The Faithful Husband - Leftovers In The Survival Of The Fittest

New Brighton is a small Connecticut city once known for its industry.  Its factories produced arms and materiel for the Union Army in the Civil War, the United States Army in WWI and WWI, and hardware for the domestic market. Its factories eventually shut their doors in the face of foreign competition, but small tool-and-dye shops remained. 

New Brighton in the modern era was like many in New England, recovering from the end of their industrial heyday, losing population to the wealthier suburban towns serving New York, Hartford, and Boston, but managing.  For those who remained - a healthy cadre of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and accountants - like was good.  Crime was rising due to Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants; the Polish neighborhoods, always anchors of civility, were now far smaller than they were fifty years ago, but there was the Frederick Law Olmstead park, an important regional hospital, and a small university. 

The older residents remember the town in its halcyon years - a bustling downtown, festooned with lights and window displays at Christmas, Holy Week processions, and a post-war optimism shared by many in the country.  Things changed, of course.  Religion was no longer the common thread of the community, children are driven to school rather than walk, the finer stores have moved to the suburbs, and marriages are more open, women more free to come and go as they please, and men involved with other women.  It isn't exactly the free-for-all found in big cities, but the old life of fidelity and Kinder Kirche Kuchen is no longer. 

From an evolutionary point of view, this is a good thing.  Darwin would have been cautionary at best had he seen the sedate homeliness of the Fifties, men settling for one woman, women happy as homemakers and mothers, and children brought up in an atmosphere of propriety, faithfulness, and patriotism. 

The real world was held in abeyance during those years of happy marriages and a welcoming but censorious society.  The Sixties changed all that.  Love the one you're with replaced the old tired nostrums of sexual ordinariness.  Sex was offered, accepted, negotiated in a free marketplace, the fetters, tethers, and halters were off.  Mr. Right went packing.  Men were free to roam. 

Something happened, however, in later years.  Somehow sex was again being put back in carefully-wrapped boxes, opened carefully to save the ribbons. Women were once again nicely trimmed, honorable, and as untouchable as the Virgin Mary...unless they let their knickers down, set the rules of engagement, warned against untoward advances, and in the interest of personal integrity replaced ravishment with dutiful respect.

 

Arnold Perkins was a man who accepted this new ethos.  He washed the dishes, kept hair meticulously out of the sink, encouraged and congratulated his wife at every turn, never questioned her intentions or movements, and saw only the emergence of the New Woman - independent, confident, ready and able to take the place of men everywhere. 

Needless to say, his wife quickly tired of his toadying complaisance. She was a woman, after all, programmed for bad boys, genetically primed for male confidence, pursuit, and sexual desire.  Before her inclusion within the new paradigm of female supremacy turning the tables on formerly predatory, abusive men and giving them a taste of their own medicine, she was a girly girl who fell for the football captain, the dreamboat, the man of a thousand women. 

Subject to the insistence of her political sisters she came to realize the error of her ways - this macho thing was what had incarcerated women for millennia.  Forget the hunters of the plains, the warriors, the shamans and bed the farmers who will finally and at long last treat you right. 

Now that she had roped the calf, she wanted only the bull.  She wanted to feel the glory of being taken, being used, being ravished.   She was initially ashamed of these feelings, a traitor to the cause, but nature overruled nurture, and before you know it she was in bed with a billionaire she met at the Town & Country bar at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, an after conference hours affair she had always dreamed of. 

In fact she could have written the script herself - handsome, well-dressed man treated like royalty as he came into the bar, kissed by a hundred women as he walked to his place, ordering a dry Stoli martini straight up, three olives. 

This was the very man she was told to avoid - the predatory male indifferent to women except as vessels of pleasure, the epitome of self-interest and arrogant self-assurance - and yet she could not resist, succumbed without a whimper, and wanted to come back for more. 

'Another time' he said, and of course she never saw him again. 

Meanwhile Arnold waited patiently for his wife's return from her business trip.  Dinner was in the oven, the table was set, the bathrooms had been given an extra swish, and her favorite music was playing.  When her heard her familiar step on the walk, he smiled, delighted that she was back. 

'I'm tired...sorry, see you in the morning' she said to a disappointed but understanding Arnold as she went up the stairs. 

'Of course, dear. These trips take a lot out of you', and with that he replaced the china and silver, carefully put away the roast, the parsley potatoes, and the legumes almondine, turned off the music, and sat in his recliner. 

'Man up!' was the cry he should have listened to.  He had become his wife's doormat, her convenient househusband, her steady-as-she-goes plowman, her faithful, dependable mate and had gotten nothing but a peck on the cheek in return. 

He ignored the signs - sexual demurral, increasingly frequent trips to New York, a new dismissive indifference - and assumed the best, that his wife was coming into her own, a proud, defiantly positive woman. 

Meanwhile his wife cavorted in her newfound return to the old days, danced until midnight, squired by devilishly attractive men and was left in series on the curb.  She had been used, but she loved it. 

These men all had wives, lovers, and children by all of them.  They were Darwinian darlings, at the top of the phylogenetic chain, the progenitors of the best and the brightest, the fittest; while the Arnolds of the world died out, overmatched, ignorant, and useless. Blips on the evolutionary radar. 

Feminist accusations of predatory, toxic masculinity, misogyny and swamp-and-cracker machismo were brushed off like pesky flies by these men who went on their merry way finding hundreds of women failed by the cant of femaleness and wanting only the hard, rough reality of sexual pleasure. 

The marriage ended, no surprises there.  Arnold quickly remarried to a simple, sexually complaisant, deferent woman from New Brighton with whom he shared common interests.  

He never blamed his first wife.  She had every right to choose her own path, her own destiny; and it was he who could not provide the support and consistency that she needed. 

Only once did he have his doubts about his life choices.  His Yale reunion was dominated by the wealthy, successful, sexually adventurous men of his class.  They talked only of conquests - a Wall Street merger, the billion dollar startup, offshore investments, homes in St. Bart's and third wives.  His lot - sharing misery stories in the shabby non-profit corner - was a sorry one; and he wondered if he had taken a different turn, he might be one of the big men at the bar. 

Unfortunately evolution is not a matter of choice, and he had gotten the short end of the stick. 

As to his wife? No one had heard much about her after she left Arnold and New Brighton.  His friends hoped that she was a sexual retread in Spokane, which was possible the way she started off; but no one cared that much except for the apocryphal lesson of her marriage to Arnold.  Man up! Throw the bitch out! but of course those angry howls had no resonance in a society still beholden to women.