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.

Body Check: Post 23-

Chapter 13: Surmounting the Obstacle

This chapter picks up immediately where 12 left off, with a bit of “No, he didn’t!”, “Yes, he did!” back and forth to get through. Craig wanders off and Becker wanders in. Convenient. I guess Becker felt the need to show up after having just talked on the phone with Presley a few minutes prior. Sure.

Becker immediately starts in on yelling at Brody for seeing Hayden, but Brody changes the subject and bluntly asks why Becker let Presley bribe him. There’s some token denial before Becker breaks and admits he did it for his wife.

“I did it for Mary, okay?” Becker burst out, looking so anguished that Brody almost felt sorry for him. “You don’t know what it’s like living with a woman like her. Money, power, that’s all she talks about. She’s always needling me to be better, richer, more ambitious. And now that I’m retiring, she’s going nuts. She married me because of my career, because I was at the top of my game, a two-time cup winner, a goddamn champion” (151).

So essentially Becker’s excuse is that his wife is Lady Macbeth. I guess we should be glad he just took a bribe and didn’t start a war.

We never met Mary in this novel. Back when Becker and Brody go to the gentlemen’s club (I will never tire of calling it that) for the birthday party, Brody asked Becker what he saw in Mary (since he’d just been saying, multiple times, “she’s not a nice person” (95).) I suppose in retrospect all of Becker’s complaining about her in chapter 8 ought to have been foreshadowing. And yet Becker’s answer to Brody’s question was that he did see something in her, his “soulmate” (95). That’s the only positive thing that Becker says about Mary. Yet Brody’s vision of her is as a “tiny, delicate woman who’d been married to Sam for fifteen years” (94). And he’s spent significant time with the couple. That whole scene in chapter 8 was played for laughs, it seemed to me—oh haha, big tough hockey player Sam Becker is henpecked. But, evidently, she really is a terrible person and also she’s Becker’s soulmate, so he had no choice in his actions.

Except of course he did.

Speaking of actions, he not only took the bribe but he was also the source who told the journalist about Brody seeing Hayden, and who accused Brody of being one of the players who took bribes. Brody reacts incredibly poorly to this, blood boiling, stomach churning, “a red haze of fury swept over him” (152).

This scene mirrors Hayden’s with her father. When talking with her father, she realized that Brody was offering her the stability she wanted even if it’s clothed in the instability she fears. In this scene, Brody realizes that Mary’s desire for power and money is similar to his own, and that he’d been putting too high a value on those and not a high enough one on Hayden. I get this, I guess, in that I think there ought to be a way to compromise, but he’s known Hayden for two weeks. His career has been his life. Brody continues on in his thoughts, thinking how he’d wanted a woman who could see past his athlete-status and not care about his money and that obviously that’s true of Hayden. So while he won’t lie for her father, he’ll stand by her.

In other words, they’ve each just realized that the other is exactly what they’ve been looking for. 

Which is awfully convenient as they’ve also just found each other in front of the conference doors in the arena. Brody makes a grand gesture of telling Hayden that he’ll stay by her side through the investigation and beyond. Hayden starts laughing and has to explain that that’s only because she’d come to tell him that she was okay with taking a break for the sake of his career but that she didn’t want it to be permanent.

The Insurmountable Obstacle has been Surmounted! And there was much rejoicing.

There is kissing and more kissing.

Flushed, she broke the kiss and stepped back before she gave in to the urge to pull him into the restroom and fulfill yet another kinky fantasy (155).

She has a bathroom fantasy? Really?