Body Of Research: An Experiment In Hotwifing Read online

  The seconds ticked by and she breathed in little pants. In and out. In and out.

  She was distracted. Distracted by whatever he was doing to her.

  And he was probably smiling smugly, that fucker. Maybe all he was doing was nuzzling his mouth up against her neck and listening to her tell me lies.

  “I'm going to be a little late,” she said, finally.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. I did my best to make myself sound casual, but I sounded accusatory instead.

  Another pause. A little bit of panting. “Yeah. Sorry. I...this is David's phone, I forgot mine or I would have called you earlier.”

  David.

  “So you're working late with Dave?” I said.

  “Hey,” she said. It was too late when I realized that she was saying hello to someone else. I was already replying, awkwardly. “Hey, what?”

  “Huh? Listen, I'm almost there. Stats are in the basement so this phone will probably cut out.”

  “You need a ride?” I said. “What time will you be done?”

  “You know it's...” her voice drifted off.

  Oh, I got it. She had run into David. They were smiling at each other. About to go to the basement, to work on “stats.” I pictured her smiling at him, pointing at the phone, making a sign to indicate that she was nearly finished talking to her husband.

  “...it's sort of...complicated. I'm not sure. I'll just get a ride.”

  “With Dave?”

  There was a long pause, while I imagined her smiling at him.

  “No, with Sven the Swedish stats star,” she said, in a theatrical Scandinavian accent. “He's so good at binary logistic regression. It's really hot.”

  I had to laugh at myself. And her, for having me pegged. She was, after all, doing a postdoctoral fellowship. She was, in fact, going into a stats lab and consulting a statistician about... statistics. And if the guy was a Scandinavian statistician, he was probably about as sexually stimulating as a plate of salted fish.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, conceding her veiled point.

  “He's also very good at massage,” Jen continued. I could practically see her smiling through the phone now.

  “Okay,” I laughed again. Jen was great at driving me wild but also calling me out. “But no idea when you'll be home?”

  Another pause. It seemed to me that she was still out of breath, which was unusual. For as big of a nerd as she was, and as little exercise as she did, she was in remarkably good shape. Her heavy breathing seemed almost ominous. “I don't know, honey,” she sighed, and for a second I was worried I had taken the joke too far. Then she quipped, in a breathy voice. “These massages can last all night.”

  “I do pretty good linear binary regressionism myself,” I said suggestively.

  I got a chuckle.

  But no correction.

  Even though it was ludicrous, my suspicions reignited. My imagination went wild again.

  Maybe there actually was a Sven the Swede, doing complex algorithmic maneuvers on my wife.

  “It's...sort of complicated,” she said mysteriously. Then sharply, quickly, (as if someone had appeared, someone she didn't want to know that she was talking to me) she said: “Yeah, so, I don't know. I'll just...get a ride, okay? Okay. Bye.”

  “Uh...” I was saying, but I realized that she had ended already the call.

  *

  I stood up and paced the room. I indulged in a little more fantasizing about Jen and “Sven,” Jen and David. Then a central part of the conversation struck me:

  Her phone.

  She had left her phone behind.

  My eyes scanned the office.

  In the back of my mind, there was a rational voice, telling me that looking for my wife's phone, in order to sneak a peek at what she was up to, was a breach of trust and a bad thing to do.

  Etc., etc.

  It was precisely for this sort of thing, I feel I should mention here, that I was seeing a shrink. I was seeing her tomorrow, in fact - and the voice in my head took on the timbre and cadence of Dr. Heller. The voice advised me to deal with my suspicions and fantasies about my wife head-on, instead of indirectly. The voice told me not to violate our trust, and not to do the very thing I was doing.

  I do possess a voice of reason, after all.

  I just never listen to it.

  Which is part of the reason I'm seeing a shrink.

  I ran my eyes over the clutter in the office, which Jen used rarely. She had a desk piled high with dog-eared printouts of articles and books. Somewhere beneath the heaps of paper were a computer, a highlighter, and some chewed-up pencils. She knew exactly where they were, and if anyone moved one piece of paper in the messy-looking pile, she knew that, too.

  No, the phone wouldn't be there. She turned her phone off when she sat down to work.

  Almost putting on a show, though no one was present to observe me, I strolled casually into the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. I looked around on the counters, and even went so far as to take a sponge out and use the pretense of cleaning to move jars and containers – in reality, searching for her phone.

  Oh, sure. The voice in my head was telling me what an idiot I was being. At least I know this about myself. I'm not entirely severed from reality. Half of my mind was laughing at myself, pretending to make tea I didn't even want, in order to give myself an excuse for myself being in the kitchen looking for a phone.

  I know exactly how psychotic I am.

  It all fell apart pretty quickly anyway. I went to the living room, and gave it a brief once-over: Jen never spent any time in there, so there wasn't much point in digging around unless it was the last place I looked.

  I walked quickly to the bedroom, a cool boil of excitement percolating inside of me. It would be hours before Jen got home, but there was something thrilling about imagining I was under some sort of time pressure. Sneaking around. Doing something voyeuristic.

  I looked on the dresser, in her drawers, in the pockets of a jacket I thought she had worn. All to no avail. I worked quickly, feeling like a burglar in my own home. Every time I sorted through an empty pocket, or found only clothing in my hands, my excitement actually increased.

  My imagination began to go to work, off to the side of my determined search for the phone. Maybe she hadn't left the phone here at all. Maybe she had left it someplace she shouldn't have been. In a car she shouldn't have been riding in. An office she had snuck away to with Dave.

  A hotel room.

  Dave's fancy-pants townhome.

  Maybe she had lied about the phone to cover up even more lies.

  I shuddered, both repulsed and delighted by the thought.

  Then I began my search again.

  I spun around the room, looking for additional places the phone might be.

  I slid my hand under the pillows, doing it quickly and half-heartedly, because I really didn't expect to find anything there.

  I was so shocked when my fingers brushed against the phone that I jerked my hand away as though something had bitten me, and the phone slid behind the bed.

  I fished it out from behind the headboard, annoyed and cursing. But with the phone in my hands, my annoyance quickly faded, drowned out by the excitement I was feeling.

  I know. It's a little perverse.

  I promised myself to bring it up with Dr. Heller the next day.

  I was working on it.

  I let go of my guilt about it and indulged fully in the thing I was about to do. (This was another thing I was working on in therapy: my grand potential for justifying things I did, or making excuses for breaking my own promises).

  It was strange that Jen would leave her phone under her pillow, I thought.

  The dark ideas this fact inspired were very arousing.

  Maybe she was texting David at night. Lying next to me and texting him when she thought I was asleep.

  To get into her phone, I entered Jen's standard code for everything: 771133. Doubled digits of the address first apartment she'd ren
ted, 713 Whitby Circle, apartment 12. Her pin for her bank card was 7711. Her password for gmail was Whitby12. She was so predictable it hurt. She had confessed all of this to me one night while she was drunk, and I had never forgotten, because I lectured her daily about password safety.

  And I also liked being able to occasionally spy on her.

  I stared at the phone.

  Inexplicably, I had been denied access to the phone.

  I shook the phone a little with my hand and re-entered the code.

  Denied again.

  Maybe she changed it because she didn't want you to get in, Chris. She didn't want you to get and see her dirty messages to her professor. What do they say? They must be damning, filthy, trashy messages...maybe sexts. Maybe she sends him pictures of herself...of her tits...of her excited cunt...

  I shook my head and began entering all of the possible variations of Jen's usual password that could be entered in a smartphone.

  I was working so fast, getting myself so worked up and paranoid about why she might have changed her code, and getting denied over and over, wondering if her Samsung would lock me out and for how long, that when I finally entered the right combination and the display opened up for me, I had no idea what I had entered to get it to do so.

  I sank onto the bed.

  I went to messages first. Making sure to keep my hands moving on Jen's screen, so as not to let it turn off and lock me out again, I looked at my own phone to get David's number.

  My stomach was twisting into knots. Delicious, double-edged knots.

  I found “Dr. Emery” in her messages.

  I frowned. She seemed to have entered the name a long time ago, back when he had been her mentor and not a colleague, and it implied no real familiarity.

  And she hadn't changed it.

  If she was fucking Emery, wouldn't she have entered a more familiar version of his name?

  It could be some kind of private joke between them, now, my dirty mind offered helpfully. Or, better yet, a way to keep her secret, secret.

  I pressed on, searching for a conversation between them.

  There must have been something.

  My heart sank when I found it.

  A single screen of text, dated and sparse:

  [Dr. Emery]: Jen. Can you stop by Harding Street to print out the BLR from last night's run?

  SAT JUNE 12 2015 3:15PM

  [Me]: Hedda's is closed. You want Starbuck's instead?

  WED MARCH 11 8:07PM

  [Dr. Emery]: Sure. Make it a soy latte then

  WED MARCH 11 8:08PM

  [Me]: I can't believe this. Out of soy.

  WED MARCH 11 8:14PM

  [Dr. Emery]: Milk's fine

  WED MARCH 11 8:15PM

  Banal.

  Banality overflowing. The two conversations were nearly a full year apart, and evidently Emery hadn't even followed up on the first one.

  I groaned.

  My reason-voice was calmly telling me that I should be both happy (my wife was obviously not having an affair with Dr. Emery) and ashamed of myself for thinking she was.

  Ashamed of myself for engaging in the very perverse pleasure of spying on her, digging into her phone like this.

  Actually... sort of hoping to find something else.

  Actually disappointed that all she discussed with Emery was soy lattes.

  I kept tapping at the phone, keeping it open while I thought about what to do next, what to pry into.

  I should have been elated. She wasn't texting Emery late at night.

  Hopefully, I went to her call log anyway.

  Oh, but she was calling him, I saw, and my stomach twisted again. I felt a delicious squeeze in my cock. Calling him at...

  2:13pm.

  Seven days ago.

  10:17 am, February 21.

  Another plunge of disappointment.

  I almost let the phone close on me.

  Except...

  I quickly swiped my finger over the screen.

  Except: she could have deleted her messages. She could have deleted her calls.

  I began to frantically swipe my finger around on her screen, keeping the phone open, trying to figure out what I could dig into on her phone to find out where she had hidden her messages.

  I could get into her email, I realized, with a sudden flash of hope.

  Surely something incriminating would be there.

  I looked down at the phone and swiped through her apps. Jen was a geek who used geeky applications for certain things and not others, extra security for some things and then shitty passwords for them... she drove me insane. There was no telling what her email app was called -

  I was looking for an email app, not really seeing anything else. I was so fixated on that task that the icons of lips, and fires, and hearts - so many hearts – swept from right to left across the screen without much notice from me for a few seconds.

  But slowly, a cool wave of realization was creeping over me. A new tightness began to ball up inside my chest, squeezing my heart to a dead stop.

  My fingers paused over the screen, my eyes scanning and jiggling as fast as my mind was working, blurred by too much adrenaline, too much frantic excitement.

  DeBauch, one of the applications said, beneath its steamy heart, vaguely reminiscent of an ass.

  I stared at it.

  I moved slowly, my eyes in state of rigid shock now, my brain playing catch-up.

  Another heart icon. Lust, it said.

  Lust.

  My mouth hung open.

  And then, just as I was starting to awaken and think about moving, about opening one of those apps, just as I was finally about to get what I had somewhat fantasized about, my worst nightmare and my ultimate dream -

  The screen went black.

  I was locked out again.

  Shaking, I entered codes until the screen displayed a message informing me that I was locked out for 24 hours.

  I set the phone down, my mind racing.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  Now I had several problems.

  One, that there was literally nothing I wanted more than to get back into Jen's phone.

  And then there was the fact that my wife seemed to be active on dating apps.

  My heart turned icy cold and then boiled away inside my chest, in just seconds, just thinking about it.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  I had a goddam hard-on. This was the other thing I couldn't believe. I mean, what kind of man actually gets turned on thinking that his wife might be cheating on him?

  I was also fucking furious.

  My rational voice tried to cut through my emotions.

  There was nothing about any of this that necessarily meant that Jen was having an affair.

  I snorted aloud. “What else could it be?” I said defiantly, aloud, to my voice of reason.

  There was also the problem of the phone. I had broken into the phone and now Jen would know that. She would know I had looked for it, she would know I had dug it out from under her pillow, and she would know that I had tried to break into it.

  And what the fuck was I going to say about that?

  And also, what did it matter? My wife was using dating apps.

  Trashy, booty-call apps. I mean, DeBauch?

  There could be another explanation.

  I stood up, leaving the phone, and headed for the kitchen to make myself a drink.

  C hapter 3

  DR. HELLER

  “I have my best ideas when I'm drunk,” I explained to Dr. Heller.

  She frowned over her notepad. It was an impartial frown, the kind, I supposed, she was supposed to use.

  Maybe it wasn't even a frown at all.

  She adjusted her glasses.

  “So what happened when Jen came home?”

  I rubbed my forehead with the back of my thumb and made a face.

  “Chris. Are you using humor to avoid discussing something?”

  I shrugged. “It's sort of m
y schtick,” I said.

  I was extremely uncomfortable. On the one hand, my insurance was half of a shit-ton of money to see this woman, who had been recommended by a friend of a friend, to another friend, who had a completely different problem than mine, and who was well and altogether out of my PPO. Whatever my problem was, I sensed that actually telling her the truth was the whole point of therapy.

  On the other hand, it wasn't much fun.

  “Okay,” I said. I held up my hands. I took a deep breath. My stomach was really twisted up. “I...came up with a good excuse. For the phone. While I was drinking, that is.”

  She nodded. “And what was that?”

  I shrugged. “I just said that I needed to update something. I found her phone and I needed to update something, but I had locked myself out.”

  Heller's face was impassive. “And do you think she believed you?”

  I stared at the wall, recalling Jen's face. I had scrutinized her expression as I told her that I had tried to break into her phone. I had hoped to see some trickle of panic creep over her lips and make them quiver, or the shade of her skin to go pale. I had half-hoped for her to start to cry, and confess her terrible misdeeds. The other half of me had hoped that some kind of devious, mysterious expression would come over, and she would half-narrow her eyes and say, seductively, “Oh. And what did you find?”

  But Jen had done none of these things. Jen had narrowed her eyes (sans seduction), and sighed.

  “Shit,” she had said. “When does... how do I unlock it? It was such a pain in the ass not having a phone today.”

  I had waited, patiently, as though she were prey and I had built her a trap.

  I was hoping for her to say she really needed something on there.

  I was hoping to watch her squirm as she thought about her lovers, all the men she was leaving in the lurch by not having her phone.

  Then I thought: or maybe there was just one.

  Maybe the apps were old, and she had already found her perfect lover.

  I burned with all the possibilities and all the jealousy that each one of them produced.

  Back in Heller's office, recounting the story, I lied.

  “I think...she probable believed me.”