Interactive Fiction

After reading the third installment of Who Is She? please respond to the following question: What should Bart’s wife do after arranging a liaison with an old beau?

a) Tell her husband Bart that she ran into Jonathan.
b) Buy a new outfit for their dinner.
c) Confide in her book club friends and get advice.
d) Keep the secret.
e) Other (please write your suggested game below)

The alarm clock rang at six o’clock AM. She asked Bart if he’d mind having breakfast alone. "Sure," he said. She told him she had had a rough night and trouble sleeping. "Feeling sick?" he asked. "No," she said, "just wiped." She turned over in bed and pulled the light blanket over her head to block the sun streaming through the wooden blinds. Had she dreamed all this? Her robe was on the floor. She peeked from under the cover, shielding her eyes, and put her hand in the robe pocket. She touched it. It was true. The rubber condom reared its ugly head.

To read Who Is She? Part One, click here.

To read Who Is She? Part Two, click here.

Bart pulled out of the driveway. She heard the car leave. Every day for as long as she could remember, two honks as he backed out making sure Godzilla was not in his path. She felt light-headed. Oddly perverse. She opened the drawer of her bedside table. She pulled Bart’s condom over her lipstick vibrator with Bart’s condom and held it against her. It was fast. It was easy. She came quickly — for herself and by herself. She moaned, so loudly that Godzilla started to bark, bounded up the stairs and jumped into the bed. Bart didn’t allow the dog in bed, but she welcomed Godzilla’s arrival. She petted her best friend. He licked his mistress’s face. A forbidden bedmate. How wicked. She was happy to have this dog in her life.

Relaxed, she wondered about this masturbatory-secret-self-of-herself. With all her good friends, and all the confidences they had shared all these years, vibrators were the one small appliance they never discussed. Electric knives, toaster ovens, mixers, can openers, all safe territory, but never this life affirming gizmo. Why? she wondered. She had read in a science journal that the clitoris was the only human organ that existed solely for pleasure. Maybe self-pleasure was deemed verboten for her group of women. Or possibly all women? She’d bring it up at the next book club meeting. She’d slip it in somewhere between the talk of Anna and Vronsky’s fatal attraction. She’d dare it. But what was most important was that she had done it with Bart’s condom. She was proud of herself, a kind of quid pro quo, and she was ready to move on.

Faithful wife, unfaithful husband — so what else was new? In truth, she and Bart were strangers joined by body parts, for a short time paired in passion, or so she thought, and now performing a perfunctory, occasional, marital obligation. Like the family dinner at Thanksgiving. Rx: Ordinary Sex; i.e., turkey, cranberry, sweet potato.

For no reason that she could fathom, she suddenly remembered her mother’s dying. Her father had died four years before. When she visited Charlotte in the hospital, they had held hands, her mother’s so cold. Her mother saying softly, as if thinking aloud, "You know I never really loved your father." As she lay dying, she confided to her only daughter that her father had not been the love of her life. "Charlie was a good man, a good husband, but my heart belonged to Mikey."

"But, Ma," she said, "Mikey married your sister, Aunt Helen. He was Uncle Mikey."

"I know," Charlotte said.

"Did Aunt Helen know?"

Her mother answered, "No, no."

"Did Mikey know, Ma?"

Her mother seemed to doze off, but answered with her eyes closed. "Mikey knew he made my heart skip a beat. Yes, he knew. But he married my sister and I was married to your father. Sometimes life doesn’t work out."

Then her mother drifted off to sleep — the sleep of preparedness, the sleep of the almost dying. Her mom, mother, ma, Charlotte died three days after her deathbed confession. Basta memories.

She got out of bed, fluffed up her pillows and began her day: Leave money for Esmeralda, call a new lawn-mowing service, bring in the car for the 10,000-mile checkup, get new knobs for the worn out ones on the kitchen cabinets, call and change her library shift so she could take her daughter, Lila, to lunch on her birthday, etc., etc., etc., call Jonathan Marston. Yes, call Jonathan Marston.

Bart rings up and says he’ll be home about nine o’clock PM. He’ll be in the air-conditioned conference room and she has the number. Bart’s telling the truth, she thinks. Call Jonathan Marston. She checks in with the kids, all in order — short conversations. It’s good that they’re always busy, too busy to talk. Call Jonathan Marston. She has until nine o’clock PM. Tempus Fugit. It’s 7:30 PM.