No Strings

  ALSO BY MARK SAFRANKO

  The Favor

  Hopler’s Statement

  Hating Olivia

  Lounge Lizard

  Loners

  God Bless America

  Dirty Work

  Seedy

  The Suicide

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Mark SaFranko

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477826164

  ISBN-10: 1477826165

  Cover design by theBookDesigners

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014941174

  For Lorrie . . . Jack . . . and John

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1.

  Clever, I remember thinking at the time. Very, very clever. Because I had it all figured out.

  At least that’s what I told myself.

  You know how it is. You hatch an idea, then grind it in your brain until it makes perfect sense. Until all the pieces fit—like when you finish off a big, elaborate jigsaw puzzle, except that you’re not playing a child’s game.

  You make the decision: Hell, yes. It’ll work. I can pull it off, no sweat.

  Then you go ahead and do it.

  And one day you find yourself in a boat on the ocean, your doubts circling you like bloodthirsty sharks, your misgivings, your regrets, your fuckups closing in on you like the jaws of a gigantic vise.

  Then you’re not so cocksure anymore.

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself. So let me go back to the very pedestrian beginning of it all.

  What I figured I’d do first was run up the red flags of infidelity, then, after Monica was enticed into taking a closer look—and finding nothing—I’d actually go out and get a little on the side. What reason would she have for being suspicious after already checking me out and finding me clean?

  Very clever indeed.

  Let’s face it: extramarital affairs are a bear. If you can manage it, you’re better off making do with what you’ve got. The problem is, if you don’t take chances, you’re stuck with your life, and nothing ever changes.

  That’s what I was most afraid of—that nothing would ever change.

  There was of course really no way of knowing whether the whole thing would fly, but I figured it was worth the shot. Because I had to be straight with myself—I was bored to tears with my existence. Whatever it would take to spice it up, I’d have to make the effort. Until now, I’d been too afraid.

  Why wasn’t I now? Maybe I’d just convinced myself that the time was right. Maybe I was tired of endlessly fantasizing and not doing anything about it. Maybe I’d reached the point of no return. It’s impossible to know for sure. All I knew was that I was ready.

  The first part of the plan was a piece of cake. Everything I needed was right there on the Web, courtesy of the Sharpeye Investigation Agency:

  “Signs of Infidelity—30 Clues to Cheating Spouses”

  Indicators like “sudden increase in time away from home,” “decreased sexual interest,” and “subject attends more work functions alone” were the easiest to fake, and therefore the ones I employed most often to arouse my wife’s suspicions. But jolting her out of her dreamland took some doing, much more than I expected. It made me realize why people cheated—because they could get away with it. At least up to a point. But I was going to be different. I wanted to be sure.

  So I had to practically beat Monica over the head with my red herrings because she’s fundamentally such a guileless soul, and I’d never before during our years of marriage given her reason to mistrust me. It was only later, when I resorted to tactics like “getting laundry done independently,” “asking about spouse’s schedule more often than usual,” and “suddenly buying spouse more gifts,” that she finally woke up.

  “Are you seeing someone else, Richard?” she asked one evening after I’d dragged in a few hours late for dinner for what seemed like the hundredth time.

  There was an almost pitiful mixture of determination and anxious vulnerability on Monica’s face. The conflicting emotions made her look a little like a kid trying to screw up the courage to stand up to her parents for the first time.

  The look on her face convinced me that I was in the driver’s seat, and that the first part of my plan was going to fall right into place. And that the same would happen with part two.

  At the time we were sitting in the recently remodeled living room, she on the long sofa, me on one of the easy chairs. She was cradling a flute of Château Cheval Blanc. I had a glass of water. Diane, our fifteen-year-old, had already gone upstairs to bed.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now, but . . .”

  I let my jaw drop in utter and complete shock at the mere notion of faithlessness. “You have?”

  She nodded, a little sheepishly. I’d actually been taking in a movie at the local multiplex earlier that evening, but naturally I didn’t tell her that.

  “Me? Seeing someone? No way, honey! What on earth would give you that idea? We’ve been married for how long now—seventeen years? And in all that time, when have you ever known me to be interested in another woman?”

  I stopped short of challenging her to go through my stuff, to check my computers, to do whatever she needed to do to convince herself. That, I thought, would be overkill.

  She gazed at me steadily with her soft, beautiful gray eyes, which were still bright and youthful even though she’d recently crossed the threshold of an early menopause. I thoroughly understood the expression in them: she wanted to believe me with all her heart, but she had to rely on her considerable native intelligence and intuition to guide her—she’s that kind of person. And of course those qualities were exactly what was making this all so tricky.

  After more questions about my increasingly errant behavior, all of which I answered calmly—and truthfully—she appeared to accept my explanation and the subject was dropped. After all, she had no hard evidence to confront—or accuse—me with, right? I hadn’t done a single thing to be guilty for, had I?

  And she still loved me, didn’t she?

  In the following days, she sure acted like she did. At least I saw no evidence to the contrary, including the fact that we didn’t fail to miss our regular Saturday night lovemaking session. And it was just like it always was. Predictable. Dull. Boring. A damned-near deadly snore that was hardly worth the energy expended.

  Despite my reassurances
to Monica, I could have sworn I caught glimpses of something, and someone, shadowing me whenever I was out and about—which was of course exactly what I wanted. The appearance of an unmarked forest-green Chevrolet Malibu in the parking lots of the dry cleaner in Roseland, the Whole Foods supermarket in Montclair, and the takeout Chinese restaurant in West Caldwell caught my attention, though it may have been nothing more than coincidence—after all, there are scads of green Chevies on the road.

  It’s just that this one always seemed to linger, and the fact that the windshield was tinted and I couldn’t make out who was inside seemed a bit odd. Maybe it was just my imagination working overtime, since I was on the lookout—hoping—for something unusual.

  Then one day I discovered an invoice from the law offices of Simon and Levandowski in a bone-colored envelope, no postmark, no stamp, in the bottom drawer of the desk in Monica’s upstairs study when I was hunting for a box of staples, and any doubt that my scheme was working was erased.

  “Dear Mrs. Marzten:

  Below please find the final report of our operatives, Ronald Pleasants and Wallace Van Loan,” it began. There followed a list of surveillance dates and expenses incurred.

  At the bottom, under “Findings,” was this:

  After extensive investigation over more than four weeks, it is our conclusion that the subject, Richard Marzten, is not involved in any extramarital activity whatsoever. His behavior, while at times somewhat less than predictable or routine, is in our view innocuous and innocent—in other words the behavior of any normal, law-abiding man of his age, occupation, and lifestyle . . .

  Etc.

  Beautiful. A little stilted maybe, but otherwise perfect.

  There was even a little handwritten addendum of congratulations on my fidelity to my wife from Mr. Roger E. Simon himself. And, of course, the total cost—which was nothing short of breathtaking. But sixteen grand was a small price to pay to establish my impeccability, and my wife could certainly afford it.

  Apparently Monica had wanted to do a thorough job of it, like I did, and she had. She’d gone all the way.

  Watching her afterward, I got the feeling she was satisfied, at peace, even. For that money, I hoped she was.

  2.

  But maybe it goes back even further.

  Like all the way back to Maui, months earlier. I was licking the salt off the rim of a margarita glass on the beach when it hit me hard. That was the real beginning, I suppose, before the planning even commenced.

  Not that I hadn’t had spasms of discontent with my personal life before, but now for some reason it was really getting me down. It wasn’t clinical depression, exactly. Call it an early midlife crisis.

  Maui is the wrong place to be when you’re in a certain frame of mind. There I was, a reasonably attractive guy surrounded by so many gorgeous young female bodies I couldn’t even process the sight, and I couldn’t do a goddamned thing about it. Did I want to? Sure. Who wouldn’t? I could have tried right then and there to score, but it would have been messy. You can’t do much of anything when your wife and kid are hovering nearby.

  Despite how good my life was, it was a little like being in prison. I had all the amenities, I could move around a bit, but I wasn’t free.

  A few feet away, Monica waded in the turquoise surf, her short, highlighted hair blowing in the fragrant sirocco. I was thinking that since she’d got it cut (why do aging women always get their hair chopped off?) she was looking more and more mannish. Dyke-ish, even. And I was thinking that I didn’t like it. She was in the fringed bathing suit (I referred to it in my mind as the old lady’s sack) she’d taken to wearing over the past couple of years since her figure had begun to expand, but it didn’t altogether hide the creases of cellulite on her thighs, or her sagging tits. Despite her regular, if not fanatical, workouts, her once-svelte body had gone matronly, and she wasn’t about to go in for a facelift or tummy tuck. Maybe it was lack of vanity. Maybe she didn’t think she needed them. Maybe she figured I loved her no matter how she looked. Whatever—it was her prerogative. Occasionally I’d made subtle, jesting suggestions in that direction, but you have to be very, very careful when it comes to women and their looks—they’re even more sensitive than we men are, and we’re pretty damned touchy.

  A little further out, on the horizon, Diane leisurely stroked her way through the gentle waves. As long as we’d been on the island, I’d been eying girls close to my daughter’s age, and it made me feel a little sleazy since I’m no pervert. But are you supposed to pretend to yourself that you don’t notice?

  As I lay on my chaise watching the babes dash in and out of the Pacific, I grew more and more crazed with lust. I shifted in my seat to conceal my hard-on. One of the nymphs, a lissome twenty-something in a painted-on black bikini, smiled in my direction every time she galloped over the sand for her towel or sunscreen. It wasn’t my imagination, either, because she even said hello on one of her trips. Maybe she was just out to torture a guy who was never going to have her, but whenever something like that happened—and something like it seemed to happen damned near every day—my spirits sank just a little further. Then I got angry. Sometimes I even got up and left when I couldn’t take it anymore.

  Because I knew that when we returned to our suite at the end of the day, it would be just Monica and me and a bottle of lubricant—that’s if she had any desire whatsoever to do anything but close her eyes and sleep.

  I’ll admit it—lots of times it was me who wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes I needed MILF porn to pump me up. To ice the cake, my wife had never been all that adventurous in bed. Into it, maybe, but not wild. I wanted wild. I wanted crazy. I wanted demented. I wanted what you imagine Courtney Love or Angelina Jolie is like in the sack. I wanted screaming, scratching, attacking. Sometimes, right in the middle of it, I’d have the urge to switch off the light, roll over, and go to sleep without even finishing. It had become that kind of dull. It’s no surprise why the divorce rate is 66 percent. Can anyone, man or woman, be expected to last with the same partner for half a century?

  Worst of all, Monica expected our love life to never morph, and she was definitely not about to introduce any variations into the routine—she’d had seventeen years to take the lead, and to this day she hadn’t thrown me a single curveball.

  No, it was always up to me. And I knew the limitations: no porn, no toys, no third parties. It was like trying to swim with cement shoes.

  Now the really strange thing is that I genuinely loved Monica—as much as any man can love his wife after knowing her for two decades, if time hasn’t completely eroded what was there in the beginning, if familiarity hasn’t bred outright contempt, if there’s even a scintilla of romance or erotic longing left. If, as in the vast majority of long-term marriages, inertia isn’t the major determinant of togetherness.

  And I wasn’t the only one, I often reminded myself. Jackie hadn’t been enough for John Kennedy. Hefner was never satisfied. Vadim hadn’t even been satisfied with the likes of Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda. If he couldn’t keep it in his pants, how could I expect myself to, a bloke married for going on eighteen years?

  In my case, you’d also have to throw in the fact that Monica is twelve years older than me. Older woman, younger man—it never wears well down the road, John and Yoko aside. There was affection, there was loyalty, but on the other hand there was the sheer stultifying sameness and predictability of being chained to one person. Immature? Sure. But then I’m a man. A man who got married in his midtwenties. All men think the same, whether they’re twenty-five or eighty. If there hadn’t been a child involved, it would have been easy to ask for a divorce.

  But I didn’t want one.

  Because there was another complication in my case, that even trumped having a kid. And that was that Monica was rich.

  Very rich.

  And that she’d made me rich.

  For someone like Richard Marzten,
who hailed from a dying coal-mining town in a godforsaken corner of Western Pennsylvania, not having to worry about money ever again was something more than a dream come true. It was like going from the outhouse to the penthouse, as the old joke goes. And that’s exactly what we used back there in Podunk, PA—an outhouse.

  My old man had succumbed to mining-related lung disease after decades of having to chip and scrape black shit off a cave wall, and I had the privilege of putting in a few summers in the shaft myself, between college semesters. The experience was enough to make me know for sure what I didn’t want. It was enough to make me crave more. Lots more.

  I liked my father. He was a truly good, damned-near selfless person, maybe the only one I’ve ever met in my life. Raised a family of six on next to nothing and never bitched about it. He may have lost his temper and taken a swing at his wife and us brats a few times, but slaving for years in the darkness will do that to a man.

  Watching his slow, excruciatingly painful death at the premature age of fifty ripped my heart out. And it changed something else in me, too: it opened my eyes. Self-sacrificing people end up dead before their time. My old man didn’t get out of that hick town, or that infernal mine, in time to save his own life.

  Hell, he probably never even gave it a thought.

  But I did. Oh, baby, did I ever.

  “Enjoying yourself, darling?”

  Monica slipped into the empty chaise beside me and picked up her Lava Flow.

  “Always.” I patted her wet hand.

  “Good. That’s why we’re here, right?”

  Where were we again? That’s right—Maui. Paradise.

  “Right.”

  But I wasn’t angling for a free meal ticket when I crossed paths with Monica. It had been the last thing on my mind.

  I was taking a course in ad writing that she happened to be teaching in the evenings at the state university. At the time I had a low-paying gig as a newsletter editor for a fledgling telecommunications company, and I was trying to break in as a writer. I didn’t realize when we met that Monica was so much older than me, or that she was teaching part-time only because she needed something to do with her degrees and not because she had to worry about making the monthly nut.