A Wine-Fueled Key Party Didn't Save My Marriage

Welcome to Stranger Than Flicktion, our new Flickr-inspired column. We provide writers with five random food-related Flickr images and ask them to construct a fictional short story in under five days. In this installment, we tackled two of our favorite subjects: wine and group sex.

The marriage was over. We knew that much.

It had been over for five years, at least, ever since Debra informed me that she wasn't just taking those Pilates classes because she liked how they toned her glutes, but because her instructor, Fausto, afforded her the kind of self-worth as a woman that I wasn't providing to her. "Empowered," was the word she used, still squeezed into her Lululemon stirrup pants and steaming with damp.

Our children were grown and gone. Maybelline was studying neuroscience in Denmark, and Geremy had, by the grace of God, found some kind of employment on a less-than-legal-sounding farm in Northern California. We packed up most of his things and sent them cross-country in a U-Haul, but we never got a thank-you. Typical Geremy.

Overnight, the house became as quiet as a Mormon funeral. Except for the goddamn Brussels Griffon. Chauncey, Debra calls him, or just "Chaunce."

One day, after staring far too long into the dead eye of my future—professional obsolescence, erectile dysfunction, an inexorable and forever unrequited crush on my eventual live-in nurse—I decided that I should try to inject some adrenaline back into my otherwise DNR life with Debra.

I would have a wine party, and Fausto would not be invited.

We'd always loved wine—or for the last couple decades, at least. Sure, I'd been known to chug a jug of cheap Chianti in college, take off my pants, and waggle my dick to the beat of a Rod Stewart or Andy Gibb track. But I'd never really given good wine the time of day until that trip to Napa back in '96, when everyone in the neighborhood became a Merlot connoisseur overnight. I blame the Whitewater scandal, personally. The whole nation needed a drink.

Anyway. The house needed a lot of work, but I had enough in savings—God knows that Geremy wasn't using it for college tuition—and carved out some time on the weekends to head down to Lowes in the pickup, grab some sheetrock, and spruce up the living room.

I planned to invite the whole neighborhood over. I'd get a few nice bottles—some fine Chardonnay from the Russian River Valley, maybe a Condrieu from the Rhône—but the rest of it would be cheap Beaujolais Nouveau I could buy in bulk from BevMo.

After all, how else could I loosen everybody up for the wife swap?

OK, OK. Now you're going to call me a pervert, a pig. Fair enough. But I figured that an old-school, wine-fueled key party was the only way to light a fire under me and Debra.

I wasn't going to suggest that everyone arrive dressed in ass-less chaps and lubed up with coconut oil. It would be a classy affair. Of course there would be branzino. Of course there would be molten chocolate cake. We would sip wine and make mindless chitchat and be oh-so cosmopolitan, before segueing into an orderly and sophisticated exchange of spouses.

Reality, however, proved a little different.

It was Toby's idea that we all change into togas. "This is a classic bacchanalia, brother," he told me. I hadn't wanted to invite him, but Toby had recently been laid off from his job at the sock factory, so I felt bad for him. On top of that, his wife Tawny had a killer rack.

I say that only in comparison to Debra, who looked to me like a sack of potatoes that had fallen off the back of produce van in the middle of the interstate and left to ripen in the sun. (I mean, I was hardly a looker myself. I hadn't seen my penis without the help of a mirror since Sally Jessy Raphael was on the air.) But, clearly, Debra's Pilates classes were paying off in the ass department.

When guests began to arrive, Toby handed out bedsheets for everyone to wrap around themselves, and Debra started pouring the wine. We had little platters of hors d'oeuvres—some Colby cheddar on crackers, some smoked sockeye from my Salmon of the Month club—but they were hardly touched. People were going for seconds, and then thirds, on the wine.

It was like everyone already understood my intentions: get drunk, make love.

But things turned blurry very quickly. I looked over and saw Dolores, the elementary school teacher who lived at the end of the block, demanding that our sheepish accountant Alvin use her breasts as a boat for a banana split, before smashing his face between her whipped cream-filled cleavage and ululating a high-pitched yodel of sexual conquest.

Tom—the CTO for a company that created an app that makes dog whistle noises—was humping my daughter's street hockey trophy and foaming at the mouth. His wife, Cheri, had spread her legs like a burlesque performer and was speaking in tongues about the Greek god Priapus, which several people mistook as the word "Prius" and went to check on her car. A couple of others took off after Chaunce, chasing him through the backyard to do unfathomable kinds of offenses against nature.

I had no idea what was going on. How could Beaujolais Nouveau do this to people? Is Georges Dubœuf French for "sex crime"?

It was then that Debra turned to me with her rheumy, drunken eyes and whispered in my ear: "Spanish fly." She'd drugged the entire neighborhood with some voodoo pills she'd picked up on a trip to Tijuana—probably Cialis mixed with mephedrone and a dose of botánica magic from the bruja that sold it to her. Debra cackled, knowingly.

Moments later, everything went dark. After a dozen glasses of laced wine—or maybe because Debra had slipped me something extra-potent—I passed out, the party continuing to rage on all the while.

When I woke up the following morning—the sun searing my eyes through the wide-open bay window facing the street—Debra was standing over me.

And next to her was Fausto.

"I'm leaving you," she said, matter-of-factly. "You can keep the dog."

She picked up her overstuffed LeSportsac duffle, turned, and walked out the door. Fausto followed her, only stopping for a moment to look back at me and say with a shrug, "Ey, no hard feelings, brah?" And then he clicked the door shut behind him.

It was for the best. I lolled my head, heavy with a hangover, to one side. At least there were still a couple bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau left.