The Wolf of Wall Street

CHAPTER 2

THE DUCHESS OF BAY RIDGE

December 13, 1993

The next morning—or, if you want to get technical about it, a few hours later—I was having an awesome dream. It was the sort of dream that every young man hopes and prays for, so I decided to go with it. I’m alone in bed, when Venice the Hooker comes to me. She kneels down at the edge of my sumptuous king-size bed, hovering just out of reach, a perfect little vision. I can see her clearly now…that lusty mane of chestnut brown hair…the fine features of her face…those juicy young jugs…those incredibly loamy loins, glistening with greed and desire.

“Venice,” I say. “Come to me, Venice. Come to me, Venice!”

Venice moves toward me, walking on her knees. Her skin is fair and white and shimmers amid the silk…the silk…there’s silk everywhere. An enormous canopy of white Chinese silk is suspended from above. Billows of white Chinese silk hang down at all four corners of the bed. So much white Chinese silk…I’m drowning in white fucking silk. In this very instant the ludicrous figures come popping into my mind: the silk cost $250 a yard, and there have to be two hundred yards of it. That’s $50,000 of white Chinese silk. So much white fucking silk.

But that’s my wife’s doing, my dear aspiring decorator—or, wait, that was last month’s aspiration, wasn’t it? Isn’t she an aspiring chef now? Or is she an aspiring landscape architect? Or is it a wine connoisseur? Or a clothing designer? Who could keep track of all her fucking aspirations? So tiring it is…so tiring to be married to Martha Stewart in embryo.

Just then I feel a drop of water. I look up. What the hell? Storm clouds? How can there be storm clouds inside the royal bedchamber? Where’s my wife? Holy shit! My wife! My wife! Hurricane Nadine!

SPLASH!

I woke up to the angry yet gorgeous face of my second wife, Nadine. In her right hand was an empty twelve-ounce water glass; in her left hand was her own balled-up fist, punctuated by a seven-carat, yellow canary diamond in a platinum setting. She was less than five feet away, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, like a prizefighter. I made a quick mental note to watch out for the ring.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” I yelled halfheartedly. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and took a moment to study Wife Number Two. God, she was a real piece of ass, my wife! I couldn’t begrudge her that even now. She was wearing a tiny pink chemise that was so short and low cut that it made her look more naked than if she were wearing nothing at all. And those legs of hers! Christ, they looked scrumptious. But, still, that was beside the point. I needed to get tough with her and show her who was boss. Through clenched teeth, I said, “I swear to God, Nadine, I’m going to fucking kill—”

“Oh, I’m really fucking scared,” interrupted the blond firecracker. She shook her head in disgust, and her little pink nipples popped out of her next-to-nothing outfit. I tried not to stare, but it was difficult. “Maybe I should go run and hide,” she quipped. “Or maybe I’ll just stay here and kick your fucking ass!” The last few words she screamed.

Well, maybe she was boss. Either way, she had definitely earned her scene with me; there was no denying that. And the Duchess of Bay Ridge had a vicious temper. Yes, she was a duchess, all right—a Brit by birth, who still carried a British passport. It was a wonderful fact she never failed to remind me of. Yet, it was all very ironic, since she had never actually lived in Britain. In fact, she had moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, when she was still a baby, and it was there, in the land of dropped consonants and tortured vowels, where she was raised. Bay Ridge; it’s that tiny corner of the earth where words like fuck and shit and bastard and prick roll off the tongues of young natives with the poetic panache of T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. And it was there that Nadine Caridi—my lovable English, Irish, Scottish, German, Norwegian, and Italian mutt-of-a-duchess—learned to tie her curses together, as she was learning to tie the laces on her roller skates.

It was sort of a grim joke, I thought, considering that Mark Hanna had warned me about going out with a girl from Bay Ridge all those years ago. His girlfriend, as I recalled, had stabbed him with a pencil while he was sleeping; the Duchess preferred throwing water. So, in a way, I was ahead of the game.

Anyway, when the Duchess got angry it was as if her words were bubbling up from out of the rancid gullet of the Brooklyn sewer system. And no one could make her angrier than me, her loyal and trustworthy husband, the Wolf of Wall Street, who less than five hours ago was in the Presidential Suite of the Helmsley Palace with a candle in his ass.

“So tell me, you little shit,” snapped the Duchess, “who the fuck is Venice, huh?” She paused and took an aggressive step forward, and all at once she struck a pose, with her hips cocked in a display of insolence, one long, bare leg slewed out to the side, and her arms folded beneath her breasts, pushing her nipples out into plain view. She said, “She’s probably some little hooker, I bet.” She narrowed her big blue eyes accusingly. “You don’t think I know what you’re up to? Why, I oughta smash your fucking face in, you…you little…ugghhhhh!” It was an angry groan, and the moment she’d finished groaning she gave up her pose and began marching across the bedroom—marching on the custom-made beige and taupe $120,000 Edward Fields carpet. And she marched fast as lightning, all the way to the master bathroom, which was a good thirty feet away, where she turned on the faucet, refilled the water glass, turned off the faucet, and came marching back, looking twice as angry. Her teeth were clenched in unadulterated rage, making her square model-girl jaw really stand out. She looked like the Duchess from Hell.

Meanwhile, I was trying to gather my thoughts, but she was moving too fast. I had no time to think. It had to be those fucking Quaaludes! They had made me talk in my sleep again. Oh, shit! What had I said? I ran the possibilities through my mind: the limousine…the hotel…the drugs…Venice the Hooker…Venice with the candle—Oh, God, the fucking candle! I pushed the thought out of my mind.

I looked over at the digital clock on the night table: It was 7:16. Jesus! What time had I gotten home? I shook my head, trying to get out the cobwebs. I ran my fingers through my hair—Christ, I was soaked! She must have dumped the water right over my head. My own wife! And then she called me little—a little shit! Why had she called me that? I wasn’t that little, was I? She could be very cruel, the Duchess.

She was back now, less than five feet away, holding the water glass out in front of her, with her elbow cocked out to the side: her throwing position! And that look on her face: pure poison. Yet, still…such undeniable beauty! Not only her great mane of golden blond hair but those blazing blue eyes, those glorious cheekbones, her tiny nose, that perfectly smooth jaw-line, her chin with its tiny cleft, those creamy young breasts—a bit worse for the wear after breast-feeding Chandler, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with $10,000 and a sharp scalpel. And those legs…God almighty, those long bare legs of hers were off the charts! So perfect they were, the way they tapered so nicely at the ankle yet stayed so luscious above the knee. They were definitely her best asset, along with her ass.

It was only three years ago, in fact, when I had first laid eyes on the Duchess. It was a sight I found so alluring that I ended up leaving my kind first wife, Denise—paying her millions up front in one lump sum plus fifty thousand a month in non-tax-deductible maintenance, so she would walk away quietly without demanding a full-blown audit of my affairs.

And look how fast things had deteriorated! And what had I really done? Say a few words in my sleep? What was the crime in that? The Duchess was definitely overreacting here. In fact, at this point, I had every reason to be mad at her too. Perhaps I could maneuver this whole thing into a quick round of make-up sex, which was the best sex of all. I took a deep breath and said with complete and utter innocence, “Why are you so mad at me? I mean, you…you kinda got me confused here.”

The Duchess responded by cocking her blond head to the side, the way a person does after they’ve just heard something that completely defies logic. “You’re confused?” she snapped. “You’re fucking confused? Why…you…little…bastard!” Little, again! Unbelievable! “Where do you want me to start? How about you flying in here on your stupid helicopter at three in the morning, without so much as a fucking phone call to say you’d be late. Is that normal behavior for a married man?”

“But, I—”

“And a father, no less! You’re a father now! Yet you still act like a fucking infant! And does it even matter to you that I just had that ridiculous driving range sodded with Bermuda grass? You probably fucking ruined it!” She shook her head in disgust, then she plowed on: “But why should you give a shit? You’re not the one who spent your time researching the whole thing and dealing with the landscapers and the golf-course people. Do you know how much time I spent on that stupid fucking project of yours? Do you, you inconsiderate bastard?”

Ahhh, so she’s an aspiring landscape architect this month! But such a sexy architect! There had to be some way to turn this all around. Some magic words. “Honey, please, I’m—”

A warning through clenched teeth: “Don’t—you—honey—me! You don’t ever get to call me honey ever again!”

“But, honey—”

SPLASH!

That time I saw it coming, and I was able to pull the $12,000 silk comforter over my head—deflecting most of her righteous wrath. In fact, hardly a drop of water even touched me. But, alas, my victory was short-lived, and by the time I pulled down the comforter she was already marching back to the bathroom for a refill.

Now she was on her way back. The water glass was filled to the rim; her blue eyes were like death rays; her model-girl jaw looked a mile wide; and her legs…Christ! I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Still, there was no time for that now. It was time for the Wolf to get tough. It was time for the Wolf to bare his fangs.

I removed my arms from beneath the white silk comforter, careful not to get them tangled in the thousands of tiny pearls that had been hand-crocheted onto the fabric. Then I cocked my elbows, like chicken wings, giving the irate Duchess a bird’s-eye view of my mighty biceps. I said, in a loud, forthright voice, “Don’t you dare throw that water at me, Nadine. I’m serious! I’ll give you the first two glasses out of anger, but to keep doing it again and again…well, it’s like stabbing a dead body when it’s lying on the floor in a pool of blood! It’s fucking sick!”

That seemed to slow her down—but only for a second. She said, in a mocking tone, “Will you stop flexing your arms, please? You look like a fucking imbecile!”

“I wasn’t flexing my arms,” I said, unflexing my arms. “You’re just lucky to have a husband who’s in such great shape. Right, sweetie?” I smiled my warmest smile at her. “Now get over here right this second and give me a kiss!” Even as the words escaped my lips I knew I’d made a mistake.

“Give you a kiss?” sputtered the Duchess. “What are you, fucking kidding me?” Disgust dripped off her very words. “I was an inch away from cutting your balls off and sticking them in one of my shoe boxes. Then you’d never find them!”

Jesus Christ, she was right about that! Her shoe closet was the size of Delaware, and my balls would be lost forever. With the utmost humility, I said, “Please give me a chance to explain, hon—I mean sweetie. Please, I’m begging you!”

All at once her face began to soften. “I can’t believe you!” she said, through tiny snuffles. “What did I do to deserve this? I’m a good wife. A beautiful wife. Yet I have a husband who comes home at all hours of the night and talks about another girl in his sleep!” She started moaning with contempt: “Uhhhhh…Venice…Come to me, Venice.”

Jesus Christ! Those Quaaludes could be a real killer sometimes. And now she was crying. It was a complete disaster. After all, what chance did I have of getting her back into bed while she was crying? I needed to switch gears here, to come up with a new strategy. In a tone of voice normally reserved for someone who’s standing on the edge of a cliff and threatening to jump, I said, “Put down the glass of water, sweetie, and stop crying. Please. I can explain everything, really!”

Slowly, reluctantly, she lowered the glass of water to waist level. “Go ahead,” she said in a tone ripe with disbelief. “Let me hear another lie from the man who lies for a living.”

That was true. The Wolf did lie for a living, although such was the nature of Wall Street, if you wanted to be a true power broker. Everyone knew that, especially the Duchess, so she really had no right to be angry about that either. Nonetheless, I took her sarcasm in stride, paused for a brief moment to give myself extra time to coagulate my bullshit story, and I said, “First of all, you have the whole thing backward. The only reason I didn’t call you last night was because I didn’t realize I’d be getting home so late until it was almost eleven. I know how much you like your beauty sleep, and I figured you’d be sleeping anyway, so what was the point of calling?”

The Duchess’s poisonous response: “Oh, you’re so fucking considerate. Let me go thank my lucky stars for having such a considerate husband.” Sarcasm oozed off her words like pus.

I ignored the sarcasm and decided to go for broke. “Anyway, you took this whole Venice business completely out of context. I was talking to Marc Packer last night about opening a Canastel’s in Venice, Calif—”

SPLASH!

“You’re a fucking liar!” she screamed, grabbing a matching silk bathrobe off the back of some obscenely expensive white fabric chair. “A total fucking liar!”

I let out an obvious sigh. “Okay, Nadine, you’ve had your fun for the morning. Now come back into bed and give me a kiss. I still love you, even though you soaked me.”

That look she gave me! “You want to fuck me now?”

I raised my eyebrows high on my forehead and nodded eagerly. It was the look a seven-year-old boy gives his mother in response to the question: “Would you like an ice-cream cone?”

“Fine,” screamed the Duchess. “Go fuck yourself!”

With that, the luscious Duchess of Bay Ridge opened the door—the seven-hundred-pound, twelve-foot-high, solid mahogany door, sturdy enough to withstand a twelve-kiloton nuclear explosion—and walked out of the room, closing the door gently behind her. After all, a slammed door would send the wrong signal to our bizarre menagerie of domestic help.

Our bizarre menagerie: There were five pleasantly plump, Spanish-speaking maids, two of which were husband-and-wife teams; a jabbering Jamaican baby nurse, who was running up a thousand-dollar-a-month phone bill, calling her family in Jamaica; an Israeli electrician, who followed the Duchess around like a lovesick puppy dog; a white-trash handyman, who had all the motivation of a heroin-addicted sea slug; my personal maid, Gwynne, who anticipated my every need no matter how bizarre it might be; Rocco and Rocco, the two armed bodyguards, who kept out the thieving multitudes, despite the fact that the last crime in Old Brookville occurred in 1643, when white settlers stole land from the Mattinecock Indians; five full-time landscapers, three of which had recently been bitten by my chocolate-brown Labrador retriever, Sally, who bit anyone who dared go within a hundred feet of Chandler’s crib, especially if their skin was darker than a brown paper bag; and the most recent addition to the menagerie—two full-time marine biologists, also a husband-and-wife team, who, for $90,000 a year, kept that nightmare-of-a-pond ecologically balanced. And then, of course, there was George Campbell, my charcoal-black limo driver, who hated all white people, including me.

Yet, with all these people working at Chez Belfort, it didn’t change the fact that, right now, I was all alone, soaking wet, and horny as hell, at the hands of my blond second wife, the aspiring everything. I looked around for something to dry myself off with. I grabbed one of the cascading billows of white Chinese silk and tried to wipe myself. Christ! It didn’t help a bit. Apparently the silk had been treated with some sort of water repellent, and all it did was push the water from here to there. I looked behind me—a pillowcase! It was made of Egyptian cotton; probably a three-million thread count. Must’ve cost a fortune—of my money! I removed the pillowcase from the overstuffed goose-down pillow inside it and started wiping myself. Ahhh, the Egyptian cotton was nice and soft. And such terrific absorption! My spirits lifted.

I scooted over to my wife’s side of the bed to get out of the wet spot. I would pull the covers over my head and return to the warm bosom of my dream. I would return to Venice. I took a deep breath…Oh, shit! The Duchess’s scent was everywhere! All at once I felt the blood rushing to my loins. Christ—she was a frisky little animal, the Duchess, with a frisky little scent! No choice now but to jerk off. It was all for the best, anyway. After all, the Duchess’s power over me began and ended below my waist.

I was about to do a little self-soothing when I heard a knock at the door. “Who is it?” I asked, in a voice loud enough to get through the bomb-shelter door.

“Iz Gwaayne,” answered Gwynne.

Ahhh, Gwynne—with her wonderful Southern drawl! So soothing it was. In fact, everything about Gwynne was soothing. The way she anticipated my every need, the way she doted on me like the child she and her husband, Willie, were never able to conceive. “Come in,” I replied warmly.

The bomb-shelter door swung open with a tiny creak. “Guh mawnin, guh mawnin!” said Gwynne. She was carrying a sterling-silver tray. There was a tall glass of light iced coffee and a bottle of Bayer aspirin resting on it. Tucked beneath her left arm was a white bath towel.

“Good morning, Gwynne. How are you this fine morning?” I asked with mock formality.

“Oh, I’m fine…I’m fine!” Ahhhm fahyn…Ahhhm fahyn! “Well, I see you’re over on your wife’s side of the bed, so I’ll just walk right on over there and bring you your iced coffee. I also brought a nice soft towel for you to wipe yourself with. Mrs. Belfort told me you spilled some water on yourself.”

Un-fucking-believable! Martha Stewart strikes again! All at once I realized that my erection had given the white silk comforter the appearance of a circus tent—shit! I elevated my knees with the speed of a jackrabbit.

Gwynne walked over and placed the tray on the antique night table on the Duchess’s side of the bed. “Here, let me dry you off!” said Gwynne, and she leaned over and began dabbing the white towel on my forehead, as if I were an infant.

Holy Christ! What a fucking circus this house was! I mean, here I was, lying flat on my back, with a raging hard-on, while my fifty-five-year-old plumpish black maid, who was an anachronism from a bygone era, leaned over with her drooping jugs three inches from my face and wiped me with a five-hundred-dollar monogrammed Pratesi bath towel. Of course, Gwynne didn’t look even the slightest bit black. Ohhh, no! That would be way too normal for this household. Gwynne, in fact, was even lighter than me. The way I had it figured, somewhere in her family tree, perhaps a hundred fifty years ago, when Dixie was still Dixie, her great-great-great-great-grandmother had been the secret love slave of some wealthy plantation owner in south Georgia.

Whatever the case, at least this extreme close-up of Gwynne’s drooping jugs was sending the blood rushing out of my loins and back to where it belonged, namely, my liver and lymph channels, where it could be detoxified. Still, the mere sight of her hovering over me like this was more than I could bear, so I kindly explained to her that I was capable of wiping my own forehead.

She seemed a bit sadder for that fact, but all she said was, “Okay,” which came out as, Ohhhhkaii. “Do you need some aspirin?” Daya need sum airrrsprin?

I shook my head. “No, I’m fine, Gwynne. Thanks anyway, though.”

“Ohhhhkaii, well how ’bout some of them little white pills fer yer back?” she asked innocently. “Would you like me to get you some of those?”

Christ! My own maid was offering to fetch me Quaaludes at seven-thirty in the morning! How was I supposed to stay sober? Wherever I was, there were drugs close behind, chasing after me, calling my name. And nowhere was it worse than at my brokerage firm, where virtually every drug imaginable lined the pockets of my young stockbrokers.

Yet my back did actually hurt me. I was in constant chronic pain from a freak injury that occurred right after I’d first met the Duchess. It was her dog that did me in—that little white bastard of a Maltese, Rocky, who barked incessantly and served no useful purpose other than to annoy every human being he came into contact with. I had been trying to get the little prick to come in from the beach at the end of a summer Hamptons day, but the little bastard refused to obey me. When I tried to catch him he ran circles around me, forcing me to lunge over to try to grab him. It was reminiscent of the way Rocky Balboa had chased around that greasy chicken in Rocky II before his rematch with Apollo Creed. But unlike Rocky Balboa, who became fast-as-lightning and ultimately won his rematch, I ended up rupturing a disk and being bedridden for two weeks. Since then I’d had two back surgeries, both of which had made the pain worse.

So the Quaaludes helped with the pain—sort of. And even if they didn’t, it still served as an excellent excuse to keep taking them.

And I wasn’t the only one who hated that little shit of a dog. Everyone did, with the exception of the Duchess, who was his sole protector and who still let the mutt sleep at the foot of the bed and chew on her panties, which for some inexplicable reason made me jealous. Still, Rocky would be sticking around for the foreseeable future—until I could figure out a way to eliminate him that the Duchess wouldn’t pin on me.

Anyway, I told Gwynne thanks but no thanks for the Quaaludes, and, once more, she seemed a bit sadder for the fact. After all, she had failed to anticipate my every need. But all she said was, “Ohhhhkaii, well, I already set the timer on your sauna so it’s ready for you right now”—raghite nahow—“and I laid out your clothes for you late last night. Is your gray pinstripe suit and that blue tie with the little fishees on it ohhhhkaii?”

Christ, talk about service! Why couldn’t the Duchess be more like that? True, I was paying Gwynne $70,000 a year, which was more than double the going rate, but, still…Look what I got in return: service with a smile! Yet my wife was spending $70,000 a month—on the low side! In fact, with all those fucking aspirations of hers, she was probably spending double that. And that was fine with me, but there had to be a certain trade-off here. I mean, if I needed to go out once in a while and swing the schlong here or dang the gong there, then she oughta cut me just a little bit of slack, shouldn’t she? Yes, certainly so—in fact, so much so that I started nodding my head in agreement with my own thoughts.

Apparently, Gwynne took my nodding as an affirmative answer to her question, and she said, “Ohhhhkaii, well, I’ll just go on out and get Chandler ready so she’s nice and clean for you. Have a nice shower!” Cheery, cheery, cheery!

With that, Gwynne left the room. Well, I thought, at least she killed my hard-on, so I was better off for the encounter. As far as the Duchess was concerned, I’d worry about her later. She was a mutt, after all, and mutts were well-known for their forgiving nature.

Having worked things out in my mind, I downed my iced coffee, took six aspirin, swung my feet off the bed, and headed for the sauna. There I would sweat out the five Quaaludes, two grams of coke, and three milligrams of Xanax that I had consumed the night before—a relatively modest amount of drugs, considering what I was truly capable of.

Unlike the master bedroom, which was a testament to white Chinese silk, the master bathroom was a testament to gray Italian marble. It was laid out in an exquisite parquetlike pattern, the way only those Italian bastards know how to do it. And they sure as hell hadn’t been scared to bill me! Nonetheless, I paid the thieving Italians in stride. After all, it was the nature of twentieth-century capitalism that everyone should scam everyone, and he who scammed the most ultimately won the game. On that basis, I was the undefeated world champ.

I looked in the mirror and took a moment to regard myself. Christ, what a skinny little bastard I was! I was very muscular, but, still…I had to run around in the shower to get wet! Was it the drugs? I wondered. Well, perhaps; but it was a good look for me, anyway. I was only five-seven, and a very smart person had once said you could never be too rich or too thin. I opened the medicine cabinet and took out a bottle of extra-strength Visine. I craned back my neck and put six drops in each eye, triple the recommended dose.

In that very instant, an odd thought came bubbling up into my brain, namely: What kind of man abuses Visine? And, for that matter, why had I taken six Bayer aspirin? It made no sense. After all, unlike Ludes, coke, and Xanax, where the benefits of increasing the dose are plain as day, there was absolutely no valid reason to exceed the recommended doses of Visine and aspirin.

Yet, ironically, that was exactly what my very life had come to represent. It was all about excess: about crossing over forbidden lines, about doing things you thought you’d never do and associating with people who were even wilder than yourself, so you’d feel that much more normal about your own life.

All at once I found myself becoming depressed. What was I going to do about my wife? Christ—had I really done it this time? She seemed pretty angry this morning! What was she doing right now? I wondered. If I had to guess, she was probably yapping on the phone to one of her friends or disciples or whatever the fuck they were. She was somewhere downstairs, spewing out perfect pearls of wisdom to her less-than-perfect friends, in the genuine hope that with a little bit of coaching she could make them as perfect as she was. Ahhh, that was my wife, all right—the Duchess of Bay fucking Ridge! The Duchess and all her loyal subjects, those young Stratton wives, who sucked up to her as if she were Queen Elizabeth or something. It was totally fucking nauseating.

Yet, in her defense, the Duchess had a role to play and she played it well. She understood the twisted sense of loyalty that everyone involved with Stratton Oakmont felt for it, and she had forged ties with the wives of key employees, which had made things that much more solid. Yes, the Duchess was a sharp cookie.

Usually she would come into the bathroom in the morning while I was getting ready for work. She was a good conversationalist, when she wasn’t busy telling me to go fuck myself. But usually I had brought that on myself, so I really couldn’t blame her for it. Actually, I really couldn’t blame her for anything, could I? She happened to be a damn good wife, in spite of all that Martha Stewart crap. She must’ve said “I love you” a hundred times a day. And as the day progressed she would add on these wonderful little intensifiers: I love you desperately! I love you unconditionally!…and, of course, my favorite: I love you to the point of madness!…which I considered the most appropriate of all.

Yet, in spite of all her kind words, I still wasn’t sure I could trust her. She was my second wife, after all, and words are cheap. Would she really be there with me for better or worse? Outwardly, she gave every indication that she genuinely loved me—constantly showering me with kisses—and whenever we were out in public, she held my hand or put her arm around me or ran her fingers through my hair.

It was all very confusing. When I was married to Denise I never worried about these things. She had married me when I had nothing, so her loyalty was unquestioned. But after I made my first million dollars, she must have had a dark premonition, and she asked me why I couldn’t get a normal job making a million dollars a year? It seemed like a ridiculous question at the time, but back then, on that particular day, neither of us knew that in less than a year I’d be making a million dollars a week. And neither of us knew that in less than two years, Nadine Caridi, the Miller Lite girl, would pull up to my Westhampton beach house on July Fourth weekend and step out of that banana-yellow Ferrari wearing a ridiculously short skirt and a pair of white go-to-hell pumps.

I had never meant to hurt Denise. In fact, it was the furthest thing from my mind. But Nadine swept me off my feet, and I swept her off hers. You don’t choose who you fall in love with, do you? And once you do fall in love—that obsessive sort of love, that all-consuming love, where two people can’t stand to be apart from each other for even a moment—how are you supposed to let a love like that pass you by?

I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, trying to push all this Denise business back down below the surface. After all, guilt and remorse were worthless emotions, weren’t they? Well, I knew they weren’t, but I had no time for them. Forward motion; that was the key. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back. And as far as my wife went—well, I would right things with her too.

Having worked things out in my mind for the second time in less than five minutes, I forced myself to smile at my own reflection and then headed for the sauna. Once there, I would sweat out the evil spirits and start my day anew.