A Capital Affair

When a Jewish Mother Goes Bad

I committed adultery. Although I promised my rabbi, family and friends under the chupah that I would be faithful to Barry Halevy all my life, I didn't keep my promise. What kind of example am I setting for my two children? Not only that, my parents would be so ashamed that they would never be able to show their faces in shul again and they would never talk to me. So, please keep everything I'm about to say to yourself.

It's not just the shame. Personally, I have a lot of moral issues about this even if you're cool with adultery. Adultery is ranked at number seven in the top ten sins in Torah. Ancient Jews took adultery so seriously that my lover and I would have been stoned to death outside the gates of the city. In our times, the penalty is a little lighter, with notable exceptions like Iran. These days, adultery only costs you money, family, reputation, give you STDs or any combination thereof.

In fact, all the 613 sins in the Torah are serious if a good Jew wants to avoid a one-way trip to Sheol when they die. Until now, I think I've been a good Jewish girl, avoiding any other transgressions on the top ten list. OK, maybe I did a bit of coveting as a child when I wanted some toy or other that one of my friends had but covetousness is far down the list at number ten. I'm sort of excused from that sin because all that coveting happened before my bat mitzvah so, technically, I'm not responsible.

Jesus set an even higher bar for adultery. For Christians, just having dirty thoughts about someone of the opposite sex is enough to make you guilty of adultery. I assure you that my adultery went far beyond just thinking about it. I did the real thing so I'm guilty of adultery even by Jewish standards. Not only am I guilty of adultery, I screamed "Oh my God" several times to my lover. Jews call that "Misusing The Name", close to the top of the charts at number 3. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we get to the details of my adultery, I need to do a flashback to my early years, just like watching a bad movie.

As you might have guessed by now, I grew up in a rather strict Jewish family. We lived in the Côte St. Luc area of Montreal which, despite having a name that would never offend Quebec's Office de la Langue Française, is largely populated by working class second and third generation Jewish immigrants. I never believed in such a thing as Jews who control the world's money supply but, if they do exist, trust me they don't live in Côte St. Luc.

My parents fit into Côte St. Luc like a hand in a latex glove. You know the type, moderately observant but very traditional Jews in the process of shucking off the customs of a Russian shtetl. My father never wore a black hat but he went to the shul for ma'ariv every Friday evening while my mother stayed at home, lit candles and prepared supper. Saturdays, my parents marched us kids off to shul, after which we went home or to a relative's place for a cholent or brisket dinner that had been in the oven all night. My parents always talked Yiddish between themselves so the "kindele" wouldn't understand. They thought they could keep their secrets from us but I picked up just enough Yiddish to break the code.

There's a lot I like about Judaism, the moral and ethical part for example. It's more than just knowing what's right from wrong. Jews incorporated into Torah humane treatment of animals thousands of years before the SPCA was founded. Torah contains commercial laws regulating interest rates, honest weights and measures and labour relations written well before modern governments got into the act. You can look all of this up in your Bible if you don't believe me. But I have trouble with Jewish attitudes towards sex.

Jews rate pre-marital sex right up there with adultery but they don't have the same rules for men and women even though they define sex as only between a man and a woman. If you look up Deuteronomy chapter 22, a woman who has pre-marital sex could be executed. A man who has pre-marital sex simply pays a fine of 50 shekels (10 bucks at current exchange rates) and endures a shotgun wedding. It contradicts my logic that men and women should be treated differently. It also contradicts logic that people would go into the lifetime commitment of marriage without finding out whether they're sexually compatible. To me, it's the same as buying a car without a test drive. Despite my opinion, I was a late starter when it came to sex.

When I began high school, I discovered boys and what they were useful for, thanks to the school's sex education classes. Sex-ed also directed my attention to the parts between my legs and what they were useful for. I had vivid sexual fantasies about having sex with boys in my class. I crossed Jesus' line and was into mental adultery while I was still a single teen. But, with all this knowledge and incentive, I never had sex in high school. My parents' system to keep me virgo intacta until marriage was to not let me date a boy unless we went out with at least one other couple. And God Forbid that I try to go out on a date with a Gentile.

I was able to explore my sexual knowledge and my views on pre-marital sex when I went to university, probably because my parents realized that they couldn't control a daughter nearly 20 years old. My choice of career would have been music but my parents would only support me at university if I took a business degree. Accounting paid better than the piano according to my father and he was the law in the family. I met Barry Halevy, my now ex-husband, in a Commercial Law course that was both a pre-law and commerce requirement. He was so handsome and had a lot in common with me, besides being Jewish, of course. After a few dates, I knew that he was seriously interested in me and that we were destined for marriage.

When I brought Barry home for the first time, my father reserved his opinion because Barry's family were Moroccans and not Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe. Despite this defect in his Jewish credentials, my parents ultimately accepted Barry as my boyfriend, potential husband and best bet to take me off their hands. After Barry and I dated for six months and became engaged, then we had sex. My parents would have plotzed had they known we became intimate before marriage, not because of the morality but because non-virgins are unmarketable as brides in traditional Ashkenazi society.

You probably think I was cold and calculating but I planned our first time well in advance. I say that I was just handling my hormones sensibly. I had a doctor, not our Jewish family doctor of course, deflower me so the first time would be painless. He also prescribed the pill to relieve me of any worries about getting knocked up. I even planned the time and place for my first sexual experience. I decided to seduce Barry during a late movie at his house while his parents were asleep upstairs. It was ideal because the family room was in the basement and his parents' bedroom was on the second floor.

We engaged in some hot and heavy couch wrestling, managing to strip down to our underwear despite the close quarters. No man had ever touched my breasts before Barry massaged them and played with my nipples. He got me so worked up that, when he put his hand on my mound, I gushed right into my panties. Barry reached into my panties and rubbed my wet mound but I wasn't far behind, exploring his jockey shorts. Ladies, do you remember the first time you had hard, hot shlong right there in your hand? I was a bit intimidated because Barry's shlong was much bigger than the ones portrayed in the diagrams in high school Sex Ed. The purple colours of the tip of his shmuck were so much more sensual than the black and white drawings in my high school sex-ed textbook. When I kissed his shmuck, I caught my first whiff of male pheromones. Heady stuff for a frustrated virgin.

Barry pulled off my panties and got between my legs. My bush was matted and tangled so I had to part my outer lips for him and guide his fat circumcised tip to the opening of my vagina. I was amazed at how comfortably he eased into me. The Boy Scouts slogan is right - Be Prepared. Our Sex Ed. teacher had warned the girls in the class that the first time would be painful. Not so if you plan it carefully enough. Instead of scaring us about pain, my Sex Ed. teacher should have warned us that sex is messy. It took half an hour to erase the evidence from the couch fabric.

I loved sex right from my first time, even though I didn't have a vaginal orgasm right away. It was enough for me at the beginning to savour the intimacy of joining with another person and drawing them right inside me. I will never forget the first time I felt the delicious friction between our parts moving together and then apart in increasing frequency until Barry climaxed. At first, Barry was far too aggressive with me but I taught him how to be gentle with me and give me what I wanted. By the third or fourth time we had sex, I got the hang of it as we climaxed together.

Why am I telling you all of this instead of getting to the adultery right away? To understand what drove me to adultery, you need to know that my initial experiences at intercourse awakened my libido. I wanted, no I needed, sex regularly and in quantity. Barry obliged me. I was so obsessed with sex that it's a wonder that I was able to graduate from university. After all, I missed out on a lot of sex in high school.

If love is blind then sex is, at best, very near-sighted. I overlooked a lot of Barry's faults during our engagement. There was his aggressiveness, which I didn't like in bed but which brought him success as a lawyer. Now I see his materialism and superficiality but I just didn't see it then. Probably Bob Eubanks was right after all. Jewish girls never fuck assholes, we marry them.

After I graduated, Barry and I married under the chupah. We had a large wedding so my parents could celebrate getting the eldest daughter off their hands. My first job after I graduated was in retailing in the head office of Crumleigh's Department Stores. I became one of their ladies' wear purchasers. My job was to fill orders for the same old mom's clothes Crumleigh's had sold for years without any recent updates to current fashion. It was a routine, crappy job but it paid the bills and supported Barry in his final year of law.

Let me explain something about Canadian retailing. Many Canadian retailers were founded in the 1880's when Canada was expanding out west and growing. In those days, any idiot could open a store in Canada and make money. Unfortunately, the idiots thought they hit on a formula for success that would see them into the next few millennia. When I worked for Crumleigh's, the founder's Victorian attitudes were still very much in force. As a woman and a Jew, there was no way I could advance much beyond entry level. I had a series of bosses, usually some nebbish out of accounting. God Forbid that my bosses would ever ask a woman what women really wanted in clothing. My treatment during my employment with Crumleigh's just reinforced my growing feminism.

For ten years, I was happily married to Barry, giving him two lovely children, Michelle and Ethan, two and four years after we were married. Barry became a corporate lawyer for a well-connected law firm. He worked hard, won some important tax cases and eventually transferred to Toronto where most corporate offices are located in Canada. Ironically, his career move resulted in an upgraded career for me.

Nerdstorm's, the famous American department store, moved into Canada about the same time Barry, the kids and I moved to Toronto. With my experience with Crumleigh's and knowledge of the shmates trade, I was hired as Assistant VP Women's Fashion, which in US English means chief buyer. Nerdstorm's has an affirmative action program so my boss, the VP Women's Fashion, is actually a woman. Together, we opened up Nerdstorm's first store in Toronto. Unlike Crumleigh's, Nerdstorm's understood women and what they wanted in clothing. With my less than perfect figure, I bought for real women, not for runway models.

As a result, the Toronto store was a great success and encouraged Nerdstorm's to open a store in Montreal. I was the natural one to set up the Fashion department because of my ability to speak French and my contribution to Nerdstorm's initial success. My boss, being American, was fluently unilingual. Americans may have great personnel policies but they have lousy language skills.

The two weeks in Montreal were a success career-wise and personally. I made sure that Nerdstorm's complied with Quebec's language laws before they opened. Nerdstorm's became le Magasin Nerdstorm east of the Ottawa River. Women in Montreal are very fashion-conscious so, in my buying capacity, I made contact with the city's leading edge clothes designers that Crumliegh's would never deal with. On the weekend, I visited my family and some friends I was still in contact with. The store opening was free of glitches and, more importantly, the fashionable women of Montreal voted big-time for Nerdstorm's with the dollars in their purses. Head office noted that I was instrumental in making the new store a success so I was sure my career was about to take off.

My wonderful life started to go off course after my flight back to Toronto. I had such good feelings about my two weeks in Montreal after I boarded that I chose a glass of white wine when the stewardess began serving drinks to business class. I leaned back in my seat sipping my wine and relaxed for the first time in two weeks. Life is good, I thought. Barry was on his way to a full partnership at his law firm, I had two great kids and, best of all, a promising career with a good employer. I was thirty-three years old, at a woman's sexual pinnacle. Two weeks of involuntary celibacy mixed with a glass of wine made me incredibly horny.

The glass of wine tasted good so I asked for another, which made me feel even better about life. In the middle of my reverie, a voice in my head said: "There's something wrong with this picture. Life can't be that good." Probably the two glasses of wine dulled my instincts because I dismissed the voice as just a bit of my Jewish guilt.

I called home while I waited for my luggage at Pearson International. When Dolores, the nanny, answered, she seemed to be choosing her words carefully. She said that Barry wasn't home at his usual time, which I found strange. I began to feel troubled during my taxi ride to our home in Etobicoke. Maybe I was too focussed on my work instead of what was going on with my family.

When I got home, Dolores rushed out the door without telling me what the kids had done while I was away. She's usually such a chatterbox when I arrive at home, discussing everything the kids had been up to that day. But today she just left saying "I made dinner and it's warming in the oven." Dolores may be Catholic and Filipina but she adapted kosher rules to her cooking immediately.

I lit the candles for Shabbat and said the blessing on the challah, the grape juice for Michelle and Ethan and a glass of white wine for me. My parents just loved that awful sweet red wine that's traditional for Jews but I asked the rabbi and he said any kosher wine is OK. We ate Dolores' Filipino food chatting about everything that happened over the last two weeks. After supper, I helped Michelle and Ethan with their homework and poured myself another glass of wine while I waited for Barry to come home. I was a little uneasy that he was so late but the wine helped me relax. Finally he arrived and we had a short conversation about my work in Montreal while he ate some leftovers. Abruptly he got up and left the kitchen saying he had a few calls to make.

Since I hadn't had sex for over two weeks, I was really horny by the time we got into the sack. I waited patiently in bed as Barry's bedtime prep seemed to take forever. When he finally came to bed, Barry tackled the job of fucking me quite mechanically, with not the least bit of passion. I just couldn't get with it that night. Something was wrong but I couldn't put my finger on it just then. After going through the motions, Barry dry humped me and I faked an orgasm. Finally, he just rolled over and padded off to the bathroom.

While Barry was having a pee, his telephone pinged a text alert. Call it wifely curiosity, but I had to take a peek. Maybe I could find out something about this project he was working on and do something to ease Barry's tenseness. I was shocked by the text I read:

"OMG, wot U do 2 me! my puC iz stil tingling frm U. i can't W8 untl i c u again. wen wiL u leav that bitch? did i sA i luv u? f not, i luv u."

I just sat there unable to move. Pieces came together in my mind. My husband was fooling around with another woman. That explained so much of what had been going on, not just while I was in Montreal but even the late nights at work the past two months. Maybe he had shtupped Dolores as well while I was away. That could account for her strange behaviour earlier. Finally, passive-aggressive anger overcame indecision. I put Barry's phone back and hoped he wouldn't discover I had been peeking. When Barry finished in the en suite, I went and cleaned myself up, looking forward to a sleepless night as I sorted things out in my head.

I lived a lie over the next week. Outwardly, I tried to be the same loving wife and mother as always but inwardly I was thinking how to handle the situation. I didn't want to confront Barry and turn this into some kind of a public Elin/Tiger spectacle. I tried asking Dolores if something had happened while I was away but she clammed up every time I tried to talk to her. I couldn't confide in any of my friends because either I couldn't trust them with any secrets or I was ashamed of my situation. If the word got around that Barry was cheating on me, my friends and work colleagues would condemn Barry to my face but secretly they would conclude he cheated on me was because I'm no good in bed.

I found it hard to keep up my false front. We mostly talked to the kids but very little between ourselves. I started noticing that Barry did things that I once tolerated but now I couldn't stand. This may sound little to you but he's always pronounced my name, Regina, so it rhymes with vagina. I'm quite sensitive about my name. My parents gave me my Hebrew name Malcha, which means Queen. My parents tried to call me Queenie when they spoke English. I rebelled against Queenie because one of my mother's old yenta friends called herself Queenie. A Malcha who calls herself Queenie or a Zahavah who is Goldie is an old yenta in my opinion.

Regina is a direct Latin translation of Malcha. Regina should be pronounced Re-GEE-nah, not rhyming with vagina as the ignorant pronounce it. Regina/vagina is just a crummy, featureless little city in the middle of the Saskatchewan prairies distinguished by the worst football team in Canada. That was the first time I rebelled against my parents' upbringing and why it bothers me to this when people don't say my name correctly.

Sorry for the digression. I keep forgetting that you're just interested in the adultery. Well, after a week of mulling things over, I decided to take some action. Barry, ever the diligent lawyer, had drawn up a prenuptial agreement instead of a ketubah before we got married. I read it over and it all sounded great. I was supposed to get a hefty alimony based on his earnings, custody of the kids, child support, the house, my choice of our cars, etc. I was a fashion buyer, not a lawyer so I needed to get one to step me through a divorce so I could get what I was due from the pre-nup.

My choice for divorce lawyer was one of my old high school classmates, Pincus Goldstein. In high school, even the Gentile kids called him Putzie because, well, he was a real putz. Most girls avoided him, except for me. I discovered that he was just an awkward nerd and we became good friends, but just friends. He helped me with my homework in exchange for me showing him how to use social media and meet girls. I lost touch with him after high school but I heard he moved to Toronto and channeled his teenage angst into a career as a feared divorce lawyer.