The Adulterer and the Adulteress or, In Contempt of Monogamous Love, a Short-Story
Acknowledgments: for Wednesday Martin for writing Untrue about why women are getting so fed up and her theory that MeToo was about women who were jealous of men’s sexual entitlement because they— like— want the right to do the same things or something, which I noticed myself at the time and I abhorred it because I didn’t think it would be good if women became like Harvey Weinstein because no one should be like Harvey Weinstein but I guess that’s the scary direction we’re all going in, and I guess it can be kind of fun, the really left wing girls coming onto me in college as much as they claimed to hate men I understand a little better now; for the old ladies in the supermarket I liked complimenting more than anyone’s mom seriously; for anyone who was cheated on or cheated or thinks about it or the people fascinated with this because their parents divorced when they were young because someone cheated; and for the women who are strangely exhilarated when I tell them I wrote about myself as a neurotic to the point of being tortured pick-up artist, but it’s not that strange a phenomenon so never mind: first it’s a hilarious concept, second it’s cool, and third it’s damned timely—there are a million of us, and if you can’t tell about Musk or Trump or “pride” parades in your conservative town, everyone is a libertine now and libertinism is sort of the spirit of the age, not that I endorse any of this—I think I’m actually a pretty mean critic of it as sympathetic as I am to it in a way
Author’s Note: This is my attempt at portraying how more marriages are going to look in the near future if it’s not already here. The only way to save marriage as an institution is to merge it with the acceptability if not the normalization of cheating reminiscent of the fifties sixties and seventies as John Updike wrote about, or Cheever or Mad Men chronicles, times where infidelity wasn’t as taboo as suicide as it somehow became today, back when Americans knew how to live and wanted to live more than they do now. Indeed I would never break up with my girlfriend or wife just for cheating on me, how boring! As you’ll see it’s not this like religion of fidelity I look down on so intensely so much as how no one can handle infidelity like they used to—why? Why do you need so much attention? Fucking losers. People are not property. People are free. No one owns you and you own no one.
“Don’t Tread on Me,” one of my favorite American sayings dating back to the Revolution—I’m really going to move to New Hampshire just to get their license plate that says Live Free or Die or something.
“Live free or die,” another classic American sentiment I treasure
“I asked her for water she brought me gasoline,” Howlin’ Wolf, “I Asked for Water”
“My girl my girl don’t lie to me tell me where did you sleep last night?”—Kurt Cobain, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”
“What if I paid you to have sex with me?” a high school crush on her way to breaking my heart just by saying outrageous things like this
“For Lucretius and Ovid (respectably c. 99 55 BCE and 43 BCE-c. 17 CE), what two people erotically besotted with each other call love is merely the unwitting servant of the instinct for self-perpetuation. This is an instinct so fundamental that, on some conceptions of it, it can be identified with life-force itself. Its modus operandi is power and manipulation, warfare and illusion. Far from being a harbinger of virtue, it is a harbinger of ruin; and the art of love is to live this impulsive and heedless instinct without being harmed by it.”—Simon May, Love, a History
“In many societies of the past sexual loyalty was not a high priority. The expectation of mutual fidelity is a rather recent invention. Numerous cultures have allowed husbands to seek sexual gratification outside marriage. Less frequently but often enough to challenge common preconceptions, wives have also been allowed to do this without threatening the marriage. In a study of 109 societies, anthropologists found that only 48 forbade extramarital sex to both husbands and wives.”—Marriage, a History, How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz
“Flora,” by Ramon Casas
The Adulterer and the Adulteress, or In Contempt of Monogamous Love, an Exhilarating Short-Story
by Jay burkett
The story of the Scotchlovers was the story of a very cocky man and a very plucky woman.
There was never a married couple not in the history of Long Island or even the world that was or could be more happy than Don and Corinne. That was because they cheated on each other as much as they could and could stand it.
They weren’t always this happy.
They were actually miserable some ten years ago because one then the other cheated.
Early in the marriage too.
At first like a lot of men, Don cheated with a girl he met on a plane to Australia. They fucked once in the bathroom, once in the food pantry, and once even in the “cockpit,” nearly crashing the plane and not even caring whether the plane crashed or it didn’t. They actually enjoyed all the hysteria all their frenzied lovemaking occasioned on behalf of the pilots, as their bodies rolled over so many switches and buttons that air traffic control were literally losing their shit. Like they all took shits at work not even in the bathroom but at their alarmed frenzied posts. Corinne found out because Don didn’t conceal indeed he considered his prowess, legion even before his marriage— so irrepressible and incorrigible that it nearly crashed a plane it was worth boasting about to her.
Don Scotchlover was very bad very poor at keeping secrets and disdained to push anything under the rug proverbially. Lovers and loving fighting men like Don Scotchlover told their wives to their faces that they were cheats not to hurt them but just because they had a good story to tell that wasn’t worth withholding the divulgence of not to disturb or even destroy their marriage, but because he knew it wouldn’t hurt Corinne who likewise was known far and wide all her life for her voracious sex life and recalcitrant and dysfunctional love life, not hurt her too badly. If you’re sexy enough you can’t stay in a relationship because you just can’t.
Either you or someone else won’t let you.
That they were voted the two most oversexed men and women at a Charity once was actually how they met. Don was tall broad domineering and loud with a big belting brash voice and liked to guffaw when he laughed with a barrel chest wide large size thirty-seven feet, massive strong hands, and thick dark shiny brown hair, a thick mustache and gleaming unnatural but they were real natural white teeth, a massive smile. He was open-hearted and carried himself like at any moment he might turn around and make love spontaneously to a tree.
He was a natural born loathsome lover.
He was always a guy to have multiple drinks just with lunch, sneak a shot of whiskey at the office, and sometimes put some bourbon in a coffee thermos in the morning after a big breakfast of eggs bacon and sausage and seven hundred cups of strong hard black coffee. He liked lots of salt and pepper and hot sauce on everything. He liked a big mean lunch and a big mean goddamned dinner, and his favorite word was goddamnit. His favorite insult was Go To Hell. His favorite question was What the Hell? He liked meat. He liked fish. And bread. With a lot of wine. And butter. And even in the very beginning of their marriage, Corinne had a slightly sad but slightly amused bemused even eager even consciously thrilled, exhilarated feeling that their marriage might not last long.
The way women gravitated to Don everywhere were laughing their heads off at all his stupid jokes, he flirted with every waitress and stewardess cashier lifeguard bar tender, yoga instructor; he was a neighborhood proto-libertine menace. And already they were losing friends and trends because none of the men trusted this guy around his wife. It would be the same for the wives when Corinne soon too started to indulge her own hitherto repressed sexuality again. It felt good. She felt hot. She was a very sexy woman in her mid thirties when they stopped sleeping with everyone in sight temporarily to get hitched like cattle. Chattel. Marriage was so ugly it didn’t become them. It made them feel old. They didn’t want to have kids.
Even before his affairs Corinne was quietly accepting compliments a little too indulgently. Smiling a little too long. She liked to be demure and look up with her large green eyes at a man with her head nodding down. She was a little red head, a dark red head hair like auburn. She had long legs and limbs, and her body was hard strong and tough, smooth white skin that colored easily, and scattered light freckles. She was very very confident like her husband but it wasn’t the way she liked to come across when you first met her. She liked to be demure innocent expectant eager; she liked to look exactly like how she felt about conventional postindustrial east coast American contemporary society; that she wanted to live as freely and express herself as sexually as nature otherwise would have constituted her not without her perfect facial features, and her witty sense of humor that made every party a raving lunatic riot her will to have what she wanted as soon as she wanted it, her natural charm and poise with a sex drive that hounded her and harrowed many a conquest and sometimes terrified a guy she might mock for it later. Corinne, like her husband, wanted it all day and all night long with as many partners as she liked right away. So after Don’s airplane tryst she went over and fucked a high school kid their neighbors’ son across the street.
Corinne stormily proudly her pretty figure cutting like butter and molasses peanut butter across the smooth hard pavement of the street hot in the scorching summer sun, hot as Corinne felt in the heat of her burning lust her ravenous licentious hunger for men whomever she wanted returning in the thick of her first years of childless marriage; she cut straight into the Brownson’s black house when Mike Brownson got home from school, Corinne through the unlocked front door finding Mike Brownson about to watch porn on his Xbox with his dick in his hand on a beanbag chair, Corinne dragging him to his room to rail and ride him, it was so big she smiled before she sucked and he came way too soon. Then they fucked in his sister’s and his parents’ room, and when his brother Adrian came home she fucked him on the kitchen counter, and when the whole house reeked of sex, Corinne was confronted with their pretty little sister Elisa with long platinum blonde straight hair blue eyes only fourteen just getting home from practice with a backpack and field hockey stick and Corinne just said to her threateningly, “you’re next,” and stalked out the door.
When the Brownson’s parents came over to destroy the Scotchlover’s sports cars, Don and Corinne just disarmed by making rapid love to them on their front lawn, the children glimpsing it in horror terror.
Because there was no cheaper way for people like this to solve a problem except by fucking the aggrieved party. Any lawsuit anyone filed, the couple just fucked them hard and made it disappear.
I.
Don and Corinne Scotchlover were “consensual non monogamists” not by choice but quite by accident. At first though they were never guilty sometimes they struggled with shameful bouts of shame over their indecency and the social destruction it caused for themselves and others. They were hated, they were loathed, resented, envied, and reviled and most of all feared.
But once perhaps perversely they philosophically reasoned that when you married you were cheating on everyone you could have had or did have in some way because you desired them at all or they desired you or both, but you chose not to have irrationally unseasonably because you were idolatrously married: they were ashamed no more. Now they were even proud. Although no one in love with the sentimental concept of romantic love who considered it the high water mark of virtue and nobility and respectability and goodness could admit it, why would someone either this lusty fed up with failed romances hard-headed or all three suffer it?—there was no particular reason why romantic love was superior to erotic love or why they couldn’t coexist alongside each other.
So they reasoned.
Perhaps perversely but perhaps nobly and at least rationally and logically.
The Scotchlovers loved each other romantically and they desired every soul erotically in gyms at events or planes trains random cities in random haphazard countries and on exotic river cruises and tours in the Everglades.
To them “cheating” was an antiquated concept and rank hypocrisy something we made up to scorn and ridicule people for living uninhibitedly. And monogamous marriage was absurd and ridiculous. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you commit yourself to one lover your whole life not to betray your funny vows and commitments by stepping out and having just one one-night stand, a fling, a hook-up, an affair, a tryst a rendezvous?
At least.
Come on.
II.
Not only were they agreeably non monogamous and gloried in it, but they practiced such contempt for monogamy and romantic modern mediocre “love” that they deliberately sought out romantic couples with romantic illusions to redeem them erotically—they were the Siegfried’s and Brunnhilde’s of their times, saving the world through the monomaniacal pursuit and prosecution and enforcement of eros in all events; they may as well have been living in Rome—not that they believed they would get many on their exotic wild side but if only to express their frustration anguish and contempt for weakness, superficiality, shallowness, meekness, impotence, tameness and self-repression and self-denial, narrow-mindedness, vanity, their resentment of people whose natures were not as strong and tough and tender and gentle and annoying and loving as their natures; those who cling to their small town little fragile values because they can’t face reality and can’t face themselves and what they really want right now without the will to create their own values, the cretans who love their creature comforts and “guilty pleasures—” why should you feel guilty about indulging any pleasure for fuck’s sake? Why couldn’t you just take whomever whatever whenever you wanted? For as long as it lasted or you cared for it to last.
III.
If one had not the guts the zest or the spirit to live like them, one envied and loathed their oversexed overconfident plucky lucky strong cocky bodies and domineering heavy hard tough drinking supreme self-regarding, self-loving selfish Happiness that was the implacable enemy of mere little trifling trivial superficial bourgeois middle class: satisfaction love support moderation restraint temperance fortitude faith hope and fulfillment and closure. Because authentic happiness was the incessant willing of joyful short-lasting moments of bliss and ecstasy only found through rough and coarse amusements substances intoxication and orgasm. These unleashed beings spat on contentment and the easily contented the easily impressed the easily pleased, and were haters of easy things in general. They loved difficulty and complexity with wild abandon, so they made themselves hard to understand, as hard as their bodies, hardened their hearts, and drove everyone crazy and were hard on everyone themselves most of all; Don was the envy of every man, and every woman wanted to sleep with him; Corinne had the same issues, women loathed her as much as men loved her.
They reviled the happy striving peasantry of the world as mediocre bigoted and hypocritical and dishonest. Fucking Vapid. They were only unappeasable not “depraved” not “lascivious” or “lecherous” not “nymphomaniacs” or “satyromaniacs” or “alcoholics” or “sluts” or “manwhores.” They were just bigger than you, stronger than you funnier than you better looking and way cooler than you— who couldn’t swing modern romantic love because that was for the easybreezygoing easy tender-minded soulful wise truthful loathsome peasantry! The mean the meek the stupid the average the common the lowest common denominator the cowards who live in fear and shame and guilt hiding behind their principles and unquestioned morality and false phony virtue, people who questioned nothing reacted to everything they found unpleasant reflexively, and judged and condemned everyone irrationally. The weak men deceiving themselves they’re strong. The villains who believe they’re virtuous. That moderation is saintly. Chastity is somehow good. And self-indulgence is automatically bad. Where would the world be with all its achievements like Einstein Newton Galileo and Elon Musk and Tesla and Shakespeare if great people ever gave a damn to follow Christian doctrine? Not even Jesus wanted you to. You were supposed to follow his example not the damned Church’s! If Marx was right about one thing he was right that organized conformist religion was really “the opium of the masses.” To people who said, “Don’t do this” or “don’t do that” or “you can’t say that” or “don’t go there”— WHO FUCKING SAID SO? WHAT ARE YOU MY MOM! BACKSEAT DRIVERS, SCHOOL MARMS, WOKE SCOLDS, HIGH SCHOOL HEALTH TEACHERS! NUNS! came the Scotchlovers’ scrappy cocky plucky daring domineering swaggering threatening disturbing unsettling arrogantly superior message like a stick of dynamite sizzling on the wind of whatever night it was always in their fun world…
IV.
Your mom your dad your teacher your therapist your high school gym teacher your nutritionist your doctor your gynecologist your veterinarian and your podiatrist and parole officer your boyfriend your girlfriend your grandparents brothers sisters priests step parents and siblings God religion your boss the guy who cuts your moss—they were ALL DEAD WRONG!
“I’m going out tonight, not even to get laid but just to hang out with some guys and smoke cigars at the Pine Tree Pond Club,” Don said putting on his cufflinks. He turned to Corinne masturbating and watching porn in bed.
“I have an assignment for you my dear. Pay attention. There’s this guy this writer who's like a gift from God redeeming our declining civilization and fighting for our way of life every day. He’s very reclusive. Finding him is going to be like finding Count Dracula or Orlock or whatever. He’s very good looking and he writes explicitly for real men and real women and the alpha dogs of the universe and life like us. After he wrote about himself as a neurotic pick-up artist he shut himself in somewhere. Rumor is he’s actually pursuing a vampyress divorcee ironically speaking of vampires, and she kidnapped him or he got lost somewhere on Center Island or the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. He mistakenly assumes people are angry with him for how he made fun of them so nastily so meanly. But all of us are basically ready to throw him a surprise party soaked in bourbon to thank him for the genius he’s brought out in us and the spice and drama and comedy he’s touched all our relationships with. It’s because I like a challenge, I want you to find him Corinne. Introduce him to our lifestyle and our polyamorous cult. It’ll be for him like Jane Goodall in Africa among the apes. Except we’re the apes. Well we descend from them don’t we?”
Corinne closed her laptop snapped and clacked it shut. And looked up at Don with an eager smile in the warm glow of their dim bedroom with dark lampshades and red wallpaper a four post bed.
“What’s his name?”