A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century by Jane Vandenburgh

Author:Jane Vandenburgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582439815
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

This is during the Time Period, as my daughter says, and it is probably as a corollary to the economic boom, when every other marriage in Berkeley, or at least in these two or three little Zip Codes with which I have an acquaintance, has foundered or struggled and either does or doesn’t come apart but rattles on down the road, and it is very often true that Somebody Else is involved, despite all these protestations to the contrary.

Somebody Else is usually involved. What people around here prefer to say is that it’s a mutual parting of the ways, and My People, by which I mean the 77 Million—who honestly believed this kind of thing was basically beneath us—feel it’s just so sickly retro, so sort of fifties, sixties, seventies, and clichéd to have Somebody Else Being Involved as a reason to wreck your marriage, which ruins not only your own life but also the lives of all your various loved ones.

It’s almost always Someone Else, at least in my experience, and what this person’s name is, frankly, honey? Anyone But You.

I believed it was beneath my basic dignity to have fallen in love with one man while I was married to my children’s father, and I was so ashamed at the Glamour-Trashy nature of this not particularly original plotline, how it made me feel exactly like a friend of mine, a woman I really liked whose kids went to school with my kids. This woman who one week was laughing affectionately at how her truly diminutive husband, a man who in truth was as preternaturally small as he was almost astonishingly wealthy, needed to buy his suits in the boys’ department, and wasn’t that sweet?

That was one week. The next she was there in the carpool lane in her new sports car in a badass color, top down, and her car was being driven by her black, unbelievably beautiful, and almost embarrassingly studly personal trainer whose name is Marcus, and she was waving, waving, like she was on a float and was ecstatic, having just been crowned queen of the Rose Parade.

So I’m evolving this theory that this has something to do with the stats on my side of the 77 Million, all these women who have just turned forty or are turning forty in a little while, and how forty is the new thirty, or maybe it’s more descriptively the new twenty-six, so we’re all now acting exactly like we did when we were way, way younger, having basically missed this important step in growing up, and we’re all back up to our same old tricks and acts of mischief.

So I’ve created these characters who enact these half-patched-together, semi-sociological theories of mine, my characters being composites or sometimes flat-out caricatures of the French I’ve met through my children’s school, which is Ecole Bilingue, and the eventual publication of this book will result in some of these people’s never again speaking to me.

I’m coming to realize that we are

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