Second Thoughts

by Stanley W. Rogouski

Maybe it was the way that he had so much trouble hailing a cab, or the way that all of her friends thought he was a dork that was giving her all of these second thoughts. That he was a dork made no difference to her at all since she had always been attracted to dorks. Her father, after all, was a dork, admittedly a dork from a very distinguished family, and, aside from her unfortunate predilection for dorks, it had not done her any harm. How many women could make close to six figures at 26, cruise through high-school listening to Pixies albums and still get into Columbia, keep her little sister out of trouble when her intellectual abilities did not, shall we say, match her physical charms, and all when her father was a clueless dork? That all of her friends thought he was a dork, however, did matter. You just do not go against the unanimous opinion of all of your friends, especially if you wanted to keep them. True, maybe a few of them were acting out of snobbery or simple jealousy. He was a good-looking dork, but at least one or two of them had her best interests in mind. Simply put, her friends weren't really that malicious. They wouldn't have been her friends if they had been. The trick is to strike the right kind of balance, not to give free reign to every disfunctional little impulse that your sex drive can drag up from your dirty little subconscious, however much fun that would be, but certainly not to become one of those frigid, sexless little biddies who spend their 20s waiting for Prince Charming, and their 30s living with cats, and writing bad personal ads. Until now, she thought she had found the perfect balance. She would continue to sleep with the good-looking, easily manipulated dork for a few years, then, when she was ready to get married, she would drop him for somebody more suitable, someone she could trust to be the father of her children. Now she had to give the dork a closer look. Maybe her friends were wrong, not malicious, just wrong. The cab turned the corner from 8th Avenue onto Flatbush, and she caught sight of the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower in the distance as he put her hand in his and started to massage her knuckles. He did have a lot of good qualities, not the least of which was the fact that he was tall, good-looking, and muscular. He could carry her up two flights of stairs, and she was no waif. He was by far the best-looking man she had ever dated. If his teeth had been perfect, he would have looked just like Brad Pitt, or at least a reasonably good clone. She wanted to curse his mother for not having gotten him braces when he was a little boy. Cheap slut. She had ruined what would have otherwise been a perfect face, perfect jaw line, nose, dark, brooding eyes with a certain sleepy looking sexuality. Only those teeth spoiled it, not that they were exactly what you would call bucked, but it made it impossible for him to ever hide what he really was, white trash. She hated herself for thinking like this, It was the worst form of snobbery, almost as bad as racism, but that was what she felt, and you could not deny how you felt. What a bitch I am, she thought, but ten seconds after meeting his parents, she knew that he came from the most stereotypical white trash imaginable. >>>>