When One Woman Is Not Enough - The Odyssey Of An Uncontrite Sexual Adventurer And The Women Who Loved Him

Bartlett (Bart) Parsons was a man of moderate intelligence, good looks, and excellent upbringing, a man bred for moderate success, a respected career, prosperous and healthy family, and a sense of well-being. 

This all was not surprising given his family's history, one dating back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Salem, the New Haven Plantations, and the first Puritan settlements in what is now New Jersey.  Bart's father, Lionel, had been a well-known man of particular rectitude and impeccable honesty, a leader of the community, and a faithful wife and loving parent. There was no question that Bart, their only son, would follow in the same footsteps. 

 

After Yale, Bart married well, a girl from an equally prosperous and well-known family. After living for a while in her family's townhouse on Beacon Hill, they bought a house in the nearby suburb of Winchester from which he commuted to downtown while she pursued a career in fashion design - a cottage industry at first, but certainly to mature into a more lucrative position in one of the big fashion houses in New York. 

There was only one fly in the ointment. Bart was a sexual wanderer, a man who loved women, who adored their style and their irresistible allure.  He understood women.  He listened to them, deferred to their whims, respected them, loved them intently and always without fail exited from affairs with grace and humility.  His former lovers always loved him. 

He had not exactly been railroaded into marriage.  He knew quite well the step he was taking and the risks of dalliance to follow, but his sexual confidence was such that he knew he would be able to negotiate with, please, and satisfy his wife who would always be thankful for such intimacy and profound understanding. 

Theirs was not a Harold Nicholson, Vita Sackville-West open marriage, one Bart found in its openness only a boring similitude.  Sexual conquest provided the juice - arranging play dates on a mutual calendar with one's wife was uneventfully routine - and such arranged sexual libertinage never appealed.  And so it was that Bart took lovers at will while keeping his wife in such blissfully satisfied ignorance, that she either never doubted his fidelity or didn't care.  What were a few incidental affairs when she had found a man who truly and absolutely knew her. 

 

She like most women were not after love per se, but understanding - respect from men so hard to find and so long in coming.  Women had suffered years of patriarchy, dismissiveness, and desuetude, so to find a man like Bart who showed her every bit of respectful deference, she was more open to a particular sexual tolerance that other women found unthinkable. 

In fact - and again not unlike most women - Bart's wife found his sexual attractiveness to other women intriguing and indefinably appealing. She was the one who had bedded this man of universal appeal, not they; and marriage to an undeniably sexually lethal male was a feather in her cap. 

'What do women want?', Sigmund Freud remarked after years of being perplexed by women's strange, indecipherable sexual cosmology; but Bart had known all along that before women finally got over the centuries of playing second fiddle, emotional and sexual chattels, they would still be looking for what had never been granted to them - to be taken seriously.  

As he sat across the table from any one of his many lovers, listening patiently and intently to their stories of demanding fathers, immature lovers, bad and worse sexual opportunities, and above all about the treasure inside them, he knew that sex would come soon. 

 

Of course every so often he would come upon a special edition, a one of a kind woman who had found herself, had as much confidence, energy of pursuit, and inextinguishable demands for sexual variety as he, and had not one iota of female vulnerability. 

He surprisingly and uncharacteristically had fallen for Berthe because she was his sexual homonym, an irresistible, implacably confident woman who had no need whatsoever for legitimacy, acknowledgment, or dues paid.  Bart was the one in need of her attention, her counselling; and she had no patience for need. 

There was Evangeline, a woman whose ubiquitous sexuality gave her limitless license and left her with no regrets.  She took Bart as she took hundreds of others willy-nilly, a woman whose eclecticism was Nietzschean and made her straw boss of all her lovers. 

 

But few others like these two ever crossed his path. Most women were not only unlike them, but were from a different planet - women who were still complaisant in the company of men, and still with so much residual patriarchy and male intimidation, that assertion - the real amoral assertion of Goneril, Regan, Cleopatra, Emma Bovary, and Hedda Gabler - was not even a pipe dream.  These women were simple, easy prey for the likes of Bart Parsons. 

There are some men who have bought into the feminist, MeToo, women first, foremost, and forever movement. Men who attend conferences on sexual equality, who approve safe spaces and male sanctions, who demand 50-50 parity without exception, and who subscribe completely to the notion of female gender supremacy.  They are reproductive necessities - the rooster's contribution - and nothing more, and they are evolutionary losers.  

Savvy men like Bart have given all this a pass.  'The lady doth protest too much' agreed Bart who saw these now familiar female paroxysms as nothing more than a necessary St. Vitus' dance of tribal cleansing; but beneath the Sturm und Drang, women still had not changed, and men like Bart knew well how to - guess what? - listen, understand with respect and concern.  

So with a few glitches - the likes of Berthe and Evangeline - Bart went on his way.  Whether complicit, admiring, or ignorant, his wife stayed the course especially now that there were sunken costs in the marriage - house, children, retirement accounts, and sociability. As his sexual pull-by date approached, he found slippers and a dog by the fire more and more appealing, but there was his December-May affair with Donna from Accounting.  

'Granted, she isn't my first love', says the Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain about his affair with a woman half his age, 'nor is she my best love; but she's certainly my last love. Doesn't that count for something?'

And so it was for Bart.  The affair ended as all before it.  Donna from Accounting said she would always love him and she probably did; and he returned once and for all to hearth and home.