Erotica Artist 00: Prologue

She has no plans to tell Len that she's resumed sexual relations with her husband. "He couldn't take it. I'll lie to him about it if necessary," she tells me. Old Len couldn't take the knowledge that she's still screwing her husband, but I'm supposed to be able to accept the fact that she's stepping out with no problem at all.

She's not an insensitive person. This I know. But for now she's so full of her own confused joy and pain that short or long-term effects are perhaps beyond her consideration. She certainly feels no pressure to give up either one of us, it would seem.

"I'm alive!" she beams at me one day.

In a strange way, so am I. After all the years of quiet suffering we've both lived through, we've now entered a series of emotional rapids and we're hanging on desperately, not knowing quite what's ahead.

The one-sidedness of the sex, for instance, is now well and truly over. My chemicals have seen to that. The passion is more raw, more verbal. We play sex games we haven't played in years, if at all. One evening we play the new secretary game, where Kelly dresses up in prim skirt and blouse but underneath wears black garter belt and stockings with no underpants. Dirty dress-up becomes a regular thing. I tell her I want her to be my part-time whore and she groans with pleasure. We have anal sex, something we've done rarely in over twenty years of marriage.

"Is this break-up sex?" she asks me one night. "They say break-up sex is the best ever."

I don't know where she's heard this and I don't care. Though part of me wonders if this is not so much break-up sex as me pleading "Don't leave me. How can you leave me if I give you sex like this?"

Another part of me says this is simply sex as play therapy: name-calling and dress-up all part of a healing process. Using the betrayal situation as a turn-on, acknowledging and exaggerating it rather than ignoring it. One thing she does assure me of: this is not mercy sex.

Whatever it is, there's to be the inevitable pause in the proceedings every six weeks. Though early in the summer she does have to cancel a weekend trip at the last minute. As if my pain over these visits could not be any more acute, on this particular occasion, my dear mother enters the final phase of her illness. She's been in the hospital only a day or two, under heavy sedation, when she's transferred to a nearby hospice. Her doctor tells us she could have only a matter of hours perhaps. I'm to spend a night with her, maybe more, on what could be her final weekend.

Kelly was to fly out that Friday evening to be with Leonard, but she has to call him at the last minute to cancel the trip. She'll have to stay home with our girls while I sleep on a cot in my mother's hospice room. The look she gives me as she makes this final decision is hard to decipher. Pain and compassion for me for sure, but is there also a hint of tense frustration? It's a terrible weekend for both of us, with my mother passing in the early hours of Saturday morning. A horrible week follows, concluding with the news phoned by a mutual friend in the city that my old buddy Nick has also just passed away. How much more of this do I need in this most godawful of blazing summers? How much fading away can I take?

In late July, as a much needed respite, we take a family trip to Drumheller, Alberta, to see the Tyrell Dinosaur Museum. In the hotel, prior to another torrid sex session, I hear Kelly's phone beep while she's in the shower. Len's name pops up. Probably to say that he loves her. Before we left on our trip he apparently told her over the phone that he knows the two of us will be sleeping together and that it's okay. He just doesn't want to hear about it. So it's Len perhaps calling to reassure Kelly that it's permissible to sleep with her husband: the ironies just keep piling up.

"Len's just called," I tell her, once she's out of the shower. "Probably to tell you he loves you. And later you'll text him back that you love him too. But not before I go down on you and fuck you silly."

"You have a problem with that?" she asks.

And I don't quite know what to say. Except I find this whole situation very, very weird.

The incessant texting does in fact constitute a problem. As honest and open as we are trying to be with each other, there's an inevitable tension. A certain amount of secrecy is unavoidable. There are things she must keep from Len, like the fact that she's recommenced a torrid sex life with her husband, and there are things that she must keep from me. Except that the stuff Len "can't take" and must be protected from I have to endure on a daily basis. He's not to know about our renewed sex life, but I have to accept the fact she has a sex life with another man.

She has, in fact, a secret life with Len, though she's unable to keep it totally secret. On this trip to Alberta in fact I have to protest. The endless fucking texts she actually answers while we're driving and she's sitting right next to me.

"Here we are, on a family vacation," I tell her, "and my wife is sitting next to me, texting her lover! Every time I hear that damn machine ping it's like a stab to my heart."

This from a guy who professes not to love his wife, not to care what she does with another man.

From then on she shuts off her phone in the car, but I catch her checking it in restaurants, as I return from the washroom. And once we're back home I come to lie down to read on the bed while she's close to me on the computer, e-mailing Len. I have to leave the room.

"I'm sorry I'm causing you pain," she says.

"I've brought a lot of it on myself," I reply. Though this doesn't make it any easier to bear.

For by now of course what began as agreement and acceptance of this new reality on my part has evolved into something quite different. Anxiety, insecurity, intense jealousy, fear of loss, and yes, anger, resentment, and no small doses of hatred.

For the end result of this arrangement has come more and more into focus. It won't just involve the break-up of a marriage, when, according to the long-range plan, Kelly will move to the city to reunite with Len on a permanent basis. It will mean the loss of my family, the loss of my girls.

The relief of the early days, the sense of impending freedom, is gone. And I no longer feel compassion for Len, if indeed I'd ever felt any at all. At the start there were indeed moments when I looked on him as a savior of sorts. He was the key to our liberation. And though I never knew him well, never having been involved in union activities the way he and Kelly were, I always thought him decent and trustworthy, his only major fault perhaps his fondness for alcohol.

And I knew he and Kelly had a past. They were a couple before I knew Kelly at all. And the fact that they had to break up because his ex-girlfriend decided she wanted him as the father of her expected baby, well it always struck me as grossly unfair. Even more so of course when Kelly filled in more details as this whole new reality evolved. Yes, he and Kelly had to break up because of Louise's pregnancy, but, get this, it turns out the baby wasn't even Len's. Old Len has a fertility problem apparently. His sperm count is virtually zero. So yes, it's considered a minor miracle when Louise conceives, an act of providence almost. But later, years later, poor old Len is told, for whatever reason his vicious ex-girlfriend, now spouse, has in mind, that the real father of her child is some ne'er-do-well poet/musician she'd been seeing during and after her relationship with Len.

To confirm this particular nugget of information from the gracious Louise, all Len has to do, years later, is attend a reading by the said poet/musician and lo, the truth is beyond doubt: his daughter, now in her teens, whom he has doted on since her birth, is the spitting image of Bret Whatshisname, the ne'er-do-well. Poor Len has to stagger to the washroom to vomit.

He continues to dote on his daughter. He remains the excellent father to her he has always been. And he never tells her the ugly truth. This he reveals to Kelly, and she tells me. All the more reason to admire and respect the guy, yes? Well, no, since now he and my wife are in daily contact, are sleeping together every six weeks or so, and are planning one day to be together permanently. Can't say I find this easy to take at this particular time, I must admit. Can't say my admiration and respect for old Len have ever been lower, in fact.

For his relationship with my wife is starting to drive me not a little crazy. This experiment in open marriage, from my point of view, is clearly a failure. Our family doctor was apparently spot-on in his early diagnosis. The fact that all they have are text messages, phone calls and infrequent visits, while I live with the woman and currently enjoy a heated sex life with her, all this does nothing to ease my resentment.

It grows so intense in fact that I begin to fear for my mental and emotional stability. Before the end of the summer Kelly takes our daughters on the annual visit to her family back east. I have quit going along on this particular trek, partly because I'm no big fan of Kelly's family but mostly because of our strained relationship. Now I wonder as they change planes in the big city, is Len meeting them there? It would be a brief connection but a connection nonetheless. Is Kelly introducing Len to our daughters, preparing the way for future meetings? I drive myself crazy imagining all kinds of weird scenarios like this. Imagination. My damned imagination running wild again.

But then, get this, once they're back east and I'm talking to Kelly on the phone, I ask her if she'd mind if I called Len to discuss this whole business, to make a connection with him myself, the third angle of the triangle, to relieve the tension engendered by the jealousy, perhaps. Bring things more into the open. Less subterfuge.

This an indication of just how deranged I am. It's no less crazy than giving her the green light to see him in the first place. But there is, thankfully, a silence on the line while Kelly absorbs this. Finally she whispers "It might be awkward."

No kidding! Am I out of my mind? Perhaps not. Within twenty four hours I realize the lunacy of my suggestion. I just gives me an insight into how far gone I am.

I sink back into my deep depression all alone in the house. While Kelly and the girls are back east, gone is the balm for my aching heart. And I realize that a large part of my despair is knowing the end of this particular story.

I try to keep busy. I paint a bedroom. I listen to Bach. In bed alone at night I check out internet porn, the updated version of an old obsession of mine. And suddenly I recall that when I've done this in the recent past, alone on one side of the wall, Kelly has been alone in her bed in the next room, probably texting Len in the small hours. She's betraying me with Len, but I've done my share of betrayal over the years, if only with fantasy girls.

And now here I am again, all alone in my bed masturbating, while my wife and daughters are three thousand miles away. And this in late middle-age. How sad and pathetic can I get?

And how unbalanced. My behavior becoming more and more that of a desperate and emotionally over-charged man, even after Kelly and the girls return home. For the secret texting continues and I'm becoming less and less tolerant of it.

Kelly and I go for what we hope will be a pleasant dinner, and over our first glass of wine I begin to taunt her over how often she and Len are in contact. She's on the point of tears before the first course arrives.

"I thought you didn't want me, so I went with someone who did," she moans. "Mason, you have to let me go. It's time to move on."

How we get through that dinner I'll never know. But the outpouring of emotion ends in the usual way. We stroll along the lake, hold hands, end up clutching each other tight in the twilight under the trees. On the way home in the car she takes off her underpants and I finger her. We dash up to the bedroom and fuck like crazy. Insanity.

And so we find ourselves back in the office of yet another counsellor, a sweet-natured, middle-aged, overweight gay man named Earl, who actually does a superb job of calming down what turn out to be pretty highly-charged sessions.

"There are five people living in our house, Earl," I tell him. "Our two daughters, Kelly, myself, and Len Foyle. I need it to end. I want him gone."

I go on to make an outrageous but heartfelt suggestion. In September our youngest daughter will be entering middle school, our eldest will be moving to high school. Big changes for both girls. Why doesn't Kelly move back down to the city with both girls, so our eldest can take advantage of the fuller opportunities for special needs kids? Kelly will be able to live near or with the man she loves.

My agony is such that I find this suggestion eminently reasonable. Earl actually looks over at Kelly as if he considers this not too outlandish himself.

But Kelly hits the roof. Feels that she's been 'set up.'

"How dare you suggest such a thing!" she howls.

"Well what am I supposed to do, move out myself? Away from my family, my home, all because of some asshole who lives three hundred miles away? My pain has to end sometime, Kelly!"

Earl: "Maybe it's not such a terrible solution if you can't give Len up."

Kelly: "I'd like to. I want to! But there's the matter of the heart! I'm sorry, Mason, being in love with someone else does seem to have deepened my affection for you, but the time of my life when I was in love with you is over. I'm sorry I can't be more than your best friend. I don't want to give you false hope."

"Since when do you fuck and suck your 'best friend'? Behind your boyfriend's back yet! Besides, I don't think I'm all that interested in being your friend. I don't need friendship from you. And if not now, but eventually you'll be in town with Len, and we'll be living in different cities. Do you really think I'll be coming to visit the two of you? Do you think Len and I will be having beers together and we'll all be best buddies?"

"But we have children!"

"They'll visit me. I'll see them regularly. But I sure as fuck won't be visiting you and Len. Forget it. I'll cut you out of my life as much as is humanly possible."

"This is emotional blackmail!"

"Could be. I haven't analyzed it. But you can't have it both ways, Kelly. I have to let you go, okay I'll let you go. But you have to do the same for me! I don't want to give you any false hope that we'll ever be friends."

"What about Stella's wedding?"

"You're talking fifteen years from now. You think Len's going to live to his mid-seventies, with his drinking habit? I don't think it's something we need worry about. If it happens, I'll get blind drunk myself. But I can guarantee you it'll be the only time you get to put me through such an ordeal."

On and on it goes over several sessions. I tell Earl how something seems to die in me each time Kelly goes to see Len. Is it my hope for the future, for my family? Is it my tender feelings for Kelly?

He asks if I think I can "win her back?" Kelly says it's not a competition.

My hope may be dying, but my jealousy and rage are steadily increasing. I'm outwardly the ever-obliging, deeply empathetic husband. I quietly drive her to the airport for her next weekend with Foyle but inside I'm seething. Yet another weekend. Yet another two days of agony. No union meetings as an excuse any longer. She's visiting for no other reason than to enjoy his company and share his bed.

We don't discuss the details when she returns, of course. And ever the responsible husband I continue my household duties. Like laundry, for instance, among which I find a pair of sheer, sexy green underpants that I've never seen before. A gift from Foyle, perhaps, that she's neglected to keep hidden?

I secretly rummage through her half-unpacked suitcase when she's at work and find no less than four unused pairs of her own most erotic underwear. I rifle through her closet and at the back, hidden behind coats and sweaters, I find another pair, recently hand-washed and hung up to dry in a place she thought I'd never look. Just how many pairs did she think she'd need?

I say nothing. And two days later, when a piece of mail arrives for her with a big city P.O. Box as return address but no name, I smile and quip that it's probably from 'Charisma-boy.' What a sweet, understanding, fine fellow I am.

I'm ninety nine percent sure it is indeed from the aforesaid charmer, though she denies it to my face. I'm one hundred per cent sure when she returns from taking the letter upstairs and gives me a tearful hug.

Next day, again when she's at work, I begin my search, which takes all of five minutes. The envelope is shoved down the side of one of her dresser drawers and contains two long-distance telephone cards and a note: "Kelly my darling: I sent these calling cards so I can hear your voice. We can cheer each other, ease our separation. We can grow closer, love longer, my darling love."

I actually feel a twinge of pity mixed in with my jealousy and rage as I read this, but it doesn't last long. It's soon drowned by my loathing for him and, I confess, by my loathing for her.

And so begins my period of total lunacy, when every few days I can't resist the urge to spy on her, to search through her things. It's shameful behavior, I realize, but I tell myself it would never have begun if she hadn't lied to my face over her silly little piece of mail.

I even resort to checking the odd text message when I see her phone lying around.

"He's so jealous and angry right now," she tells Len apropos yours truly. And this: "Hold me tight on this: Last night I dreamed I was pregnant!"

"Fantastic!" old Len responds. "Sarah (his daughter) would be over the moon!"

Fuck, is it any wonder I'm jealous and angry? They're so fucking playful! So happy!

Maybe I should feel pity for what they're going through, separated as they are. Poor old Len, all he has are phone calls and text messages and a quick two day visit every six weeks. And there's his sad, barren, fucked-up past history. And now when he finally thinks he's re-acquired the woman of his dreams, whom he lost long ago, he's being cheated on yet again! Writing sweet little notes to a woman who's back fucking her husband blind!

But I can't feel pity for him or her. I'm too full of pity for myself. Especially when on one of my scavenger hunts I come across an envelope of photographs dated from their first weekend together, back in June. Kelly has told me they spent much of it in tears, and there is indeed a shot or two of them looking rather somber. But there are also head and shoulder shots of them, clearly naked, obviously in bed, grinning at each other. There's one of Len leering down at her like some aged gargoyle. So much for the tears.

I say nothing of this discovery. What could I possibly say? But I can't help but feel a showdown of some kind is approaching. And within a week it begins.

This time I don't even have to go searching through her stuff. As lame in her subterfuge as she's sloppy in her personal habits, she leaves on her night-table a flight itinerary from Foyle with all the details of her next visit. A handwritten note is on the reverse side of the sheet: " Kelly darling: 120+10 now and by the time you get this less than 100! Fly to me my sweet darling!"

He's actually counting the hours, the poor son-of-a-bitch. So looking forward to his next session of sleeping with another man's wife.

I'm so stunned it takes me a while to realize that this next trip is only days away. And the last one was only a week or so back. Our arrangement was for visits every six weeks and now suddenly we're down to four weeks?