CLICHE #5

Written by Vandemonium1

Edited by the one and only CreativityTakesCourage

Another story where most of the words and concepts are entirely well-used-to-the-point-of-being-tiresome. Maybe the ending will break the mold; maybe it won’t.  

Ever read a story where the guy’s condition for forgiving the wife for cheating is that she ‘unfuck’ her lover? What if she found a way to do just that?

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The first inkling I had that my wife didn’t deserve the trust I’d always placed in her was after an invitation to our new neighbour’s house. Sandy and John had bought the place a year ago but delayed moving in until they’d completed major renovations which included the building of a clay tennis court. Sarah and I were the first of the neighbours they invited over. We enjoyed a lovely barbecue lunch and some friendly drinks before being given the grand tour. Ours was an affluent neighbourhood and the tour of the gardens alone took some time and ended up at the magnificent tennis court. At John’s invitation, Sarah and I went home, only next door, to change into clothes more suited to tennis.

Ten minutes later, I was the brand new owner of a grave new set of doubts about my wife’s fidelity. Why? It was blatantly obvious that not only did she not know the rules of tennis but was lousy at it. Not a problem, you might think, but for me it raised a couple of questions. The first of which was, “What the hell has my wife actually been doing when she claimed to be at tennis lessons at the country club on Friday mornings?”

Sarah had been attending one-on-one tennis coaching lessons for nearly a year and yet she was obviously still at beginner level. I muddled through the rest of the day, trying desperately to think of any reason, apart from the obvious one, as to why that was the case.

My emotional side of the brain would offer a solution, like maybe she wasn’t athletic, then logic would step in with a counterargument, such as, she had a collection of trophies for soccer and netball.

The scary part of the whole deal was that Sarah seemed to be greatly enjoying herself, bending over and laughing every time she fluffed a shot or missed having the racket make contact with the ball. She seemed oblivious to the howling doubts now screaming through my head. Our hosts weren’t though. I apologised to them before I left, telling them I had a huge distraction on my mind. Well, it was true now.

It didn’t take thousands of dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment or days of a PI’s time to shatter my marriage, I just re-scheduled my appointments the following Friday and followed my wife in a rented car. She went to the country club all right. Walking as bold as brass to the sports section, past the tennis court, and into the block of units that housed non-local staff. I was just in time to see her disappear into room 4B.

Being well known at the club, I opted against waiting five minutes and kicking the door down. Instead, I went to the main admin block and spoke to the duty manager. He grabbed the security guard and we all went back to room 4B.

I didn’t request any sort of privacy when they unlocked the room quietly. If Sarah was doing what I thought she was in there, my marriage was over, and I didn’t owe her any kind of defence from social ridicule. The duty manager also thought knocking was unnecessary, the tennis coach who lived in this room was supposed to be working this morning.

Thus, I was standing right behind the duty manager as he quietly slotted in the master key. I watched as his wrist turned. The action was almost silent, or maybe that was just because my heart was pounding so loudly it was like a drum in my ear. The door swung open and revealed the room. I had my phone on video record.

It was as bad as I’d imagined. Sarah was bent over the back of the sofa, her short tennis skirt rolled up around her waist, eyes screwed shut in apparent ecstasy as some young, muscled shithead ploughed into her from behind. I felt sick.

Shithead’s heart-felt, “Oh fuck”, and sudden cessation of thrusting alerted my wife. Her eyes shot open, taking in the sight of me and my entourage before rolling back in her head as she fainted. She looked absolutely ridiculous with her ass still up in the air over the back of the couch.

Shithead turned away and pulled his shorts back on. Not easy when you’re still sporting an erection. Dumb shit that had more cum than brains didn’t even go limp.

The duty manager fired his staff member while I pulled Sarah’s wedding and engagement rings off her limp fingers. I did nothing to defend her modesty. I then grabbed one of Shithead’s shoulders and looked pointedly at the manager and security guard. With a barely perceptible nod from each, they turned and looked the other way. My fist broke the younger man’s nose and possibly cheekbone, my ungentlemanly knee would at least help him go limp… for a week or two.

With him conscious but on the floor—unconscious people don’t cry like that—and with Sarah in no danger of swallowing her tongue in that position, we left the room. If Sarah and her hunk wanted to run off together, I personally didn’t give a rat’s ass. As a couple, we were finished.

Or so I thought.

I admit, I found it hard to turn off the love I’d felt deeply for over twenty years. Sarah used that to her advantage and hit me with everything from the cheater’s handbook, Chapters 1 through 14. She was feeling old and unwanted when a younger man seduced her, blah, blah, blah, fucking blah. At first, she begged me to not tell our children, there would be no coming back from that. I agreed for the moment.

She assured me she’d never cheated before and if I was any judge of character, a judgement that had taken a huge hit recently, I thought she was telling the truth.

I told her that as she was 100% responsible for breaking the marriage, she was also 100% responsible for fixing it. She took up that challenge and, I have to say, I was secretly hoping she would convince me to forgive what she assured me was her first stray from fidelity. Yeah, that bloody love tap that was reluctant to switch off.

Besides, with everything she was spouting there was a nagging feeling in my hindbrain. Would I have been strong enough to resist if a beautiful girl, twenty years my junior tried to seduce me? I hoped the answer would have been yes but who knows?

After a think, she asked me what it would take to get me to forgive her. I set her an impossible goal. She would have to unfuck shithead. Erase all my knowledge of her affair. Wipe the tape of her bent over his couch, face scrunched in ecstasy, that was playing on a perpetual loop in my head.

In other words, I gave her what I thought was no chance at all.

Things were very frosty around the house until the following weekend, with me ousting her from our marital bed and packing. Sarah’s actions made it obvious my openly looking for somewhere else to live ratcheted up her level of desperation.

On Friday night she told me she was going to see her bestie, Julia. She gave me Julia’s home phone number and invited me to ring it whenever I liked to prove she was where she said she was. I could even ask to talk to Julia’s husband, Jake, who, of course, I knew well. I didn’t bother. She might have pulled some dumb crap of late but she wasn’t moronic.

It was after eleven o’clock that night when Sarah burst into the marital bedroom practically vibrating with excitement. She and Julia had brainstormed a fantastic idea. An idea that fit all my demands totally and utterly. Quickly, I shook myself to full alertness and listened with a heart that unconsciously but desperately wanted to find an excuse to forgive her.

She suggested that part one was that I would be allowed to have sex with another woman once a week for a year. It would kill her that I was doing it, but I could be assured that the pain would ensure she’d never stray again. She shushed me when I interrupted, telling her that two wrongs don’t make a right and I wasn’t that kind of guy, but she begged that I listen to the complete package.

Julia had a friend that had been to a hypnotherapist in our smallish town to deal with her terror of spiders. She had apparently been totally cured. Sarah and Julia had hit Dr Google and researched to see if memories could be erased and the answer was a definite YES, if the patient wanted them exorcised. She begged me, tears rolling down her cheeks, to think about it and, if I agreed, she’d contact the hypnotherapist for the earliest appointment possible. I did promise to think about it if she left me alone.

Well, as you can imagine, not much sleep happened that night. The idea did seem to give me the excuse I longed for. I was sure the whole experience had terrified Sarah enough that she would never again stray from her vows of fidelity. Her plan also seemed to fit the criteria I set her, and welching on a deal went against my nature. I’d given her a challenge and she appeared to have risen to it. Undergoing the therapy she suggested would effectively allow her to unfuck the guy, at least in my head. It would certainly wipe the memories I just couldn’t forget otherwise.

In the morning, I sat down with my quietly confident wife. I explained that under no circumstances would I sleep with another woman. Sarah seemed a little worried about that until I said the rest of my piece, that I would fully co-operate with a hypnotherapist erasing my knowledge of her affair.

On one condition.

She had to further reassure me that she wouldn’t use my freshly erased mind to cheat in the future, merely using her recent experiences to be more careful not to be caught the next time.

She cried at this further evidence of my distrust in her but recovered enough to convince me that wasn’t a possibility. This whole episode had terrified her to the core and there was absolutely no chance she’d jeopardise a relationship pulled back from the brink of disaster. She’d never hurt me again. She loved me.

With me satisfied, she wanted to drag me to the bedroom to seal the deal but I just wasn’t ready for that. Asking if she had a clean STD checklist took the wind out of those sails.

Luckily for us, the hypnotherapist had a cancellation the following Wednesday afternoon and Sarah grabbed it. We arranged for me to go to work early while Sarah stayed to remove all evidence of her sleeping in the spare room and any other giveaways to a mind recently cleansed of bad memories. We’d agreed to meet at the practitioner’s office at 3:00 p.m. As usual, I arrived fifteen minutes early. I walked into the clinic, an old residence, and said hello to the receptionist. She gave me a new patient form to fill out.

It was just after three when Sarah stormed in. I had just returned the form and was sitting down. She looked a little annoyed, loudly complaining about an accident closing the direct route she’d tried to take. At the end of her diatribe, the receptionist politely said, “Go right in,” and pointed to a door off the reception area.

Sarah was already standing so she strode to the door indicated and knocked before rotating the doorknob and stepping into the doorway. I followed and was only halfway across the expanse of the reception room when I heard a strange voice, surprisingly loud and booming for a woman.

“Hello again, Mrs. Brown, have you lost weight?”

I froze and in the silence that followed, the receptionist called out to me, “You must have been here before, Mr. Brown, we already have your details in the computer.”

As the hypnotherapist’s booming words and receptionist’s innocent observation sank into my shocked brain, Sarah spun around, and I found myself staring straight into the eyes of my so-called loving wife of twenty-three years. She was unnaturally pale and had a look of panic in her eyes; eyes that quickly diverted their gaze to the floor when she saw me staring at her. I took a deep breath as the true story of our recent past formed its inevitable shape in my head. All the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle assembled themselves. The picture ugly.

The journey to where I, Dave Brown, stood right at that moment was only three weeks long, or so I had thought. There were no doubts anymore. My once idyllic life was shattered. For the second time I now realised.

I had always thought my wife to be my intellectual equal, but she’d recently done some really stupid, or was it over-confident things? Regardless, in doing so, she wrecked both our lives and the ripple effect would be felt by many.

We both remained frozen for what seemed an age. Each of us, I guess, caught in our respective internal horror. But time would not be halted. Indeed, it seemed to go on fast forward as Sarah fled the premises as if a demon were on her tail. She literally bumped my shoulder so hard as she ran past that I spun a full circle. I stumbled and slumped into one of the chairs in reception.

My words, “We’re finished, bitch” followed her.

EPILOGUE

Jane, as it turned out the hypnotherapist’s name was, sat with me, her voice now calm and gentle as she explained that she’d been offended when Sarah contacted her for a second time. Confidentiality prohibited her from telling me I was being duped again so she’d come up with a way of clueing me in by having a different receptionist on and her greeting to Sarah. The method was subtle and relied on my being observant, but it obeyed all the rules for upholding confidentiality. I thanked her profusely for her integrity.

With the hour allocated, she played part counsellor, part friend. Perhaps because she already knew so much about me, I found her easy to talk to. At the end of the hour, we stood. Jane smiled and shook my hand saying she was confident I was calm enough to get behind the wheel of a car without risking the safety of others on the road. She did recommend I contact a friend to be with me.

As she walked with me to the door she said, “Bet you’re glad you’ve got a postnup in place.”

That halted me. “What postnup?”

Back to her room we went, resuming our seats. Turned out that the ‘me’ that came for my first treatment with her a little over a year ago had made Sarah sign a postnup as a condition of attending hypnotherapy. The ‘me’ then was clearly a lot smarter than the ‘me’ now.

The gratitude I felt toward Jane quadrupled and I asked how I could repay her. Her reply surprised the hell out of me. Apparently, she had two receptionists who job shared. The other one, Sandra, had been on duty for my first visit and bemoaned the fact my therapy had been successful, lamenting that, ‘All the good ones were taken’. Sandra was a year or so younger than me and had left an abusive marriage two years before. She was reluctant to put her trust in another man and was leading a lonely life. Jane extracted a promise that I would go out on one date with Sandra when all the dust settled. I gladly agreed.

By the time I arrived home it looked like a tornado had gone through it. Much of Sarah’s stuff was missing and there were papers strewn all over the place. I searched everywhere but couldn’t find anything resembling a postnup. I resolved to ring all the local law practices starting the next day to see if I was a client but had had the memory masked.

I was in the middle of cleaning the house and tossing the rest of Sarah’s stuff into the garage when the phone rang. It was my daughter, asking what the hell was going on. Sarah, wanting to get in first, had woven a story that I’d agreed to let her sleep with other men, even watching at times, but had changed my mind as was ow punishing her.

I blew up and my daughter was quickly convinced by my passion that I was telling the truth. Thankfully, the idea of my being a cuckold wasn’t believable to her in the first place. I rang my son to confirm his mother had given him the same story and changed his mind as well. Sarah’s lies to the kids only served to feed my anger.

With an all-consuming rage pumping through my veins, I composed an email to her parents, brother, sisters, all our friends, and her charity work colleagues. Every damn email address I could find. In the email, I told them I was aware of what Sarah was saying about me, that it wasn’t true, and here was the footage of her reaction to being caught bonking her tennis coach. I also laid out the hypnotherapist story to correctly portray Sarah as a serial philanderer and general evil slut. I received many replies of support.

Just before midnight, I received a call from Sarah. She was screaming incoherently but I managed to understand from her disjointed ramblings that both her children, her parents, and many of our friends had rung to disown her. Toward the end, she calmed enough to resort to threats.

“Contact everybody you sent that email to and take it back or I will destroy everything you hold dear.”

“You’ve already done that,” I replied, making her realise she had no hold over me anymore. It sent her into a crying fit that was interspersed with apologies one moment and threats of taking me to the cleaners the next.

It took me five phone calls the next day to find which lawyer drew up the postnup, a copy of which was soon in my email inbox. There it was, in plain English, signed and notarised. Sarah must have been desperate the first time around as she’d signed over pretty much everything to me if I could prove adultery after a certain date. I rang the lawyer and started the ball rolling on the divorce and my ex-wife’s evisceration.

By the time the divorce went through, and the bailiffs tracked Sarah down to recover what was left of her personal jewellery – she’d sold most of it to enable her to live – I heard from various sources that she’d approached old mutual friends begging for support but all doors had closed in her face.

The last I heard of her, from my daughter, the last person Sarah knew from our old life that didn’t hang up in her face, she was living off one of the charities she used to help run. Shortly after that, she disappeared completely. My daughter still gets a card every birthday but there’s no return address.

Me, well, I did go on that date with Sandra. A date that led to another, then another, and another, and another. You get the picture. Initially, we were both very reluctant to open our hearts but, eventually, we married. Jane was the matron of honour, and we are in the middle of living our happily ever after.

POSTSCRIPT

Please don’t be boring and point out that hypnotism and/or postnups don’t work like that. This is fiction.

*****

Now lighten the fuck up.

ON MATHS

The teacher asks her class, ‘If there are 5 birds sitting on a fence and you shoot one of them, how many will be left?’

RALPHY, ‘None, they will all fly away with the first gunshot.’

The teacher replies, ‘The correct answer is 4, but I like your thinking.’

Then little RALPHY says, ‘I have a question for YOU.

There are 3 women sitting on a bench having an ice cream: One is delicately licking the sides of the triple scoop of ice cream. The second is gobbling down the top and sucking the cone. The third is biting off the top of the ice cream. Which one is married?’

The teacher, blushing a great deal, replied, ‘Well, I suppose the one that’s gobbled down the top and sucked the cone.’

To which Little RALPHY replied, ‘The correct answer is ‘the one with the wedding ring on,’ but I like your thinking.’