The first time Ellen Sawyer saw him, she was ten months out of a five-year relationship. He barreled into the party, a tiny ball of nervous energy seeking a power outlet, like Napoleon preparing for battle. Ellen’s first thought when she saw him was, who the fuck does this guy think he is. Her second thought, bedroom eyes. Her third thought was interrupted by his squeaky speech, but first by the speech of his friend in the room.
“Benny! What have you been up to, buddy?” Ellen could sense the way the other men in the room fed on his nervous energy, his insecurity. He was fodder for ball busting, for making everyone laugh, for making the other men feel stronger than they actually were because, at least, they were stronger than him. Ellen felt sorry for Shakespeare’s fool, but she had to remember that this wasn’t Twelfth Night, that people are people and not character types, that just because someone acts like a fool on the outside does not mean they must carry some heavy wisdom on the interior. In the real world, the fool is often just a fool, but Ellen was still a bit enamoured with Madame Bovary ways of thinking about the world. For the moment, though, Benny quickly shook her from her literary frame of pondering the world.
“Tryna get laid, dude!’ Benny said it and then sniggered into a fit of staccato, high-pitched laughter. Ellen shifted her context of understanding this man from literary to historical. He wasn’t Shakespeare’s fool. He was Napoleon Bonaparte. And, then, the context quickly shifted to the psychological - Napoleon Complex. If there was a term to describe Benny, that was it, and it seemed his friends knew this and pressed on with inquiry of his apparent bachelor lifestyle of attempting to hook up with random chicks at ski resorts. Sex has always been an easy way to obtain power.
“Having any luck?” his friend said with a smirk.
“Not really.” Benny sniggered into laughter again. Ellen’s Madame Bovary lens flicked back on again. In her typical way, she felt sorry for him in the moment. She wanted to help him, to let him see that everyone had something to offer, that any man can reach for the apples at the top of the tree and keep one, if he really worked hard for it. And Ellen wanted to help herself out too. It was clear Benny had one thing on the mind for attaining status - women. Having sex with him would be easy. She didn’t think at the time that easy sex would not necessarily be good sex. Her only thought was that it had been too long. That ten months, twelve if you don’t count the last two of her relationship where sex amounted to hand jobs, was not a healthy amount of time to go without the touch of another human being. So, she decided to play the game, a game she had been good at because of her solid knowledge of how it worked, but bad at because of her inability to foresee how the game would toy with her sensitive emotions.
