Free You're Not Pretty Enough by Jennifer Tress Page B

he’d shoot at me accusatorily.
    “Why don’t you?” I’d shoot back.
    I’d drink and smoke in the house, and he’d chastise me, so I’d meet my friends out at bars and smoke and drink and complain. After only six months, a malaise settled into our sparsely decorated home: married life wasn’t what we expected. We both felt it, but didn’t speak it.
    ****************
    And then Charlotte entered our lives.
    When I think about Charlotte, it becomes clear what was destined to happen. She was tall and thin and had long, bleached-blond hair. She looked
     like what I imagined Pamela Anderson would look like if Pamela Anderson were an accounting intern. She worked out, didn’t smoke, and asked Leo for his opinion on decorating ideas she had for her new apartment.
    The first time I met her was at a bar in early 1995. Leo was with his favorite people from the finance department at the hospital where he worked, and Charlotte, their intern, was the only woman invited besides me. Being twentysomethings, we were a fairly immature bunch, and once a few pitchers of
     beer were tossed back, the conversation predictably turned to sex.
    “What’s the weirdest sexual thing you’ve ever done?” one of the guys asked the six of us. A collective groan filled our space.
    “I’ve got something,” said Charlotte. “But I’m afraid it’s too…I don’t know, too much. And I don’t want to tell you guys and then have you make fun of me or think I’m bad or something.”
    “Tell it to Jen first,” Leo said. “She can be the judge.”
    So Charlotte proceeded to whisper in my ear a story about her and her former boyfriend fooling around in bed and their dog, who was also on the bed, started getting uncomfortably close, and she asked her boyfriend to
     move him. The boyfriend suggested that maybe the dog should be part of the mix, and at the end of the story the dog “sort of” went down on Charlotte.
    I stared at her for a full five seconds, mouth agape. “Don’t
     tell that story.”
    The men were staring at us, literally on the edge of their seats.
    “Why?” she asked. “Too much? Scale of one to ten.”
    I whispered in her ear, “Honey, there’s no scale for
     bestiality.”
    “Oh, please—they’ll love it!” She retold the story and then went to the restroom. (After that, Charlotte bore the nickname “dog girl” among me and my friends.)
    One of the guys said, “I would drink her bathwater.”
    My husband looked transformed, like he had experienced something so profound that he would never be able to go back again.
    ****************
    I tried to talk to my friends about the growing unhappiness
     in my marriage, but they generally—perhaps to be hopeful—blew it off as being a phase. The one sympathetic ear I had was in Cathryn, a beautiful, bohemian singer-songwriter who dated Leo’s cousin. Having been
     through similar situations, she walked that perfect balance of encouraging me to trust my woman’s intuition while holding out hope that it was “nothing.”
    One night in the summer of 1995 I called Leo at work to see
     if he wanted to meet at one of our local haunts to watch the Major League baseball playoffs.
    “Oh man, I have a major deadline. When I’m done I’ll call and see if you’re still home, and then we can make a plan from there, OK?”
    “Sure, sounds good.”
    I called Cathryn an hour later and asked her to meet me instead and left Leo a note telling him where we’d be.
    When I walked into the bar to meet up with Cathryn, I saw
     Leo and Charlotte sitting across from each other in a booth, engaged in intense conversation. I felt a rush of emotions—surprise, hurt, anger—but I just kept advancing toward them as if on autopilot. Charlotte saw me out of her
     peripheral vision, mouthed the words “oh shit,” and immediately pulled back and reached for her wallet. Leo appeared completely unfazed.
    “Hey, what’s up? I was just about to call you.”
    “Yeah, um, this is weird,” I