Debbie Bascomb
I have always liked and wanted big breasted women in my personal and fictional life. No apologies. There’s a reason why tall, dark and handsome – not to mention well hung – shows up over and over in fiction and real life as the iconic male sex symbol.
Probably the most ubiquitous of the bombshells in my writing has been Debbie Bascomb. She is one of the most important figures in the ongoing “When We Were Married” series but she has and will pop up in other books as well.
She is, of course the ex-wife and love of Prosecutor Bill Maitland’s life. Following a painful divorce after 20 years of marriage, both she and Bill are trying to figure out what a life will be like without the other.
Thanks to the efforts of some friends, Debbie has been given a visual identiy. I had a nebulous vision but when fans showed me what I’d written, I realized what I’d created. She appears to be a pornographic male fantasy. But I have met Debbie, and not on the silver screen or porno films either, but in the office of a Florida high school. Not exactly as I’d written her, but possessing the same sexual charisma and the ability to enchant men without trying. And I’m sure there are more Debbies.
(Sidenote) When I met her husband, or boyfriend, because he had come in to discuss his son’s progress, I told myself that it would be interesting to see if she came in with him the following year. He was a young, good looking guy. But even though this was real life, not the pages of fiction, I wondered if a normal guy could hold a Debbie. AS it happened, I met with him the following year and she was not there. And he made it clear to me she wouldn’t be coming again.
When I first started writing WWWM, I wrote it from Maitland’s perspective and didn’t get into any third person perspective from Debbie’s viewpoint until a few chapters in. Which meant that from Maitland’s perspective she was a cold-hearted cheating bitch and most readers adopted that view of her. It isn’t until later in the first book that it’s possible to see there are TWO truths about what is happening – and why.
Maitland is THE central character and the entire series revolves around him. Which makes it possible to underestimate who and what Debbie is. She liked a lot of sex with a lot of different men, but she was the smartest woman – the smartest person – Maitland had ever met. And after he saved her at the Frat House party, she stayed with him – on and off – for two years when almost any of the men lusting after her could have given her a life Maitland could only imagine.
Debbie went to work at the Hunt Bank in Jacksonville and kept up her studies while supporting Bill financially getting through Law School. When he graduated and went into private practice, she resumed her academic career and eventually became an Associate Professor of Business at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. Along the way, she made time to give Maitland three children, two of whom lived, and she raised them.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that she raised them alone, but especially after Bill went into the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville in Florida’s 3rd Judicial Circuit, his work took up more and more of his time – and his life. That is one of the Big Hurts that destroyed their marriage, which she refers to over and over in WWWM. He spent one of their anniversaries in Paris – without Debbie -working a case of human trafficking of Muslim girls from Paris to Florida for prostitution. You can look at that as either a very good thing, or a very bad thing.
Of course, their marriage
eventually goes down in flames. Bill is
free to sample the delights of the women he’d stayed scrupulously away from for
20 years. Debbie begins a torrid affair with a younger, very hot professor she
has been mentoring. When that affair burns out and he moves on, she is more selective about the men she takes into
her bed.
After Bill crashes a gala at the University and gets both Debbie and her lover fired, she moves on to the Jacksonville Public Defender’s Office, headed by a friend of both her and Maitland, the blind Attorney Johnny August. She talks herself into a number two position under August as Director with the job of managing a corps of young, ambitious attorneys, which August refers to as “herding cats.”
In the end, while Debbie possesses a lot of positive qualities, none of these really detract from her overwhelming sexual magnetism. While Bill describe her in many places as being almost inhumanly beautiful, that assessment has to make allowances for the fact that he is in love with her and probably will be until the day he dies.
So to really get an idea of her appearance and how it affects men, you have to look at other places.
Look At “The Currency of Time” in 1999.
Oil man Michael McCarthy has attended a Christmas Gala at the old Jacksonville Train Station with Deirdre Lancaster, heir to the $150 million OIL Inc. fortune, the woman he’s fighting against falling for because he already knows she’s in love with a Mafia thug. As he turns his gaze from the flame-haired Deirdre:
“Could you grab a
champagne for me?”
I turned and
momentarily lost the power to speak.
She was tall, as
tall or taller than Deirdre. Blonde as sunlight, a face that could have come
from a frieze of an ancient goddess, full red lips, eyes that could pin a man
like a butterfly pinned to a page. My eyes dropped and her body was better than
her face. Big breasts, a woman’s full hips. She wore a low cut dress that drew
the eyes of the half dozen men who swarmed around her.
“I’ll walk with
you if you need someone to keep you company,” she said, smiling at her posse to
take the sting out. To make it more obvious that she was going to be with me,
she slipped her arm inside mine and tugged at me to move me forward.
I let her walk me
away from her admirers.
“What just
happened,” I asked when I regained the power of speech. “I know I’m catnip to
women, but I usually have to work it a little bit.”
She grinned.
“You are an
attractive man, but I was honestly using you. You may not have noticed, but men
tend to be attracted to me. Normally it’s fun, but once in a while a woman wants to be able to walk
around without a pack of horny men sniffing her.”
“Glad to be of
service.”
“You came in with Orion Lancaster and the tall
redhead. Are you with them?”
“I work for him,
for both of them, actually.”
“You’ll pardon me,
but you don’t look to me to be a paper pusher, an executive type.”
“What do I look
like?”
She looked me up
and down and the thing that really puzzled me was that my dick didn’t
immediately spring to attention.
“A roughneck oil
rigger, one of those men who work in the muck and oil, guys that actually work
with their muscles.”
“You have a good
eye, as well as good everything else. I do physical labor, but I also push some
paper once in a while.”
I found an elf and
grabbed two champagne flutes. As we both drank we made our way through the
crowd moving toward the entrances at the rear of the ball room. When we got
close enough to the rear entrance that
we could feel the cold breezes from the outside I watched the goosebumps
rise on the gilded flesh of her upper breasts.
She noticed where
my gaze went and smiled.
“Why are you in
here alone?” I asked. “I noticed your wedding ring. I can’t imagine a husband
letting a woman who looks like you wander around unattended.”
“He’s here. I just
lost him but we’ll hook up in a little while.”
“That’s dangerous.
I honestly don’t know why I haven’t put the moves on you. You’re exactly the
kind of woman I’ve always gone after.”
“I’m married?”
“That’s never
stopped me before, to tell you the truth.”
I could tell she
wasn’t shocked.
“You think there
might be a reason why you’re not trying anything with me?”
I shook my head.
“I saw you when
you came in with the redhead. You never took her eyes off her when she went off
to dance.
“You’re wrong.
It’s not like that.”
“She’s a beautiful
woman. And there was something in your expression when you watched her walking
away.”
“We’re not like
that. I’m not like that. She’s the daughter of my employer. I like my job.”
She shrugged.
“It’s never going to happen,” I said, dismissing the
fantasy.
She searched the
crowd.
“You never can
tell. Fifteen years ago I could never have imagined being married to my
husband. Nobody else could have either.”
She saw someone
across the room and stepped away from me.
“Thank you for the
company. That tall, white haired man over there is State Attorney Austin
Edwards, my husband’s boss. He invited us both to this party to celebrate
Bill’s being promoted to the number two prosecutor in his office. Bill will be
somewhere around him.”
As she swiveled
away from me I thought that Bill -whatever his name was- had to be one of the
luckiest assholes on earth. And I wondered again why in the hell I hadn’t tried
for her. And I told myself there was no way in hell I could possibly be
thinking of anything serious with Deirdre Lancaster.
AND LASTLY:
I had another
snippet about Debbie that I was going to put in here BUT…
SIDENOTE: Burt Reynolds was
at one time probably the country’s biggest male sex symbol. And a major movie
star (Financially but not critically. Check out “Smokey And The Bandit” and “Deliverance.”)
In 1974 he made a
movie called “The Longest Yard” featuring a football game between prison cons
and prison guards inside the prison. Reynolds was a football./NFLsuperstar sent
to prison for some bad life decisions.
One of the other
cons is trying to cheer him up by telling him all he has to do is “get his shit
together.” And at that point Reynolds utters the quote that is my favorite
quote EVER.
“I’ve got my shit
together,” Reynolds says. “I just can’t lift it.”
Which has been my
problem for many years. A friend of mine tells me I’m the most disorganized
person he’s ever known. And he’s right. I’ve
been writing for many years. And I can’t tell you exactly how much I’ve
written. I know there are stories I loved that I can’t find any more and I doubt
I’ll live long enough to find them.
Now that I’m working
electronically, it’s even worse. It’s hard to realize this, but I’ve been
writing as DQS for almost a decade. You write a lot of stories and novels and
partial novels in 10 years.
I’ve got hundreds of copies of the same story,
that I’ve made changes to. Where it gets bad is finding ONE copy in the forest
of similarly tagged files. I’m stuck right now on my “BETA MALEs” two-part novel
because I wrote an important section I can’t find..
ENOUGH RAMBLING
The reason for
this sidebar is that I;m going to turn to the great resource of all disorganized
authors – my wonderful readers 😉
There is a short
section in one of the WWWM books – I think it’s #3 – when a man is trying to
console Debbie. I think is the Public Defender Patrick Leary.
And he tells her “You’re
a beautiful woman. Even men who are too old and fat to believe they can ever
have you, want you to smile upon them!”
That’s it. Roughly.
I think that one quote explains everything you need to know about Debbie and
the effect she has on men.
NOW, what I’d like
is for my intrepid readers to FIND THAT QUOTE and let me know where it is, page
number and volume.
My mail list is not
set up yet so I’ll be relying on Facebook members and Twitter-ites to do the
heavy lifting. UNLESS I HAVE A HUNDRED READERS MEET THE CHALLENGE you can have
your choice of both volumes of the BETA MALE/SHARK duology or the upcoming “Stay
She Said” volume 5 of WWWM – FREE!
AS always, I’d
prefer you to email me at danielqsteele1@aol.com.
Although I don’t mind info in facebook or Twitter comments, I’m more like
to see it in the emails.
Disorganized, you
know. But I always read my emails.
