Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy

By Helen Argiro

Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy picks up where the fairytale ends and the “…ever-after” begins.

In an affluent town just north of Toronto a different kind of suburbanite has emerged. Well educated successful Gen X-ers with a misguided sense of entitlement, an insatiable appetite for luxury goods and a set of lifestyle choices that includes everything from Dr. Bernstein diets and recreational drug misuse, to the bizarre antics of the sexually deviant and scandalously promiscuous.

And in the mix of dating, mating and moral dysfunction you’ll meet characters like Nina, forty-four, the divorced mother
of twins who accidentally stumbles from one mortifying encounter to another in an effort to end a two-year long sexual
drought. Madeline, fifty-two, single and stuck in online dating purgatory with a collection of horror stories acquired during her quest to find true love and join the ranks of the married middle-class. Jeannie, a forty-year-old TV producer and single mom with a gifted son, a sexy sadistic lawyer for an ex-husband and a gynecologist that is convinced Jeannie is a closet lesbian.

So welcome to a place where illicit sex is plentiful, romantic love is as elusive as smoke, and where life is part comedy of communal errors and part tragic milieu of the corrosively ambitious. Welcome to the suburbs!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781624883569

Book preview

Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy

Helen Argiro

* * *

Women’s Free Press

Canada USA U.K.

Copyright 2012 by Helen Argiro

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers, who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Women’s Free Press, Canada: www.womensfreepress.com.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Argiro, Helen,

Tales of sex & suburban lunacy [electronic resource] / Helen Argiro.

Electronic monograph in HTML format.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-62488-356-9

I. Title. II. Title: Tales of sex and suburban lunacy.

PS8601.R43T34 2012 C813'.6 C2012-907754-2

1. Sex customs-Fiction. 2. Single women-Fiction. 3. Man-woman relationships-Fiction.3. Dating (Social customs)-Fiction. 4. Single mothers-Fiction. 5. Suburban customs and relationships-Fiction. 6. Suburban life-Fiction. 7. Toronto (Ontario), Canada-Fiction.

Cover Illustration Copyright 2012 by Marie Dorey

Cover design by Marie Dorey Design-www.thewowthatworks.com

Women’s Free Press

Canada USA U.K.

www.sexandsuburbanlunacy.com

For Krista and all the brave women like her.

All literature is gossip.

Truman Capote

Table of Contents

Introduction

ONE. SEX IN THE SUBURBS

Single Sex…(I Don’t Think So)

Making A Comeback

Boredom Is The New Stress

Model Behaviour

TWO. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS

Loving Thy Neighbour

Extra-Curricular Debauchery

Destination Thin

Domestic Homicide

Stoney Saw Me Naked

Theo’s Mom Naked

THREE. SINGLE OR SETTLE

Missing The Boat

Bait-And-Switch

Caucasian Karma

Monster In Paris

Timing Is Everything

Sex Is Like Booking A Tee Time

Plenty Of Weirdos.com

Knee Braces Or Disney World

Hell Hath No Fury… (Part I)

FOUR. UNPLEASANT ENDINGS

A Protracted State Of Lust

Older Women, Younger Men

Bagels Or Brad Pitt

The Old Con

FIVE. MEN BEHAVING BADLY

Mr. It’s Complicated

A Simple Man

The Blackberry Incident

Emotional Rescue

Glory Days

SIX. HAPPILY EVER AFTER. (I DON’T THINK SO… )

The Big Taboo

Uninvited Guests

The Quiet Billionaires

Hell Hath No Fury… (Part II)

About The Author

Introduction

In the city, the crazy people and sociopaths are generally more out in the open. You can find them harassing pedestrians on a street corner, screaming at God in the subway or practising family law for one of the big Bay Street firms. In the suburbs it’s different. People can live for years on a quiet street in a good neighbourhood, without a clue as to where the dangerously unbalanced among us reside. That is, until one morning you wake up to discover a SWAT team on your front lawn and yellow tape around your neighbour’s yard, only to find out that Mr. Nice Guy next door has been collecting body parts in his basement freezer for the past five years.

Scientists who want to study different kinds of behaviour will put rats in a variety of simulated environments to see if they will adapt, become content and live or despair, reject their surroundings and die. The same can be said for people. Depending on a family’s socio-economic level, corresponding location—size of their home, their cottage, their boat or the make of the cars in their driveway—modern suburbia is an experiment in various forms of human behaviour, one cul-de-sac at a time. It’s also the place the middle class calls home. It’s the place where family values are about raising over-achieving children, who develop into impossible-to-please teenagers, who then go off to university, only to call home crying about the stress of unreasonable essay deadlines and having to show up for 8 a.m. lectures. Then, after graduating, getting a job and starting a career in the more exciting big city, the suburbs is also the place young married professionals return to when they begin procreating, and the circle of life is complete.

Oh, and the suburbs are also the place where the one thing you told yourself when you were young, idealistic and full of hope would never happen, happens: you turn into your parents.

Here in Canada, Toronto is the heartbeat of our nation. It’s where stocks are traded, cultural diversity is integrated, gay pride is celebrated and it’s the financial centre from which 11 per cent of Canada’s GDP is generated. On the surrounding perimeter of the City of Toronto is the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The GTA used to be the suburbs thirty years ago before amalgamation. Surrounding the GTA is what is now known as the 905. When amalgamation happened, the residents of Toronto and the GTA got to keep their 416 area code, while the new 905 exchange was forced upon those of us living on the fringe. Just north of the city there is a small suburban town in the 905 that is to Toronto what Westchester County is to New York: home to the ruthlessly ambitious, socially over-networked, upper middle class. This town is called Unionville.

In Unionville a different kind of suburbanite has emerged: well-educated, successful, first-, second- and third-generation Canadians with a misguided sense of entitlement, an insatiable appetite for luxury goods and a fierce desire to accelerate a way of life into which they were raised.

Founded in 1794, at the centre of Unionville is a Norman Rockwell-esque Main Street lined with rod-iron lampposts, hanging flower baskets and (in between the busier wine bars, bistros and pubs) cute little shops with an old-fashioned bandstand to the south, Too Good Pond to the north and multi-million-dollar homes surrounding the perimeter. Next door to Starbucks on Main Street is the McKay Art Centre. A white, two-storey board-and-batten house built around 1847, the McKay was once home to the magnificent painter Frederick Horsman Varley, an original member of the Group of Seven. A few hundred yards north of the McKay House is an unassuming red-brick building with a wide-open courtyard and a sign that reads: Welcome to the Varley Art Gallery. Built in 1997, the Varley Art Gallery is home to several superb works of art by Jackson, MacDonald, Casson and other members of the Group of Seven, including, of course, the extraordinary portraits and landscapes painted by Fred Varley himself. Considered one of the most important galleries in our nation, people from different parts of the world visit the Varley and, yet, the majority of people who live in Unionville, including those who walk, jog, cycle or drive past the gallery every day, have never stepped inside.

As for Fred Varley the man, legend has it that Fred got loaded one frigid January night and ran naked with just his boots on slip-sliding down Main Street through the snow on a drunken dare. Every once in a while history repeats itself, and an intoxicated male resident will exit a local pub and take it upon himself to keep the legend alive and run streaking down Main Street on a freezing winter night in a pair of Sorrels, with everything else flapping in the wind.

There is an unmistakable pride of ownership for the people who call Unionville home. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s historically significant and for the two-mile radius of houses surrounding Main Street, it is home to some of the most outrageously expensive residential real estate in all of Canada.

With the new 905 clearly defined, Unionville became the host for massive suburban sprawl. The migration of a married generation X cohort joined the already-ensconced baby boomers and proceeded to buy up big homes with big mortgages, installing salt water swimming pools, giant hot tubs and outdoor ice rinks in their long, wide backyards neatly secured by six-foot-high wooden fences. This same crop of gen-Xers, driving around town in their BMWs or heading north to Muskoka in their resource-depleting SUVs, continue to prosper, consume, procreate and raise children. These are the same Canadian, dream-defining, young professionals who sailed through the late 1980s, 1990s and into this shiny, new century, bringing with them a new set of lifestyle choices that includes everything from Whole Foods and alcohol abuse to Dr. Bernstein diets and recreational drug misuse. From hot yoga to hot sex with a neighbour to getting divorced, getting remarried, staying single or, on occasion, suddenly announcing, I’m gay! These are the same people held financially hostage by country club dues, luxury car lease payments, rising university tuition fees for their kids and the cost of private nursing homes for their parents, along with multiple mortgages on their homes, chalets, cottages and condos in the sub-tropics. And these are the same people on either side of the half-century mark who now lament the squandering of their youth. With an unspoken desire to escape their current reality, these are the people who dream of running off to an ashram in India or sailing around the world to exotic locations in a 50-foot sailboat. But, in fact, these are the same people who will end up, instead, working well into their sixties and eventually retiring to any one of a thousand painfully dull, gated communities for seniors somewhere in Arizona or south Florida.

Oh, and what about love? Well, love we have in abundance. We love and are loved by our children, our parents, our close friends and our pets. Yes, that kind of platonic love is free and accessible and it’s soothing and reliable and, in most cases, it lasts a lifetime. But what about that other love? The love that makes you greedy for your next orgasm and seduces you into having sex in a car or a pool shed, in the locker room at the country club or in the forest behind the baseball diamond at Monarch Park. Or is that just lust? Because here in the suburbs, lust is plentiful. Lust thrives and flourishes like an epidemic of lawn grubs during a heat wave. Up here we lust after each other’s six-figure incomes, custom-built houses and cottages on Lake Joe. We lust after each other’s relationships and Range Rovers, social circles and sudden inheritances, pecking order at the country club and coveted invitations to join the hospital’s board of directors. And, in certain cases, we lust after each other’s spouses or partners, and no one will ever admit it, but sometimes when they’re old enough, we lust after each other’s teenage children. But it isn’t all bad. A healthy dose of mutual lust for two people in love is like winning Lotto Max, except in the cases where one or both of these people are married to someone else.

Now back to the question of love. For the young, love is natural and effortless. But for most of the gen-Xers I know (and I am one), romantic love is something that very few people have and the rest of us are still trying to find. That elusive, all-consuming love that makes you feel a decade younger, ten pounds thinner, glowing from the inside out and for which there exists no better feeling in the world. The truth is, urban or suburban, married or single, young, old or middle aged, it’s that romantic love which can sometimes make life complicated and messy, and even lead us into episodes of madness. And it is exactly that kind of love that we all want.

So welcome to a place where truth is always stranger than fiction, where romantic love is as elusive as smoke, and where life is part comedy of communal errors and part tragic milieu of the corrosively ambitious. Welcome to the suburbs!

ONE.

SEX IN THE SUBURBS

Single Sex…(I Don’t Think So)

It was one of the most humiliating episodes in Nina’s life. And when an episode such as this involves an exceptionally attractive man and a single forty-four-year-old woman in her never-looked-better prime who has not had sex in more than two years, it just serves to underscore the humiliation that much more. Heartbreaking, but true.

Not that a woman has to be smart or interesting or witty to appeal to a man, but Nina is all of these things. In addition, she has a rewarding career as the director of an important art gallery, a firm athletic body and an outstanding head of thick, wavy shoulder-length hair the colour of a roasted Brazil nut.

The sad truth is that Nina isn’t the only one not having sex. This reality is, in fact, epidemic amongst her unmarried friends and most women she knows over the age of forty, who exercise even the most modest set of standards where men are concerned. There is, of course, no shortage of married men eager to have sex with the single women of her generation, but that is not an option Nina is willing to consider.

Madeline the accountant and Jeannie the television producer are standing with Nina amongst the faux California decor inside the Harvest Wine Bar on Main Street in Unionville as angry snow squalls slam up against the windows outside. As is the case on the last Friday of every month, Jeannie cashes in some Zip Car points and drives her eleven-year-old son from their midtown Toronto apartment north to Centennial arena in the suburbs, so that Ethan can watch his older cousin play hockey for the Unionville Jets. And since Madeline, unfortunately, has nothing better to do in the city on this particular Friday, she has decided to tag along for the thirty-five minute ride up to the suburbs and join her friends for a nice dinner in the town where Nina has lived with her children for the past two decades.

While they wait for a table, the three unmarried women drink Malbec from glasses the size of small fish bowls as the conversation settles on the topic of men.

I just really need to get laid, Nina said. Her voice held a note of quiet bereavement. I can’t remember the last time; it’s been so long.

I understand, Madeline nodded. I’m currently in the longest drought I’ve had since breaking my leg skiing in ’98. It’ll be five months next week.

Are you kidding? Five months is nothing, Jeannie said. If you’re a single female over forty, I think having sex every five months is probably way above the national average.

Five months is perfectly respectable, Nina agreed. I’m over two years now. You and I are apples and oranges.

The problem is, you don’t do online dating, Madeline said to Nina. I do, and that’s the difference. I hate to admit it, but dating has turned into a numbers game. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m on these websites trolling for men just to have sex. I’m looking for a real relationship. I want a boyfriend or, better still, a husband. I’ve never been married and I want to be. So I go on a lot of first dates. Ninety-five per cent of which do not lead to a second date. It’s no one’s fault; there’s just no connection. But of the 5 per cent left, there is usually a man in there somewhere who I’ll start dating and eventually have sex with. That’s why I’m at five months, and you’re at two years.

Madeline is right, Jeannie said. You need to make an effort. Why not try match-dot-com or something? Or if you meet a guy you’re attracted to at work or the gym, make the first move. I think you need to be more proactive.

You’re both right, Nina said. But I’ve just never been able to approach men. And, unfortunately, the only ones approaching me are either married or I don’t find them attractive.

"Look, the last man who asked me out was a short, round guy wearing a Spiderman T-shirt and a Geek Squad badge in Best Buy, Jeannie said. Am I going to date him? No. My point is we all get approached by unattractive men. That shouldn’t be an excuse for not making an effort. If I were actively looking for a relationship, I would probably try J-Date or some other singles’ website."

Madeline turned to Jeannie. So, basically, you’re saying you’ve given up on men altogether? Madeline asked. When did this happen?

I’m not saying I’ve given up on men, Jeannie said. I’m just in a different place right now then both of you. When I’m not working, Ethan and his endless stream of activities take up all of my time. I’m constantly schlepping him to and from karate or theatre practice or soccer games or he’s got friends over. I haven’t had a free weekend in months, but that’s okay; he’s eleven. Pretty soon he’ll be a teenager and won’t want anything to do with me, so I want to capitalize on my time with him for right now.