from the men's group at regular intervals.

And the women would do the same.

Except their conversations seemed set at a much more basic level than ours.

There were no fixed rules or even conscious decisions about when and how the groups would form, and people would split away to chat to people in the other group all the time; reminding a partner of something they had just thought of, telling a titbit of gossip just heard that was too good to wait until the trip home, or just for a hug and a squeeze of a hand.

It's just how people are when they get together.

The thing is, I'd hung out near the women's group often enough that I knew the topics of conversation would usually be about husbands, children, homes or something newly purchased. Hell, that was what the men covered as well -- among other things.

But the tone was very different. The women in our circle of friends would start off casually gossiping about what was going on in their lives, which would gradually morph into what their husbands were doing, and then change further into what their husbands were doing wrong. When it came to things they did wrong, husbands were the preferred topic, even beating out how horrendous their children's moods, untidiness and eating habits were as the greatest source of merriment.

It would start lightly; a little emphasis here and there when describing something a husband had done, causing much hilarity amongst them. Then it would quickly become a competition to one-up each other about how awful their husbands were and how badly they screwed things up.

Each story would be interrupted by screeches of laughter at a mean comment that one of them would chip in, and the mood would seem to get even nastier as each new raconteur took up a tale.

Thank god for children, as it was usually they who would interrupt the group's toxic conversation -- kids complaining about each other, crying over a fall or scrape, or whining for something to put in their mouths. Hey, I'm not moaning about the kids, they were just doing what all kids do.

I know now that this not an unusual state of affairs when women get together. Hell, even I think that quite a few husbands are absolute arseholes who don't deserve the wife they have. So the conversations are a way of lowering tension in the women and allowing them to vent in a passive-aggressive way which they can blow off as 'just having a laugh'.

But the first time I heard it ramp up, the way it always does, took me completely by surprise. I was in the kitchen, checking the marinade on the steak and chops and could hear the women chatting in the lounge. There was a burst of laughter that brought a smile to my face, and I began to consciously listen in.

May was having a go at Dom, who according to her, "always tries to score some three-pointer by throwing his socks at the laundry basket from his side of the bed. He even tries to do trick shots, by making them spin in the air -- idiot stuff like that. Like there's some crowd watching and cheering him on."

"Hey, at least he tries for the basket," moaned Annie. "Greg just drops them on the floor, as if the act of taking them off makes them non-existent. They exist when I have to pick them up to do the laundry, that's for sure."

"I don't even mind that," interrupted Freddie. "What I object to is the skid marks, and the fact that Vern always manages to turn his boxers inside out when he takes them off, and I have to turn them right side out again to wash. I don't even want to look at that, and I still have to turn them right side out! With my hands! Yech! Can you believe it?"

I couldn't help having a silent snigger at the hapless Vern and his careless toilet habits. He always tried to come across as the macho man, and now...

Georgina chipped in. "Pete balls his undies up if they have skid marks in them, and then tucks them into his socks. So I have to pull them out again to wash."

"They the undies with Minions on them?" asked Reggie.

"Oh, now he has more -- new ones with the Avengers on," Georgina came back.

"Iron Man?" sniggered Freddie.

"Actually, I think it's a male version of Elastigirl," Georgina said, straight-faced. The laughter from the whole group was almost deafening.

Wow, she just dumped Pete into the garbage disposal of female opinion with that remark, and they just got worse and worse as the conversation went on. Everything from Pete's apparently limp noodle, to Stan's 'fumble-fuck-flirting' with women and Dom's fat belly -- which by all accounts needed a corset or even more appropriately, a bustier -- were torn apart for their amusement. Every husband with a wife in the group took more than one tank-buster during that conversation. And I didn't think Dom was much overweight at all.

It actually shocked me. I thought these women were happy to be married to their men. Yet here they were in some sort of unacknowledged competition to make their husbands the very worst man in their whole circle of friends. Sure, there was lots of laughter going on, but it seemed at the very least to be disloyal, and at worst -- outright sneering derision.

How could they stand going home with their spouse, thinking the way they did?

Even if they didn't mean it, damn -- at a minimum it was cruel. There was no respect apparent.

Luckily for me, Margot didn't take part in these discussions. She would dip into it when passing by, but would wave and smile when encouraged to sit in with them.

Until three weeks ago. We were at Klaus and Ingrid's house, and as I was passing the lounge window, I saw Margot sitting in the group; wine in hand and laughing hard.

Both puzzled and curious, I entered the house and remained out of sight.

There was the normal complaining about the husbands' habits and nasty desires, each in turn having to outdo the previous offerings. Then I heard Margot chip in.

"Oh God, I know all about that. The noises that Johnny makes when he flosses his teeth..."

I heard her make noises as if she was throwing up, sneezing, humming the theme from 'Frozen' and gargling all at the same time. I felt my face grow heated.

"I think that's the noise Vern made when we made love last night," giggled Freddie. "The last true romantic!"

"Not a chance," laughed Margot. "My husband is way more romantic. When Johnny cums it sounds like a vet just stuck his arm up inside a cow, without any warning."

She giggled loudly.

"No smooth talk or dinner, just whoom!" chortled Annie.

"Not even a flower in sight!" Margot finished.

There was a delighted howl of laughter. I moved on. I didn't want to listen to any more of that shit. If there's one person who knows how I sound when I cum, it's me. There wasn't a single note of truth in what she'd just said. When I come, I don't yell, or bray or anything the women had come up with. I let out a series of long, low sighs -- as if experiencing an expected pain, like when a doctor carries out an extended check on your sprained knee and it hurts, although you're braced for it.

I didn't want to cause a fight in front of our friends, so I stayed cool but not unresponsive for the rest of the day. We got home after a day of wine and sun, and after putting Bethany to bed, just hit the sack and went straight to sleep.

But that sound she had made kept echoing in my mind. And it promised to hang about unless I worked it all out.

The next day was Monday, so I called Henning Moritz in HR and invited him to lunch on my expense account. Henning was German by birth and was unfortunately true to the largely false caricature of the lack of humour within his nation. But he was very intelligent, and more importantly, had studied psychology at university before going on to major in personnel management.

"Ah, I understand. You call on the German about such an emotional wound, because you know we are such an emotional people," he said in an overly accented voice, after I explained what I had heard.

I stared at him blankly.

"Ja, that was a joke," he said in his normal voice after a moment of silence.

"Sorry," I said.

"I'm used to it. So what do you want me to advise you about?"

"I want to ask why women would do that. Why would my wife do that and lie about me."

He chewed his lip and perused the lunch menu for a while.

"You know I subscribe to the philosophy of sexual economics."

I did. He had explained the theory one evening at a boring work's conference.

"So in my view, she is joining this group to denigrate husbands for one of three reasons. Which one, I can't tell without interviewing her, and I presume you don't want me to do that?"

I shook my head. I didn't need her telling the witch's circle about that as well. I would drop to the very bottom of the league table of husbands if she related that. Perhaps even relegated from that league altogether.

"The first and most obvious answer is that she feels separated from the group of women in your circle. She feels she needs to reconnect, and is willing to throw your reputation to the wolves in order to do that."

I nodded. I had already thought about that, but taking into account that we had been having these get-togethers with our group for years, I couldn't see why she would suddenly have that need.

"Secondly, you may have wounded her with something you have or haven't done, and this is a passive-aggressive way of getting even with you."

I nodded. What man ever knew what women got pissed off about, until she finally -- sometimes after years -- revealed the truth about some horrendous crime you had committed. I decided to think about that further, and examine my memory about anniversaries, casual remarks I may have made, or worst of all, any frantically vital appointment such as a lunch she had vaguely indicated she might want that I forgotten to turn up for.

"Thirdly, if it isn't something you've done, she may be trying to lower your position in the group in order to raise herself up and achieve sympathy and support for something she has done or plans to do."

"She wants to get people on her side against me?"

He shrugged. "It wouldn't be the first time, would it? It happens within families all the time, especially between siblings. You know, that is also part of the sexual economic theory: the advancing of oneself at the expense of the other in order to gain resources or genetic material, depending on the sex of the protagonist of this action. In fact..."

He waffled on and on as we ate, and I remembered all too clearly why I didn't have lunch with him very often. But he had given me plenty to think about.

"Who's hosting the get-together this weekend?" I asked her later in the week, carefully casual. I couldn't bear the fall-out if she knew my thoughts. I loved her and didn't want to face a month or more of silent accusation if she thought I was falsely accusing her of something.

"Annie and Greg," she said.

"That'll be nice. You seem to enjoy getting together with the girls."

"I do," she agreed. "They're a nice bunch."

"You seem closer than you have been for a while."

"Yes. I don't know why it's taken me so long to relax into their company."

I thought about that. Could it possibly be because they seemed to be awful human beings, with no loyalty, respect or high opinion for and of anyone at all? How could anyone relax in their company? After my wake-up call about those witches, I had taken to listening to their group conversations, and if one of them was absent, they would be ripped to pieces by the rest like a wounded and bleeding fish in the centre of a shiver of sharks in a feeding frenzy.

Henning had explained that as well. "Despite vigorous denials, it has been found that women do indeed gossip way more than men, and as they mostly eschew violence, this is one of the main weapons in their arsenal. Men are hunters by nature, while women are gatherers. Nuts, seeds and berries are good, but nowhere near as rich in nutrition as meat. So they are programmed to want the resources that men are traditionally better at bringing home. In return, they can offer sex and exclusivity, something that usually has no value when offered by men. But a woman has to advertise herself to men, hence the make-up and clothes and all that, in order to compete with other attractive women. The other way to compete is through gossip, which is basically her talking shit about another woman and the value of her sexual ability or exclusivity, while raising those values in herself at the same time."

"So a woman hinting that another woman is a slut is a genetic weapon?"

"Of course."

"Why don't they just come out and accuse each other of being that?" I asked.

"One: because that would devalue the denigration. It's a potent weapon and has to be used sparingly. And two: because first-hand knowledge would place her squarely alongside the slut in order to gain that knowledge, and that would lower the value of her own promise of exclusivity. And lowering that even a little could cause her a lot of damage in the genetic stakes."

"So gossiping is the answer. Jeez, that's fucked up."

"It's the way our monkey brains have been programmed," he said with a smile.

"But if they know they are all calling each other sluts, even just to each other, why don't they call each other out on it?"

"Studies have shown that most women firmly believe that their friends would defend them against any such talk. Almost every woman interviewed maintained that she would defend her friends, and absolutely believed she never spread any such gossip onwards. And yet, if that was true, there would be no gossip to go around, so I wouldn't take that denial at face value."

He paused to think. "Economically, perhaps it's to maintain the high price for being exclusive. If a woman does sleep around, it increases the flow of sex into the market, which -- like any other commodity -- lowers the price. If they all did it, then the cost to a man of having sex would be almost nothing. He wouldn't have to spend much in the way of resources to get laid.

"However, if the value of that slut woman's sexual ability is lowered, and the promise of exclusivity is questioned, then that maintains the price for those women who are regarded as virtuous and yet good in bed -- for one man."

He took a drink. "Good wine."

I muttered something, wishing I'd never asked him about all this. To be seen as purely a provider of resources to a woman in order to get sex and the promise of faithfulness seemed just so sad.

It was the conjunction of those two thoughts that brought up another. Margot had explicitly promised me that she would be faithful to me when we married, and implicitly promised to have sex with me at the same time. Was I getting neither?

I certainly wasn't getting as much sex as I was lead to believe, that was for sure. Once a week maybe. It was once a month more often than I would like to remember. And if that new, little nagging voice in the back of my head was right, then I wasn't getting any exclusivity either. In fact it was more likely that someone else was getting all of that.

So I watched. I wasn't going to fly off the handle. I had no idea if I was right. And if I wasn't, then bringing it up might actually cause something to happen out of anger, rather than defuse the situation. I loved my wife, but I wasn't blind to the fact that sometimes she was more than happy to cut off her nose to spite her face.