By Walter Kirn, GQ May 2005
he even looks devious!!!
One night at dinner, a girl I used to date revealed to me that her father was a bigamist. He had two families, two sets of wives and children, one in the southern United States and one in Southeast Asia. His work for an international company allowed him to spend six months a year with each of them. For a long time the families didn’t know about each other, but eventually, my then girlfriend said, her mother put together various clues and hit upon the truth. “What happened when she confronted him?” I asked, imagining scenes of flying lamps and rolling pins, followed by years of costly litigation. But my girlfriend seemed puzzled by the question.
“Confronted him? What would the point of that have been? To ruin two families? Think about it.”
“She forgave him?” I asked.
My girlfriend shook her head. “She punished him in the worst way she knew how. She asked him if he had something he wanted to tell her, and when he said he didn’t, she raised one eyebrow and didn’t say another word about it. Which doesn’t mean she still can’t.”
Though this story was told to me many years ago, I think about it every month or so, whenever some news report or bit of gossip brings back to me this great existential truth: A man, any man, has just one life to live on earth—and one is rarely enough. Men (if their health can support it) desire two lives. A minimum of two. As many, in fact, as we can get away with.
Consider the late, beloved Charles Kuralt, the jolly teddy bear of a CBS newsman whose quirky travels across America were motivated not only by his longing to film eccentric Nebraska ranchers building space-shuttle replicas out of hay bales but also by his feelings for the longtime mistress whom he maintained in a rural Montana cabin, thousands of miles from his wife in New York City. Then there’s Scott Peterson, of course, who sold fertilizer to farmers as well as b.s. to Amber Frey, who bought it by the truckload. And don’t forget former president Clinton, whose secret lives seemed to have numbered in the dozens (much as his carousing stepfather’s had before him), leading to physical and emotional stresses that may keep him in surgery for the next few decades. The list goes on, but let’s end it with Kobe Bryant, whose wife had a very special reason to fear the otherwise innocuous term “away game.”
Women bend the truth, too, of course, but not like we do. We break the truth in half, then into quarters, and then we feed it through a wood chipper to prevent the DA from gathering evidence for the trial that always seems to come. Women fudge, but men, construct whole chocolate factories. When a wife tells her husband that a new sweater cost around $200, it means that the garment cost $299, excluding sales tax. When a husband tells his wife that a new sweater cost $200, it means that the sweater cost exactly that, but he leaves out the fact that his girlfriend in Sacramento bought it for him as a birthday present in gratitude for the new Saab he bought her.
As with most men’s bad habits, the practice of devising elaborate, secret double and triple lives starts at age 12, when our mothers walk into our bedroom before we’ve hidden all the evidence. I remember the day it happened to me: a winter afternoon in Minnesota, my windowpanes frosted with vapor from the humidifier that had been plugged in to treat a flu bug I hadn’t actually contracted but had faked enough symptoms of, including vomiting, so that I could skip school and be alone with my shoplifted Penthouse Magazine and borrowed a jar of Oil of Olay. The box of Kleenex on my nightstand, full just that morning, was empty now, and the wadded up tissues strewed across my blankets were stiff and slightly crunchy, like dried carnations. It had been a long session among the VapoRub fumes, dreaming of an assault on Gilligan’s Island that had killed all its male inhabitants as well as the unappealing Mrs. Howell and spared only Mary Ann and Ginger, whom I’d prodded at rifle point into a grass hut and forced to disrobe and kneel on the dirt floor. What I’d make the two vixens do after that, I wasn’t sure. Ordering them to kneel was so exciting that I hadn’t managed to get past it, despite a dozen attempts.
“I brought you a milkshake for you poor, sore throat,” my mom said.
I asked the Lord to have mercy, and maybe he did. How else could I explain the fact that the Penthouse had slipped cover-down to the floor, revealing only a Newport cigarette ad? The magazine might as well have been a Newsweek, which was what I told my mother it was.
She pretended to believe me.
And I learned the dangerous lesson that tempts young males to gradually broaden and deepen their deceptions until they have wives and families on two continents: Most women would rather let themselves be fooled by men, particularly the men they love, than to make those men look foolish. Either that or most women are just plain dense, perhaps because God—being male—is on our side and understands that one life lived openly is a drag compared to, say, eleven lives carried out behind closed doors.
It must come down, at least partly, to genetics. (In the old days, it would have come down to the subconscious, but the science of making excuses had advanced since then.) Having been programmed to spread our seed as widely as Scott Peterson spread his fertilizer, men have also been programmed, it would seem, to cover our tracks as we move from field to field. This assures the survival of the human race by increasing the number of babies that are born and by decreasing the number of full-grown men who are castrated by jealous mates.
I suspect that men have another main reason, though, for going through the looking glass and setting up housekeeping on the other side in cozy Montana cabins and less-than-cozy New Jersey motel rooms. A double life not only doubles life’s pleasures, it doubles (or triples or sextuples) life’s dangers. And in a world where even tomato-soup can comes with labels warning the consumer that the cans may have been filled in a facility that also processes possibly deadly peanuts, danger is extremely hard to come by.
Unless you manufacture it for yourself.
***
Here’s another story from an old girlfriend.
She’d known a fellow once who loved to kayak. He was married and he and his bride made a rule: no major nondiscretionary purchases without the permission from the other spouse. The problem was that the fellow loved kayaking slightly more than he loved her, particularly now that she’d gained weight, and kayaks—nice kayaks, kayaks made of Kevlar; not crappy old kayaks made of fiberglass like the one the fellow already owned and that his bride felt ought to be sufficient—are non-discretionary major purchases, at least as far as most women were concerned.
This presented the fellow with quite a dilemma.
But not for long, because men don’t like dilemmas. Men like solutions. Like buying a new kayak. And then pretending for the next few years (while using the kayak every weekend) that it doesn’t exist. The charade this entailed consumed the fellow’s whole life. On Sunday morning he’d kiss his wife good-bye, tie the old kayak to the roof of his car, and drive a few miles to a buddy’s tool-shed, where he stored his expensive Kevlar beauty. He had to do this before dawn, while his friend’s wife, who might tell on him, was sleeping. On the return trip, he’d park out on the street until the friend’s wife had gone to bed, switch the kayaks again, and drive back home. To make the old kayak look progressively used, he’d bash it with a hammer now and then.
Because the double life of the poor kayaker had nothing to do with the usual stuff men lie about, it illustrates masculine mendacity in its purest form. Our grand deceptions obey a simple narrative. First an impulse arises, any impulse. (What if I open this email from “3 Hot Babes”?) Then we indulge the impulse, privately. (Click.) When lightening doesn’t strike immediately, a sense of invulnerability arises. (I’ll have MasterCard send the statements to my office.) Next comes what I like to call the Death Waltz. (“Stall my wife in the lobby Stephanie—my damned computer screen is frozen gain, and I’ve lost a very important document that was right here on my desk a minute ago.”)
This complicated middle stage, which is all about maintaining power, evading capture, and removing stains, is the real reward of a secret life. It’s not the porn or the stash of Percocet tablets or that blowjob at the trade show, it’s the excruciating chase. Bobbing and weaving makes a man feel vibrant. Suddenly, he’s no longer a junior ad exec trying to pay for his live in girlfriend’s riding lessons by thinking up catchy slogans for humdrum breakfast foods (“Prune, the other brown juice) but a fighter pilot drowned behind the lines of an enemy country ruled by women who resemble Barbarella and Lady Margaret Thatcher. Yes, in the end, he’ll be imprisoned and tortured, but eventually he’ll grow sick and perish, too, maybe from one of those horrible malignancies that are found by inserting a “tiny” video camera into the dilated, lubricated anus. A man deserves a few thrills before this happens.
The Death Waltz. If only that band could play forever. What makes the music so sweet, though, is knowing it can’t.
It’s an axiom of moral physics that tall tales, once in motion, tend to stay in motion until they meet a woman in the doorway who has just finished going through your pants pockets while sorting whites and coloreds in the laundry room. She has the goods now (usually a credit card receipt). Her expression mixes anger and disappointment that hurts the most. Once, you were a good son, a perfect boyfriend, an ideal husband. Or so the woman claims. In truth, you were Beelzebub Jr. all along, and both of you knew it by your second date, when that floozy sitting at the bar winked at you while you were ordering appetizers, causing you to say, unconvincingly, “She belongs to a church I attended a few years back. I used to be an active Episcopalian.”
But back to the Death Waltz and its final step. The chocolate factory is collapsing. How thrilling it was to live there, yet how fatiguing. Switching kayaks in the pre-dawn gloom. Jugging a half-dozen online screen IDs based on the middle names of women you’ met in various Delta Air Lines Crown Rooms. Calling your wife in Atlanta from the house you shared with your other wife in Bangkok and then, when the Thai wife burst into the room and brandished a condom she’d found inside the dryer, saying stupidly to your American wife, “The maid’s here. It’s time for turndown service. Bye.” And hanging up as she shouts, “It’s morning there!”
But now you’re free. She knows. She knows you lie. Or did she know all along? Of course she did. No one mistakes Penthouse for Newsweek.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” They love to say that.
And you’d love to answer “Yes” and tell them everything. How demeaning and limiting it feels to be a man and have only one life, one sex partner, one kayak. And how potent you feel in your parallel reality, an emperor on a tall black throne of danger surveying an oatmeal colored world of safety whose warning labels and passenger side airbags and seat cushions that also serve as emergency floatation devices would have suffocated you had you not answered that email from 3 Hot Babes and paid thousands of dollars to that faceless Web troll who ushered you across the bridge to hell.
Instead, because such a speech would take too long and it’s not what your accuser wants anyway, you tell her (or him), “Not really. No.”
And then, as the accuser turns to leave, the revelation comes. The lightening strikes. Honest people lie, too. They lie profoundly. They lie to us by pretending to believe us when we pretend to be other than what we are—they do it and they can shame us when we aren’t, even if they don’t actually bust us but merely signal that they can (at anytime, in anyplace, in front of anyone, including our mothers. The best way to fight this would be to practice openness—consistently, fully, and from the very beginning.
It’s too late for me, but I’ve given up on me. I’ve already covered up a hundred cover stories with other cover stories that I’ve forgotten. My advice is intended for the youth.
“Just faking sick and lying there in bed jerking off reading Penthouse. Was that our only box of Kleenex, Mom?”
Can it be done? I suppose. But should it? Hmmm…That “tiny” camera is snaking its way toward you. One of those peanuts that you happen to be allergic to will plop into the tomato soup eventually. Which means time is short, my boy, and your days are numbered—unless you can divide them into halves and thereby double them. Or even (if you think your heart can handle it) shred them into thirds or fifths or tenths.
The illusion of immortality is worth the risk. And furthermore (as I told the bigamist’s daughter when she found out I was just as bad as Daddy), there’s the fate of the species to think about. That, too.
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