Mrs. Robinson (Mrs. Robinson #1) (2 page)

2

Grace Robinson

On the night of my twentieth wedding anniversary, I sat alone in a dimly-lit Georgetown restaurant in a four thousand dollar gown thinking of how badly I wanted my husband dead.

Okay, maybe not
dead
. Badly maimed, maybe. Perhaps a baseball bat to the knees and a short hospital stay of a week or six would do. But that’s always the first thing I think of when I think of my husband – my grotesque, bizarre, all-encompassing hatred of him, and also of how strange it is that I somehow love him at the same time. Even though my distaste for him burns in my chest like bad acid reflux, I still need him and long for his affection and approval, and I loathe myself all the more for my weakness. He is my alpha and my omega, a quandary I cannot explain even to myself, and so I stopped trying. The second thing I think of when I think of my husband are his eyes – the way they’re black and beady but somehow bright at the same time, always one step ahead, bolting back and forth like a vampire bat in a cage, looking for someone or something to injure. Like his enemies.

His coworkers.

His employees.

Me.

Speaking of devils in Dior tuxedos: as the waiter appeared to pour me glass of wine number two, throwing me pitiful glances all the while, my phone lit up with a text from Richard, the man himself. The glow of the screen illuminated my tired face as I groaned and read whatever lie my husband had come up with this time:

Hey Gracie. Bad news- work is piling up for the night. Gonna stay at the office a little later than expected. Hope you’re not at the restaurant yet. We can definitely celebrate another night. Sorry, babe. Xoxo, Rich.

Go fucking figure
, I thought as I tossed my phone onto the table with a little more force than intended, sending it sliding across the tabletop and crashing onto the Turkish rug below. A few diners glanced over at me, making me blush the color of my merlot.

“Sorry,” I muttered as I bent over and retrieved my phone, one hand still on my glass. “Bad night.”

The diners shared quietly knowing expressions and glanced away. Of
course
work was piling up and Richard wasn’t going to make it, I thought as I sat back in my seat and tried to regain some of my dwindling dignity. After all, that’s what things did in my life – pile up. Like the credit card statements full of plane tickets to romantic getaway spots like Napa Valley or the Bahamas that would show up when Richard was supposed to be traveling with lobbyists “for business,” the dinner receipts from fancy Italian places in Georgetown he would leave in his car from nights when he’d supposedly been at his office in Capitol Hill, and the bouquet of roses he’d even bought in New York with our joint debit card one weekend when he was supposed to be at his own aunt’s funeral in Boca Raton. I ignored all this, of course, just like I ignored the stares and whispers I’d get from the other women at the golf club on the rare occasion that Richard would actually take the time to treat his own wife to brunch. I knew he was making a fool of me – I could see it in the other womens’ eyes – but what was I supposed to do? There was no pre-nup, which would be a plus under normal circumstances, but Richard was not normal. He’d been the best trial lawyer in the state in his day and everyone knew it, and if I ever
did
try to divorce him, he’d lovingly find some way to drain every cent from our bank accounts and leave me with nothing but Bird, the annoying pet toucan that neither of us liked much anyway. That, and the scars I’d accumulated from pointlessly fighting an unwinnable war for two decades.

Unless…

As I sat there drinking in the dark, the word
unless
rang in my ears like a church bell on a Sunday morning.

Unless perhaps I could produce rock-solid proof of Richard’s indiscretions, find something besides random debit transactions and hearsay…

As
Sounds of Silence
by Simon and Garfunkel came over the restaurant’s speakers, I leaned back, took a long swig of wine, and told myself to chill. This was the hand I had been dealt, and I needed to take things one day at a time. My life hadn’t always been like this, of course. Just like anyone who hated themselves, I’d arrived at this situation through many small changes and hiccups and unexpected turns in my path, little detours and such that I’d barely even noticed, until suddenly I’d woken up one day and realized I was living a life I didn’t even recognize. When I met Richard he was the hottest guy on campus, the proverbial big-dicked frat boy with the cocky smile and the family money that was older than God himself, and I fell in love with the gleam in his eye faster and harder than I would like to admit. I’d always had a soft spot for boys who looked like they would eventually make me cry, and Richard definitely fit the bill. He was an ocean, and I drowned. All my friends were crazy with envy when we’d had the storybook wedding in the biggest Methodist church in town, ivy-colored steeple included, little bursts of popcorn filling the air like lights in the July sky as we headed out those church doors and into our shaky little future. At first I’d been dumb enough to think he’d be my Great Big Love – you know, the kind of love you see in old black-and-white movies and feel silly even wishing for because it’s so unattainable; the kind that makes you get all dressed up and walk alongside rivers at night and dance next to cafes for no reason at all and wake up every day thinking that maybe the world was as good and as beautiful as you’d hoped it was as a little girl. And in the very beginning, I guess it
was
that big love. For one shining moment Richard and I were smiley and content and rosy-cheeked and ten million different kinds of happy, and we’d walk the streets hand-in-hand laughing at the secret we held between us, that love was the only truly great adventure left in this world. Soon I forgot how I had ever lived before him. While the rest of the cold dead world stumbled around in black and white, we loved in blazing Technicolor, and that made us laugh all the louder.

But like most of the adventures out there, this one had proved short-lived. I got the sense that Richard would never open the gates and let me in on that secret inner life that sparked within those captivating black eyes, and I was right. Of course he’d finished his degrees and gone off to work for a law firm a few years after the wedding, and that’s when the magic wore off and the drifting started and the lingering scent of other women started reaching my nostrils when he’d lie down beside me at night. And the sick thing was that sometimes it seemed like he barely tried covering his tracks, that he almost
enjoyed
twisting the knife and keeping me a pawn in his sadistic game. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t run. And I guess I wasn’t totally blameless – perhaps I’d been a bit distant and cold, a little prim, and maybe that was what had made him stray. But whatever the case, the hope that things would return to how they were during those halcyon days after the wedding in that little house on Braddock Avenue with the weathered wooden floors and the vivid blue drapes had kept the blinders on my eyes and the ring on my finger. Sometimes it felt like the memories of those days were the only things that sustained me, actually – those, and my books. So the seasons blended into years and the years blended into decades and now every night I sit on my sofa, pour myself some Sauvignon Blanc while the love of my life pours his love into other women, and lose myself in fantastically improbable romance novels about tortured billionaires with private helipads and red rooms of pain to spare.

But lately I’d started to get a little restless. I didn’t know how much longer I could sit on the sidelines of life, reading about the world instead of living in it. I was kind of over getting told to swoon every time some unrealistically wealthy alpha dude told his clueless virginal girlfriend to drop her panties, went to town on her for an hour, and then flew her off into the sunset in his helicopter in some perfect little happily ever after. News flash: real life didn’t come with happy endings. There were jagged edges; flaws in the system; all kinds of unsavory details to deal with. I mean, in the last book I read, the female character had
eight
orgasms in one night. Eight! Who even orgasms during sex
at all
? The endless parade of billionaires, affairs, bondage, drama, unrealistic orgasms – at the end of the day my romance novels were kind of bullshit, and they did nothing to help my unhappy little life. Every book was the same, and I was starting to feel like it was time to shake things up. Where was the climax of
my
story? Were Richard and I built to break? Would things somehow pick up, and the magic would return? Or would I stay in the shades of grey forever?

I grabbed my iPad Mini from my bag to distract myself, as I had appetizers on the way and didn’t want to waste a perfectly good eighteen-dollar salad just because I’d been ditched. I pulled up my browser, which was set to some political news blog I’d been reading earlier, when suddenly a certain story caught my eye:

CONTROVERSIAL NEW APP BEING CALLED MAIL ORDER SERVICE FOR YOUNG MALE PROSTITUTES
, the headline read.

What
?

I tried to close out the window, but something stopped me. Telling myself I only wanted to rubberneck at these crazy women using this strange app, I opened the story.

NEW “COMPANIONSHIP” APP IS ALL THE RAGE – BUT ARE CLIENTS PAYING FOR MORE THAN JUST FRIENDSHIP?

The intrigue only grew as I scanned the article. Apparently there was a hot new app called Hookd that sad sacks were using to pay young hot dudes to sleep with them, and it was stirring up all kinds of drama. But because of a loophole in the wording of the app, it wasn’t even illegal – not yet, at least. I even laughed a little at the last paragraph:

…Congresswoman Gloria Schein’s office had no comment on recent reports naming her as one of the controversial new app’s clients, but when confronted outside the Forum on Upholding Family Values that Schein hosted on Capitol Hill this morning, the notoriously conservative Republican did instruct reporters to “keep their grubby little hands out of her love life”…

Suddenly my pulse sped up. My hands slickened with sweat. A legal service that could deliver one of the beautiful boys I read about in my novels – the idea certainly had its appeal. Was this app my ticket to living again?

Wait – no. This is crazy.

I told myself I was being ridiculous and X’d out the story. That was the last thing I needed right now, especially considering all Richard’s
other
scandals he had running. Figuring I’d lose myself in a novel like usual, I chose a book from the bestseller lists, a debut from a young male author that seemed chock full of sexy, cheesy drama, and then pulled up my Kindle app and tried to focus…but unfortunately, the book hit a little
too
close to home. “When you’re in love,” the book began, “the whole world feels like New York City.” I frowned, thinking of how my gauzy, sparkling dream life had burned down into this horrid little American nightmare – was this really it for me?

I tried to stop myself and focus on my book, but soon I was powerless against the lusty tide sweeping over me. As I sipped my wine, another side of my brain – the reckless, foolish, long-silenced part of it that had persuaded me to get a tiny tattoo on my ankle when I was nineteen and try marijuana at my first party with Richard, leaving me in a coughing fit for the rest of the night – looped back to the app. I reminded myself that I didn’t
have
to leave in order to throw water on the hot coals inside me that begged for revenge on Richard with every breath. In fact, I could serve his medicine right back at him, except with someone even younger and hotter. Someone more, say,
professional
than an intern or a secretary – what about a through-and-through “professional,” perhaps? If Richard could play Hide the Cock with every bimbo on Capitol Hill who was still too young to legally rent a car, then why couldn’t I do the same just because I was a woman? And didn’t I deserve a little affection, too, even if I was paying for it? Was it really too much to ask to be with someone who looked
at
me, instead of through me, or past me? Was it really too selfish to want someone to make me feel like I did when I was seventeen and free and thought the whole world was New York City?

Cursing myself, I Googled the stupid app and pulled up its website. My eyes fell across a few phrases as I tried to convince myself to stop reading…

Companionship provided at a cost…

Models come pre-screened and tested for disease, and are chosen for their looks, physiques, and skills at providing companionship…

…utmost privacy, safety and discretion guaranteed…

Honestly, it didn’t sound half-bad, I decided as I finished reading and leaned back in my chair. Thanks to the spicy romances I cycled through faster than joggers burned through water bottles, I had oodles of new positions and scenarios I wanted to try out in bed – not that Richard gave a damn, anyway. Trying to get him to make love to me was usually as futile as trying to lead a cat into a bath. Just for shits and giggles, I glanced through the app’s roster of guys…and then felt something below my stomach clench with desire. They were gorgeous model-types, every one of them, and just looking at their photos made me feel all sweaty and nervous. And truthfully, this wasn’t the
first
time I’d thought about younger men. My sex drive certainly hadn’t decreased with age – actually, it felt like the opposite was happening – and sometimes I fantasized about finding someone who could keep up with my newfound energy. I can’t say I didn’t take the long route to Whole Foods sometimes just to pass the campus of Georgetown and take a glance or two at the students on the sidewalk, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t stopped to admire their strapping shoulders and muscled forearms. Occasionally I’d even imagined one of them bursting through my door, tossing aside their backpack, and treating me like they treated one of those slutty cheerleaders they usually hooked up with…