The Most Costly Passion of All
Unless you happen to live in one of those delightfully backward Latin countries where husbands are encouraged to form liaisons with other women instead of loitering round the house and watching TV, the mistress is forbidden fruit. She is a threat to the fabric of polite society, a wrecker of homes and a walking distraction to men who should be keeping their eye on the corporate ball. She wears black underwear. She takes long, scented baths. She sneers at housework. She is either feared or envied, or both, by fifty percent of the married population of America. She is illicit.
It is this, more than anything else, that keeps the mistress in business, despite high running costs and savage increases in the size of the Ultimate Fine if dalliance is followed by divorce. (A process that our lawyer friend describes as working out who gets custody of the money.) If mistresses were socially acceptable, they would lose much of their appeal; it is the whiff of sin and the fear of discovery that sharpen the pleasure, make parting such sweet sorrow, and enable a man to contemplate his American Express bills with a secret smile.
We shall return to those bills later, but for those of you who are about to invest in a mistress, it should be said that the costs are not just financial. Who can put a price on the emotional wear and tear caused by whispering the wrong name into the wrong ear at the wrong time? The desperate attempts to remove the lingering traces of Chanel No. 5 from a suit that is supposed to have spent the evening at a sales conference? The thrill of horror as someone vaguely known and dimly seen waves at the two of you in a restaurant that nobody goes to? The sprint for the mailbox to collect incriminating evidence before it falls into the wrong hands? The verbal acrobatics required to cover up those deadly slips of the tongue? The marvels of contorted invention that have to be produced to explain why you didn’t call to say you weren’t getting back from the office until 3 a.m.?
In fact, these daily jolts of intrigue and adrenalin are meat and drink to the mistress addict. A woman is just a woman, but a mistress is an exercise in tightrope walking and ingenuity as much as a source of physical excitement. The mind loves the whole naughty business as much as the body. Which is just as well, because in simple cash terms a mistress will cost only marginally less than a forty-five-foot yacht or a promising racehorse.
There are five major areas of expenditure that prospective cads should expect. The amounts allocated to each will vary according to whim of mistress, degree of guilt, logistical complications, and credit limit, so it is difficult to be precise about the bottom-line figure. However, you can be sure that it will be much more than the number you first thought of, divided more or less as follows:
Tokens of affection
“How do I love thee?” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote. “Let me count the ways.” But that was in the good old pre-inflationary days when you could not only count the ways, but afford to pay for them as well. Not anymore. Modern society offers limitless opportunities to blow your salary, and your mistress will be happy to guide you through them. They range from a modest bouquet of roses that have been reared on a mulch of banknotes to ludicrously expensive scraps of silk masquerading as underwear, and onwards and upwards to Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels and floor-length sable coats, until you arrive, if your passion and resources can run to it, at the most acceptable trinket of all: the love nest. Nothing brings the bloom to a mistress’s cheek like real estate, preferably in a high-rent district and (for discretion’s sake, of course) with her name on the lease.
Remodelling expenses
Men with newly acquired mistresses frequently undergo a transformation almost as startling as the frog-into-handsome-prince routine. They go on diets. They buy dashing ties and bottom-hugging Italian suits. They have their hair styled. They seriously consider trading in the station wagon for something low and aerodynamic and dangerous-looking. They change their no-nonsense aftershave for a musk-based lounge-lizard concoction that retails for three figures an ounce. They leave for the office dressed for romance.
This does not pass unnoticed. Our man may think his explanations are plausible, but he’s kidding himself. His secretary will know almost instantly what’s going on, but at least (assuming he’s not a complete scoundrel) he won’t be sharing a bed with her. His wife is a different matter. She trusts him. She wants to believe he’s working late, and as his excuses become more and more flimsy, he becomes more and more guilty, leading directly to the next expense.
Remorse gifts
Wives of men with mistresses often find themselves on the receiving end of unsolicited and puzzling gifts. Benign neglect suddenly changes to husbandly concern. Health, leisure activities, and relatives are the favourite topics, but it doesn’t matter which of these scams the husband chooses; the end result is the same—an offer of an all-expense-paid trip to somewhere far away.
Thus it happens that the bewildered wife is packed off to the health spa at Eugenie-Les-Bains, to a hang gliding course in the Andes or to visit an aunt in upstate Alaska. Needless to say, the husband is unable to go with her due to his obligations—pressure of work being one, and a long-standing promise to take his sweetie to Palm Springs being the other.
Provisions
Mistresses do not eat at Burger Barn. They do not drink beer. And after a while, even the most extravagant picnics in hotel rooms and apartments lose their novelty. There comes a time when a mistress insists on going out to eat, and this creates its own problems.
A restaurant has to be safe to be suitable. How can you enjoy the touch of a silken knee under the table when you’re half expecting to bump into your next-door neighbours? You are therefore limited to restaurants that the people you know never visit, and for a very good reason: they can’t afford to.
As you look down the menu and blink in disbelief at asparagus that is priced by the inch and at £30 lamb chops, you recall a charming compliment paid to you by your companion: she loves your carefree attitude with money. Fiscal restraint is out of the question, and to make sure you don’t escape for less than £150, here comes that smirking bastard with the wine list.
Experienced wine waiters can recognise a clandestine couple from a distance of twelve feet. The subtler operators will hand you the wine list open at the champagne page. The hustlers will suggest it—not to you, but to her—confident in the knowledge that mistresses can’t resist champagne.
Add to that the Grand Marnier soufflé, the 1929 cognac, and the double-digit tip (generous to the last, and you might want to come back) and you have a bill suitable for framing.
Transportation
Mistresses don’t have cars because they don’t need them. Public transportation is something they once read about in the paper. Your car is too risky and occupies attentions that are better directed elsewhere. Taxis are dirty, driven by garrulous maniacs and generally unromantic. You have no real choice but the limousine.
It all mounts up.