WE’VE COVERED a lot of territory, I think you’ll agree—getting ahead on the job, fighting jungle warfare, traveling on business in sexy style, stealing . . . What we haven’t covered—or uncovered—yet are office affairs. (I know you thought we’d never get there!)
A lot of otherwise perfectly hip people, it seems to me, don’t take the subject of office affairs very seriously. They think of office romance as mere purple puppy passion among some junior clerks and attribute carnal lust only to a few walrussy-faced tycoons who chase their secretaries around the desk.
Based on my own observations and experiences in nineteen different offices, I’m convinced that offices are sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity house weekends, Hollywood swimming parties, Cary Grant’s smile or the Playboy center-fold, and more action takes place in them than in a nymphet’s daydreams.
Office romance not serious? Dynasties are toppled, new beneficiaries named in wills, stock issues plunge, new corporation heads are elected—not to mention girls getting pregnant, sexually defunct men getting funct and married ladies who thought they had it made finding it’s all unmade just because some man goes ape over some girl in some office!
We’ve got to keep in mind who’s saying these things, of course. You know how one person will attend a party and say it was the greatest little party he ever went to while some other guy who attended the same party will say it was a thumping bore. Well this is my view of the party, and I do honestly believe these things to be true!
1. No office anywhere on earth is so puritanical, impeccable, elegant, sterile or incorruptible as not to contain the yeast for at least one affair, probably more. You can say it couldn’t happen here, but just let one yeasty type into the place and first thing you know the bread starts rising!
2. Practically every man in an office has had, is having, or is capable of having an affair at some time in his life. No matter how fine his character, how much he loves his wife or how happy he is at home, under the right (or wrong, depending on your viewpoint) set of circumstances, any adult male is a candidate. The circumstances would, of course, include being acted upon by a certain person. If she never happened to him, maybe it never would either. (There are any number of “shes” around in a man’s lifetime.)
3. Single girls are equally “good” candidates. In the life of almost every single girl in an office I think you will find a current affair, past affair or contemplated affair. Never overestimate the resistance of Miss Mousy Mousecrat typing away at her Smith-Corona. You think she’d thrash out like an octopus if a man tried anything funny! Of course she would if he walked right up to her desk and blurted out an indecent proposal. After weeks of wooing and flattery, however—people have time in offices, they both work there every day—she’s apt to be in a more receptive mood.
With the exception of engaged girls, very young girls, deeply religious or frightened femmes of any age who have hermetically sealed themselves off from men (I know one who calls her sixty-eight-year-old mother every afternoon from work and says, “Is din-din on the table, dearest?”), I think most girls in offices are seeing or will see combat, if only with the man they ultimately marry.
4. Far from being minor, transient, pippypoo associations, romances and affairs starting through work can be some of the most cliff-hanging, satisfying, memorable episodes in any two persons’ lives. Even when things end sadly, a participant rarely says (nor, I believe, even thinks) he would have given his right arm for the whole thing not to have happened. He—or she—fantasizes the rest of his or her life, remembering the best of it.
5. Most husbands, except utter nutburgers, don’t cheat in the first few years of marriage. About 94 per cent do after that. This is the Gurley-Brown Survey, you must remember, not scientifically documented, but a product of personal research! (I was willing to turn all this information over to Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin, but nobody asked for it.)
6. The girl a married man “succumbs” to is forty-nine times out of fifty—again by my “inside” information—a girl he has met through his work, although she may not work in his own office. She seldom comes to him from his country club, church group, social milieu or alumni organization. She is hardly ever his wife’s best friend.
7. Married women who work and become involved in an affair often draw their partners from some place other than the office. And they don’t get involved nearly so often.
8. The blame (or responsibility, depending on that viewpoint!) for affairs rests about equally with men and girls. Though men usually instigate the office affair, girls second the motion enthusiastically—while pretending with all their insincere little hearts they were talked into something! No girl, in my opinion, is ever the categorically “put upon,” innocent victim of a predatory married or unmarried man. So there!
9. At least once in an important man’s career he makes a decision affecting hundreds or even thousands of people—to say nothing of sales, earnings and profits—based purely on whether something is good for his romance. He moves the convention from Salt Lake City to San Francisco because she lives in San Francisco. He says, “We’ll be open the day after Thanksgiving,” because she’ll be in the office. And on a minor level, things are being done every minute not for the stated reasons but because somebody’s romance makes them necessary. One man I know left his neady typed speech on his girl friend’s dresser in Cleveland and flew to New York without it. His office just had time to teletype the whole thing to him from their carbon copy. People wondered why Mr. M. read from yards and yards of scrollwork like a Roman senator.
Sex and the office!
10. Companies are not usually destroyed by sex. Except when kings or board chairmen abdicate for the women they love, most sex at the office concerns only the people it concerns. Other people may try to make it their business, but it isn’t really.
An office affair doesn’t necessarily undermine office morale either, except for the person who had his eye on one of the participants for himself or in cases where the head of the organization falls into the hands of a ruthless, power-mad girl barracuda. That’s bad, of course, but usually they both get fired pretty soon and things settle down.
11. There is no more sex at the office now than there was twenty-five years ago. It’s just come up from underground.
12. Some of the people who cluck-cluck the loudest about office affairs are ex-participants who played and knocked off—or didn’t knock off, got their divorces and married each other—and are peculiarly hard-put, in their dotage, to remember that this sort of thing happens to perfecdy nice, normal people.
Those are my personal primary conclusions about sex and the office. Now here are my secondary conclusions:
1. It’s impossible to chart what kind of people will get involved with each other. Girls you know to be as wholesome as wheat germ and skim milk will walk willingly straight into the arms of a leech. The chandelier-swinging office “party girl” who plans to marry a millionaire can get hooked and stay hooked by the assistant bookkeeper. Chemistry!
2. Timing is everything in office affairs. It depends on who’s looking and who’s there to be looked at. For the first twelve years of a man’s marriage he’d be immune to Claudia Cardinale bringing in his breakfast coffee. In the thirteenth year he goes off his rocker for a file girl with a receding chin, crowded teeth and a twenty-four-inch measurement around each kneecap. When a married man has an affair, it’s probably less likely that one special girl got to him and unhinged him than it is that he was ready to be happened to by almost anybody pleasant. His affair is a symptom of a troubled marriage rather than an irresistible urge to merge with a particular lovely new girl.
3. Office affairs are not the hurry-up, gobble-down, hit and run things people on the outside think they are. Only a Don Juan or maybe an occasional convention-goer would gobble. The grand passions that cause the stock-market dips and new marriages to form often develop after the two people have known each other for several years. (One friend of mine began her affair with an office crony after they had tried twenty-two tax cases together. Another saw her present husband rise from stockroom boy to display manager to president of the store to head of the chain before their liaison began. Very patient girl!)
4. Office affairs don’t actually go on in offices—behind locked doors, on top of desks, in cloak rooms and that sort of thing—as the uninitiated seem to think. They are rooted at the office, but they blossom at tennis, in seaside villas when two people are on the same business trip, in penthouse apartments, in Buick Rivieras, or wherever lightning has room to strike. One man and woman I know (he’s married to somebody else) have managed to rendezvous with each other in practically every major city on two continents since their affair began in 1951. That’s how far things can branch out.
5. The office affair (except for that naughty Matinee thing I described), has more sustaining it than just plain sex. The people who think it consists of dirty little half-hour episodes—people sneaking off to a motel and that sort of thing—are fuzzy observers. Many an affair is grounded in friendship and mutual respect and has deep emotional and intellectual rapport going for it. That’s why office affairs aren’t so easy to bash in the head. Marriage may be the only legal relationship, but it is far from the only meaningful one. So there, there, there again!
6. Participants in office affairs are not always dashing young executives and their beauty-contest-winning young assistants. A magazine publisher of fifty-six I know has been having an affair for fourteen years now with a woman who is mousy, motherly and about as chic as apple pandowdy. She is fifty-two, softly sensuous and very kind. Friends of this couple say he’d come apart at the seams without her. She makes it possible for him to get through the day.
7. Offices are yeasty because everybody is at his best—clothes, make-up, perfume, brains, jokes and energy! No girl ever sees a man in his scrappy pajamas and scrappy early-morning disposition, and he never sees her wired for sound in her curlers—not early in the game anyway. The hours spent together in offices are limited, therefore a litde mystery can prevail indefinitely.
8. There are no friendships between virile men and womanly women anywhere, in my opinion, completely devoid of sexual overtones. (And that’s good!) A man always wonders what a woman is like in bed, not necessarily with him but with anybody. She wonders the same thing about him. All this speculating among men and women in offices, even if nobody does anything, causes sexy waves.
Those are my major and minor conclusions about sex and the office—but wait, there’s more! Case histories, too. (You can put down the cyanide. I’ve changed all the names and identification labels!)
Nobody worries much about single men and single girls becoming involved with each other (except people who don’t want anybody to have any fun in bed anywhere), but just everybody seems to worry about married men and single girl combinations. What about them?
The popular version of why married men “pounce” on girls at the office is that they are lecherous, spoiled, licentious, neurotic, treacherous, lascivious, selfish, undisciplined, lustful and immoral.
I think they do it because they enjoy it! Some men are all those adjectives, to be sure, but many are not. There are men who, if there isn’t anything else around to chase, will chase and eat their own tails like the live lobsters do when they’re shipped from Maine to California without enough ice. More often, however, I think married men become involved with girls at the office because men are human. Can any attractive man really go through life attracted to just one woman when waves and waves and waves of lovely girls continue to wash up against him every year at work? We keep pretending he can, but I don’t think so.
Some men do stay faithful to their wives, but the reason doesn’t have much to do with their desiring only that woman—in my opinion. Some men stay more faithful than others because they are not powerfully sexed. The factory was kind of shut down in childhood by too many parental don’ts and mustnts and naughty-naughties, so they married a girl who was also undersexed by the same influences and lived happily, unsexily ever after. I honesdy think nobody has any idea how many husbands and wives simply don’t go to bed with each at all and don’t go to bed with anybody else either. The “undersexed” man can be shored up, however, if a patient, enthusiastic, possibly predatory woman happens to wiggle-waggle into his life. If she happens, she will usually be somebody he met through work.
Other men abstain from extra-marital sex because other things in fife are more important to them and they have too much to risk. In my opinion, that’s their reason. In the case of the high-placed government official, the desire for girls may just not rank with the fear that an enemy could “get something” on him. Every so often, however, one of these stable heads of dynasty or state does drop off the vine into the arms of the woman he loves, and hypocritical noises are heard from those who have yet to be found out.
Some married men do not get mixed up with other women because they prefer boys.
There are men, however, and I admit it, who never have anything to do with girls at the office because they are genuinely nutty about their wives. These obviously are well-adjusted—emotionally, sexually and every other way—men. Bless them! They too can be toppled! It can happen on a business trip with twenty lonely nights ahead, twenty lovely girls in the firm they’re visiting, etc., etc. Yeast is no respecter of persons!
A man who insists he never has a twinge of desire for another woman, never fantasizes about other women, and lusts only for his wife—after twenty years of marriage, mind you—is, in my opinion, a phony. Even the young husband who ostentatiously loves his wife but shuts out all other women from his friendship, kindness, affection and concern probably doesn’t love anybody from the gut—including his bride. He’s cold as Kelsey’s. (That’s a seaweed, dear, not another sex survey.) Either that or he isn’t sure of her. A worried, tormented lover is usually faithful.
Aside from feeling a natural attraction toward many women in a lifetime, I think men also stray for other reasons. (I had some of this dope as far back as 1945, but the sociology department of Indiana University never sent for it.)
1. Husbands and wives get to living in different worlds. It’s chauffeuring, souffles and azalea club for her—back orders, production step-up, profit-and-loss for him. The girl at his elbow while the big merger is shaping up nicely may also get to be the girl at his elbow at cocktail time. (Husbands and wives who share business ventures together often stay more closely knit.)
2. A man may live so far away from his office he’s too woofed to be a decent mate when he gets home—yet nobody, and especially his wife, will hear of selling Twelve Acres and moving to an apartment closer in. Earlier in the day at lunch or cocktails, before his charm and energy ran out, there were other girls around to be impressed by it.
The business trips that separate men from their wives are full of yeast, too, as we just mentioned . . . exotic atmosphere, expense account, freedom from spies and all that.
3. Husbands and wives get used to each other. She can finish his sentences. He can start and finish hers. They get bored with each other in bed. As for becoming a sexy new her, as all the magazines promise she can, a zebra doesn’t change stripes. Even a twenty-nine-year-old zebra—I mean wife—is still the same wife in new black lingerie. People are stunned when a man strays from a beautiful gracious lady to a creature with knobby elbows and no eyelashes at all, but you see, she’s a different zebra.
If you think this is just one woman’s opinion, here’s what the eminent psychoanalyst and New York University professor Dr. Ernest van den Haag said in an article in Harpers Magazine: “Though by no means weaker, the marital bond is quite different from the bond of love. Yet, instead of acknowledging that love and marriage are different but equally genuine relationships, they (marriage counselors) depict love as a kind of dependable wheel horse that can be harnessed to the carriage of married life. For them, any other kind of love must be an ‘immature’ or neurotic’ fantasy, something to be condemned as Hollywood-inspired and ‘unrealistic’ romanticism. It is as though a man opposed to horse racing—for good reasons perhaps—were to argue that race horses are not real, that all real horses are draft horses. ... It is foolish to pretend that the passionate romantic longing doesn’t exist or is ‘neurotic,’ i.e. shouldn’t exist; it is as foolish to pretend that romantic love can be made part of a cozy domesticity. The truth is simple enough, though it can make life awfully complicated: there are two things—love and affection (or marital love). They do not usually pull together as a team.”
Very well, while a man is deeply caught up in one of these loves at home—the affectionate kind—he is perhaps experiencing the other kind at the office ... or at least daydreaming about it.
4. Men stray because they get cut off from sex in marriage. A friend tells me in the chic New York commuting town he lives in at least 75 per cent of his married cronies have been expelled from the conjugal bed. Nothing sudden, just a gradual shutting down of the shop. If he’s anywhere near telling the truth (and apparently some of these men compare notes!), that town alone could be liberating as many as fifty or sixty deprived males into the havens of advertising, public relations and the law.
5. Wives get older and men prefer younger women. They find the most convenient supply of fresh young beauties in offices—with new shipments every June when colleges let out.
6. A man strays if his marriage is really unhappy. I don’t mean the kind we all have . . . fight, scrap, scream, kiss, make-up, fight, scrap, scream, and so forth, but I mean the man who’s had it up to there. He meets a girl at the office who really seems to prefer him alive to dead, and the yeast starts rising.
I think you can sum up why some married men behave as they do this way:
A man is a pie. Part of the pie is his house, one portion is his wife, another portion his children, another his business and investments and then there’s a golf or fishing or hobby portion and a sex portion.
People who don’t know any better think that the only parts of the pie which really represent him are the wife and children and business part, and that the sex part isn’t even a piece of the pie unless it’s sliced at home. Well, anybody who knows anything about pies knows that every piece of the same pie is real whether it’s eaten at home or away from home. For some men, for example, the golf and fishing part is the biggest piece of pie of all, and you can’t say they aren’t genuine pie, either. A girl having an affair with a man gets into trouble when she pretends the wife and house and family pieces of pie are smaller than they really are.
These are the reasons men get involved at the office. (Maybe Kinsey was too busy at the time, but I don’t see why Pomeroy or Martin wouldn’t have found all this enfightening.) Now what about the girls?
With “everything to lose” why does a single girl fall for a married man with whom she works? Because a lot of single girls decide finally that the only thing they have to lose by falling for a married man is their loneliness, that’s why! Any girl who’s been single a few years, or single again after being married, knows how long it is between “live ones.”
Two attractive friends of mine were discussing this man-shortage thing at my house the other night. “We got out a pencil and paper recently,” Polly said, “and decided to chart the men in both our lives since graduating from high school. (One girl is twenty-eight, the other thirty-three.) Jean averaged one good eligible man about every three years and two months—somebody she could marry or fall in love with. Mine were slightly further between—one big possibility about every four years.”
No, these girls were not losers. They were attractive women who liked men but found that big gaps between eligibles is just the way the ginger snaps.
In between eligible men there are, of course, the spooky-spooks and sub-men single girls do go out with but couldn’t marry or have an affair with. Granted one girl’s spooky-spook may be another girl’s darling, if he’s spooky to you, you can’t help it. Meanwhile, back at the office, during your spook and sub-men dating era and before an “eligible” shows up, you keep running into adorable, whole* hale, hearty, smart, attentive married men who are supposed to be frightening, bad, naughty, revolting, scruffy-moraled, skiddy-scat taboo—but who can remember?
As for the built-in “safeguards” that used to keep girls from getting involved with any kind of man before marriage (and sometimes after marriage), a lot of them just don’t exist any more. A young friend of mine who works for a woman’s magazine (don’t get nervous, McCalTs!) says, “Modern girls are too informed and too comfortable with men to be as frightened of them as you’d have to be to stay completely physically clear of them. We’ve danced, fought, studied, played football and necked with them since we were teen-agers. How in the world are you going to be frightened?
“Girls know about diaphragms and how babies get here and all that too,” she adds. “They also know their own anatomy and show off quite a lot of it in a bikini every summer. You just can’t pretend your own flesh is some strange foreign substance that doesn’t belong to you the way girls did fifty years ago. We can’t go back to pretending we’re untouchable and marble-coated.”
When I recendy visited Harry Richman, the veteran night-club entertainer, he said, “When I first entered show business back in the twenties, men-about-town and college boys used to flock to the stage doors to take the chorines to dinner. Now they just take out their own girl friends” (who apparently look as good as, dress better than and know as much about men as chorines!).
Okay, then, girls in offices are not exacdy untouchable. Would girls in offices stay more cold-cream pure if men didn’t tempt them? My friend Charlotte, a wow of a pretty working girl, says, “I don’t believe for one moment that girls in offices are poor little grasshoppers who are preyed on by those mean old praying man-rises. A girl can say no. Just plain no.”
A girl does say no all the time to door-to-door salesmen, the service station guys who want to put new tires on her Chevy, dull girl friends she doesn’t want to have dinner with, parents she doesn’t want to move back home with. The word isn’t unknown to her. Just watch a girl get rid of a real creep who absolutely revolts her . . . it’s swish, swash, wham-bam, right out the door without any trouble. When a girl doesn’t say no to a man, it’s very likely because she doesn’t want to.
Girls who are bewildered and shocked by a man’s physical interest in them seem to me a little phony too. Girls happen to have a powerful, built-in allure for men. It’s there and God gave it to us. To pretend to be outraged and petulant because a man wants us “that way” is like having the Maltese Falcon buried upstairs in a dresser drawer and acting surprised because Sam Spade and a bunch of hoodlums are milling around outside the door.
Whether a girl says yes or no to a man in the office, it’s my opinion she’s not really that insulted by his desire for her. Unless he is a real monster with one beady eye in the middle of his forehead or long green hair all over his back, I think she will remember most propositions not unkindly. Somebody wanted her. Somebody flipped.
Aside from the fact that office affairs come about because men feel needy and girls, while pretending to be fortresses, actually cruise around with their “available” lights turned on, what other specific reasons cause girls to get involved?
These:
1. A dynamic executive reminds a girl of her father—the one she lost or never had. If she works close to him, “his own dear little girl” finally gets to him and they become a thing.
2. A man has power and money—more aphrodisiac to some girls than the physical endowments of Mr. Universe. This particular girl has no wish (unless buried very deep) to be that powerful person herself, but she finds a certain thrill in thrilling a tycoon. The “dear friend” of an automotive tycoon—a girl I’ve known for many years—says, “To have this kind of man excited by you brings out the sexiest, most womanly, female equality in you. In bed you are the tycoon. Not that he is weak or unattractive or lacks potency, but that suddenly, simply because you’re a woman whom he adores going to bed with, you become quite, quite power-laden. In his office, he is king. In your bed, you bestow favors, you are queenly and in command even if you are as highly sexed as he and need the love-making as much as he. It’s delicious!”
3. Even if there’s no affair, a poor girl may enjoy playing Cinderella by going out with a married man from the office who is out of her league socially, educationally, professionally or financially. One girl describes an Alice-in-Wonderland fortnight with a “foreign potentate” (she works for the government) like this: “He had his own private plane, his own private limousine and even his own private bagpipers to play concerts for us at dinner. He used to send the car around for me to go shopping at Ohrbach’s or do whatever I needed to do on my lunch hour. Fair or unfair, it made my regular beaux seem a little hard up for things to do.”
4. A barracuda girl may want professional power herself but not have the capacity for it—or her company won’t hear of it. She takes on a lover who has the power she wants, gets inside him like a tapeworm (hope you don’t mind mixed species) and starts sapping. After she’s sapped a while, he gets skinnier and skinnier, and the business doesn’t look so robust either! Nobody can get the guy on the phone. His own lieutenants can’t get in to see him, and heads start rolling from the bodies of anybody who threatens his girl adviser. Pretty soon his is one of the heads (management will stand just so much), and usually litde Evita’s rolls along with his. This is the kind of affair that can really damage a company, at least temporarily.
5. Sometimes an office affair provides a girl the opportunity of getting out of herself. You don’t change leopard spots, of course, but you may discover some new spots you didn’t know you had just by brushing your coat a bit.
“I’d always been such a nice girl,” Evelyn recalls. (And of course this is a true story. With so many real ones to choose from, I don’t need to make anything up.) “I’m kind of a Sunbonnet Sue, if you know what I mean—the one all the mothers trust to take their kids to the circus or ball game, and even wives don’t worry if their husbands have dinner with me when the wives go to Portland to visit their sisters.
“Well, last year my company sent me to Detroit to do a drug survey, and the first day I was there I met the general manager of the drug chain. Usually I have to badger managers to let me talk to their clerks, but this man was extremely interested in the whole thing. He stayed while I asked all my questions, and I followed him back to his office still yakking away. I don’t know what came over me that day or how I knew—I’m not one of those sexy broads who expects action—but it came to me—this man is asking to be led astray, and by me. I mean he was so sincere ... so nice ... so very attractive, but he didn’t know he was. Or maybe it was just because I was away from home and found some new courage. Anyway, it was as though I heard Joan of Arc voices saying, If you don’t do something about this man—or at least try—you’ll regret it the rest of your life!
“ ‘Look,’ I said, Til have all my surveying finished by this evening. If you’d like to look it over I could leave it somewhere for you.’ (I wasn’t up to asking anybody to dinner. Even this was pretty nervy for a Sunbonnet Sue.)
“He took the hint and said, Why don’t you come back here about seven o’clock. We’ll grab a bite (“grab a bite” is what a man says when he doesn’t want dinner to sound like a big deal) and 111 look over the stuff’
“Well, I finished the survey, went back to my hotel and put on the closest thing to a witching dress I own. It was just plain black crepe but had kind of a low neck. We had dinner—it wasn’t just grabbing a bite, he took me to an elegant restaurant and we still talked about the drug business. But ... I don’t know ... for practically the first time in my life I felt kind of lady of the evening.’ I thought I might be having the same effect on him as Sadie Thompson had on that missionary. Where I got the courage I’ll never know, but I said, Why don’t we go back to my hotel for a drink?’ and he said, ‘Fine.’
‘We never even stopped in the lobby. I had a key with me and we just got on the elevator without saying a word. I never did turn on the lights when we got to my room. The minute we were inside the door I put my arms around him and began talking as though I’d been doing this sort of thing all my life. I said I’d worn the closest thing to a wicked dress I owned because he was so attractive. I also said I’d worn the least possible amount of underwear because I wanted to be a slinky, sultry minx, which I’d never been before in my life but he inspired me. In other words, I sort of told the truth, so he’d know I knew I wasn’t a sexpot but that it was he who brought this on, which of course he did.
“I wasn’t a desperate old maid or anything. I’d had men before, but they had always made the advances. I just kept murmuring and purring this sexy stuff which I honestly felt toward this nice, middle-aged man. I was enjoying myself utterly because I was seducing him instead of getting mauled by some Adonis who was getting around to me simply because I was a girl—maybe number three thousand seven hundred and two on his list.
“I brought it off and it was wonderful.”
To reprise then, a girl may get involved with men in the office because she’s looking for a father, she loves a man’s power and money—among other things; she loves only power and money; she wants to be Cinderella for a spell, or she is a leopardess who sees the opportunity to brush up her spots. She may also have a fling at the office to prove she isn’t getting any older, to prove to herself and observers that she likes men (not girls), to sink into a man so he’ll marry her and, well, just because she’s a girl!
Married girls in offices have affairs, too, but I think they’re more likely to stray for the same reasons men do.
Married or single, doesn’t a girl indulging in an office affair ever consider what she might be doing to a man’s wife?
Remember about the pie. The girl friend only knows about the sexy portion that’s with her. She hears very little about the family-man chunk. She knows there is a wife, of course, but the woman may be as indistinct as a smoke ring.
Technically the girl isn’t damaging the wife if the wife never knows—and many and many a wife never knows.
A man who cheats flagrandy year in, year out usually doesn’t stay married. One affair, however, doesn’t necessarily make a divorce. By the time it happens, the marriage, paradoxical as this sounds, may be a pretty rock-founded institution which a man isn’t about to dissolve and thereby disrupt his life. Too awkward. Too expensive.
“I used to think a man couldn’t have anything to do with another woman without his wife being dashed to bits,” a close friend told me. “It isn’t true. I’ve found that a casual encounter with some bar-broad isn’t the least bit important to me or my relationship with Tom. (Not his name, of course.) I did ask very early in our marriage that he never embarrass me by telling me about it.”
Another married friend says, “You can’t help but know when a husband cheats, and I’ve even giggled over the fact. Men think they’re so smart at concealing these little peccadillos and then practically spell it out for you in bed! Any man has pretty standard bed patterns. Well, suddenly something new is introduced or suggested, and you know damned well he hasn’t been reading any book on sex, so where did he get that idea? From some other dame, of course!”
Another reason a girl in an office doesn’t balk at an affair or stop to worry about a man’s wife is because of the great pleasure it affords her! Never underestimate the joy for a single woman—even one who wants to get married—of having a man around her house at an hour and in a room he wouldn’t usually be in if she were only dating him. Some women just don’t find that channeling their physical energy into basketball or nature-observing walks does the trick.
One girl I know stops short of having an affair—not until she’s married, no siree—but has a trusty office friend who every few weeks squeezes the daylights out of her. Old Mike comes over to her apartment, they have a chicken sandwich, they tussle, she fights like a Zulu and nothing happens. But the physical struggle “gets a lot of it out of my system,” she says. I haven’t talked to this girl in months but I do keep tabs on the strangulations and ax murders in her city. Old Mike could lose his temper.
Some girls really have no reason to feel guilty on a wife’s behalf. If the woman and her husband are not in conjugal harmony, the man’s office friend may be supplying the one important commodity he doesn’t enjoy at home. Ironically, while the girl plumps for him to get a divorce and marry her, the ingredient she supplies may be what’s holding his marriage together.
Rightly or wrongly, some working girls think that if a man is attracted to them, they’re entitled. Husband-luring is like landing a job in the Depression. There weren’t enough jobs then. There aren’t enough eligible men now.
Girls also rationalize that if a woman loses her husband she deserves to. The Jezebel may have something there. We all know husbands set adrift among models, starlets, and barracudas who do not start affairs. Are they more moral? Probably they are just happier at home.
One wife with a happy husband reveals this technique:
“He thinks I’m a nymphomaniac. Since the day we were married I have pretended to be out of my head about going to bed with Jack. Oh, I don’t mean that I never actually do enjoy it. Perhaps one time out of six I have a good time myself. The rest of the nights I do an Academy Award performance, and this has been going on for thirteen years,” she says. “Sometimes I’m so weary at the end of the day I think I would pay a hundred dollars to turn over and go to sleep (they have four children and no help), but he never knows. If I can lift my big toe off the bed, I respond. I’m such a ‘sexpot’ Jack is even a little bit afraid he doesn’t supply me with enough sex, and I’ve never tried to talk him out of this!”
A girl may not feel too guilty about charming a married man, because if she works for him, she can’t help observing what a spoiled, demanding creature his wife is. If a good secretary has to be away from the office two hours because her temporary filling fell out, she’s a frazzle of anxiety for having inconvenienced her boss. Yet it isn’t a bit unusual for her to answer the phone one morning and hear, “This is Mrs. Westerhaven, Miss Betz. Would you tell Mr. Westerhaven my car broke down over on Twelfth Street and they’ll have to keep it overnight. I’m picking his car up at the lot and would you tell him to take the bus home?” That’s what he does, too.
If Miss Betz should fall in love with Mr. Westerhaven, she may feel she has more real regard for him than his wife, although in all fairness, in about seven years it may be she who is taking the car from the lot and sending him home by bus. New wives get to behaving very much like old ones!
Despite everything, I think wives still have the best and biggest piece of the pie. (Listen, don’t think this whole report isn’t making me nervous too. I’m a wife, for heaven’s sake!)
All right, that’s the why and how of sex and the office, but what are the actual machinations? Who does what to whom and when?
A man may do a simple thing like ask a girl to lunch. A girl may ask a man she works with to a party. It’s like boy meets girl anywhere. You and a co-worker may work late several nights in a row and the last night out go off to hear Miles Davis. You may live near a dreamboat and have a car pool. Developments develop, that’s all.
As for sinking into men who come into your office from the outside, the procedure varies. One secretary I know was told by her boss to map out a very extensive sightseeing and night club itinerary for a visiting general and his party. When the general got to town, there wasn’t any party, just one youngish general. Her boss suggested Madelyn go on the tour herself with the visitor and . . . proceedings proceeded.
Another stenographer I know was sent by her firm to a visiting executive’s hotel suite to pack up his belongings while he finished an important meeting. When he returned to the hotel she was to rush him to the airport in her car and get him on the six-fifteen jet for London without fail. He reached the hotel before she finished packing, took one look at her and announced, “I didn’t make it back in time and missed my plane. People miss planes all the time. Where shall we have dinner?”
One boy and girl I know detested each other for two years. He absolutely made her flesh crawl. She, he said, was dense and un-talented. He did everything in his power to get her fired. She got ill if he was in the same room. One Christmas a musical-comedy production was needed for a client’s sales convention. She had been a singer and he wrote first-rate limericks, so their practical boss teamed them up.
For two days our boy wouldn’t go near her. He locked his door. The third day she took a Miltown, telephoned him and said they’d really better have a conference. The fourth day they went home to her apartment to work because the office was so noisy they couldn’t hear themselves think. The fifth day they moved to a rented house at the beach so they could really concentrate. The sixth day they were madly in love, and one year later (when his divorce became final) they were married.
Sex at the office!
Now the time has come to tell you three little bedtime stories. They all actually happened and they all started in offices. These three “heroines”—all of whom are personal friends or close acquaintances—came to my house and I tape-recorded while we talked. What you read here is right off the sound track—with only slight editing by me but with names, jobs, companies and cities changed to protect the guilty.
En garde!