Decameron: Approaching the Tail End [IX/10]
Me: So get this: The new Decameron story I’m adapting has this guy and his hot wife—
Husband: —stop. Stop right there. You don’t have to go on. Let me guess. It has a guy and his hot wife, and a second dude, who’s maybe a stranger or maybe a close friend of the husband. And this guy wants to bang the hot wife. Am I wrong?
Me: No, but —
Husband: But he can’t bang the hot wife because of societal norms, or because the husband doesn’t want it, or for some other reason, even though evidently “banging the hot wives of other guys” was a major Medieval ambition, since it makes up about 98% of The Decameron’s content — a fact which should maybe have inspired them to reevaluate whatever social forces and power dynamics were making them all so miserable all the time, but I digress — and so he has to come up with a clever way of getting to bang her, such as, including, but not limited to: sneaking into her room at night under some kind of pretense, tricking the husband into making himself scarce for a few hours, kidnapping her, pretending to kidnap her, hiding in a barrel inside the house, disguising himself as a maid, and/or disguising himself as an angel. And furthermore, because it’s The Decameron, the plan will work, regardless of its asininity. Correct?
Me: Yes, and —
Husband: And somehow they never got tired of it! Somehow, these people were so eager to get it on with another man’s spouse that approximately ten billion stories about cheating and getting cheated on were not enough to quench their thirst. They’d read about a guy coming into a window on a zipline to cheat with another guy’s wife, and then the next day they’d read the same story about a guy coming in via parachute. They’d read about a guy hiding in an armoire so he could cheat on another guy’s wife and then two seconds later they’d read the same exact thing, but this time the guy is hiding in a kitchen cabinet. So tell me: What possible maneuver could the other guy pull this time that wouldn’t just feel like a ripoff of a ripoff of a story from Day 3? What could he possibly say to the husband to trick him into letting him sleep with his wife?
Me: He tells him it will magically turn her into a horse.
Husband: …
Me: And then they could use the horse to carry things around.
Husband: …
Husband: ...
Husband: Ok, that’s actually pretty good.
Decameron is a newsletter recounting the 14th Century set of quarantine tales for 2020. Read the original story.
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