Days before my 30th birthday, I was naked in a swanky Manhattan hotel room, gazing at the Hudson out a floor to ceiling window, waiting for a former NFL player to join me for the evening. At the time I assumed that this was just going to be one more in a long string of interesting hookups -- like the Afghanistan veteran who'd been deployed three times, or the lanky white boy with the Japanese name courtesy of his adoptive parents, or the male model with a business degree from the University of Phoenix. What I got instead was a months-long relationship that gave me a rare window into the life of the celebrity mistress -- a life far less glamorous than I had once assumed.
I'd never been drawn to celebrities, and I didn't really care much for sports, but somehow I'd found it hard to resist the giant gentleman who'd approached me at a bar the night before. He was charming, he was funny, and it didn't hurt that he had a couple of Super Bowl victories under his belt. After an hour or so of chatting, we ended up outside, making out like teenagers just steps from the West Side Highway as I promised to meet him at his hotel room the following night.
The morning after meeting my new paramour, I prepared myself for our evening together the way every modern girl does: by Googling him. Making my way through Web page after Web page, I watched videos of his sports victories, read stories about his post-football accomplishments, and, eventually, discovered t...
Maybe it would have been easier, or simpler, if he were single. But at the same time, his marriage afforded me a degree of remove that I found appealing. After a string of disappointing attempts at relationships, there was something appealing about entering into a relationship that was destined to fail, through no fault of my own. I wouldn't have to worry where this was going, because I knew it wasn't going anywhere. And given my date's wealth and fame, it seemed likely that he'd try to compensate for all he couldn't give me by doubling down on everything he could.
Like the rest of America, I'd long been intrigued by the women who wound up splashed across the pages of tabloids. And though I didn't exactly yearn to wind up with my personal life made glaringly public, I was, I admit, curious to know what it would be like to be one of those girls. I imagined glamorous nights in fancy hotel rooms, expensive gifts and, of course, mind-blowing sex. Having lived in Manhattan for more than a decade, I'd long been on the outside looking into the bubble of privilege that affords accessories costing more than my month's rent. The idea of gaining access to that world -- just by having sex that I wanted to have anyway -- was too tempting to resist.
The first night I spent with him lived up to my expectations. We had sex all over the hotel room, and in the morning he treated me to a fancy room service breakfast and cab fare. Bleary-eyed and smiling, I tottered out of the hotel in my too tall heels and cabbed it across the island to my apartment, imagining a future full of illicit sex in hotel rooms, beautiful Louboutins, and all the trappings of a life my moderate salary couldn't begin to afford.
My new acquaintance quickly declared me to be his New York girlfriend, and it wasn't long before our relationship began to resemble something intimate. We'd spend hours each day messaging each other over AIM (text message having been deemed too risky). I learned about his likes, his dislikes, his secret desires, his fantasies -- and, surprisingly, about his wife.
Going into this relationship I had assumed, as many people do, that a man in search of an extramarital affair must be unhappy at home. But I quickly learned that was not the case. From the get-go, my celebrity boyfriend told me that he loved his wife, that he enjoyed sex with her, but that he simply yearned for other things as well. In a perfect world, he'd be able to mesh his home sex life with his away one -- but as things stood, he was content to have sex with his wife at home, have sex with me in New York, and persuade me to talk about group sex with his wife during our numerous cybersex sessions.
It was an unusual arrangement, to be sure, but I found myself enjoying it. I wasn't interested in a deep emotional connection with anyone, so my boyfriend's attached status didn't bother me; as long as the sex was good, and the relationship entertaining, I was happy to stick around. And the more we talked, the more excited I got about the possibility of being with him: He promised me fancy dinners, he promised me sex toys, he promised to fulfill my wildest sexual fantasies. I had no illusions about what I was doing -- it was, after a fashion, a sort of proto-sex work -- but I also had no qualms about it. Approaching the relationship as something transactional provided a feeling of remove that gave me a sense of emotional safety. While it was possible that someone would end up hurt by this arrangement, it sure wasn't going to be me. Given that my boyfriend's wife was a long-suffering, repeatedly cheated upon spouse, I assumed that she was either aware of the transgressions, or in a sad sort of denial that I didn't really feel much pity for.
The second time we hung out was less glamorous than the first. Though I'd been promised a fancy dinner and sex toys, the combination of a delayed arrival and an early morning meeting the next day meant a few hours of exhausted sex followed by me hailing a 7 a.m. cab after too little sleep. It wasn't quite what I'd expected, but I suppressed my disappointment as he promised, again and again, that next time he'd make it up to me. Next time we'd have dinner, next time he'd give me a birthday present, next time he'd make my fantasies come true.
There is something fundamentally strange about sleeping with a celebrity -- the inner conflict between feeling special, chosen somehow, by virtue of your place in their bed and the knowledge that you are, at the end of the day, merely the most recent addition to the nonstop parade of willing bed mates, like the realization that even if you're one in a million, there are still several thousand of you on the planet. In my conversations with the sports star, I did my best to differentiate myself from the masses. I was well aware that there were plenty of girls who'd be eager to take my place, but I was determined to prove myself better than all of them. Every time he'd compliment my technique, I'd feel a flush of pride: I was on my way to securing a place in, if not his heart, at least the part of the brain that controls the baser instincts.
At the same time, I found myself increasingly curious about his wife. It was hard not to be. Unbeknownst to her, this woman had wedged herself into my sex life, taking a privileged place in the fantasies I would discuss with him. I wanted to know more about this woman whom I kept professing to want to perform sexually for, whom my boyfriend wanted to see me sexually involved with, whom I was supposedly interested in inviting into my bedroom.
Again I turned to the Internet. It wasn't hard to find her on Facebook; more surprising was the fact that most of her updates were public. I read about her support for Barack Obama, her children's sports teams, and yes, her devoted husband. And I paged through her public albums, trying to figure out what, exactly, she looked like.
When I finally found a picture of her, I was stunned. Like her husband, she was in her late 30s; unlike him, she had aged prematurely, looking more like his mother than his wife. It was hard to reconcile this image with the woman I'd heard so many lurid fantasies about. It was also hard to deny that, in pictures together, they looked happy. They looked in love.
I tried to stop thinking about her. I was never in love with the guy, and the last thing I wanted was for him to leave his wife, so whatever happened between the two of them was none of my concern. I doubled down on my goal of working my way into the world of pampered mistresses. Little by little, my dedication started to pay off. Everything was coming together. And then it fell apart.
About a month into our relationship, we were scheduled to meet at an even swankier hotel than the last one, smack in the middle of midtown Manhattan. As I was on my way to the salon that morning, he sent me a message: The jig was up. His wife was on to him. We had to be more careful.
My concerns at this point were purely pragmatic. I didn't want to shell out money for a manicure if it was going to go to waste. When I pressed him for more information, he told me that he'd come up with a good lie and would still be seeing me that evening; again he promised me gifts and dinner and sex. I thought nothing of it and went on with my day.
When I didn't hear from him that evening, I went to the hotel at 8:30 as planned and waited in the lobby. For an hour and a half I waited. He didn't respond to instant messages, so I switched to texts. When that didn't work, I tried calling him. Finally, I gave up: It was obvious he wasn't coming. Furious, I hailed a cab and made my way home.
At 6 in the morning, I finally got a response. My phone buzzed loudly, rousing me from my sleep; the screen revealed a series of angry text messages from someone claiming to be my paramour's wife. She wanted me to stop talking to him, she said. She was going to call me right away to discuss my relationship with her man. The idea that she thought I would actually pick up the phone to be berated by her seemed ludicrous. I turned off my phone and went back to sleep.
A month later I was sitting at home on a Friday night when he messaged me. He was on the train to New York, he said, and he couldn't stop thinking about me. I should come spend the night with him, he said. I should come be with him.
I didn't want to sleep with him again, but curiosity made it hard for me to completely stay away. We started talking again, and though my dreams of being a kept woman had long since faded away, I discovered a new thrill to be had in our relationship: I could be relentlessly, cruelly mean to him, and still he would keep talking to me, still he enjoyed it.
"I love you," he'd say.
"I hate you," I'd respond. And still he'd thrill to my response, the knowledge that he'd gotten a response from me enough to satisfy him. It didn't matter how I felt about him, the fact he'd evoked any sort of strong feeling was more than enough to please him. I took full advantage of this quirk of his, using him as a sort of emotional punching bag for everything that annoyed me. He would tell me that we should have sex again; I'd respond disparagingly, telling him that he wasn't worth my time, that I wasn't about to leave my house just for him, that he'd have to buy me half of New York City to make me want him again. There was something satisfying to knowing that I was desirable enough for him to put up with my insults, my bitchiness, my anger.
And then one day, even that wasn't enough. My fantasy of playing a rich, married man, of using him to experience the finer things in life, had disintegrated into a tired, familiar feeling of disgust and disappointment. The sense of promise that had shimmered around our conversations had long since departed, and even my verbal abuse had begun to feel halfhearted. I stopped responding to his messages; eventually he stopped messaging me. My grand experiment as a mistress was over, and I found myself relieved to be moving on.
It would be easy to say that I felt bad about my time being the other woman: that I regretted the pain I may have caused another woman, that I regretted being a home wrecker. But it wouldn't be true. Whatever damage I may have done, it wasn't to anyone's marriage -- my ex and his wife are still together to this day, bonded in a marriage that will likely outlast any of his extracurricular activities. My image of life as a mistress as something gilded, glamorous and wonderfully free of any real responsibility, on the other hand, did not emerge intact. Being the other woman turned out much like any other casual relationship I'd ever had -- with a few more perks and gifts, to be sure, but far more headaches and broken promises to make me ever want to do it again.
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