The Sad Tale Of A Dirty Old Man - Feminism Was His Home Until A Pretty Young Thing Turned His Head

Betty Lou Burnham was a sweet girl, an innocent girl when she came to Washington.  She at first felt lonely and alone in the corridors of power, so indifferent was she to the allure of influence and policy.  Washington could have been any major city offering a career and social promise, and she chose it because Scientists For Social Action was looking for young women like her, a woman of intelligence, rectitude, and good will who would join the legion of Americans who fought to keep democracy alive. 

Bob Muzelle, President and CEO of this small but influential progressive organization had interviewed her personally as he had all young women who had applied for an internship.  Bob had an eye for the women as the old saying went, a self-fashioned man-about-town, a boulevardier, a dapper uncle, but a man whose prim morality and desperate uxoriousness kept him just far enough away from the skirts of young comers to keep him faithful and celibate. 

Bob's wife, Corinne, was a harridan, a social justice reformer like her husband but who had been addled long ago by a bitterness against male patriarchy and who never trusted any man who crossed her path.  She barely tolerated Bob, but since he had so quickly and easily fallen into line and become a militant soldier in the fight against American moral dissolution, he was tolerated - not tolerated enough to share a bed, for she had turned away that knuckley, splayed, saggy excuse for a husband long ago. 

There is something about some men who instinctively obey women, something in their character or childhood which has stunted psycho-sexual maturity, and Bob was one, now a dirty old man who thought about women night and day but somehow felt he must keep his distance. 

He was a natural for the women's movement. There surrounded by lesbians from Bernal Heights, swarms of nasty, tribulated women in flannel shirts and jackboots who hated men and their truncated sexuality, he could leave his smarmy, frustrated sexuality at the door and get on with the nation's business.  He pounded the asphalt, marched with the best of them, rallied for MeToo, Abortion Now, and the heady virtual castration sub-movement. 

Bob was a bit squeamish about this last one, for he was old enough to remember the trial of a woman who lopped off her husband's penis in the middle of the night, invoked some arcane 18th century Constitutional codicil, and got a suspended sentence from an all-female jury.  The modern virtual movement had no Sweeney Todd intentions, but were out to so demean and deride men and their puerile sexuality, that it would amount to castration.  If enough women turned bitch at every approach of the predatory male, the world would be a better, more congenial place.  It was a kind of uber-feminism, taking a world without men seriously, a scorched earth policy that left no survivors. 

Yet there he was, this gaggle of succubae doing the trick, keeping his mind of sex with lovely young things, until Betty Lou walked into his office, all bright and sunny, peaches and cream complexion, lovely breasts under that charming, demure gingham, cute pumps, long legs, and a smile that brought him in one quick moment from dutiful manager to besotted male creature. 

'I want to make a difference', Betty Lou said, a delightful opening, an apertura to God knew what, an earnest statement of innocent intent, a beautiful thought. 

Bob, usually eloquent and persuasive - he hadn't risen to the top of the non-profit, reformist world as a mute - but now was as flustered as a young man on his first date.  All the old romantic, eighth grade desire for Nancy Blythe, the sex kitten of Muirland Farms Country Day, came back in a flash.  He was lassoed, taken, corralled by this porcelain beauty. 

The phone rang and it was his wife in a particularly snarly mood.  It mattered little what the call was about, for all Bob could hear was this irritatingly whiny, coruscated voice asking him to pick up a quart of milk or something as irrelevant.  'Yes dear, of course', he said and hung up the phone, offered his apologies to Betty Lou, and went on to offer her a job. 

There is one infrangible no-no in Washington - don't have sex with interns - and most of the politicos on the Hill kept by it, at the very least to avoid the locker room jokes about Bill Clinton.  Thirty years had passed since Monika Lewinsky, the Oval Office, the cigar, and the stained dress; and the MeToo generation was out to neuter any man who dared to even look the wrong way at an intern. 

Yet, there was something about that ineluctable, irrepressible attraction between men and women that had gotten them both in trouble since time immemorial - something that no social opprobrium, no threat of civil or criminal action, no ruination of wife and family could deter; and it was that consequential and unavoidable desire which did the old boy in. 

'Many a slip twixt the cup and the lip', the old English proverb about ill-timed, ill-conceived intentions, should have been the day's homily for Bob Muzelle, but this time he felt he was on sure ground.  In one fell swoop he would be done with that desiccated, angry cunt at home and the intolerably lame and ugly slices who hated men and tossed their hats on the Mall.  

Of course Bob, so arrested was his emotional development and his total sexual ineptitude that he had no idea where to begin - a cup of tea, a walk in Lafayette Park discussing the climate, lunch?

As overcome as he was and as clueless about women, he missed what just about every man on K Street would have seen.  The girl had not one scintilla of interest in this old fart, and was only innocently and dutifully playing the complaisant intern; but of course Bob saw only what he wanted to see, and every lovely gesture, every look was meant for him. 

His wife saw it immediately and told him to wipe that sick, mopey, childishly goony look off his face. She would not tolerate the least semblance of sexual interest in him - not that she wanted that disgusting has-been anywhere near her, she wanted to control his every whim. 

Poor Bob, nearing his pull-by date, supernumerary to most in political circles, sick and tired of the dykes in The Movement and his vixen of a wife, and for whom only Betty Lou had some resuscitative power, some hope of epiphany before he died, he was perplexed. 

On a park bench in Lafayette Square, he took her hand and told her he loved her, and of course that was the end of the story.  She went her own way, on to a better, more promising, and far more respectable job, and Bob retired to Florida where he continued to be hammered and hectored by his shrewish wife who was always after the Sarasota municipal authority to clean up their act and fly right, and finally dumped where she belonged on the curb. 

It was wrong for a man, stilled on the concrete by a burst aorta, and looking into the void to have thought such vile thoughts about his wife - poison, a loose wingnut in the transmission, a bullet to the head - but his last thoughts were not about their vileness but that he had acted on none of them.