The Prenuptial Agreement Ch. 02

The other person who has not figured much in this story is Jenny, my now ex-wife. I don't know if it was me or if we were too young. That must sound odd, given that she filed suit against me but in my mind it was as though the divorce had just happened on its own. Why had I married her? Was I really happy? How had my emotional problems affected the marriage? When in Asia with Susan, I'd been focused on her and us, on finally closing the gaps that lay between us, on fully recovering the twin sister I'd lost. Now I had nothing to occupy my thoughts.

Susan called me to say that Jenny had come to see her, specifically to apologize for causing so much pain. They didn't talk about me or the divorce, except in passing. The whole conversation lasted only ten minutes.

I'd been looking at a large bundle which had been sitting in the corner for weeks. It had come from Jack's office with a note saying that the entire set of files were marked strictly confidential, for my eyes only, and the firm felt it was their duty to deliver them to me unopened and unread. I had a sneaking suspicion the files held the results of our surveillance of Jenny, but I lacked either the courage or the curiosity to check. Jenny had become a blank, our time together, our marriage events so remote they felt like they had happened in another lifetime.

Weeks went by and the weather grew colder. We had settled into a weather pattern of grey drizzle that matched my mood. My week had started with a spurt of anger forced out by the necessity of meeting my father. Business before pleasure. Business before anger. We did the business. I had read the financial statements and had asked my questions directly of the accountants before the meeting. My father insisted on this formality, perhaps to show that he was head of the family, perhaps because it was the only way I'd see him.

He showed no sign that he'd been served with an order keeping him away from Susan. He didn't betray for a moment that he knew I must know what he had done. I marveled at his control even as I was disgusted by it. He refused to fight with me and I realized this was all he was capable of doing. This show of accountability was it, his way of saying that he knew he was being watched. No emotion. No admission. Nothing but another business transaction between father and son. Now that the bluster and the screaming and the threats were all stripped away, that was all we had left.

When I left that meeting, my blood was boiling over so I pulled into a parking lot and sat. That didn't work so I walked in tight circles, fuming. That didn't work either, so I opened the trunk of my car and started smashing things. I beat my golf clubs against the pavement. I bent the woods over my knee. I only stopped when I took a four iron and smashed out my own tail lights.

That was how my week began. As the days ticked by, I realized that the last illusions about my father had faded. He didn't love me through the yelling. Or if he did, he was totally incapable of showing it. Ever, never, ever, never. He treated me like an investor, an outsider with audit power, an investigator from the SEC. I had no father. Just like Susan, I had no father. He wouldn't change. He wouldn't start listening to my concerns and my ideas. He wouldn't care. He would refer to me as his son and I would refer to him as my father but we had no relationship, not any more, not even a bad one.

I'd never realized the depth to which my psychology was tied up in my father's opinion of me. I'm textbook: the neglected child seeking approval from the distant authority figure as he is confused by and rebells against everything that authority figure represents. I'd known this for years but it had never sunk so deeply in. I missed my mother.

Jenny walked up behind me in line at Starbucks. She said hello. I said hi. I took my coffee and sat down. She waited for her latte and headed for the door. She rested her hand on the push bar, then turned and came to my table. I'd been watching warily. She stood a careful distance away.

"What happened to your car?" Her voice was forced, not natural.

"I tried to kill it." She nodded, unsure what to say. "I was upset." A cloud passed over her expression. "With my father." She suddenly sat down on the opposite chair. She knew my father.

"What happened?"

"We had a very pleasant meeting so I took my anger out on my car. With my golf clubs." She was biting her lip and looking at my chin, avoiding my eyes. She nodded. "We no longer have a relationship."

"No. We don't." The words had escaped her before she realized her mouth was moving.

"I meant my father and me." She put her hand to her head. I was noticing things about her but I was still, almost frozen, my hand resting on the table wrapped around the paper cup. "You went to see Susan. That was nice of you. She appreciated it."

"I felt awful." She waved a hand in the air. "Oh God, how did we end up here?"

"I sometimes wonder if we were ever married." She looked stricken. "I mean it seems like another lifetime."

"No. I'm not sure we ever were married." She caught my eye for an instant. I could see hurt.

"I wonder the same thing. The more I know about myself, the less confidence I have in my ability to be much of anything as a person."

"Don't say that."

I raised my eyebrows and looked deep into my coffee. "I'm a little down. I just realized I don't have a father. Not really. Never did. Why did you marry me anyway?"

Jenny almost reached out her hand. "For your money. For your money." Time slowed and I became aware of my stillness. "I married you because I wanted to be rich. I'm a terrible person. I married you and thought I'd be able to live with you . . . but then I . . . and then I . . ." She broke off. "I have to go." She almost ran out the door.

That night, I tried to watch television but found myself lifting the bundle from Jack's office onto the dining room table, opening it and spreading out the contents. File folders organized by surveillance date. Transcripts of phone calls. Cell phone and credit card records.

I spread all the items out on the table, but found I didn't have the heart to tackle them without knowing what I was looking for. My wife had married me for my money. My ex-wife, the woman who had filed for divorce because she thought I was having an affair, had admitted . . . had admitted what? Did she never love me? Was she looking for a way out? That would go a long way toward explaining why she'd filed for divorce without ever speaking to me about her suspicions, about any problems she'd seen in my marriage.

I left the pile on the table, took a hot shower and got into bed. I woke restless at 4AM. Too much sleep to feel tired again, too little to sustain me through the day. I went into the kitchen and gobbled a handful of grapes. "Don't eat now. You'll regret it later," I told myself. I poured a glass of cold water and walked into the dark dining room where I stood in front of the table looking at the shadowy lumps which might tell me things I didn't want or need to know. I flicked on a light and picked up the pile of transcripts.

Nothing here. Nothing here, just boring chatter with her mother. My God, she's filed for divorce and she doesn't talk about it at all. Her mother asks if she's all right and she brushes her off. She doesn't wonder if she's doing the right thing.

I put down the transcripts and picked up the surveillance records. Flipping through them yielded little more than trips to her lawyer's office, to her mother's, to her dentist, to the market. Hell, I don't want to know this stuff. Even if I were married to her, I wouldn't want to know every move she makes.

Back to the transcripts, this time with more diligence. I forced myself to turn the pages slowly, to look at each phone call to see what it was about. She talked on the phone a lot. Did she also use her cellphone a lot? I picked up the pile of her cellphone records. She barely uses minutes. Why did I pay for her to have such an expensive plan when she barely uses the phone?

More pages of transcripts. I'm getting tired. Maybe I'll go back to bed. I pick up the surveillance records one more time. This folder has transcripts of overheard conversations. I squint at the notes - recorded at some chain restaurant using a directional microphone, lunch with a shorter brunette woman - maybe it's her friend Robin. Lots of mindless chatter. Talk about Robin's work.

"So am I allowed to talk about it?"

"My lawyer said I shouldn't say anything."

"What? You don't trust me?"

"No, not that. He said you never know who might be listening."

"I think you're paranoid. It's a divorce, not a TV show."

"You don't know these people."

"You mean your husband?"

The transcript doesn't indicated pauses. It isn't a script filled with stage directions. Here it indicates "unintelligible" but without saying how long that lasted.

"You're kidding. You really did that?"

"I know, I could barely believe it myself." This was interesting.

"Did you do it?"

"No. No. I couldn't. I still can't."

"But you wanted to."

"God yes."

"But if Mike was having an affair, then why shouldn't you? You know, get some of your own."

"It's complicated."

"You mean by love."

"No. No. I don't think I ever loved Mike. But I promised I'd be faithful and there's a lot of money at stake."

"Mike's loaded."

"I have a prenuptial agreement. If I got caught, I'd get nothing."

"Is that legal? Aren't you entitled to half?"

"He can keep what he brought into the marriage. That's everything. And I agreed to some other things because I thought it was the only way he'd marry me."

"I thought you were crazy about him."

"I don't know. I met him right after you know the break-up. Mike's nice but I never felt the same way for him."

"He's rich. He's good looking. Was the sex bad?"

"It was fine. It should have been better. Maybe that was my fault."

"Wow. So after the divorce, you'll be rich and you'll have your true love and everything will be perfect."

"I think we should talk about something else."

The rest showed nothing of interest. I was now wide awake. The rest of the files contained only a few short bits of conversation, none particularly interesting. Only one line stood out, "I have no intention to back off." I assume she was talking about the court case.

So there I had it. Jenny had married me for my money. She'd been in love with someone else and saw me as a meal ticket even though I was at best second choice in her heart. And in her bed. Well, that just about made my day.

"She must be with him now," I thought. I wonder who the bastard is. Maybe I could have him castrated. "It could be arranged." Hell, with my money, almost anything could be arranged.

People think it's easy being rich. Well, they're right. I'm always amazed when rich people complain about how hard their lives are. Yes, there's so much to organize for that trip to the Loire Valley and charity functions are worthwhile but so exhausting. I never had to worry where my next meal came from, whether I could afford a house - or to be honest, if that Ferrari wasn't a little too much. The last thing I would do is complain about having more of what most people barely have.

When you're divorced, upset, emotional and lonely, the best thing that money gives you is sex appeal. I was suddenly a very sexy man. It was like my cock had grown three more inches so it was now a full foot long - as if. I realized I could probably not shower and not shave and still get laid by hot women. I could probably fuck 'em without foreplay, roll over and go to sleep and still get called 'lover' if she believed a diamond bracelet might be forthcoming.

Is it a sin to take advantage of what's offered? Or is the sin not seizing the opportunities presented? When a blonde with expensively enhanced tits, puts those attraction generators in my face as one of her hands guides one of my hands under her short, designer skirt, who am I to not fuck her?

Meredith? Great thighs, a pussy so perfectly hairless the pedophile associations kind of frightened me, and a mouth that yes may have had some collagen injected into the lips but that didn't bother me since they felt fine when I injected my sperm between them. I'd give her an eight on the extreme beauty scale - the one where a ten has never yet been seen and would cause instant ejaculation if found. She lost a point for artificiality. A high score on the enthusiasm scale - another obvious benefit of wealth - balanced by her definite lack of real sensuality. When she rode me, she bounced rather than fucked. I'd been fucked by some experts recently and she needed to learn better pelvic control to move out of the amateur ranks.

I was seeing a lot of highly plucked eye brows and carefully rouged cheeks. Very long lashes and mascara can look like hell when you're being sweatily plowed.

Blow jobs are offered to a man like me as a form of hello. As in, we chat for a minute and she gives the shaft an oral greeting as a hint of wildness later to come. In a two week period, three different women whom I'd never before dated asked me to fuck their asses. I was taken aback, though I felt honor bound to comply with their wishes. I gather the ass is either considered a less intimate substitute for pussy or as the ultimate mark of nasty intimacy.

It is amazing what some girls will do. Some pick sexy and others pretend to be shyly vulnerable. I say pretend because my experience during this time in my life was that the so-called shy ones, the ones who weren't pushovers, actually were - round heels every one. The game was obvious, to make the act special by making the surrender an event. I never could decide which approach I preferred. Sexy is definitely good but there is something inherently fun about playing a little sexual poker before the actual poking.

Genevieve. When a woman lets you know that her enormous breasts are real and then puts your hand on one, then you know the odds that your cock will be in her mouth are good. I'll admit her hair was permed; I didn't like it at all, too tortured and artificial. I'll admit I had no interest in her from word one. But, but, but . . . she had me fuck her mouth. That's different from a blow job, which is administered by the woman. Genevieve stretched out on her belly across my kitchen table, lifted her head, opened her mouth and I pumped it like a pussy, though not as roughly. I enjoyed it. I slapped her ass and squeezed her soft plush tits and rubbed my cock all over her face. I think she liked it too, that it wasn't only an act for her. I realized when fucking her that tits can actually be so big they can get in the way. Sometimes when you fuck, you want to be able to concentrate on the fucking itself, not on the big bags whacking your head around.

That was my life as a lonely, divorced man with a devastated family and deep-seated emotional issues. It wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds. At least I still had my looks.

I started working with Susan in therapy, first thinking the goal was to help her but quickly realizing that I'd underestimated how much help I needed. The depth of my rage scared me. After the second session, I broke down and couldn't stop crying.

I knew only that I felt empty, like I was living inside a shell that hid me from the world and kept me from knowing the real me, whoever that was. I realized I was unhappy, that I'd always been unhappy, that my life was a prison and my father had always been my jailer.

Looking around me, I saw too many women with Hermés bags and diamond necklaces and surgery altered eyes under expensive coiffures. I saw people who lived in a cocoon made of money, who passed everyday through corridors of luxury, whose contact with the real world was the same as that experienced by a tourist in the third world. My interactions were with clerks in stores, with the service people who pampered me at the car dealer, with the bankers who solicitously acted like they were my friends, with the darker skinned people who cleaned up after me. Nice people, I would think, nice people and that made me feel more of a man, more of a human being for being nice to them in turn, for taking the time to know their names. I wondered if they cursed me in Spanish when my back was turned.

I suddenly felt grateful to Jennifer, grateful in the same way that a cancer survivor looks at what has been learned from the experience. I could have walked through my life asleep inside myself, but now I was awakening. It was not, I realized, that my life had been free of pain - it was not - but that I had been so completely unfulfilled.

I am not a religious man. I believe in God but for reasons I can't put in words. My God is not a man, not a force that watches over us. I didn't feel any urge to find salvation in belief, in handing myself over to Jesus, to be saved and perhaps then to use my wealth to spread the gospel, amen, to every corner of this glorious but awful world. I could look around me and what I saw was hypocrisy and judging and sanctimony, not love and not peace. Yes, many men of God would be glad for my money, glad for the good works they could accomplish in God's name with my money and, yes, some of them likely would do some good. But others would not. I knew of the affairs, of the closeted ministers spouting the word on Sunday when they'd been dicking it with a man on Saturday. I knew about the money spent on trips and cars and fancy houses.

All that would not have mattered if I had within me the true belief that people can be saved. From what are they being saved? What exactly are they to believe when everyone hears the Word differently? Is this sect right and that one so wrong? Is it all facets of the same picture? And if it is, then why can't the Hindus be as right as the Baptists?

It sounds like I'm justifying myself and maybe I am. I should shut up.

Enlightenment filled me when I realized I was the hero of my own story. It is my choice to be tragic, to walk away wounded, to die even in a burst of raw emotion. It is my choice to be forgiving, to be the one who turns the cheek and accepts. It is my choice to be vengeful. Only I am the hero of my own story.

I choose happiness. Easily said, harder to define. Does being happy mean I must stoke the fires that burn or that I should damp them? Must I overcome the most difficult hurdles or should I seek the easiest path? What kind of man fits this kind of happiness? How can I know if I don't know who I am?

Who am I? I am Sam. Sam I am. No, that's Dr. Seuss. I am Mike. Mike I am. I am a worthless, rich bastard. I am a complete, fucking blank. All I fucking am is what I have and I didn't earn a goddamn penny of it. All I fucking am is a pile of clothes and objects and things and not a bit of that shit has anything to do with me.

The last time I remember being me was when I was a kid. I only feel good about myself when I feel like a kid. I have to get out of here.

I told Susan. I told her I'd reached the breaking point, that I was at the end of my rope and every other cliché which fit. I had to get away, not on vacation but away, not like she had done - to go into hiding - but to find myself. Even my urges are fucking retreads from old dreams told in every generation.

Susan, bless her heart, understood, probably with more depth than I was capable of reaching. She told me to get lost. Her exact words were, "Mikey, go until you run out of road. Then every direction you go in will be your choice." Then she said I love you.

It doesn't take long to disappear. Preparations in case I ran into big trouble. A security code to retrieve money if necessary. Instructions. A Durable Power of Attorney authorizing Susan to act for me. My will brought up to date. A motorcycle.