Somewhere East of Eden

The theme is "The End of the Affair." The problem is that everybody from Ovid to Henry Miller has written something about that - not to mention a whole lot of you folks. So I took "the end" literally. Some of you might view this as a tad allegorical. You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment. The usual thanks to Randi. You're a muse for everybody my friend... DT.

SOMEWHERE EAST OF EDEN

Sir? ... Sir? ... I cracked one eye open, then quickly shut it. The sun was painfully bright. The same irritating voice said, Sir?... I shaded my eyes and slowly opened them. I was lying in a chaise on a sandy beach and a little man was standing next to me holding a pineapple. That was odd.

He was dressed in a short white coat with black slacks. He said deferentially, "This is for you, sir," and put it down near me. Then he walked away. I assumed it was a drink rather than an actual pineapple because there were a menacing number of umbrellas sticking out of it.

I gazed out at the ocean. There were picture perfect waves breaking on an expanse of unbelievably white sand. Gulls circled overhead making their distinctive cries. The smell of saltwater was exhilarating. The sun shone from a crystal-clear sky. A few puffy clouds hovered in the distance and the tropical breeze was scented by Gardenia and Hibiscus.

It felt like paradise. But how the fuck did I get here? The last thing I remembered was Eve's voice yelling, "That's it - Baby. Give it to me ... it feels so good!!!" That was minutes ago!!! I had no idea what'd happened in the meantime. Maybe I'd passed out? It was bewildering.

The surroundings looked like a high-end tropical resort. You know the type, trendy, all-inclusive, catering to the rich and famous. I was more than a little curious about who was picking up the tab since I was neither of those two things.

I glanced around. There were people everywhere, all tricked-out for a day at the beach. Then, I closed my eyes and counted to ten hoping that the world would go back to making sense - popped them open -- no joy. I was dressed in what appeared to be a pricey pair of swim trunks, on a gorgeous tropical beach in the middle of God-knows-where. How I'd gotten here was a total mystery.

I was more confused than I was panicked. It was like the weirdness you feel when you drop into the surrealistic world of sleep. Maybe that was it. I was dreaming. I picked up the pineapple, it felt real. I parted the umbrellas to locate the straw and took a sip, "Is there touch and taste in a dream?" I concentrated, desperately trying to recall what had brought me to this weirdly idyllic spot.

*****

I wanted Eve the moment I laid eyes on her. It was an irrational, all-consuming lust. I don't rightly know why I felt such a burning desire for her. I mean, I've met a lot of women in my life. But Eve was just so lights-out attractive that I had the crazy desire to throw her down on the floor and mount her.

Of course, that would have presented a couple of problems. First and foremost, there would have been a prosecution for gross indecency. But also, Eve was my wife Lilith's guest. So instead, I smiled politely and said, "It's a pleasure to meet you Eve."

She was eyeing me with a mysterious smile and a look of unadulterated longing. I'd never gotten that reaction from a woman before, let alone one I'd just met. But she seemed to be processing the same astonishing feelings I was.

I'm no genius. So, I shouldn't be pontificating about attraction. But it was as-if our pheromones were communicating on some kind of biological sex channel, broadcasting attraction like a honeybee. Of course Eve had all the extra-cost options -- gorgeous, five-two, blue-eyed blond whose body put new meaning to the term brick shithouse.

My wife Lilith had invited Rick Mariani, who was her principal, and his wife Eve over for an evening of cards. I like bridge because it's the only game that you can win without depending on luck. So, I was there to make up the fourth.

Lilith and I had been wed for ten years. We'd met in college and married after we graduated. We were both education majors. My wife teaches third grade and I'm a high school assistant principal and football coach. We lead a relatively stress-free life. The hours are decent and there are always the three reasons for getting into teaching, June, July, and August.

Lilith isn't a raving beauty. She's what people would call cute, a pleasant round face framed by a mop of dishwater blond hair, tall and skinny. Her best asset is her butt and long legs. She was a cross country runner in high school and college and that part of her is almost perfect.

Our sex life is vanilla. But sex was never very important to either of us. I just didn't view my wife as an object of lust, and she was clearly glad that I didn't. I suppose we were close to average in terms of our frequency. But we were both pretty inhibited. So, there was never the hanging from the chandeliers jungle fucking that you see in porn movies.

Her boss Rick was a pretty boy, a few years older than we were, with great hair and almost violet eyes. He was short, perhaps five eight, and unlike a lot of late thirties guys he was in excellent shape. I could see the reason why he would be able to land a knockout like Eve.

I also know what you're thinking, and I can tell you with certainty that nothing was going on between Lilith and Rick. He was just her principal. Having a smoking hot wife like Eve might lead you to believe that the man was some kind of Lothario. But Lilith's hotness factor is minimal, and it looked like Eve had chosen Rick for his domesticity, not a ten-inch unit,

The point of the evening was bridge, which Lilith and I played a lot since we liked the game. We kept a harmonious marriage because we never partnered. I've seen couples who've partnered end up in divorce court over raises without support or trumping your partner's ace.

So now I had a woman, whose mere presence caused my adrenal system to overheat, sitting four feet in front of me trying to burrow into my mind. The other two at the table missed what Eve was doing mainly because mind reading's sort of what you do with your bridge partner. But the signals she was giving off were a lot more carnal than whether she was contemplating a short club, or no-trump.

It didn't help my state of mind that the occasional whiff of Eve's perfume brought up thoughts of debauched pagan rituals by the dark of the moon. Needless to say my level of concentration was not what it normally was, and Lilith and Rick wiped the table with us.

We'd lost three rubbers in a row when Lilith suggested that we break for munchies. My wife had obviously invited the Marianis over to score points with her principal and she was doing her best to impress. So, we sat around the bridge table sipping a decent cabernet, and dining on marinated steak bites, while we got better acquainted.

There was actually a pecking order of sorts. As an assistant principal and coach of a moderately successful high school football team, I occupied the top of that totem pole. You don't need to remind me that the pole was insignificant in the great scheme of things.

I knew I was a nobody. But I was the biggest somebody in a room with a third-grade teacher a housewife and an elementary school principal. Thus, we all have our delusions of grandeur.

Eve was the surprise. She was originally from one of those unpronounceable shithole countries that Borat has so lovingly popularized, sent over here when she was twenty to live with a relative and to snag an American. That explained why such a hot looking woman was married to a nebbish and living in a cultural desert like Ohio.

She had no discernable accent. I asked her how she had mastered English so thoroughly. She told me that, like every other resident of her village, she'd learned to speak English because they all knew that the U.S. was where the opportunity lay. Then she'd perfected it watching TV.

Eve didn't work. She just focused on making her man happy. She added, "That's what a Slavic woman is brought up to do." I thought I detected a commercial there.

Rick was looking at her with a level of devotion that Eve wasn't returning. It kinda confirmed the lack of balance in their relationship. I'm not saying that Eve didn't love Rick. It just seemed like she thought her husband's adoration was part of the natural order of things. In retrospect, that should have been a warning sign. But I was way too full of myself to recognize it.

Rick himself seemed like a regular dude, a guy you'd want to hang out with. He liked to hunt, and he loved lake sports. He had an aluminum fishing boat on a trailer that he'd wheel down to the little bluegill lakes that dot the area.

Like a lot of people who get into teaching, Rick wanted to have some purpose in life. That made him more interesting to talk with than the average Joe, who more-or-less just sold his time for wages because that's the only thing of value that he had.

Lilith and Rick told us a few stories from their building. All of it was laden with rumor and innuendo. Women outnumber the men in elementary education by about three to one. So, there is always a hefty dose of female gossip -- basically news about relationships, or the lack of same, and which members of the teaching staff are the ones most likely to win their scarlet letter. Eve seemed disgusted by the triviality of long days spent among the five-to-eleven-year-old set.

That sort of idle chatter goes on at the secondary level too because nobody who works in the constrained space of a school building can avoid the scrutiny of the teacher's room. But the male-to- female ratio is a lot more even-steven in high school and more importantly, the kids you're working with are a lot less innocent. So, secondary school gossip is fraught with weightier implications, like who among the teaching staff might be doing who.

The concept of the members of the faculty at your local high school canoodling is one of the lesser-known aspects of secondary teaching. But high school teachers are immersed in the soap opera that is teenagerhood, and sometimes adolescence rubs off on the so-called adults. As a result, crushes amongst the faculty in a high school environment are sort-of an occupational hazard and speculation about who was whose boyfriend or girlfriend is as rampant as it was among the kids.

I'd always managed to fly above that stuff since I had a contented, if not passionate marriage and it just seemed so pointless getting caught up in something that could only lead to personal disaster. Maybe the ability to detach myself from the teenybopper flirtations of my peers had made me a little arrogant in my dealings with the real world, because I never saw it coming.

*****

Our community is a two-traffic-light wide spot in the road. But football is a religion in small Ohio towns. So, the coaching staff of the Mighty Sioux might have been in better position vis-à-vis our status than the doctors at the local clinic.

One of my more successful innovations was to capture statistics for each play, like yards-after-contact, assists, pancakes and hurries. Then we would go over that while watching film. The guy who recorded the data was normally a volunteer dad who sat with the coach in the booth.

But it was hard to keep anybody consistently in that job because you had to miss a lot of the game while you wrote things down. That was the reason why I was surprised when my assistant told me that he had snagged a regular recorder, and man was SHE ever hot!!

I said, surprised, "She?" We'd never had a female statistician.

He said, "Yeah we put out a call through the district office to see if anybody was willing to do it, even offered to pay, and a chick showed up the next day."

The local Ford dealership provided a bit of "sponsorship" money to "support" the local team. Some people might call that a slush fund but nobody in the area was going to question anything that had to do with the football team's success, and it was also good for the car business.

He added, "She's the wife of one of the local teachers. That was unexpected. But I was even more amazed when I had my first meeting with our new statistician. There was a knock on the door of my little office. I said, "Come in." The door opened and in walked Eve!!

I tried to not look astonished as I stood to greet her. She was squeezed into a warmup suit that showed off her big full tits, her round hips, and her bubble butt to their maximum advantage. She was also wearing her man-killing perfume which was so alluring that it almost melted the soles of my running shoes.

Eve had a cat-that-ate the canary look on her face as she sat with her little stat book cradled against her delectable chest. She said, "Rick told me that I needed to get out more, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. He was happy to hear that I was working for you."

I knew instantly that the situation was wrong. First and foremost, I shouldn't be in close proximity to a woman who stirred me up like Eve did. My wife Lilith was a perfectly satisfactory mate. But she was completely lacking in the bone crushing allure of this new one. I mean, who wants to go around staring at a prime cut of porterhouse when you're living on a diet of hamburger.

Even worse, Eve seemed to be going out of her way to tempt me. She was the polar opposite of a typical football mom. She had no kid on the team and she'd grown up in a country whose version of football was "futball." As far as I could tell, her only qualification was that she could write in English. She seemed to have taken the job simply to be near me and the upsetting part was how happy that made me.

I admit it's shallow. But men keep score by the woman they're with. You can be impoverished and stupid, but other men will think you're something if you show up with a stunner. That's the origin of the term "trophy wife." Lilith and I might be a wholesome looking pair. But nobody ever dropped their fork when we entered the restaurant.

That's exactly what happened when I took Eve to the local diner to discuss her responsibilities. Every guy in the place was eyeing us. It was ego expanding. I was trying to stay businesslike as she sat opposite me nursing a cup of coffee, visibly hanging on my every word. I explained the hours and the duties while I tried to get an idea of what could possibly motivate her to sign up for such a ridiculously inappropriate job.

She told me that she wanted to learn as much as she could about her new hometown. While at the same time she was subliminally communicating that she was really just interested in me. She gave my arm a little squeeze when we parted company, nothing more than that. But it felt intimate, like she was breaking down a physical boundary. I arrived home more than a little bit distracted.

Luckily, Lilith wasn't there. She was off with her gal pals doing whatever women do when they want to get away from men. It wasn't anything wanton. They just hung out in a local eatery, or sometimes in the library, bitching about their life and their husbands. It was the female equivalent of my bowling night. The excuse is always something reasonable, like a book club, or quilting. But the practical purpose is the same. Married people get along better after the honeymoon if they see less of each other.

I fed Buster and sat down with a beer. It was upsetting. I had followed all the rules and I was a person of respect in the community. My life was comfortable. My wife had done nothing to deserve what I was contemplating. But nonetheless, the thought was still there.

I suppose men never get completely out of the stage when all the young stallions compete for the herd's females. It's the joy of the hunt, the chase and capture. It might even be genetic for all I know. But it's a phase in every fellow's life when all you can think about is scoring with the hottest chick.

It's also an amoral time of dog-eat-dog rivalry. And you are willing to pull any lowdown stunt to achieve your nefarious ends, lying, cheating, and sneaking around behind everybody else's back. I mean what the heck, we were just horney pubescent kids with no real concept of right and wrong.

I thought I'd grown past all of that. I'd learned the ropes in the dating game, met a girl who I could reasonably expect to couple up with and gotten married. That was a decade after puberty. I just thought that I'd done the required mating dance, and I had the other two-thirds of my life to develop a bit of wisdom.

Well, that's what I thought anyhow, until the gods rolled the golden apple into my version of the Garden and it took all of my willpower not to pick it up and take a bite. I had no idea why Eve had chosen to entice me. But she was definitely doing the temptation thing. Even worse, it was working.

Maybe she was bored? Small town Ohio ain't exactly a garden of cultural delights and Eve was a European. Maybe she thought that she was trading up. I had traveled around a bit over there. So, I had more alpha male cred in the worldliness department than Rick, who had never been out of Ohio.

There might have also been a hint of animal attraction. I know she rocked my world from the git-go. Maybe I did the same for her. It was a subliminal feeling, erotic to the max but impossible to define. Yet, it was clear that Eve had her sights set on me, and she wasn't going away.

Even worse. I didn't want her to leave. Her beauty was a breath of fresh air in the daily trudge and her obvious eagerness to please was ego expanding. It was like I had the hottest girl in school sending me signals that she wanted to go to the prom with me. That's exhilarating when you're fifteen. It's hazardous to your reputation when you're thirty-five.

Still, I had done a good job of holding temptation at arm's length up to that point. Both spouses were pleased that Eve was working with me and to tell the truth, she was really good at what she did. I even gave her an official title, "Quality Control Analyst."

Eve was clearly a lot smarter than anybody gave her credit for and she was a very capable learner. She still didn't know the difference between a skinny post and a safety blitz, but she didn't need to. All she had to do was record a standard set of data for each play, and her statistics were invaluable.

There are always a few key moments in each game, where the play-call depends on the situation and who's executing it. The insights I got from Eve's analyses helped me make the right decisions. Hence, I came to depend on her more-and-more as our season progressed.

As the playoffs approached, Eve had gotten so good at analytics that she was running her part of the operation without an assistant coach's help. As a consequence, she had begun to travel to away games to take her statistics. And that was what let the snake into the Garden.

We had an archrival who we always faced on the last Friday of the regular season. It was an away game a couple of towns over, and the team, coaching staff, and cheerleaders rode back-and-forth on three big yellow school busses. The game itself was a blow-out. We had been getting better all season and it showed. Eve's contribution was part of that.

It was a little later than usual when we pulled back in, because of all the congratulations and celebration. I did the normal post-game talk with the team and we all turned toward our cars. My defensive coordinator said, "Anybody want to grab a beer at the Village Inn, it's on me." His defense had pitched a shutout. Five voices said, "I'm in." Eve's was one of them.

A trip to the Inn was typical after a game. But I was still surprised that Eve was willing to join us. She might have been a valued member of the staff. But nobody would ever think that the beautiful round ass beneath her waist length Mighty Sioux sideline jacket belonged to one of the male coaches. So, we didn't treat her like she was a fellow denizen of our treehouse.