The Madonna and the Manatee

This started out as a tight little conversation between a divorced husband and the man who wronged him. I wanted to play around with one of my least favorite words (you'll probably be able to guess which one!) and this seemed like a fun way to do it.

Then I decided to give my characters a little more development. They ran with it.

Then my narrator joined in.

Despite my best efforts, the final product is pretty long, and the sex...well, let's just say that if you're looking for something sexy, you might want to give this one a pass. Immature humor, on the other hand, is abundant, so if you've still got a little bit of maladjusted ten-year-old running around your psyche, you should be right at home.

The Madonna and the Manatee

Copyright, B. Watson 2022

I waited until about a year after the divorce before I called Winslow Hubble. Things had settled down and memories had faded--for him, at least. For me, they were still fresh, still tender. Still strong enough to propel me forward as I planned and plotted the second half of my revenge.

The first part was the divorce itself. That went pretty fast: neither Ashley nor I had enough money to make it exciting for the lawyers, and once the facts about the breakup came out, her parents weren't interested in underwriting Ash's plans to tie me up in court. As for the division of assets, we didn't have a lot of stuff, we rented, and we made about the same amount of money, so things went somewhat smoothly, despite Ash's best efforts.

She didn't want to split up, but I did, and it took her a while to realize that she was no longer steering the ship of our relationship. I tried to persuade her gently, but when that didn't work, I threatened to send the videos of her infidelity to everyone in her address book. She folded like an origami artist on speed.

And so, less than a year after Ashley hosted her extracurricular romps in our marital bed, we had separate apartments, separate bank accounts, and thoroughly separate lives. We'd always had separate friends--we'd tried to combine them for a while, but her work buddies were part of the Brooks Brothers Financial District crowd, while mine tended more toward the "I used to be a starving writer, but now I'm a corporate sell-out in Doc Marten's" tribe. As we eventually learned, bloodthirsty jackals and mischievous otters don't play well together.

I thought about punishing Ashley for her adultery, but in the end, I decided that the divorce was retribution enough. In a few nights of abysmal sex, she screwed herself out of a great marriage, a nice little apartment that she couldn't afford on her own, and the advancement rotation at her job. She worked for Pierce, Bateman, Potter, Gordon, and Macduque--commonly known as Pierce, Bateman--an investment firm that prided itself on its staff of stable, married employees. Unfortunately, Ash no longer qualified. She'd still be able to work her way up the ranks, but it'd take longer and be more of a struggle.

I sometimes wondered which loss hit her the hardest--our cute place on the Upper West Side, our marriage, or her express route to a corner office. In truth, though, I think I already knew.

Ash got Winslow in the divorce. I think she would have preferred he went with me, but she cracked that egg and I had no problem leaving her to clean up the mess.

Winslow Hubble, you see, was my wife's lover.

No, strike that. Lover isn't the word. Nothing that happened between Winslow and Ashley had anything to do with love, or even with affection. He wasn't her boyfriend, either. Since our separation, I haven't had my ex-wife followed--in fact, I've done everything in my ability to completely remove myself from her life--but I'd bet my last penny that she hasn't given him the time of day since I sent her a video of the two of them together.

If I had to put a title on Winslow, I'd call him the guy whose dick unlocked my marriage. He wasn't the instigator and he wasn't a beneficiary--at least after the handful of evenings he spent in my bed. Winslow was a key, a tool. Destined to be used then discarded.

*

Winslow's phone rang twice before he answered. The double ring was a prep school trick that he'd carried through college to his job at Pierce, Bateman. Never look eager. Never look desperate. Never pick up on the first ring. If you knew the trick, it just looked kind of pathetic. Admittedly, the same could be said of Winslow.

His voice: Aristocratic. Arrogant. "Winslow Hubble speaking."

"Hey, Winslow. It's Charles Walker."

"Ah...Chuck Walker. That's a name from the past!" I could hear the smirk in his voice. His leather seat squeaked as he lounged back. "What do you need, Chuck? Have some money you want to invest?"

Winslow probably knew that my little nest egg was less than a rounding error for most of Pierce, Bateman's clients. Prick. "No, I'm pretty good right now, Winnie." I smiled, knowing the nickname would make him bristle. "I figured it was high time you and I had a little talk."

Winslow snorted. "Well, I can't imagine what we might have to talk about, Cuck--I mean, Chuck. It's not exactly like we fly in the same circles anymore." He let loose a plummy little chuckle. "Or really, that you're flying much at all. I can't imagine why I would want to grab a drink with you."

"Well, Winnie, it's like this: You still have a wife. And I still have a video."

*

I suppose I should give some information about my ex-wife and me. I'm Charles--Chuck--Walker, a former journalist who now makes his money editing fluffy articles about the charitable activities of Polylever, a very large, very well-known corporation. It's not the most rewarding job, but it pays well, the people are nice, and it's helping to ensure that my retirement will involve something better than cat food and a short-term heroin addiction.

As for Ashley, she's an investment banker working in the wilds of Wall Street. In contrast to the tarnished idealism that adds a little zing of hypocritical zest to my office, Pierce, Bateman runs on the firm belief that money makes its own morality. Put simply, if it's profitable, it's good.

Despite our very different jobs, Ash and I were a good fit. We were both 30--old enough to think seriously about kids, but young enough that we didn't have to think too seriously. I was 5'9", brown-haired and green-eyed, in good shape, which I maintained by going to the gym three times a week and walking 5-10 miles per day. Ash was 5'6", with dark brown hair, sharp blue eyes, and a body that haunted my dreams, both before and after we married. We'd met at a We Were Promised Jetpacks concert in Brooklyn, where she spilled a beer on my third-favorite t-shirt and I got her number.

I talked to her a lot that night--we ditched the opening act, a Scottish reggae band, and sipped our beers in the little outside smoking area. I had been on the New York dating scene long enough to realize that she was something special--beautiful and brilliant, with a playful sense of humor and a direct, matter-of-fact manner that consistently took me by surprise. I would later learn that she was the youngest of five, with four older brothers who shared her blunt honesty and mischievousness.

By the next weekend, we had a date to go to the Muppets exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image, and I discovered that the humor and intelligence that I had seen at our first meeting were still there, even after my beer goggles were gone. If anything, she was even more impressive when I was sober enough to recognize the nuances of her subtle snark. Within six months, she had my ring. A year later, we were married.

That was four years ago. Keeping a marriage together in a big city isn't easy, and we both worked hard at it. I knew that Ash sometimes had late nights at the office, and she knew that I occasionally had to scramble to meet a deadline or finish one of the freelance articles that I wrote on the side. We tried to coordinate subway rides and organize lunches, but some days we only saw each other for a few minutes in the morning and an hour or two at night. Still we made a point of keeping the weekends free, texting and emailing to keep each other in the loop, and never--ever!--forgetting an important date or anniversary. Even the stupid little ones, like "Spilled Beer Day" and "First Real Date Day."

I learned that Ash was a chameleon. In museums, she was clever and erudite, without being snotty about it. Hiking in the Adirondacks, she was rough-hewn and competitive, ignoring the scrapes and scratches she collected as she raced me along the trail. After a few cocktails, she was playful and silly, eager to join in my F. Scott Fitzgerald fantasies of being young and well-heeled in New York. We jumped in a few fountains and had frenzied sex behind a few trees in Central Park. Don't believe the hype: the hottest part of that was the fear of being caught.

As we dated, lived together, married, and made a life, she revealed more sides of herself--a geekiness to her humor, a vulnerability to her caring. It was almost like she made a gift of these parts, offering them to me when I least expected.

At work, chameleon Ash let out her predator side. I got to see a hint of it every Thursday night at Pierce, Bateman's weekly happy hour. The firm had a standing hold on a back room at Three Olives, a stodgy/hip Financial District watering hole packed with enough burgundy leather club chairs, hunting prints and flavorless British-inspired cuisine to give even the most devoted anglophile a hardon. While weekly attendance wasn't officially required, failure to show up--ideally with spouse in tow--was basically an admission that you didn't care about working your way up the ladder. So I spent every Thursday night making small talk with Ashley's fellow financial warriors, absorbing gossip from her office, and watching her work the crowd.

Most of Ashley's coworkers were self-congratulating former frat boys, and many of their spouses were the sort of lacquered blondes who spent college majoring in art appreciation or early childhood education while shopping for husbands with serious earning potential. I tried to blend in with them, but there's only so many conversations you can have about rooftop bars and Jimmy Choo slingbacks before you feel compelled to eat a bullet.

Thankfully, Martha "Call me Marty" Hubble came to my rescue.

On the outside, Winslow Hubble's better half looked like just another starved, bleached and lacquered Pierce, Bateman wife. However, my assumptions about her came to a crashing halt one night when Abby VanVoorten was holding forth on her husband's new obsession with curling, a Canadian game that involves pushing granite disks along an ice-covered surface.

"So let me get this straight," Martha muttered. "She's bragging because her blue blood New England husband is spending a small fortune to learn a game played by redneck Canadians?"

I glanced and saw the smirk playing on her face. Martha, I realized, had thrown her version of a conversational Hail Mary, a volley intended to find out if I was a fellow traveler or just another one of the pod people. "Redneck or Rockefeller, inbreeding appears to be universal," I muttered back. "Still, it's a dangerous game. Hard to play polo with permanently crossed eyes."

We were off to the races.

Marty, I learned, was a woman in the Martha Stewart mold, all the way from her driving ambition to her dry-as-the-Mojave sense of humor. Like the great Mrs. Stewart, Martha Hubble, nee Petrowski, started life with humble beginnings, working her way from a working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood to a well-regarded college and--ultimately--into a promising marriage with a man whose Anglo-Saxon surname was a bit more prestigious than her Polish/Lithuanian one. She had a job at a prominent publishing house, where she was already making a name for herself, but it was generally assumed that it was only a matter of time before she would quit and start pushing out little Hubbles.

At Pierce, Bateman's interminable happy hours, Marty and I usually found each other in some corner, where we traded smartass comments and passed the time by playing Nazi haircut bingo. That's basically where you scan a crowd of New Yorkers, picking out the various Goering, Heydrich, Goebbels and Hitler haircuts on display. In a place like Three Olives, awash in testosterone and high-end hair care products...well, let's just say, it was a target-rich environment.

While Marty and I quietly snarked, our spouses worked the crowd. They took different routes: Ashley, who was still paying off her student loans, spent most of her time sipping on club soda and using her brains and bluntness to insinuate herself with the guys in the really nice suits. Meanwhile, Winslow--who probably celebrated most of his childhood birthdays at the yacht club or the nineteenth hole--spent his time drinking gin and tonics and telling dirty jokes to his former frat brothers.

It was hard to miss the class difference. Ash was trying to claw her way into a lifestyle that Winslow took for granted; meanwhile, he foundered along, secure in the knowledge that if he failed too terribly there was always another frat brother, another investment firm, another cocktail party. And, according to the gossips, if all else failed, he could always go back to mom and dad, and a fat salary "managing" the family foundation.

So those were our Thursdays: Ash navigating the waters of happy hour like a great white, Winnie bobbing along like a happy little seal, and Marty and I drinking our cocktails, watching the show and absorbing gossip like a couple of quiet anemones. It wasn't my preferred way to spend my free time, but it made Ash happy and Marty made it fun, so I didn't complain too much about having to put on a suit and provide a cheering section for my wife.

Our marriage was a balancing act, performed by two youngish people with jobs that were way too demanding and a connection that was way too important to let slide. It was a marriage of quiet admiration and enthusiastic excitement, of principles and compromises, the kind that a young couple has when they're sucking it up and laying the groundwork for profitable careers, a house, kids, and the rest of the American dream. It was hard, but we worked at it, and it worked for us.

That's not to say that everything was easy: Ashley had a tendency toward jealousy that seemed outrageous to me, given how attractive she was. Then again, I had my own problems with the green-eyed monster: In a city of eight million people, where fear of missing out on the bigger, better deal was as much a part of life as subway rides and dirty-water hot dogs, I found it hard to believe that my wife settled for me...and oddly reassuring that she valued me so highly.

A much bigger problem was Ashley's sense of justice. At the office, her morality was flexible--a necessary characteristic if you want to make your way on Wall Street. But in her personal life, Ashley's sense of right and wrong was rigid and unshaking. When she felt wronged, Ash would quickly exact retribution, and her vengeance was--to my mind, at least--confusing, underhanded, and diabolical.

The way it generally worked was, after Ash became convinced that she had been sinned against, she would confront the scofflaw and present her case, often at high volume. At this point, a sincere apology--or series of apologies--and some form of penance might be enough to return balance to the universe. But if the scofflaw in question continued to protest their innocence or insufficiently repented, Ashley's inner avenger would spring into play.

On the surface, Ash would let the argument die, and life would seemingly go on without a hitch. In the background, though, she was hard at work--weighing evidence, rendering judgement, and quietly levying what she saw as an appropriate punishment. There was no court of appeals, no stay of execution, no higher power: Once Ashley reached her verdict, she didn't need outside validation to tell her she'd done the right thing, and she rejected any arguments that she'd gone too far.

I sometimes wondered where Ash got her sense of justice. I assumed it was an outgrowth of her childhood, of a little girl who sometimes found herself at the mercy of four hulking brothers. Direct confrontation would be useless and taking her grievances to her parents would lead to being branded a tattletale--a devastating insult in a house full of boys. I could easily imagine little Ashley plotting out satisfying punishments for her brothers, then putting them into play. And with four rambunctious boys in the house, who would suspect the angelic younger sister?

Ashley's early years as a guerilla warrior could also explain why her punishments often seemed excessive. By my accounting, for a pound of crime, she usually exacted somewhere around a pound and a half of punishment. I sometimes wondered if she still saw herself as the powerless little sister, fighting secret battles against her big brothers. Or maybe that extra 50 percent was a court processing fee that she tacked on as payback for the time she spent playing judge, jury and executioner.

Example: one Sunday a few months after we married, Ash and I were cleaning the clutter out of our apartment--weeding out the trash that collected in closets and corners, gathering up clothes for Goodwill, and saying goodbye to the college textbooks that we were finally ready to admit we'd never read again. By the time we were done, the living room was packed with bags and boxes, and I was hauling debris to the dumpster on the corner and the Goodwill around the block. All seemed good in Walker Land as we contemplated the new space in our closets and on our bookshelves.

Forty minutes later, I was on the couch clutching a beer while Ashley loomed above me, almost vibrating with fury. It seems that a bag that was supposed to go to the dry cleaners had somehow gone missing. After determining that it wasn't in the trash and that Goodwill was not willing to let us wander through their warehouse searching for it, my wife was left with a lot of anger to vent and nobody to vent it at but me. Apparently, I didn't look carefully enough at the bags when I was taking them out of the apartment, and now Ash was missing three dresses. I apologized--what else could I do!--but it was like trying to fight a forest fire with a handful of sand. After the third apology, I gulped down the rest of my beer, told my wife that I needed my space, and went for a long walk. When I got back a few hours later, there were three new dresses in the closet and Ash was asleep.

The next morning, Ashley was gone when I woke up. I did my morning routine and started dressing for work--a process that ground to a halt when I realized that I didn't have any pants. Nothing in the closet, nothing in the laundry. Even my suit pants were missing. I sent Ash a text: <Honey, have you seen my pants? I can't find them>

The response came back immediately: <Check Goodwill 😉>

Fighting a wave of fury, I finally found a pair of dark sweats in my gym bag. Not ideal, but I was running late, and they'd last me until I could run out to Uniqlo at lunch.

When I got home that night, I had three new pairs of pants. While I put them in the closet, Ashley watched me with an oddly satisfied look in her eyes. Afterward, I went for another walk--simply put, I couldn't stand to be in the apartment with her for another minute.

The final tally: Three dresses lost to an honest mix-up and twelve pairs of pants--including two irreplaceable pairs of suit trousers--sacrificed on the pyre of divine justice. I'm not sure what scale Ashley was using, but it seemed to me that the punishment far outweighed the crime. For the first time in our young marriage, I began to wonder if I'd made a mistake.