Betrayal

 

      With the temperature hovering above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, Vicky Mayhem and Jason Nolan were married down at the banks of the Powhatan River.  They had to be in love to tie the knot on such a blistering hot day, a day hot enough to make the icing on their three-tiered wedding cake flow like lava.  They chose that day and place because it was when and where they had met four years earlier; he had gone there to be born-again; she had gone there to commit suicide.  Life had an eccentric way of giving and taking, of bringing together and splitting apart, insignificant details in the overall chaos of events, but momentous occasions to Vicky and Justin.  Affairs like Vicky and Jason’s occurred everyday throughout the passages of time, from the beginning to the end�"it’s what made humans the most unstable species on the planet�"but a rare few were truly memorable: Adam and Eve, Anthony and Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah, and Vicky and Jason.  Factually speaking, the bride wore a red taffeta gown with black lace around the collar and hem; the groom wore a white tuxedo with a flesh-colored bowtie, vest, and sash.  Those who were there that July afternoon, those who witnessed the union, remember little more than the fact that it was a hot day and the champagne was warm.                            

      Jason was in his third year studying for an M.A. in Neuropsychology, hoping one day to teach music therapy to emotionally disturbed government employees.  He was a small, slender man who had positively no hair on his entire body.  Vicky was a big, beautiful woman who worked as a sex education teacher in a county prison.  She not only had a head of thick, waist-length blond hair, but she had hair on her upper lip, her chin, and even on the tops of her feet.  They both had a child from a previous marriage: Vicky had an eight-year-old daughter named Cindy, and Jason had a fourteen-year-old daughter named Angelica.  After the wedding, for Cindy’s sake, Vicky kept her last name as Mayhem.  Jason was not happy about that fact, causing him to be unproductive on their wedding night.

      Vicky and Jason were well enough off: she owned a home, they both owned cars, but despite their four-year courtship and ultimate marriage, neither one knew that much about the other.  All they did for four years was have phone sex and exchange recipes.  Amazingly, over the next six months, they each would learn the other’s secret for corn pudding and fried okra.  They both were terribly insecure, and, at times, the sources of their insecurities made them behave irrational and illogical.  For instance, Vicky would hang clothes at midnight in the nude, and Jason would drive his car through the carwash with the windows down.   

      When Vicky and Jason returned home from their honeymoon, a week at The Pink Cloud motel, complete with ceiling mirrors and video cameras, living under the same roof and parenting each other’s stepchild hurled them into a tempest.  Jason believed Vicky was too stern with Cindy, and Vicky said Jason pampered Angelica too much.  In fact, there was a rivalry between Vicky and Angelica for Jason’s affection, which annoyed Vicky; she truly didn’t like Angelica, and she took every opportunity to let Jason know it.  An exchange of angry words ensued, and after only ten days of marriage, Jason was already sleeping on the guest room futon.

      Fortuitously, it was back to school and work for every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and at a quarter to seven on Monday morning, Jason, clad in Superman pajamas, cooked pigs-in-a-blanket for the entire family.  Vicky squeezed into her 4XL Kermit the Frog scrubs and rolled out of the house without anyone seeing or hearing her.  Jason fed the girls, hurried them to be dressed, and he waved goodbye as they boarded the school bus.  Then he washed down his two blood pressure pills, Prilosec, Valium, Prozac, morphine, codeine, and hydroxyzine with a shot of Cognac, and he boarded his motorcycle and sped toward the University for his first class of the morning: Schizophrenia, Nymphomania, and You.

      As he sped across New Kent’s unpaved rural area roads, sand and gravel making visibility almost impossible, Jason almost ran Isaiah Morris in his Chevy LUV truck off the road.  Isaiah managed to hug the truck snugly against the right shoulder and into a trench, flipping off Jason as he darted past, but Jason was oblivious to his gesture.  Ironically, Isaiah didn’t appreciate that his lover’s husband was driving him off the road, but if he had noticed, he would’ve chuckled as he flipped him off.  For you see, as Jason hurried off to his day of college classes, Isaiah planned on achieving on the job training in Jason’s bedroom, on the bed, with Vicky.  For Vicky had called in sick to her job at the prison, in order to apply her sex education skills personally on Isaiah, the former convict, just recently released after serving thirteen years for statutory rape of a seven-year-old.  The fact that Vicky was just recently married didn’t have any influence on Isaiah’s judgment; Isaiah hadn’t made love to a woman in thirteen years, and he was as aroused as a horned lizard in heat; there was no way he could pass up this opportunity to cram and stuff Vicky as if she were a Thanksgiving turkey.

      Vicky had already returned home and was preparing herself for her rendezvous with Isaiah, which meant she stripped naked and waited for him to arrive.  Since her courtship with Jason began four years earlier, Isaiah was about to be the one hundred twentieth different man with whom Vicky had an affair.  Isaiah was short and squat; he had an enlarged forehead and eyes set close together, and he had more hair on his body than a woolly mammoth.