Marty, Bella, and I were chatting in my office when the notion of me having an affair on Marty came up. At the suggestion, Bella sprang to hypothetical action, saying if I cheated on her mother, the very first thing she would do is wreck both of my cars, driving them into trees or cement walls until they ceased operation. In the pause that followed, she added in an oh-by-the-way, she would never, could never, speak to me again. 

I will admit to being impressed by the immediacy and severity of Bella’s, again hypothetical, reaction to my injuring her mother. Curious, I turned the tables asking my Baya what she would do if her mother had done the cheating. The torrential winds that ravaged my small office subsided. Bella’s furor fell to the ground, a windless flag. She glanced at her mother, who sat in the chair next to her, legs pulled up to her chest, looking unhelpfully innocent. Marta smiled sheepishly at her daughter becoming even more wholesome. Well, Bella confessed, she hadn’t really considered that possibility. 

I felt vulnerable at how easy and obvious maiming me was and how Marta comparatively seemed to be a chinkless warrior. This turned into a brain-storming session between Bella and me trying to figure out how we could ever injure Marty, especially now that she’s skipping through town with some young boy-toy on her hip. 

Then finally, I solved the riddle of how you hurt someone who has little but still wants nothing. The answer: You run up their credit card with a ton of senseless, material baubles they would not buy in seven lifetimes and imagine their tremoring hand and glassy eyes taking in the multi-page statement. That, I told Bella, is how you’d deliver a body blow to her monastic mother. 

The conversation came to a natural close when Bella said that neither of us was allowed to cheat because Bella did not want to wage a lifelong campaign of hate on either of us. I said she was safe. I would never cheat because of a promise I made to my Marta over three decades ago. And she would never cheat because her new lover would have to go through navy-seal-like training to learn how to please her, AND I am the only one able to provide this training. While a ticklish situation, we could find a way through those waters. The more damning fact is the training program is three years long, and all the cute young men Marta might fancy in that way would lack the needed attention span. But what they don’t know, in fact, what no one knows because it is my closest-held life secret, is that going through all that effort for even a single day with my Marta is so entirely, totally worth it.