ALL ABOUT DEBBIE - PART 2

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  ALL ABOUT DEBBIE MAITLAND-BASCOMB
  I'm not a bad person, no matter what you might think if you're reading Daniel Quentin Steele's epic of marriage and divorce and love and loss and courtroom intrigue in "When We Were Married." My saintly ex- prosecutor Bill Maitland - is portrayed as basically walking on water when he isn't going around healing the sick. Me they're portraying as a cruel, shallow, sex-crazed slut. It's not true. There are two sides to every story,. And this is mine.
  My name is Debbie Bascomb. It was Debbie Maitland for 18 years. I have a dynamite body and a beautiful face and an ass, as one male admirer once said in a unsuccessful seduction attempt, that “I don’t have to twitch. It twitches itself.” Men are always hitting on me and I couldn’t go to a dance or anyplace where my ex-husband left me alone without having guys – old, young and in-between – trying to rub up on me.
  It’s not that I don’t like it. It gets me hot, but it just gets tiresome sometimes. I had 38DD breasts when I was 13 and I’ve been having sex since I was 13. When I was 15 I had sex with one of my father’s 40-year-old friends when he gave me an album by the hottest band around. We did it a couple of times. If my father had ever found out about it, he would have killed the guy.
  
  
  
  I was pretty wild in my teen years. I like sex and I like men. And I found out that when you look like I do, and like sex, there’s almost nothing in this life you can’t have. Fortunately I had an aunt I loved like a second mother, Clarice, who was as hot in her day as me, and she gave me the upbringing my poor ignorant mother never could have. Not that Mom wasn’t hot. Where do you think I got my body and face? But she’d never wanted any other guy except my father and she wouldn’t have understood me.
  And then I got to the University of Florida where the opportunities for sex with rich and hung and interesting and pretty boys was so much greater. It was like being a kid in a candy store, and I sampled the candy. But along with a great body, God gave me a very high IQ. I could do the work and still party.
  Then I broke up with my heart throb Ramone because he couldn’t keep it in his pants and my next boyfriend got me drunk and drugged and in a back room at a Frat house where  he and some of his friends were using me as a party toy. They were rough and they hurt me.
  Until this figure swinging a sword like something out of a movie showed up (actually it was a fireplace poker) and started breaking bones and created a riot that brought the cops and sent me to the hospital where my parents discovered how I’d been drugged and torn up inside by the assault. And my dashing hero was a nobody I’d never seen before swathed in bandages and tubes because he’d been beaten so badly that his brain swelled in his skull. He’d been beaten, as one Frat brother pointed out, “because he wouldn’t stay down.”
  And when I went to his room to see a guy that had risked his life for a stranger, his mother called me a “miserable slut” who wasn’t worth her son’s life and threw me out.
  And that’s how I met Bill Maitland, the love of my life and father of my two children, before he gave me up for a stinking job and decided everybody else was more important than myself and our two children. It was before he left me too many nights using a vibrator for relief, before he let himself get old and fat and flabby to the point that his touch disgusted me. I finally got tired of propping up his self esteem because he was shorter and not as well endowed and good looking as the guys I’d gone with in college. I got tired of telling him he was the one that I walked away with. There comes a point when you want a guy to just get over it.
  And Clarice, especially after her husband Frank left her for some young secretary he’d knocked up, always told me that Bill was cheating on me, that he had to be cheating on me. He was a powerful man and powerful men will always find women to bend over for them, no matter how fat and flabby they get.
  “He’s not pushing you for sex because he’s getting all he wants at the office,” she kept telling me. I couldn’t imagine any woman being excited by that flabby body, but I could never get her words out of my head.
  And so we rocked along until I met Doug Baker. Doug Baker was six-feet-three of solid, young male who had a rock hard midsection that I couldn’t help thinking about on nights when Bill pushed his flabby gut on top of me for his monthly mating. Five minutes of grunting and he was through and I lay there awake while he snored.
  I never cheated, seriously, but I’d made up my mind to leave Bill. What we’d had was long gone and I felt like a 17-year-old around Doug. I wanted that feeling again. I was getting ready to turn 40 and I wasn’t ready to become my mother.
  And then I said those four words. Our marriage crashed and burned and everybody made me out the bad guy and Bill the saint. Never mind his ignoring me and our kids. Never mind the fact that he was probably cheating on me for years.
  And while he was making a new life for himself and slimming down and looking younger I was losing Doug and in the process of losing my kids and I lost my job and my career. And it was all his damned fault. And now I’m going to a psychiatrist to find out why Bill is literally making me sick. I’m throwing up all the time, and I have anger and rage at Bill that even I don’t understand. And all these damned people keep telling me that I still love him. They’re so full of shit. But I can’t get him out of my head."
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• POSTSCRIPT: In the first part of this three-part examination of one of the most important characters in any of my books, Debbie Bascomb Maitland, I failed to find a  telling quote, I remembered but couldn't  locate. Fortunately some faithful readers found it. I'm including it here because part of the secret of Debbie's power over men has never been purely sexual.
  
  After her break-up with Bill Maitland, she meets and is befriended by visiting novelist Clint Abbott. She is at a low point and she and Abbott haven't yet become lovers.
  She is at a low point and she and Abbott haven't become lovers yet. She asks him. "Tell me i'm beautiful"
  
  
  

  And he responds: 

  
  
   “But it’s not just sex, Debbie. Your smile lights up this room. If I knew I could never have you, that smile would make me want to be your champion. It’s the lips and the eyes and those cheekbones. I want to be a hero for you, to be better than I am. I know that’s what other men feel for you. It’s the reason why guys fall all over themselves to do whatever you ask.
  
  “Even if they’re old or young or fat and know they’ll never in this lifetime have you. They want you to smile upon them.
  
  
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