The Adventures of a Love Investigator, 527 Naked Men & One Woman (15 page)

He studies his coffee and then turns to me. “I think when you’re born you’re issued this magnetic strip like on a credit card. It depends of course on the time and place you were born as to how you ‘scan’ with others.”

I laugh. It’s a forced sound. I find nothing funny anymore.

“The key to marriage is to remember that you’re entitled to your equal or better.”

~ Chris, 56, married

Case 484 / Chris

“How’s the interviewing going?” Lawyer Chris smiles and beckons me to a chair. His office is plushy in a leather-bound way. His law books are an irritating sight – all those rules on how to treat other people. Does anyone really believe in them?
It’s so bogus.

I settle down, ferreting out my equipment.

“I’m almost at the halfway mark – five hundred men.”

“That’s a lot of emotions to handle. I imagine it’s getting rough.” His concern appears genuine. Chris has orange hair and freckles. He wears the red suspenders that I suspect are issued to all law school grads.

“I’m cool with it.”

He laughs. “Cool huh? By the time you finish all your interviews, your internal body temperature will be fifty-one degrees.”

I study him, assessing all the things I’ve heard he is – a good husband, a terrific father, a successful attorney and a man with a few bittersweet longings.

“Ready?” I ask.

He nods. I click on the recorder.

“Chris, explain to me how you came to create a happy marriage. Give me something profound for me and my readers.”

“I guess the key to marriage is to remember that you’re entitled to your equal or better. If you settle for somebody a little less than you, you take some of the threat out of the relationship, but what do you really have?”

“What about love?” I ask.

“There are OTHER emotions. People are either givers or takers, they don’t straddle the fence.” He looks at me to see if I get it.

“I don’t mean that in a financial way. A psychologist told me have to realize it’s okay to be taken care of.”

“So you’re saying that sometimes you have to relax and learn to take?”

He nods.

It’s an alien concept for me. I shake it off. “Chris, let’s play pretend.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“I know you’ve been married for eleven years, but pretend you’ve been married for thirty years. What does it feel like physically and emotionally ... you know ... the other emotions, besides love?”

He sits back, placing his hands behind his head.

“It would have to be extremely comfortable for me. I’ve been around people, who are married for thirty years, and who are vicious with one another.”

He grins. It is a devilish grin. “After you’re married for a while people develop new, more intimate ways to fight.”

I feel a chill. I see hurt in the eyes of this man who was touted as being happy.
Oh Pooh. Perhaps no married person is really happy.

Chris considers a moment. “Marriages don’t last anymore because people are more and more self-indulgent. It’s the same thing that’s happening across society – lack of personal accountability.” He spins in his over-sized lawyer chair and gazes out the window at the almost empty parking lot.

“I see a lot of men and a lot of women, not excluding me, taking a lot of things for granted and not treating the other person with the dignity they should be treated with. I think it’s a tough relationship. It’s hard.”

Chris looks at the photos on his credenza. He slides his finger over the picture of his twin sons, all freckles and sunbeams. “The close proximity of marriage makes it tough. And kids ... kids can wreck a marriage if you let it happen.”

He touches the photo of his wife, a pretty blond lady with huge blue eyes. “Can’t let the kids see you get upset. Wrong. They have to know what relationships are all about.”

“Tell me about a friend’s lasting marriage and the woman in it.” I figure this could be an interesting angle.

“She’s very strong-willed without inflicting it on anybody. She lives her life intellectually, spiritually and emotionally strong, but very loving.”

“Would that be your ideal, if you weren’t already happily married?”

“I would be very attracted to her. It was very important to me to marry someone who didn’t depend on me.”

“Really?”
So independence trumps love?

He nods. “Some years before I was married, I overheard a woman say, ‘I got mine’ – meaning her husband. She’s got her prince of a husband. It was just so evil, the way she said it.”

He shudders. “I thought, ‘Boy is that cold.’ She could have had whatever she wanted because she’s very talented in her own right but that’s the way she defined herself,
I got mine.”

When I ask him if he would die for his wife, he avoids eye contact.

“I have a lot of clients relying on me,” he says by way of an answer.

As I totter from his office disillusioned one more time, Chris says, “I’ve told you things I’ve never told anyone not even my wife.”

“They all say that.”

“I don’t want to be a stepping stone for some gorgeous broad.”

~ Len, 49, married

Case / The Anti-Trophy Wife

I begin to notice a peculiar pattern as I travel the country giving men the gift of listening. Fifty-percent of the financially well-off married guys chose to wed women who were the antithesis of trophy wives. These guys appeared to run in the opposite direction of their contemporaries. These were men who had the trappings of wealth if not the bucks. And yet half the time, they chose anti-trophy wives as a way of positioning themselves outside the pack. It was an unconscious effort not to compete because their work lives were all about competition. They didn’t want to have to worry about their mates. Like Pete they destroyed the understanding of commitment by applying fear to their decisions as to whom they chose to marry.

I contact Len after reading about him in a national publication. He was billed as a mogul.
Was that like a troll?
We meet in his office after I pass through his security which amounts to a one-eyed armed guard who is a former government agent. I’m thinking Post Office. It made me nervous to know this guard was packing a gun while visually impaired.
The situations I get myself into.

About six feet four and slightly portly, Len has dark hair and angry eyes. He could easily pass for an actor in
The Godfather.
He’s wearing a three-piece suit despite the south Texas heat. Len travels from his limo to his office never stepping outside. We sit on either end of a cushy leather sofa. I’m recording and he’s pouring out his tale. “My marriage was my only failure. She was a really good looking woman. We had two kids. I wasn’t getting anything out of the relationship and then I found out she was cheating with my ex partner. I divorced her so fast she never knew what hit her. The courtroom drama wasn’t pretty, but I know my way around the legal system. My assets disappeared overnight. Amazing how that happened. Right after the divorce she took up with a kid who gave sailing lessons. She could have anyone, but she chose this young dude. I hated to see the alimony being spent on him. So I bought him.”

“What does that mean?”

“I financed his little boat business. Now he keeps me up to speed on my ex’s plans and I keep him funded. Someday I’ll pull the money-carpet out from under him and he’ll dump her. I like to keep my hand in the game.”

“I understand you just got married again.” I did a little checking before our interview and was told the woman he married is all rump and grump. She has the disposition of a cornered rattlesnake.

Now as I carefully peel away the outside layer of his brain, his gray matter spills out.

“She’s no looker but I don’t have to worry about her running off with anyone. No one else will have her.” He panics appearing to realize he’s verbalized his secret thoughts. Len quickly reminds me of our signed agreement not to use his name and to disguise his identity.

I tell him his secrets are safe with me. “Would you die for the woman you love?”

“If I ever loved? No.”

When I exit, I avoid shaking his hand.
Cooties.

“You meet too many women who want you to fill a hole in their life. And it turns out the hole is like 95% of their life.”

~ Skip, 39, single

Case 485 / Skip

Referral to referral, guys love my visiting psycho-service. I just listen and they feel better. Me? I’m falling apart. Did you ever pig out on one food... chocolate, potato chips, ice cream? You swear you’ll never eat that food again. This was similar but worse. The sound of a man’s voice made my teeth rattle.

I find myself in a house in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. From the outside the Spanish contemporary house looks normal enough. Inside it’s a colorful cottage of whimsy.

Skip is a writer friend of lawyer Chris. He’s a lone wolf given to a small circle of friends. He’s never been married, and is quite factual about his needs and desires.

“My friends and I were talking the other night about people coming to a certain age where they feel almost obligated to get married.”

He pops a Coke can and hands it to me as he continues his tale, “Take men who are in that trench from thirty-three to thirty-nine, and especially if they’re stage performers or working in some kind of fringe specialty, childhood-extending occupation. They feel an obligation to that normal life. They become disappointed because they’re not getting it.”

I don’t follow this line of thought. “Do you mean they feel guilty because they’re enjoying life?”

He leans against the refrigerator, an expensive retro-looking appliance – bright turquoise with chrome restraints. I’d like to lean on it for a minute, but I figure he’d think I was freaky. I wonder how many people secretly share my love for refrigerator-leaning?

Skip’s kitchen is a vision. I find it a little tough to concentrate on the interview. Damn . . I wish I had a kitchen like this. What isn’t a white or that marvelous shade of blue, is red. Red tumblers and a red tea-pot.
Cool. Oh yeah ... back to Skip.

“I think what those guys are looking for is the kind of stability they had with their parents, whether they had good relationships with them or not. Like home is the place you go, where they have to take you in.”

I laugh at his humor.

“I’m almost forty and I’ve never been married. Marriage is no longer the threat I once perceived it to be. I could marry the woman I’m with now and it would not be a problem. Children, however, would be a problem because I am incredibly selfish about what I want to do.”

I try to feel what Skip is saying.

“You make it sound so either/or.” I scribble a few notes to myself without looking into his intense green eyes.

“Well, it can be. My older brother was a very inspired and talented individual, who never lived up to his talent. When he turned twenty-one he got married, immediately had two children, and had to drop out of college.” Skip forces his hands into the pockets of his oh-so-tight black slacks.

“I see my brother as a guy whose dreams sort of got shot in the head before he was twenty-five.”

“So so you see marriage as the end of dreams? And where does love fit in?”

He wears a worried expression. “A lot of people are brought up to see marriage as a goal. It’s like when you complete your basic course work, you get a diploma and a spouse.”

“What about love?” I persist.

He smiles. “For most women, love isn’t the goal, marriage is. ‘If I can just marry somebody’ which translates in a lot of cases into if I can just fool someone into marrying me, then I’ll be a complete person.”

I think of Christa and her pursuit of Chet’s identity.

Skip continues. “It’s too much like that whole concept you see in those 50’s movies, ‘how to trap a man’. Since there’s no legitimate way for a man to say ‘yes’ I’d like to hang around with you for the rest of my life. No, no. They must be tricked.”

How many men harbor that unacknowledged resentment? That trapped feeling? I wonder again if Mark found someone and if he speaks of her that way. I think not. I hope not.

“Making love to the unattractive ones is a lesson you learn early on. You go somewhere else while you’re having sex. You have a sort of out-of-body experience.”

~ Mike, 25, single

Case 486 / Mike

Mike meets me at Sal’s apartment. My friend steps out for the afternoon and leaves us to explore what turns out to be one of the most surprising and downer of the almost five hundred interviews. He shows up early, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and white slacks. His hair is platinum and his skin is tanned to a light George Hamilton #3. We have been talking for an hour, and he has revealed himself to me. It is more than I could have expected.

We’re sitting on Sal’s tiny rear porch. The freeway traffic makes it a little hard to communicate. Mike can’t seem to get his slender frame comfortable in the metal patio chair. He begins, “The first time I got paid for sex, it was arranged by a friend. After that it became word of mouth.”

Okay... I’ve heard of this.
I keep the surprise from registering on my face.

Despite looking less than his twenty-five years, Mike’s voice is raspy, tired. “The women who were my clients all seemed terribly depressed and lonely. As much as the sex, these ladies needed to talk to another man about what bastards their husbands were.” He checks my expression. Satisfied, he continues.

“Where did you do this? At hotels?”

“Usually it took place at their homes, with some, they had more than one home, there or at hotels. The women didn’t have to worry about their husbands coming home because these women were pretty much alone. As far as people who might work in their homes, like maids and other domestics, they were so jaded by the whole thing they just did their job. I would stay the whole evening or as long as I wanted. No one questioned it. You have to realize with most of these women I was just someone else they were paying, just like a servant.”