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| A cheesy ring the doc bought for Gypsy probably had a stone no larger than this one. And maybe it was even smaller. |
Let me offer you two rules to
live by:
1. If you’re a married doctor, never cheat on your wife with a woman named Gypsy.
2. If you’re a woman who wants to stay out of trouble, never get kept by a married doctor. Especially not by a cheap one.
I pause here from the exhaustion of writing ad infinitum about Tea Party outrages, Republican idiocy, the well-intentioned Obama Administration repeatedly
shooting itself in the foot, and political overload in general. You'll get none of my
usual political harangues today.
Instead, I take note of a Associated Press story by Paul Foy
about a doctor in Provo, Utah, who’s on trial for zapping his wife with lethal
drugs so he’d be free to marry his mistress.
The doc’s name is Martin
MacNeill. The femme fatale’s name is Gypsy Willis. And while we’re pointing out
names, I feel compelled to mention that the prosecutor’s name is – say it aloud – Sam
Pead.
Even with the names, it was one of those “ho-hum, I’ve
seen this before on TV” kinds of stories – up to a point. The
prosecutor accuses Dr. MacNeill of a 15-month affair with Gypsy, during which the doc set her up with
a love nest and a debit card, and shelled out for her nursing school tuition.
But then, the wife is suddenly dead from
who-knows-what-drugs, allegedly administered by her doctor husband. Nine days later, Gypsy moves
out of her duplex love nest into the home (and presumably the bed) of the dead
wife. A few months afer that, the doc proposes marriage and gives Gypsy a $7,000
diamond ring.
And that's when the alarm went off in my head.
A $7,000 diamond? From a doctor? How cheap is that? The old wife
is hardly even cold in her grave and already Gypsy is getting nickeled and dimed like a wife
of 20 years. What an outrage!
Listen, I know something about
what diamonds cost. I’m not a rich man by a long shot. But back in the day,
when The Crank’s beautiful girlfriend was still alive and I was head-over-heels
in love with her (and as I may still be, almost three years after her death), I
took the beautiful girlfriend to Tiffany’s.
There, in the Tiffany building,
I whipped out a not-insignificant chunk of my life savings, and bought her a
pure white, 4.1 carat, brilliant-cut solitaire diamond engagement ring for –
well, it’s none of your business. However, I can state with considerable authority that I once could
have made the down payment on a Manhattan mansion or an estate in the Hamptons
with it (although I’d never have been able to carry the mortgage, or even the
taxes.)
But I’m just a poor wreck of a writer.
The doc practices medicine, a profession that actually pays people stuff you can call money
So for $7,000, gypsy got what? A
piece of crap is what. You could look it up, here. While diamonds vary widely in price according to size and quality, chances are she got a cheesy little
under-one-carat rock of mediocre quality, a little chip of a crapola stone. Of course, the $7,000 probably included the dimestore setting.
And for this she gave up the
duplex she was being kept in, her independence (“Please don’t come over
tonight, Martin, I’m washing my hair”) and for all I know her nursing school
tuition?
There’s even more juicy stuff to
it than that. Doctor Cheap-o tried to sneak Gypsy into the, uh, marital abode as a
baby sitter. And Gypsy is accused of trying to pay off some old debts
of hers (that evidently the cheapskate doc wasn’t willing to pay off) by
stealing the identity of one of the doc’s kids.
Sorry, no pictures of the cast
of characters. I’m afraid the photographs belong to the AP or some other news medium that might make noise about copyright infringement. But there
are a couple of photographs of Gypsy and Doc in the story, so go check it out here.
Oh, and one more moral. Ladies,
never even think of marrying a man
who says he’ll dump his wife for you. He will – or worse – but then he’ll start
treating you the way he treated his
wife.
This all somehow reminds me (there's no reason why it should) of the story about the married board chairman
traveling on business with his executive assistant. At midnight, she knocks on
his hotel room door. He opens it. She’s clad in a diaphanous negligee. Thickclouds of
Chanel No. 5 are wafting off her pulse points, fogging the air around her.
“Brrr!" she says, pretending to shiver and hugging herself. "It’s so chilly in my room and I think the window is stuck.
Could you come in and close it for me?"
He does so and retreats to his own room.
A half hour later, she’s at his door again. “Now I’m hot,”
she complains. “So hot! I don’t know, maybe the heat is out of control. I'm hot, hot, hot! Could you come to my room and open my window?”
So he goes to her room and opens the window again.
And twenty minutes later, she’s once more knocking at the door. This time, she's cold again.
Suddenly, he gets an idea.
“Say, how would you like to pretend – just for tonight –
that we’re married?” he asks.
“Why, I’d love it!”
she coos.
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