Adulterers Welcome - A Final Goodbye To Good Boys And Girls

Bentley Upton never intended to be an adulterer, properly brought up as he had been in a dutiful, patient, and moderately successful family.  His father adored his mother, a woman of style and good taste, 'born too early' to enjoy the benefits of suffragism and women's liberation and frustrated because of it.  An adulterer in waiting was the best way to describe her in a sexually censorious age, and while she had ample opportunities to stray, she remained - at least as far as Bentley knew - faithful. 

Bentley's father was a man of wifely bent - not so much under the thumb of a demanding woman, but obedient to the mores of the times and without much adventure in his soul to push him awry. 

The marriage soldiered along - not unhappily but without much note - no strewn bedcovers, no leers or innuendoes.  All quite proper. 

Unlike the Blevins down the street.  Old Harvey Blevins always had his hands all over his lovely wife Martha, 'Oh, Harvey, please'...she said, but liked the feel of him, and even when Bentley and Billy Blevins surprised them in the kitchen, they were slow to pull apart.  Not so in the Upton household where a proper, appropriate distance was always maintained, and one got the impression that it was not because of the children but of their own sexual standoffishness.  

So, growing up in this sexual potpourri - his own parents, the Blevins, and The Cad of New Brighton, Dr. Trapp who never tried to hide his paramours or his afternoon liaisons - Bentley was fascinated by sex.  Trapp's wife as well as all the wives of the town felt it a privilege to be pursued by such a confident, maturely sexual man.  It was therefore no surprise that the precocious Bentley was primed to begin his own adventures. 

He dated serially, and with his mother's inherited sexual instincts, was one of the few boys in the ninth grade with sexual experience, albeit with the infamous Nancy Burns.  He also tried monogamy - going steady - to get the feel of an open pantry of sexual offerings, but ended up where he felt he belonged, in the world of Dr. Trapp who never met a woman he didn't want or who didn't want him. 

His four years at Yale were an idyll of sexual delights.  He had a nose for sexual interest - which girls would give it up without reservation - but also delighted in the chase after the daughters of those families for whom the right marriage was key to their social legacy. 

 

His years at Harvard were less sexually abundant.  In those years the law school was a largely male, and after Yale the girls of Wellesley and Holyoke seemed girlish and fussy; so he renewed his college roommate's Park Avenue acquaintances - Jewish girls on the borderline of spoiled but with an irresistible Levantine sexual permissiveness that made his law books tolerable. 

He was delighted to be in Washington as an aspiring partner at Swenson, Locke, & Perkins, K Street's premier law firm specializing in the crimes of the rich - insider trading, fraud, and misappropriation - an appointment which gave him easy access to the women involved, usually indirectly complicit and never charged; and who were, characteristic of that peculiar tribe of wealthy, well-bred, and ambitious women, excitedly sexual. 

For anyone old enough to remember the love-the-one-you're-with Sixties, today's censorious, neo-Puritanical, reverential days might be a surprise.  How did we get from a free-love, enthusiastic sexual freedom to a hard no? How had feminism, a movement of so much exuberant promise of sexual liberation become one of nasty misandry?  

Bentley Upton knew that the halcyon days of Woodstock, Jimi, and Janis could never have lasted.  America was, after almost three hundred years, still a penitential Puritan culture, afraid of its own sexual shadow.  Although American men might like to be a Mitterrand, Sarkozy, or Strauss-Kahn, sexual adventurers all, they were too timid and fearful to do so.  

Yet as he and any savvy man knew, the whole MeToo, neo-feminist canon was just a passing show. Women still wanted to be noticed, courted, and loved regardless of the circumstances.  

Bad boys were still in vogue, the badder, the better; and Bentley knew how to reap the benefits.  The seduction of women steeped in feminist cant was not only possible but desirable.  The woman who by day marched on the Mall for respect, honor, and dues paid, but complaisant and happy to have a man by their side at night, was easy prey. 

Estelle Perkins for example, a model of feminist propriety and principle and thanks to her ambition and gender-committed board of directors, rose high in the ranks of Parsons, Peabody & Finkel, a law firm that rivalled Bentley's for legal influence. Estelle had never lost a case, had defended the worst of the worst, and was called The Magician of K Street. 

At the same time, thanks to her traditional upbringing, she was a normal, predictably docile and complaisant woman.  She might be a terror in the courtroom, but wanted only peace and a good man to lie with by night.  She was ripe for Bentley's overtures and seducing a willful woman not to mention a courtroom rival, was a memorable victory. 

Bentley was married and had been so for years, but he had married into wealth and social prosperity, and his wife, the only child of the Boston Holbrookes was so stubbornly protective of the image of her family's importance she looked away at her husband's vagrancy.  Not only that, she loved him like every woman had - with complete sexual abandon. 

 

Her husband's adultery then, was not just admitted, but expected - a sign of his attractiveness and allure and a feather in her cap.  She wanted no part of divorce regardless of his truancy. And so it was that Bentley went from top floor to bottom, east to west, rich to poor in a memorable odyssey of lovely philandering. 

He heard the gossip of course - 'womanizer, cheat, adulterer, defiler, cad' and much more - but paid no attention.  The ethos of America would undoubtedly change and return to the heady days of the Sixties, a time when he would be one of many, a pedestrian on easy street rather than one of God's unique creations. 

'House-wrecker' was the old-fashioned Fifties term for an adulterer, his father's generation, a generation hamstrung and tethered by convention and propriety; but Bentley was much less than a disrupter of marriage than a sexual revolutionary.  He understood and easily bedded women who had prided themselves on their individualism and independence but found themselves the willing, complaisant lovers of a man who loved women but who could do without them.  They were women suddenly tossed on the curb and left to ponder their infidelity and willing obedience to men. 

All this was of no particular intellectual interest to Bentley who went about his business, pausing for breath and a cool drink, but as pursuant of pleasure and conquest as always. 

Future generations would look to him as both revolutionary and historically sentient.  He was a Sixties man in the early 21st century, a Casanova in a snipped and cribbed age, a man who understood women and the irrelevance of sexual culture.   Men and women were as destined as ever to play out life according to genetic imperatives. 

He ended his life like many successful men on a Miami beach with many memories and no regrets.  He had sharpened things up, added some spice and verve to the very intellectually and sexually sedentary life around him and had a whale of a good time doing so.