method for collection is with an artificial vagina, but in some cases that doesn’t work, so someone needs to manually extract the specimen from the stallion. That’s right, manually. And as I was reading all about it, one thought kept ringing in my mind: If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I hope Phillip comes back as the guy who jerks off the horses.
Does that sound bitchy? I don’t mean it to. It’s just that he was the second man in my life to let me down so dramatically that I was unable to cope. The first was my father and let’s face it, no matter how bitterly disappointed you may be in your father you still never wish upon him a lifetime of giving hand jobs to horses.
But the days when Phillip and I were together do not seem real to me anymore, which is to say I recall a lot of events but I have no recollection of how they felt or tasted or smelled. I remember meeting a shy, brilliant boy in the registration office on our first day at the Harvard Business School. He was older than I, by seven years. He’d been on Wall Street and his firm was paying his tuition in Cambridge. He was a genius, and they all saw it even then, as anybody would have. I remember his bushy black hair, unkempt and curly in the back, which did not suit his face at all. I remember we were both outcasts, to a degree; me because of my father, Phillip because he came from the wrong side of the tracks. Phillip was from Brooklyn, the very definition of self-made. His father, a sweet and charming man, delivered milk. Phillip, on his way to graduating first in our class at HBS, always told me, “They don’t teach us anything in these schools more valuable than what I learned on the streets in Brooklyn.” Phillip was a fighter, and he fought dirty when he had to.
I also saw a different side of him, though. I was the only one around with whom he would occasionally let his guard down. He could be very funny. His humor was caustic and sarcastic, which I thought betrayed his insecurity at being the only Brooklyn boy in the most prestigious class in American education. And he loved old movies, as I do. That was where we really bonded. He especially loved Humphrey Bogart; in fact, the only time he was ever goofy was when boarding an airplane. No matter where we were, he would always break into the famous lines from Casablanca.
“You’re getting on that plane,” he would say, baring his teeth like Bogart, in a vocal impression that was dead-on. “If you don’t you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
I have always loved that movie, and I loved Phillip madly. It was an Ingrid Bergman kind of love, only I was much too selfish to ever consider sending him away for the good of the Resistance. Let Paris fall and the Germans come marching up Fifth Avenue, I wasn’t letting that man get away. Which is why the way it ended hurt me so, and why to this day I hope to someday see him whacking off a stallion.
They say the best revenge is living well, and I’m not buying that, either. Nobody is living better than I am; I have a duplex on Park Avenue, a driver, a chef, an assistant, and a killer house in South Hampton, and I did it all on my own. But I still haven’t gotten past what happened with Phillip and I doubt I ever will, and I wish to god he was ten times more miserable than I am.
If that sounds bitchy, I guess I don’t really care.
SAMANTHA
FUCK HIM.
With every step I ran, those words were in my head. And they were liberating; those two words freed me from my self-pity. Anger is inspirational. Anger has launched wars, cured diseases, conquered civilizations; it’s not always the most beneficent of emotions but damned if it doesn’t help get things done. And now it was helping me. The anger surged through me and propelled me with each step I took. It helped. And as I ran, I started to remember who I am.
Fuck him.
I’m not a politician’s wife. I’m a jock. I was the captain of the soccer and lacrosse teams in high school. I ran three marathons