Free Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter Page A

wanted to tie me up.”
    As convincing as she sounded, you just can’t trust the ex-wife’s version of things. I am an ex-wife, and there have been times when I’ve made my ex-husband sound like a total bastard, when in fact he is only a partial bastard and has many redeeming qualities.
    You especially can’t trust an ex-wife getting paid thousands of dollars to say bad stuff about her ex-husband.
    Backstreet also talked to three of Kanengiser’s ex-girlfriends, all of whom he had been seeing while he was married. All three had alibis. All three concurred that he was an emotionally crippled shit who had trouble making a commitment and trouble being honest. The words priapic, liar, and woman-hating heterosexual kept popping up in the interviews.
    It is very unpleasant to hear one’s gynecologist referred to as a priapic, lying, woman-hating heterosexual.
    If all that wasn’t bad enough, Backstreet Affair talked to four women who had been dating him just before he died, all with disguised faces, first names only, all of them with alibis (one poor thing had waited an hour for him at Brasserie Bleu), and all of them certain they were Ms. Right.
    After the reporter’s stand-up bridge outside Kanengiser’s apartment, the report went into a low-quality home video of Kanengiser giving a speech to a state organization of conservative school board members on the need for double standards in school sex-education courses.
    Using his expertise as a doctor, he said that “Unfortunately, the reality of the world is that women bear a much larger share of the moral burden. It isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is. Boys will always be boys, and so if we want to restrain sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy and strengthen the family unit, young girls need to be taught to restrain themselves.”
    That’s a fancy way of making an old argument: Men can’t help themselves, but women can and should, because two wrongs don’t make a right. Which is another way of saying: It’s not my fault.
    Yet, it seemed that Dr. Kanengiser had helped himself to whatever came his way. I guess he was speaking from experience about his own uncontrollable lust.
    â€œSomeone has to say it,” this expert on women went on. “The female sex drive is not as strong as the male sex drive and so different rules must apply.”
    Obviously, this man had never been a thirty-seven-year-old woman during a full moon with a good dirty book and a bag of Duracells.
    What an asshole. If what Channel 3 reported was true, his was a level of promiscuity I hadn’t seen in a while, not since the advent of AIDS. This wasn’t just an odd romantic adventure, which I’ve come to believe is very human, for men and women. This was superhuman promiscuity. Boy, what levels of energy and organization were required to manage that? And what tremendous fear of intimacy must have fueled it? How did he keep from calling one girlfriend by the name of another? Kanengiser couldn’t have been happy, with his emotional and physical energies dissipated like this.
    Two ex-wives, at least three ex-girlfriends, at least four current girlfriends. He must have lived in constant fear of discovery. How did this guy sleep at night? But, of course, he had his alibi ready: I’m a man.
    So maybe a better question was, when did this guy find time to sleep?
    Poor bastard, I thought, before putting him out of my head for the night. Dr. Kanengiser found out the hard way that when you mess with a lot of women, sooner or later you mess with the wrong woman; that the more sexual partners you have, the higher the odds one of them will be a crazy person. That’s the statistic I figure they should teach in sex-ed courses.

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    T he Jackson Broadcasting System building is a pink and granite skyscraper that takes up a whole block in the East Fifties. In addition to the All News Network, the JBS building houses the