Love After Heaven

21 I don't want to be a mistress

"I don't want to be a mistress," Julie said to Frankie, as they were lying down quietly after making love. "When my husband was alive, I was a lover. You were my lover. But now that he is dead and you are still married, I am a mistress. I don't want that."

"I will kill my wife," said Frankie. "Just give me time."

Julie didn't know what to think. It was bad enough that she was an accessory after the fact of her husband's murder. She didn't really want her husband dead. She just wanted good sex, which he was incapable of giving her. But she loved her husband. She loved the way he patiently listened as she talked about the problems she was facing with the teachers in the school, how the teachers wanted to experiment with new ways of teaching, how she wanted them to stick to what was already working. If it works, she would tell the teachers, why change it?

She loved the way her husband had taken time every Friday evening to treat her to a nice dinner in a fancy restaurant. It wasn't the cost, although she did not mind being occasionally in the company of the rich and famous. It was the thoughtfulness. He would order her favorite dish, Teriyaki Tilapia with herb salad. She loved the way the waiters would stare at him, wondering if he had read the menu, where it was not offered. But since he was wealthy, the chef would invariably come out and say that, yes, they would prepare the dish and would they just wait a little bit?

She loved the way they shared jokes. He always found something funny to say about everything and everyone. In contrast, she would repeat only jokes that she got from Facebook or from old joke books in the school library.

In contrast, Frankie was good for sex and for nothing else. He had no interest in anything remotely intellectual. He couldn't care less about education and children. Before and after sex, he talked of nothing else but sex, how good she was in bed, how good it was for him, how he wanted more, what positions they would try next time.

He would say he loved her, and she sometimes believed him, but not really. She had read enough romance novels to know that "I love you" was a mere formula for men to have what they wanted. The phrase had nothing to do with real love.

They had met in an alumni homecoming. He was there escorting one of her batch mates in college. Even at that time, she should have realized that he was not the faithful type, since he was already married then. But like every mistress or would-be mistress, she hoped that he would leave his wife and live happily ever after with her. Except that she was married at that time. Except that he was still married now.

Physically, her husband was not too different from Frankie. They were both tall, standing over six feet. They both had well-sculpted bodies, Frankie a little bit better than her husband. Frankie must have been working out regularly, unlike her husband whose exercise consisted only of a daily early-morning three-mile walk around the park near their condominium. They both had rugged looks, her husband perhaps looking a bit younger because he always shaved; Frankie always had a stubble even in the mornings.

Julie missed her husband. No matter how bad he was in bed, he was always there when she needed comfort or reassurance. When she once had to undergo an emergency appendectomy, he cancelled all his appointments and stayed with her in the hospital. Because it was not a laparoscopic appendectomy, she had to stay for three days in the hospital, but he stayed with her. They saw all the old reruns on the hospital TV and joked the whole time about how silly popular movies were. It made the hospital stay less of a trauma.

During all those medical procedures to determine why they did not have children, he was always with her, cheerfully kidding the doctors about how they had to study for decades just to help married couples do what came naturally. But he would never hear of changing his sexual positions, even if one sexologist had recommended it. He kept to the missionary position. She had to be with Frankie to try the positions listed in the Kama Sutra; they had not gone through twenty of the hundred positions, because she kept asking him to repeat positions she particularly enjoyed.