Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (23 page)

These are hard times for people like me, who are easily tempted. I try to stay on my diet, but with all the food commercials, I find myself in a TV smorgasbord of chocolate cakes, Quarter Pounders, and vanilla ice cream. And the only way I can avoid temptation is not to buy forbidden food because if a chocolate cake finds its way into my house, I cannot resist it. I will eat my way through it. Which brings me to the point:

Illicit sex.

You may be wondering about the connection, and here it is. I was listening to the radio the other day and heard an ad for a certain website. The company slogan was, “When monogamy becomes monotony,” and the pitch, delivered in a seductive female voice, was that if you’re married and bored out of your mind, you’re definitely entitled to an affair. Just log on.

I thought it must be a joke, or maybe I was hearing things, which was undoubtedly true, as Brad Pitt often whispers my name, in my mind.

But the next night I was watching TV and a commercial for a similar website came on. It featured a pretty girl in a negligee that women haven’t worn since the days of Mamie Van Doren.
The gist of her pitch was, “Married men, log on. Cheat your cheating heart out. We’re cheating, too, so we won’t tell.”

Whoa.

I thought, this is chocolate cake of the highest order. A website for cheaters. Can human beings resist such temptation? This is like a pint of Häagen-Dasz vanilla jumping into your shopping cart, mugging you to be bought, and then spooning itself down your gullet.

This is waterboarding, with saturated fats.

In the good old days, to have an affair, you had to meet another married person at work, then court them, but that wasted a lot of precious negligee time.

Those days are over. Technology has made life easier for married people with a roving eye and a fired-up laptop.

Whoopee?

I went instantly to my computer and logged onto the website, to report to you. As we all know by now, I have nobody to cheat on except a corgi. And I would never date a married man, especially one who’s attracted to a screen name like easy-sexygurl.

I’m more like annoyinginterruptingurl.

On the website, the company reported that it was established in 2001 and had 1.8 million members, 8986 of whom were “online now!” I made a mental note that 2001 was the year the world went to hell in a handbasket and that almost 9000 people want even their cheating to be time-efficient. I bet their Black-Berrys are always on, too, and they keep them in their pants.

Their BlackBerrys, that is.

So I signed on to the service, as an Attached Female Seeking Attached Males, using an old email and fake info. I made myself age 22 and “slim” because I thought it would work better than age 52 and “can’t resist chocolate cake.”

Then the website gave me a choice of “Limits.” Surprisingly, None was not an option. Neither was: Can’t Keep My Word. Or: Thinks Integrity Makes Sense, In Theory. And not even: In Sickness And In Health, But Let’s Not Get Fanatical.

Instead, the categories offered were: Something Short Term, Something Long Term, Cyber Affairs/Erotic Chat, Whatever Excites Me, Anything Goes, and Undecided.

I chose Anything Goes. Yee-hah! In truth, I was Undecided, but that sounded like a primary voter and wouldn’t project Mamie Van Doren to an Attached Male.

The next page looked like the math section of the SATs, with bar graphs showing the peak usage of the website. As you can guess, the bars showed the heaviest usage Monday through Friday, from 9 to 5. So all of this cheating was going on at the office, which made sense. Why meet in the stockroom when you can meet in the chat room? Especially if you’re an Anything Goes kind of gal. At least the website would decrease cheating within the same company and distribute it among all companies, thus equalizing the market share of cheaters. Nobody wants a single business getting a cheating monopoly.

I bet Microsoft would be all over that. They hog everything.

The final page gave lots of good tips, like “Don’t exaggerate your sexual abilities.”

Impossible.

There was even a warning: “We have a strict policy against escorts plying their craft.” Funny, I never thought of an escort as having a craft. Stonemasons have a craft. Escorts have diseases.

I clicked on the last page, which offered a book about erotic fantasies by author Sharon Sharalike. I wondered if that was her real name.

I read a little while longer, then checked my email to my fake profile. In only five minutes, I had already gotten two emails, both from Attached Males, age 47 and 51, respectively. By the way, remember I’m 22. In my dreams. And theirs.

The first Attached Male liked candles, and the second had an “insatiable sex drive.” Both described themselves as “fit.” And both wanted Something Long Term.

Something Long Term?

Isn’t that marriage?

I wonder what their wives wanted.

I’m a fan of shortcuts. Not in my job, but in everything else, to make more time for my job. Daughter Francesca calls me Sally Shortcut, but it only makes me swell with pride. I don’t know who raised that child.

Most of the time, I get away with taking a shortcut. This morning, however, my shortcut required the calling of squad cars, the stopping of traffic on a major road, and me running for five miles with a bucket of carrots.

Let me explain.

Remember Buddy, My Little Pony? He’s a brown-and-white paint, and I ride him for fun. Actually, I walk him for fun. He’s twenty-five years old and he goes no faster than a herky-jerky stutter-step. He’s the Walter Brennan of ponies.

In fact, I doubted that Buddy still had a gallop in him, until this morning. When he morphed into Secretariat.

I ride with a group of other women, which means we sit on our butts and yap while the horses do all the work. Buddy is the oldest, smallest, and fattest of all the horses, usually the Steady Eddie on our trail rides, which go around cornfields and through woods, ending when we’re tired of yammering.

I mean, exercising.

You may recall that I take shortcuts clipping Buddy, which he
accepts with the grudging resignation of Eeyore. I had clipped him before the winter, and when the first nice day of spring arrived, I decided to go for a ride. I slipped off his blanket, but to my dismay, Buddy had returned to his mastodon self. I had no time to clip him, and I thought, I can take a shortcut.

I headed out for a ride with friend Paula, who has a gentle giant Percheron named Dave. Dave and Buddy are paints with the same coloring, like Mutt and Jeff, only horses. By the way, I hope you’re following my references. Young or sane people may have to use Google.

So Paula and I were on horseback, walking along in the sunshine, chatting away, when I noticed that Buddy was shaking his head more than usual. As furry as he was, he looked like one of those automatic shoeshine brushes they have in hotels.

“I guess he’s a little itchy,” I said. “I didn’t have time to clip him.”

“He looks cute, all furry,” Paula said, which is only one of the many things I like about her. But in the next minute, her eyes widened and she shouted, “Watch out, he’s gonna roll!”

And before I knew what was happening, Buddy was sinking onto his knees and rolling onto the grass to scratch his back. The only problem was, I was still in the saddle.

Now I’m no horsewoman, as you’re about to find out, because I didn’t even realize what was happening until Paula told me and I remembered some faint instruction that you should never stay on the back of a rolling horse, unless you like the sensation of 1500 pounds landing on your pelvis, knee, and ankle. In other words, I jumped off like a crazy person and let out a scream. It freaked Buddy out, and he looked back, showing the whites of his eyes and so terrified that he leapt up and galloped away. He tore across the cornfield, and in no time, became a fuzzy black dot, like a period with hair.

I couldn’t believe it. I blinked and blinked. Paula and Dave blinked and blinked. And then I had to do something because Buddy was galloping toward the busiest street in the neighborhood. Either he would dent a truck or a truck would dent him. So I started screaming and running and calling 911 all at once.

“Your emergency please?” the dispatcher asked, and I kept running through the cornfield, screaming for Buddy and telling the story, like this:

“I always take shortcuts but maybe it isn’t such a good idea all the time!”

“Pardon?”

Amazingly enough, five minutes later there were three police cars blocking traffic, five armed cops, Paula, Dave, and six volunteers from a nearby horse farm, who brought a plastic bucket of carrots, intended to entice runaway ponies. We chased Buddy everywhere, and he ignored us, tearing all over the cornfield in curlicues and loop-the-loops, until I was pretty sure that he was spelling something or making crop circles.

We chased him until we were exhausted and he finally trapped himself behind a fence, just short of the road and certain death.

And so it ended happily, thanks to Paula, Dave, Good Samaritans, and the local constabulary.

Except for one thing: daughter Francesca was right.

Again.