The Virgin’s Secret Marriage: Post 17

Chapter 13: Seriously, who monograms their thongs?

(Posts for the foreseeable future may be a bit brief and slapdash. Sincere apologies—it’s been a heck of a few months and the Commissioner is digging her way out of them.)

We’re in the home stretch—this is the second-to-last chapter in The Virgin’s Secret Marriage—which means, of course, that while obviously Emma and Joe will have their Happily Ever After, something terrible has to happen first. As you might guess, it’s all, frankly, less exciting than a climax—of any sort—should be.

Chapter thirteen opens on the Subplot Marriage, and the Subplot Bride is deeply concerned that something bad is going to happen, and while Emma doesn’t agree out loud, she is worried too. Readers, of course, know that with only two chapters left and novels’ penchant for bad things happening at the worst possible time, that it’s likely that the Subplot Groom will be arrested for STEALING ALL THE THINGS. 

… which is exactly what happens when Mac-the-Sheriff shows up. The Subplot Groom saves everyone a great deal of time and confesses almost immediately (Miranda rights be damned).

So… naturally… the Subplot (Ex)Bride’s incredibly irritating mother blames Emma for allowing the sheriff to enter the Wedding Inn and arrest the Subplot Groom, then threatens to sue the Inn and Emma and refuses to pay for anything, until the Subplot (Ex)Bride’s father points out that actually it’s a good thing that their daughter isn’t marrying a criminal.

The cancellation of the marriage ceremony means that Emma goes home early, albeit after feeding many of the wedding guests in what must have been one of the most awkward non-weddings ever. When she arrives home, she finds Joe looking guilty, “as if he’d just been caught in the act of she didn’t know what” (180). Again, readers know that he was setting up his Grand Seduction (the one he planned with his sister in the previous chapter), but because this couple’s marriage is based on LIES and propaganda, Emma finds the fact that he’s stripping the bed to be suspicious. Joe confesses to (now underprepared) Grand Seduction and Emma fills him on Aborted Wedding/Arrest, then they decide to be romantic. Joe goes off to prepare her a bath, and Emma decides to change into sexy lingerie.

Except! What’s this?! Gasp! Horror!

And that was when she looked down and saw the hint of leopard-print satin and black frothy lace peeking out from beneath Joe’s pile of clothes (182).

Oh, but it gets worse. Not only is this not Emma’s thong, but it’s quickly obvious whose it is.

Front and center of the lingerie was an embroidered black heart with the initials T.F.  The only T.F. Joe knew was Tiffany Lamour (182).

So, Lamour is her stage name? I don’t remember that ever being specified in the book, but I’m willing to admit that this could be my fault as opposed to the writing.

My first reaction is “Who monograms their underwear?!” However, now that I’ve moved to the south, I have learned that monogramming is very popular. I cannot speak to the popularity of monogramming thongs, however.  A VERY quick Google search suggests that once you get past the kind of iron-on CafePress personalized thongs, the next step is getting your thong personalized for wearing under your wedding dress. Other than bridal lingerie, the search turned up options via Etsy (the art/craft sales site) and of course many sites for personalizing what Americans call flipflops but Australians call thongs.

This 30 second Google search did not turn up anything like what’s described in the book, but I will not say that it’s impossible or even necessarily unlikely because I just don’t know and don’t want to spend more time googling it.

My second reaction was, “Gee, Tiffany, don’t you think going with the embroidered pair is overdoing it?” I mean, it’s so on-the-nose as to seem suspicious. But then I remembered what I was reading.

So Emma accuses Joe of sleeping with Tiffany in order for her to go easy on him in the interview. Joe tells her that he didn’t. He does NOT however explain about Tiffany asking to use the bathroom and disappearing into their house the previous day. In fact, I don’t think he’d ever told Emma about Tiffany’s visit. Despite not providing a logical explanation, such as the truth that the readers are privy to, Joe just gives up.

I have a whole bunch of things highlighted in this section because I just don’t understand the direction this goes. Joe feels hurt because of Emma’s “lack of faith” (183). Then he realizes that the ruse “had pointed out a glaring lack in his relationship with his bride” (184), meaning that she doesn’t trust him.

He glared at Emma, frustrated that he hadn’t let himself see this coming, when he had known as along, that she was more of a good time gal and fair-weather friend than a devoted wife who would endure anything to be with him (184, comma error original).

What. The. Hell.

First, I do not think “good-time gal” means what you think it means. I was under the impression it meant someone who is particularly interested in, well, having a good time, but specifically sex. I looked it up online and it apparently does mean that, connotatively, and denotatively means what it sounds like— a woman more interested in pleasure than work. However, neither of those meanings makes any sense for Emma. She’s not the former, since she’s the novel’s titular virgin, and she’s not the latter since she has worked very hard for her career (when she could have just been pampered by her parents’ fortune.) I think the text is using it more as a synonym for “fair-weather friend,” someone who is only a companion during the good times and not the hard.

Second, vocabulary, outdated slang, and comma errors aside, why the hell should either of them trust each other? Their marriage is built on lies—granted lies to the rest of the world, but still. And they NEVER talked about making this a “real” marriage—as far as they’ve conveyed to each other, the expectation was that they’d get divorced in two years. So why would Emma be a “devoted wife”?

Third, “devoted wife who would endure anything to be with him”??? That smacks of such antiquated sexism. I assume the writer didn’t mean it that way and that Joe thinks he’d be there through thick and thin because of his love for Emma, but that’s not how it comes across. Not to mention, since he doesn’t even try to explain what he knows happened, it doesn’t really suggest he’s being there for her, either.

Emma’s reasoning for believing that Joe would have slept with Tiffany is that Joe put his career ahead of Emma in the past. Now, if we take that at face value, fine, okay, that makes (some) sense. But if you recall, back in chapter 9, Emma calls Joe’s choice to annul (albeit unsuccessfully) their marriage “noble”, and that he could have actually leveraged their marriage into a spot on the Storm, thus improving his career prospects. If we’re to believe this reading of their history, then he has, in fact, not put his career ahead of Emma.

Since what happened seven years before and how these two characters view it is fundamental to the entire rest of this book, I just really wish that the text was clear as to those events and the characters’ motivations and interpretations.

This scene drags on. Next Joe feels sorry for himself because Emma doubts him, just like everyone else in his life has always doubted him, from his mother to his coaches to sports columnists. Poor baby, playing successfully in the NHL.

Emma declares that Joe has destroyed what trust they’d had, and Joe’s response is to just fold in on himself and say that he’ll have his lawyer call hers. (I wonder if his sports lawyer takes care of divorces? He’s not very good at lawyering in general, though.)

The next day, Joe’s mother asks him to do yardwork at the Wedding Inn as a thinly-veiled excuse to question him as to what’s going on. (She’d seen Joe’s car at his sister’s house overnight and discovered that Emma had slept in her office.) Joe spills all, declaring that this sort of thing happens to athletes and if Emma can’t handle it, then that’s her problem.

(I’m not sure if the text means that athletes get propositioned a lot or that athletes get accused of sex they didn’t have a lot. The former I believe, but also believe Emma could get over, in time. The latter seems less likely to be a consistent and recurring problem.)

Joe’s mother accuses him of quitting, even if Emma let him down. Joe points out that if Emma loved him, he’d be willing to work things out but that this experience proves she doesn’t. Joe’s mama uses his hockey career and work ethic against him, pointing out that he worked his ass off and put his mind to it to get a successful professional career against the odds, because he knew it was the right thing to do.

“Like you knew when you were only nineteen that Emma was the only woman for you,” Helen said (190).

Uh, what? First off, Helen wasn’t around for any of Joe’s relationship with Emma seven years before. It took place in Rhode Island and the text explicitly said that the Hart family was unaware of it. That means that Helen would have found out that Joe “just knew” some time in the last week or so, while the two have been (re)married. But when would have that have happened? Joe’s only conversation with his mother about Emma was when she gave him the (now stolen and recovered) hockey memorabilia as an excuse to tell him that he has to treat Emma right.

Soooooo, Joe’s mother is a psychic. Or is just making stuff up—because the text has never even had JOE HIMSELF say that at nineteen he knew that Emma was the one. Yeah, he’s been unable to forget her and yeah, seeing her again has rekindled his love, but again the text has not indicated that he’s been unable to find someone new because Emma was the one. (The text has indicated this obliquely about Emma, saying that she unfavorably compared anyone who approached her to Joe.)

This magic speech, which makes zero sense once you think about it further, does the trick for Joe. He learns that he must devote himself to his marriage, just like he devoted himself to his career, and stick with her.

Ugh.

Well, stick with the Fictional Hockey League, since there’s just one more chapter of The Virgin’s Secret Marriage to go.

The Virgin's Secret Marriage: Post 13

Chapter 9: The No-Longer Virgin’s Not-So-Secret Marriage

(Posts for the foreseeable future may be a bit brief and slapdash. Sincere apologies—it’s been a heck of a few months and the Commissioner is digging her way out of them.)

We left off with the Great Box Cliffhanger and it turns out that it actually was a cliffhanger, in that when Joe returns we discover that he did not, in fact, unpack his boxes. Instead, ::gasp!!:: they’ve been [dunh dunh dunh] stolen.

Joe is thinking all about the sex, and not about putting away the groceries or about unpacking, when he gets back to the house. But Emma wants to congratulate him for his hard work (apparently not with sex) which leads Joe discovering that all of his hockey memorabilia has been stolen, along with Emma’s jewelry box. And none of the hockey memorabilia was insured. And apparently everyone (?) knew that he owned it.

According to a neighbor that the sheriff (remember, Joe’s brother Mac) interviews, the thieves “used some sort of electronic device to open the garage door” to get in (114). Personally, I use some sort of electronic device to open my garage door every day. It’s called a garage door opener.

After Mac leaves, Joe vows to protect Emma, horrified that he’d left her home alone when the thieves might have been there—which is sort of stupid since they absolutely weren’t at the time.

Neither of them can sleep, so they decide to go to bed together, but not to have sex. There is, of course, some touching, and Emma “was glad he hadn’t shaved his chest” (116).

Does anyone else find that line really odd? I mean, not that Joe doesn’t shave his chest—I find that quite normal for the average guy. (There isn’t anything wrong with shaving one’s chest, either. I just don’t think that shaving one’s chest is so common that Emma would remark on Joe not doing so.)

They talk a bit about trying to find out where the thief or thieves might sell the hockey memorabilia since lots of it was super rare.

Anyone else think it’s just a coincidence that the day before Tiffany Lamour was in the house commenting on that same hockey stuff? No? Just me? Okay.

They agree to go to sleep, but then Emma starts touching Joe all over. Joe decides to pretend to be asleep as a tactic, but he has to drop that when she goes for his boxers. He tells her they can’t sleep together since she’s probably only wanting to because she’s had a shock. When she says he should be wanting to get in her pants (pajamas?) he says he’s just now developed “a selfless streak.”

“You’ve always been noble. That was in fact the problem. Had you not been noble you would not have refused to stay married to me when you found out who my dad was or that my parents would not approve of my even dating you, never mind becoming your wife!” (120).

Uh, what? Emma is suddenly rewriting history. That is not okay. Every time the story of their ‘marriage’ comes up, Emma has said that they got married, Joe found out who her parents were and immediately had their marriage annulled in order to save his career. And she has been bitter about that since the very first time she thought of him in this book. Suddenly that action is now cast as noble?

I love you, Calvin, but no.

“Instead, you would have taken my virginity that night and consummated our marriage, and used that fact as leverage to keep your spot on my father’s NHL team. But you didn’t, and because of that we both suffered” (120).

This description of what Joe didn’t do is such a far cry from Emma’s description of what he did do as putting her career ahead of her that it’s like it’s two different novels. What the hell?

Despite this not-very-compelling conversation, Joe still won’t sleep with her because he wants her to want him when she wants him, instead of as a reaction to being robbed. Emma gets angry about this and insists that they can have sex and still be friends. So they have sex.

Finally. Geez.

Sex, and Emma’s first orgasm, is apparently so magical that it makes Emma declare (albeit only to herself) that she loves Joe. Joe is more concerned with the fact that Emma was a virgin and hadn’t told him. She says it didn’t matter and that someone had to be her first. He asks the oh-so insightful question of, “Is that so?”

Emma didn’t want to feel like they were in the midst of a high-stakes play-off game, but that was exactly how she felt as they faced each other and he waited for a more detailed explanation of her actions. As if Joe was the star shooter, bearing down on her, and she was the goalie trying to defend the net (125).

I suppose that’s a moderately better use of hockey terminology than the penalty calling make-out scene. Marginally. Although I don’t know exactly why she feels she’s under fire, since his question was, I repeat, “Is that so?”

I mean, who could possibly resist such an inquisition?

Her internal response? So she had encouraged him to make love to her! All the way! So what? (125).

You know, just because she was a virgin doesn’t mean she has to act like a young teenager. “All the way”? Seriously? Did they “round the bases”, too?

Joe just says that now their marriage is consummated and he liked it and they’re going to have sex again. Fortunately the chapter ends before we end up seeing that. I’m grateful, because I feared it would be more hockey terminology.

I’d like to point out that the marriage is no longer secret and the heroine is no longer a virgin, so this book should be almost over now, right?

(Oh god. What if we started having hockey terminology sex, like with this book, mixed with anthropomorphized naughty bits, like in other books? … I think I just broke my brain.)