How A Good Man Lost His Cojones - The Whore/Saint Saga Of A Mathematical Genius

Bob Adams dated Smith women, making the trip up Route 5 from New Haven every Saturday to see his princess, a sweet young thing from Billup's Corners charmed by Bob's serious intentions and good humor.  Bob was the class clown, a jokester, a tummler but with the bonhomie and gentility that came with good breeding. 

Bob had an envied pedigree, descended from both Cabots and Lodges on the Northern side, and Raleighs and Smiths on the Southern, families of historical significance who had never lost an ounce of the noblesse oblige since the first landings at Plymouth and Jamestown. 

This combination of boyish charm and a heavyweight legacy won him the attention of many Smith girls, but he had his eye on only one, Emerald Arthur, a demure and simple girl but with a beartrap of a brain, a mathematical whiz who had whipped through calculus by age 10, dynamical systems by her first year of high school, and mathematical physics by graduation.  Beneath that quiet, shy, and flirtatious demeanor was an intellectual demon. 

Bob had no idea what or who he was dealing with, for despite his family and Yale, he was a rather dull boy, a plodder, but whose limitations were nicely dressed in good cheer and camaraderie. Emerald understood this immediately, sniffed out opportunity like a good hound, knew that life with Bob would be the solid platform on which she could build her reputation - not an exciting life exactly, but solid platforms in this troubled world were nothing to sniff at. 

They married to some fanfare - marriage in the Adams family was also not to be sniffed at, taken seriously, cementing as it did two families, two fortunes, and two children.  The fortune part of the story had to be forgone in Bob's case because Emerald was a girl of modest means, simple parentage, and vague history.  Something about wagon trains and Kiowas in the picture, a nice bit of American history but nothing glorious. 

And so it was that vows were exchanged at Piping Rock - the Arthur family willingly agreed to forgo the usual father-of-the-bride responsibility and have the wedding at the tony, dyed-in-the-wool aristocratic redoubt of the finest country club on the North Shore of Long Island.  Everyone who was anyone came, good wishes were offered, and the buffet - a groaning table of pheasant, foie gras, Jamón Ibérico, Belon oysters, Kansas City beef, and the finest French wines - was featured in the New York Times. 

 

The couple, thanks to the generosity of Bob's parents, moved into a condo on the Upper East Side, and thanks to his father's good will, Bob was hired as a Senior Investment Advisor at Lehman Brothers.  Emerald finished her doctorate at Columbia and after post-doc work at Stanford began work at NSA in a highly secretive project analogous to the Enigma Project and the seminal code-breaking work of Alan Turing.  This meant commuting between New York and Washington on weekends, but the couple both agreed that it was all for the best. 

Their sex in any case was desultory.  Although Bob was always there to please, he never did; so Emerald never missed a beat and took a K Street lover, rolled dutifully over on weekends at home with Bob, caught up on her work on the Amtrak Metroliner  back to Washington, and returned to computational algorithms and her virile lover until the following weekend. 

As time went on, Bob began to suspect something funny, a sexual interloper in the woodpile, a possible affair he was not ready to consider. To him Emerald had always been a princess, a queen, and a saint, the perfection of womanhood, an idol, a woman of such beauty and inner worth that he could think of no other; and here she was in the arms of another man, a putain, a whore. 

Emerald of course had known from the beginning that Bob was a complaisant, deferential man, one that could be led, directed, and governed without consequence.  As such she did little to hide or disguise her Washington dalliances.  In fact she and her K Street law partner became an item, the cuckolded Bob only a laconic afterthought. 

Washington being a power town, no one paid attention to the illicitness of the relationship, and only NSA cared enough go do a secret background check of Emerald's lover, found nothing, and thereafter ignored the chatter, rumors, and innuendoes that followed their prize mathematician. 

Needless to say Emerald quickly tired of her K Street lover.  Life was to short with too many opportunities to waste it, and so on she went in the company of more and more impressive men with far more money, brains, and ambition. 

Such openness in sexual matters while a non-issue in jaded, well-travelled Washington, was an existential crisis for Bob who still, despite everything refused to think of his wife as a saint. Her casual carousing was nothing compared with the absolute magnificence of the woman.  Who could possibly match her limitless intelligence, her stunning beauty, charm, and elegance?  Such combinations are as rare as hens' teeth. 

So this good man, this besotted, smitten, desperately in love man lost his cojones.  He simply let things ride, never confronted his wife about her infidelity, never challenged or addressed her.  A genius like her - a Cleopatra, a woman of native royalty, brilliance, irresistible sexual allure, political genius, and indomitable will - could not be denied, nor upset in her devouring of life. 

All that was missing in Bob's adoration of his wife was a shrine, a grotto, a Lourdes; and so addled was he by thoughts of this preeminently female woman that such a virtual altar already existed.  He was a prisoner of love, so to speak, an inmate in the Garden of Eden. 

He of course became the laughing stock of Wall Street, that uber-macho redoubt of male privilege.  That pussy, his colleagues said, that failed, hopeless, image of a man, that transgendered fool, that incompetent, idolizing idiot on his hands and knees and prostrate to that cunt. A disgrace. 

Of course, as vile as their comments might be, the brokers of Chase, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Bros., and Goldman Sachs all knew Emerald Arthur and wanted her.  Who wouldn't?  Her beauty, her brilliance and that diamond-edged will! She fucked only the best and the best kept on coming back for more.  Think of the challenge and the victory! Whore and saint in the same package, the living out of the age-old male fantasy.  

 

Only Bob who actually had this prize suffered.  Her complete indifference, her diffident obligation to marriage, her complete emptiness of any compassion for her husband, was more painful than any loss.  He was subject to an autocrat, a sexual dictator, and a queen. 

The story does not end in divorce, separation, or estrangement. The marriage, the affairs, the infidelities, the catty rumors and innuendoes simply petered out. It ended up like most a marriage of old age and convenience, no regrets on either side. 

One would have thought that Bob, the capon of the affair, would have left his wife long ago, but such is that impossibly durable mix of a lack of cojones and a desperate, fantastical love for a brutally willful woman.  God knows, this is not a unique tale, nor Emerald a unique woman.