One of Jack Armstrong’s (see chapter 3) clients was a woman named Bewildra Bates. She owned a small brewery here in town and occasionally came by our studio to drop off promotional work for her business. Whenever she stopped in, it was customary for her to spend a little time socializing with Jack and me. After a while I noticed that she was coming by without delivering work. She would stay to drink a couple of beers, smoke a few cigarettes and shoot the breeze. She was particularly chatty with me.
There was a third person who shared a space in Jack’s office. His name was Danny McFarlan and I never understood what kind of work he did there. He was a big fan of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and he fancied himself a Good Fella. Everybody inexplicably played along with him. It was Danny who had reserved the Jazz Club where I met Sandra Falon years before (see chapter 3) and he was also friends with Bewildra and her husband.
After one of her more lengthy stays, Danny walked around the corner wall by my desk and said he thought she was coming on to me. Danny always loved to stir the pot in the office so, at first, I just laughed it off. A few more unannounced office visits and a rather singular elevator ride I took with her finally convinced me that he was right. In the past, run-ins involving married women had always been more trouble than they were worth. Learning from my mistakes, however, has never been a strong quality of mine and I soon found myself ensnared in the world of Bewildra Bates.
She came from a well-to-do family. Her father was once the principle partner in a legal firm until he succumbed to drinking and died in a homeless shelter somewhere in downtown Cincinnati. Her mother spent time planning an upwardly mobile future at the country club with her new husband, Reginald. Rounding out Bewildra’s family was a brother who was studying law at Princeton and a husband who she loathed. Thankfully, they had no children.
It only took a few weeks after we were together before she left her marriage which, I’m sure, had little to do with me. She moved into a condo at the Belvedere and immediately started talking about our own imminent marital union. I never believed a word of it and as the weeks passed it became increasingly clear that Bewildra had a whole host of skeletons in her walk-in closet.
The Belvedere
Both she and her husband were alcoholics. She came from money but it didn’t mean anything to her. She was one of those rich kids who feel guilty about their parents’ social stature. Playing poor wasn’t an option in her case but she still held a resentment for being part of the upper class. She saw herself as a frustrated creative type which, in her case, meant a would-be writer. I read some of her poems once and they were abysmal. Of course, I never uttered a word of criticism and only encouraged her growth as an artist.
Many times, she would go into details concerning their marriage. The stories were all horrendous but one, in particular, left an impression on me. As she told it, one night they had both been drinking heavily. She mentioned something to him about how much she hated the roses he occasionally brought her because they were such a common flower and choosing them only exposed his lack of imagination. At that, he threw a nearby Rookwood vase at her head. As she lunged towards him, they started hitting each other. He soon got the upper hand. After she was dragged into the bedroom and thrown on the bed, he climbed on top of her. Becoming sexually aroused by this, she asked him to tie her hands and feet to the bedposts and to ravish her as she lay helpless. He obliged with the tying but, once firmly securing her in place, he left the house and went out to a local bar to further drown his troubles. She wasn’t able to free herself and lay there until he returned.
I wrote a song about this incident called (She Wants) A Lot Of Something Else. (I’ve included it here for the edification of my dear readers.) It appeared on my Welcome Love CD that was recorded a couple of years after the two cassette tapes mentioned earlier (see chapter 8). As it turned out, this song and my foolishness with Bewildra were foreshadowings of a theme that I exploited in later material as well; that being, how love and sadomasochism often intersect.
(She Wants) A Lot Of Something Else
<<< Continue reading >>>
<<< Read the previous chapter
© 2013 by Maurice Mattei
All rights reserved.