GIRL 1 ~ BANK GIRL
I looked at my wife’s face, her large dancing dark eyes framed by shining locks of jet black hair. My project to get my marriage back on track seemed to be going better than expected, after my discovery that there was another man my wife was interested in.
She was the second wife and my heart’s dearest love. The divorce from wife one had gone badly and it had taken longer to break up with her than it had to get through college and grad school, but the woman sitting on the bar stool next to me had been my reward.
Of late, work had come between us, as had our daughter’s infancy. But she was three now, and it was time to get our sex life rolling again.
It was a night out, we'd gone to a hotel to get away from the three year old, it was the hotel we'd gotten married in, we had a great time at the bar, she was all over me in the elevator, and she wouldn't even wait for me to light the candles. We had hot steamy sex, and when it was over, I lay there stroking her hair and she said the most amazing thing.
"I'm not in love with you anymore. I'm not attracted to you anymore. I never want to touch you again. I never want to fuck you again."
Time froze. I could barely see her eyes, it was so dark. I paused a few seconds, hearing the echo of her words, and remembering why I'd pushed so hard to get her to go out to the hotel with me every weekend, because she had become so reluctant to have sex with me.
I remembered how she had asked me to move into the spare bedroom because I snored. I told her, the day I sleep in a separate bedroom it'll be in a separate house with a separate woman in the bed.
I remembered how she kept talking about this client rep named Bob and how he was so handsome and reminded her of what I looked like when she first met me and fell head over heels for me. Bob seemed to come up in every single conversation with her. I had wondered secretly whether my wife were bobbing on Bob.
I remembered how she always hated long fingernails or any kind of nail polish, and just about the time she started talking about Bob, she'd started going to the nail salon every week and got long red nails. When I communicated appreciation for them, saying something like, "I want you to use those to scratch my cock," she growled, "they're not for you, it's for business."
I remembered how she had started going to the garage and locking herself in her car so she could talk on the phone at night while I put the kid to sleep.
And finally I remembered that Monday, how we were in our small bathroom at the same time and my hand brushed her forearm and she shivered in disgust like a spider had touched her, then tried to act like it didn't happen.
I came back to the present. It had been twenty seconds since her "inverse wedding vow." I got up from the bed and started getting dressed, and said, "This marriage is over. I want us to disassemble it like the adults we are. I'm moving to a hotel tomorrow. When you're ready, we'll talk about how we're going to split the dishes."
She got dressed and started crying on the walk to the car. Normally if she ever cried I'd hug her and comfort her, but not tonight. I drove her home in silence and went to bed. She slept in the guest room. In the morning I got up, packed a bag, and took off my wedding ring and put it in her jewelry drawer. I kissed my daughter good-bye and drove to a hotel by the construction site where Iworked.
I never touched her again. We negotiated the property settlement by email. I got an apartment near the house and had my daughter half the time.
She tried to make a go of it with Bob, but once she was single he freaked out -- he liked that she couldn't ask for more of a commitment from him. Now free and available, he wanted nothing to do with her. A few months later Bob was walked to the parking lot for looking at internet porn at work and emailing naked pictures of his new girlfriend to coworkers.
It was definitely time to start dating, I thought, after almost hitting on the head-case secretary at work. But would the solution to my problems really come in the arms of a woman? When the problems seemed to originate there? Could it be that the answer to love gone wrong was love gone right? Oddly enough, instinct told me the answer was a resounding yes.
The initial result seemed encouraging. At the time I didn’t call her “Girl 1,” nor did I mentally refer to her as “Bank Girl.” The nickname thing was something that came into play a dozen females later, as an attempt to make my Monday morning Girl Briefing with my guy pals – all married, all wishing like hell they were me and single – go faster. Were I to call the woman “Laura,” the guys would complain – there are a million Lauras, which one are you talking about? The one who works at the bank, I’d say. Bank Girl. Then the guys would nod and encourage me to continue, which is how this story started in the first place.
* * *
I met Bank Girl in New Brunswick at a microbrew pub. I saw her across the street, her tall, slender form topped off by a halo of yellow-blonde hair, which blew in the breeze. She wore fashionable sunglasses. She smiled when she saw me.
When I looked at her across the table, I could see subtle signs of age, but they were sexy. I liked it. I liked her. She was a vice president for a major bank, and had the big career with the big chair and the plate glass window. She smiled as we talked about life.
I made the mistake of being extremely gentlemanly to her. I played the wrong role: nice guy. Two hours into the date, I had no idea whether she liked me or not. She seemed drawn to me, hung on my words, but there was a thread of something dark. There was something she didn’t like about me.
My body at that point was too heavy. I’d gained twenty, maybe thirty, pounds of bad-marriage-trauma fat.
Is it my weight? I asked.
She nodded. “For God’s sake, go work out once in a while.”
I blinked at her for a moment.
It wasn’t enough that I had to suffer the last two years with a disapproving, bitchy, sexually shut-down wife, but now I had to put up with first dates who milked me for drinks and dinner and only then told me I was unsuitable? The fucking bitch, I thought.
But then, wasn’t it also just as much my fault? I’d written a profile with a set of pictures that obviously didn’t represent me. And I needed to get back in shape. But the more immediate issue was making my exit. This nonrevealing female would torture me for another three drinks over the next hour-and-a-half if I kept acting like a gentleman.
And then I discovered the real secret, one date too late: women don’t like nice guys. They prize bad boys. I thought that girls had gotten over that in their twenties, but as I would see over and over again, if a man is terse and stern with a woman, she warms to the treatment much faster than when he’s gentle and sweet and considerate.
So I tried my first practice run at doing what Tarzan of the Divorced Apes would do.
I put five twenties on the bar and walked out without saying another word to the woman, without even looking her direction.
As I walked to my truck, I realized that walking out on her in annoyance and disgust felt even better than a first kiss, or my memory of a first kiss.
Perhaps, for me, the revolution had begun.
It was time to start a search for Girl 2.
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