Chapter Six: "Ten thousand years of male programming wiped out."
"Shit, Jackson. I can't get any lower. White male, full fledged member of the power structure, father of a teenage daughter, teaching civil-rights law, about to seduce an African-American co-ed from a god-fearing family who is in my charge to develop her social conscience and legal mind."
"When you put it that way, m' old mate, you can't." Jackson was raised in the east end of London and came of age in Australia, which left him with a speech pattern eccentric to the American ear.
"Is there another way to put it?" Guy asked with his trademark raised eyebrow.
"There are lots of ways to put anything.""Oh yeah. Give me your top five for this one."
"Okay. You're on." Jackson's eyes flashed mischievously. "Number one. We could frame this as a sweet romantic interlude. Sensitive college professor meets coming-of-age young woman. Neither is using the other. It is an act of mutual giving which cannot possibly last but is tender beyond belief, for a brief span."
"Whew!" exhaled Guy, shaking his head in admiration.
"Number two," Jackson continued. "We cast you as the world-weary mentor. You know about dreams and what becomes of them. You know about passion and what becomes of it. Your infatuated ingenue comes to you for initiation. It is your role to lift the curtain and reveal the grayness that lies behind romantic illusion, but to do this gently so, like a good wine, she is matured by the experience, not soured."
"I'm dumbfounded," Guy said sincerely.
"Number three. You're a rogue. Under the thin veil of social conscience you're like the rest of us -- no purer, no nobler. The world is corrupting. You are corrupted. She will eventually be corrupted too. You are doing her a favor by breaking her naive cherry now as, sooner or later, someone will do it and they'll probably be a lot nastier about it than you."
"Not so comfortable about that one." Guy shifted a bit in his seat.
"Who said you needed to be comfortable? Are your ready for four?"
"Probably not," said Guy, shaking his head and smiling.
"That's fine. Here it comes." Jackson leaned forward a bit, conspiratorially. "This has nothing to do with her. It is entirely about you. You are on a trajectory to become a boring, cynical middle-aged kvetch. An opportunity has presented itself to break out of that trajectory. You can let inertia keep you on your miserable course or you can grab the tail of this cute little comet that has just appeared on your horizon. This is a one-shot opportunity, take it or leave it. Either way, you are master of your fate."
"I am speechless, Jackson. This has got to be a marketable skill." Guy was seriously impressed by Jackson's intellectual artistry.
"I'm not finished." Jackson's eyes now seemed reproving.
"Number five," Guy offered unnecessarily, suddenly feeling nervous.
"Number five. You're a selfish son-of-a-bitch. You sit here contemplating adultery and completely excluding the victim from your thoughts. You are in complete denial. You are about to shred any trust that might remain between you and Jill. And the best you can do is characterize this as a failing of social conscience. In fact, it's an utter act of self-gratification. And the sooner you can admit that the sooner you'll be free to choose to act or not act without all this rubbishy guilt."
Guy seemed stunned. He remained absolutely silent and unmoving for a moment before contorting his face and half spitting, "Fuck you, Jackson. Who asked you anyway?"
"By your reaction old son, I think the last description is the shoe that fits." Jackson was maddeningly cool in the face of Guy's outburst.
"Fuck you," Guy repeated.
"Your articulate response is confirming my diagnosis," Jackson said with clinical detachment.
"Shove your wit, will you?" Guy was up now and pacing around the room. Jackson's apartment suddenly seemed too small to contain him. "This is really tough for me and you're reducing it to clever debating points."
"I don't think so," Jackson said earnestly. I genuinely think that you have reduced this to an issue about you and you are missing that this is about you and Jill."
"Of course it's about me and Jill." The angry impatience returned to Guy's voice. "Jill doesn't want sex and that happens to mean I don't get any sex. That then makes it about me because I want -- no -- I need sex. Look, Jackson, no disrespect, but look around here. You've got this small bachelor apartment. No ties. It's easy for you to pontificate about my relationship. Physician heal thyself!"
"If you don't want help, I'll shut up." The look on Jackson's face said he meant it.
Guy sat down. "I'm sorry, buddy. I know you care. And I really appreciate having you as a sounding board. I do. I really do."
"Then let me sound," Jackson said matter of factly.
"Okay," Guy conceded. "Just try not to be flip. This stuff hurts."
[Ten minutes later, they are walking around the neighborhood, and enter a park...]
Guy took a deep breath when he needed to clear his mind. He felt better just being outside, surrounded by trees. "Let the trained lawyer lay out the options."
"The way I see it I have several choices. One, walk away from temptation, get back on the straight and narrow, be able to live with myself and Jill. Downside: To quote a friend: I'm dying. Option two. Give in to temptation. Be a normal guy. Have a quiet affair. Let it run its course. Either it dies naturally or Jill finds out and the shit hits the fan and massively ruins the wallpaper. Clean up the mess if that happens and pay for new wallpaper. Option three. Run away with the sweet young thing, fight Jill in court so she doesn't walk off with half my partner earnings for the rest of my life. Am I missing any options?"
"Yes, I'm afraid you are," Jackson replied nodding as if in agreement. "Number four. The sweet young thing gets over her infatuation and leaves you and Jill doesn't get over her reaction and leaves you too."
"Oh yeah. The lose-lose option." Guy sounded glum. "You know Jackson, that option scares me, but it's not the one I have the most trouble with. The one that really bothers me is two -- being a normal guy and having a secret affair, even if it never blows up on me."
"Why is that?" It was Jackson's turn to be curious.
Guy sighed. "The older I've gotten, the more I've done things the way my father did them. It's scary. I sometimes can't believe it. But there's still a difference." Guy raised a finger, needing to emphasize the difference as strongly as he could. "I'm actually aware of most of the sexist thoughts I have and correct myself before they come out of my stupid mouth. I've beaten my homophobia and have no trouble hanging out with the gay friends Jill and I have. And one thing I have taken particular pride in is that I have not slinked around having secret affairs and manufacturing streams of lies to cover up my nights out."
"Like your dad?" queried Jackson.
"Yes!" Guy blurted. "Like my dad." He paused. "That feels so...so craven. If I do it, I'll feel like I've betrayed all my work to live a more authentic life."
"Well sport," Jackson chimed in with a look on his face somewhere between sheepish and bad boy. "I'm not very flattered by the craven label you've placed on tactics I have successfully used more than once."
"Sorry, Jacks. I'm really not judging you. It's me on trial here and I seem to be both prosecutor and defense."
"Throw in judge, jury and bailiff," Jackson quipped with a friendly smirk.
Guy laughed for the first time that day.
"I am clearly suffering from role confusion. But that's the point. I don't want to use the adversarial system to wiggle out of this. I want to get to what's true for me."
"Alright, mate. What's true for you?" Jackson's voiced dropped, as he took the questioning to a deeper level.
Guy started to answer, then hesitated. They walked four or five minutes in silence before Guy spoke again. When he did, it poured out.
"Somehow I've walked into a box and the lid's been nailed down. You know me, Jacks, I'm half economist, half lawyer. I think in market terms. When I was single I was in a free- market economy. Supply and demand were at work. So was consumer choice. If you liked the goods you bought, if you didn't like them you walked. I gave you something you valued, you gave me something. You didn't like my wampum, you traded elsewhere.
"All that's been stood on its head. While the economic world is moving from state-controlled industries to free-market economies, in my marriage I've moved to a monopoly. There is only one supplier. She controls the production, distribution, price and availability, and no one else is allowed to compete. It's the perfect recipe for terrible service and that's exactly what I'm getting. Or not getting." Guy was working up a head of steam
"And Jackson, she can't have it both ways. Either she earns the right to a regulated monopoly by providing service to the customer, or I damn well am entitled to go out into the free market to get my needs met. Right now she's a damned monopolistic utility that has turned off the electricity supply even though I have been paying my bills! It sucks! And I feel myself being pushed right to the edge where active rebellion is the only way to break the friggin' monopoly."
Guy paused for breath. Jackson slipped into the space.
"So? What's the problem? You seem clear about your rights in the situation." This was Jackson at his detached best, asking the central question.
"Well, my friend," Guy rejoined as if he had been cued for the next part of his script, "there are several problems. The first is that going out into the market isn't my first choice. It's like all the hassle since the breakup of Ma Bell. Single-source providers do have their advantages. Life is complicated enough. I don't have time now to see my wife, my friends, my daughter, to finish my work or god forbid to play. Shopping for and sustaining an affair is one more demand. Secondly, while I understand my rights to a free-market economy, why do I get the feeling Jill won't? You know her. Am I wrong?"
"Probably not," Jackson concurred matter of factly.
"Well," Guy continued, "next to being able to interest my wife in sex, the greatest skill deficiency I have in life is being able to lie or withhold information. It's why I don't play poker. It's also one of the reasons I do the back-room legal work, not the trial piece. So the most likely scenario is that I would get my rocks off once or twice, spill my guts to Jill and wind up paying the consequences for the next ten years. Is that worth it?"
"I've heard of better deals," Jackson again concurred.
"And that is what really, really pisses me off!" Now Guy was flushed. "Why the hell do I feel like the bad guy, when I'm the one being denied conjugal rights? Under the circumstances, either she ought to willingly concede to my rights to shop elsewhere, or I ought to have the balls to claim them!"
"My dear Hamlet, you really do have a problem. We are back to where we started. You are completely mired in indecision. Paralyzed. And you bloody well had better find a way of acting!"
Guy took the opportunity to pause and prop one leg on a fallen birch. Now he could really hold forth. "I know exactly the action I would like to take. I would like to throw Jill down on the bed and have my way with her. It absolutely makes my blood boil when we haven't had sex for a couple of months that she will walk around the bedroom stark naked, even bend over right in front of me to straighten the bed, and wave it right in my face as if I don't exist! And what can I do about it? Absolutely nothing! If I come on to her she brushes me off. And do you know why I can't do anything about it?" Guy's tone was a controlled shriek.
"I can guess, but why don't you tell me why," Jackson said warily, not wanting to throw gasoline on the surprising conflagration he was witnessing.
"Because somehow," Guy shook his head in exasperation, "despite the fact that the bench and legislature are still largely male-dominated, we have allowed the law to be interpreted so that a husband who pushes himself on his wife can be charged with marital rape! Ten thousand years of male programming wiped out in less than a generation!"
Jackson hadn't ever seen Guy quite like this. "Listen closely Jackson. I am not talking about wife-beating. I am not condoning violence. I have given this a lot of thought. I am talking about evolutionary programming which rigs males to have a powerful urge about every 48 hours to insert their seed carrying appendage into a vaginal canal that usually has eggs at the other end of it. To manage the chaos this caused, human evolution in virtually every culture on earth produced the institution of marriage, to channel this absolutely irrepressible behavior."
"And we could just about live with that when we had the right to insert our penises into our wives' vaginas more or less when we pleased. As society got more refined about these things, if we were clever we made it pleasurable for our wives, too. If we weren't, we still had a legitimate, if unwilling outlet. And if we got tired of the legitimate outlet and could afford it, we went to an illegitimate outlet."
"You are rambling." Jackson interrupted, trying to notch down Guy's harangue.
"Oh no I'm NOT!" Guy sputtered. "I am just getting to the point! Somehow, for all the talk of male domination, we have allowed the one legitimate, and the primary illegitimate outlet to both be criminalized! Do you read the papers? If I go to a hooker, fool that I'd be anyway with AIDS raging, and get caught, the vogue these days is to impound the Lexus I use to commit the heinous crime, and to publicly humiliate me by publishing my name in the papers for my kids, neighbors, clients, and adversaries all to see! If I stay home and let my hormones loose on my disinterested wife, at her whim with a simple 911 call, I can be charged with marital rape and carted off to jail where the odds are greatly in the other guy's favor that I will be the one who actually gets raped while my wife gabs to her friends all night on the cordless about my despicable behavior! How did we get to such a state?"
He seemed to be asking the question of the universe. "How did we guys lose all our leverage and rights?"
It was a rare moment of Jackson actually being speechless. Guy had framed the issue in such devastating terms that Jackson was mesmerized. After a long silence, Jackson said in a muted voice, "I don't know how you boiled your whole relationship issue with Jill down to sex, and I don't quite trust it, but you make one helluva compelling argument."
Guy didn't try to respond or to carry his line of reasoning any further. He was spent. "Let's go home, Jacks. I'm completely exhausted."
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