David Chapter 1-4
David, his Wife and his Best Friend
Good Intentions Gone Awry-Part 1 of 3
*****
This tome covers a genre, variations of which are spread generously through this site. The tale of a wife who sets out to help or comfort her husband's best friend after the best friend's wife/girlfriend dies after illness, gets killed in an accident or simply dumps him, leaving him distressed, or loses his job or gets an incurable disease or breaks both wrists, or legs, etc., or wants his best friend's wife to accompany him to an important event where partners are required to attend and/or wants/needs someone to look after him, etc., etc., etc...
With just another variation on a theme, this tale is about the destruction of a marriage, caused by the wife's involvement with the husband's best friend.
This story idea started as a 750-word short story and perhaps it should have been left there, but, perhaps unfortunately, developed a life of its own and became the weighty tome it has now become. This tale includes adultery, sharing and a little anal intercourse. There is no real plot: it's just a story about a bunch of people living their lives.
In 1897 Mark Twain once said, " Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. " That's what makes stories interesting.
*****
David, his Wife and his Best Friend
Chapter 1
Her husband's unannounced arrival was as unexpected as it was inconvenient. The timing so very awkward.
Linda had been staying with her husband's best friend, at his house, some three hours by car from the home she shared with her husband, so David's trip combined with his increased office workload of late was unlikely to be a spur-of-the-moment decision so it was indeed a complete surprise to hear his car approaching the house. A harbinger of things to come perhaps?
Tom, on his last visit to David and Linda's home some four months earlier, had informed them he had been diagnosed with an aggressive and incurable form of cancer and was not expected to have many more months left, possibly somewhere between four to six, the oncologist had said, given how far the disease had spread. They were shattered by the news as Tom until recently could have been a poster boy for healthy living; being tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed and with an impressive physique. David and Tom had been friends since high school and spent many good, sometimes bad, times together during their many decades of friendship. After Linda met and later married David, she had also formed a bond with her husband's best friend as they had, all three, shared many fun-filled times together. David and Tom would have done anything for each other and whilst there was nothing David could do about the illness, he did offer to help him see out his last days in any way he could.
David and Linda discussed ways they could help him after the independent Tom had returned home after his short visit. They'd decided to visit and stay a while with Tom, and after speaking with their respective employers' they arranged to take accrued leave from their jobs and one month later they travelled to visit Tom to provide as much company, help and comfort as they could to the dying man.
After staying a month they reluctantly had to return home to their jobs but during that time, Linda with her empathetic and caring nature had developed an even closer friendship with Tom than they'd previously enjoyed over the many years they had known each other. They'd always liked each other but something more had developed between them during the month of their visit. Her compassion for a dying man, her feeling for her husband who she knew was experiencing a sadness she had not seen in him before, left her feeling unsettled. Her compassionate nature filled her with a desire to do something to help. She wanted to do what she could to provide more comfort to her husband's best friend living the last days of his life whilst also hoping to ease her husband's sadness.
As they left at the end of their month-long stay, David hugged his friend and waited while Linda did the same. A tiny moment that caused him to raise his eyebrows was that the hug, very close and intimate, lasted considerably longer than just a normal friendly hug. And it didn't help when she gave him a seconds-long kiss directly on the lips. Tom watched and waved goodbye as a disconcerted David drove away heading for home. David also noted that Linda had turned sideways in the passenger seat and continued waving goodbye until Tom was no longer in sight. They were both quiet on the three-hour drive home, both in thoughts of their own. David, feeling sad about his friend's health but also about the quite intimate friendship that seemed to have developed during the month between his wife and his best friend, and Linda; thinking about how, what, she could do to comfort the dying Tom whilst also helping to ease her husband's sadness about the terminal nature of his best friend's illness.
A general unease settled over David over the next month as Linda had started communicating directly with Tom, using email, messaging and her phone, with communications during the last two weeks of the month becoming a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence. Over the many years she had known Tom, after she'd met and married David, any direct long-distance communications between her and Tom had been very few and far between, brief and were generally to do with her asking him something about David. Whether she wanted to surprise him or get him a gift, she knew Tom would be the person from whom to get advice. When questioned about how often and what she and Tom were speaking about she just replied that it was just stuff asking him about how he was feeling, what he was feeling, how he was coping, if there was anything they could do for him and dismissed any of David's probing questions about how intimate they had seemed to be during their month-long stay at Tom's. To those questions, she just answered that she was just trying to show Tom that she; that they, cared about him and wanted to make his last days easier.
It was just a couple of days before the end of the month they had been back from visiting Tom when Linda dropped a bombshell on her husband. She sat, smiling, opposite him at the dining table as she informed him that she had taken an unpaid leave of absence from her job for a month, maybe two, to spend that time with her husband's best friend, to bring him some comfort and to ease as much as possible any discomfort of his last days, now expected to be only a month or so. They didn't need the money her job provided and knew David loved Tom as a brother and would want him to suffer as little as possible, to make his last few days as painless and comfortable as possible.
David's growing unease about Linda and Tom's burgeoning relationship was concerning but he'd kept his concerns mostly bottled up but this was too much. David erupted! "What the fuck Linda?" he almost shouted as he stood from the chair, "You didn't think you should have run this by me first...? That we should discuss something like this together?" He sat back down not knowing what to do with his hands. He put them on the table, brought them up to his face rubbing his forehead, then put them back down on the table forming fists this time. He was stunned.
Surprised at David's uncharacteristic emotional outburst, Linda's smile faded and her eyes grew large as she watched her husband's unexpected reaction. "I thought you would be pleased... I thought you would be happy I was prepared to make your best friend's last few days as comfortable as possible... I thought I would do something that would ease your pain at losing your best friend knowing that his last few days were as happy for him, and you, as we, could make them."
He stared at his wife, not comprehending what or who he was looking at. His mind had gone blank.
Slowly regaining his senses and in a calmer voice he asked "How long do you expect to be gone?"
"I don't know... Maybe a month or two... Until he passes I guess... until his last day."
"And what if that doesn't happen for twelve months, a year or more?"
"David, you know the doctors only gave him four months or so and it's already been three since we found out. And you know he's been getting physically weaker and the pain getting stronger. Surely you don't begrudge my making his life a little easier... I didn't ask you any earlier because you told me you couldn't take any more time off from work... That you were still catching up from the month we both spent at Tom's."
"You can't be there for him, but I can. He's your best friend. You are like brothers. You can't be there during his last days, but I can do that for you... for him, for the two of you."
"And for you," David replied.
"What does that mean?"
"During the month we spent with him, I noticed a developing intimacy between you two. I didn't give it any more than a passing thought at the time, but now, given this bombshell you have just dropped on me, I have to go back to questioning your motives. This is not a sudden decision you have made. You must have been dreaming this up for quite some time. Possibly since your reluctance to leave when we needed to come back home to our own life, to our jobs."
"David, yes... I have given it a lot of thought. I have always liked Tom, yes, but it's always been a friendship because he was, is, your best friend, not because of any other reason and certainly not because I had any designs on him if that is what you are implying. All we have is a friendship. Yes, maybe the bond is a little closer than before, but it's still just a friendship, just as friends sometimes develop closer relationships, nothing more... David... I'm married to you. I love you. I would never do anything to jeopardize that... David, he's your best friend and he's dying. Don't you want his last days to be the best they can, given the circumstances?"
"How do you intend to make his last days more comfortable, to ease his pain, to make his last days as best as they can be? He already has a nurse who visits daily and a housekeeper who comes daily to do his cooking and cleaning. Apart from that he lives alone. He's always lived alone because that's what he's wanted. That's how he chose to live. He had plenty of company when he wanted, women, friends, publishers, and that was enough for him... He's always rejected too much intrusion into what he called his 'private space'."
"Yes, you've always told me that and Tom has always reinforced and confirmed that, but recently he's been telling me that despite the essential help he's been getting he sometimes... often... misses closer companionship, the visits outdoors, to bookshops, to restaurants, to art galleries, camping trips, stuff like that that are getting increasingly difficult for him to do. Maybe I can't help him with all of those things but I can be a friend, a friend he can talk to face to face and maybe help him do some of those things. He doesn't get many visitors these days and he feels the pain of that social isolation despite what he always claimed about not wanting people around. He could just put up with his visitors in the past but now that they had stopped coming, he missed even that infrequent company. That just adds to the pain he is already physically suffering. Even if I can't help him with the physical pain, maybe I can help with the mental side of things."
