This story is a bit longer and slower than most of my stories. I do apologize for that, but I wanted to explore an idea. That doesn't explain my need to inflict it upon you, the reader, but I have. Also, it doesn't contain any explicit sex.
It's been some time since I wrote an angry BTB story. Truth is, I've been enjoying a happier place writing love stories. Still, the itch needs to be scratched and I often wonder what form of revenge brings any real measure of satisfaction? I honestly don't know the answer to that question, although I am repeatedly drawn to that utility knife I employed in A Carpenter's Best Friend. I like revenge that isn't life-threatening and that doesn't get you arrested but is horribly humiliating for the cheater because humiliation is what the betrayed spouse feels. Despite that, there is no real revenge in this story.
I suppose this effort is part story and part travelogue. I started thinking of driving cross country as a metaphor for moving on in life. As I wrote it, I realized that no matter how far we go to escape our lives, we carry those lives with us. Then the COVID-19 virus hit, I became a shut in, and getting out and about became an almost exotic dream. Anyway, this is a story about a man betrayed who ghosts his marriage.
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My name is Andrew Baker. My friends call me "AB", but never Andy. There is always some obnoxious drunk, some jackass who doesn't know me and wants to be more familiar than he deserves, and he'll always call me Andy. "So, Andy, what do you do for a living?" I tell him, "I build a neat little device that cops can just point at you from forty feet away and tell if you're drunk. They've started attaching them to radar guns around town." That usually shuts them up; although if you haven't guessed it yet, that device doesn't really exist. I guess you can tell that I don't suffer fools very well. Lie to me and it gets worse.
I'm not a complicated man. In fact, I like a simple life. I enjoy my work. I'm an engineer with a large national company that has many branch offices across the country. I have friends. I don't drink much, but I'll have the occasional beer. Truth be told, I prefer the nachos, but that's my struggle. If I let it get out of control, I'll put on weight. I need to keep that beast at bay, so I struggle and stay in reasonable shape for a man my age. I used to sail every chance I got, but a wife and two baby girls can put demands on a man's time and I soon sold the boat. That's just one of life's little sacrifices that I made years ago, and I made it happily, so I'd have the time to spend with the people that matter to me.
I've been happily married to Karen, a high school teacher, for twenty-five years. Our two girls are both in college now. Claire is up in Rhode Island at Brown and her younger sister, Denise, is at Boston University. I doubt I could afford schools like that, but the girls are serious students and earned some exceptional scholarships. We live in North Carolina in an area they call "The Research Triangle". It's built on several very good universities in the Raleigh area with top-flight high-tech firms all around. It's a great place to live and work. I'd tell you about Carolina Bar-B-Q, but I'll just get hungry thinking about it.
I was more than a little disappointed when the girls chose to go north for college, but I guess they needed to spread their wings a little and in the long run that's a good thing. The girls are great. They are smart, funny, personable young women with a strong sense of right and wrong. I worry about their safety every day, but I don't worry about their choices. Seeing them raised and taking those first steps of independence meant that my wife and I would finally have time for ourselves again. I'd been looking forward to these days for some time. With both girls off at college, I had fantasies of coming home every night to a loving wife who poured her attention onto me and mine onto her until life was one joyful day after another. We could be like newlyweds again. We would go out to dinner, see plays, go to movies, and finally reconnect the way I'd always wanted. It didn't work out quite that way. Truth be told, over that first year of our empty nest Karen started changing. Her interests were moving away from me, or so it seemed. It was gradual, but over time it could be seen. I wrote it off as her chance to blossom now that the girls had moved out, but eventually I realized that what I was watching was a fundamental change in her values and priorities.
Karen teaches English with an emphasis on Creative Writing. To be honest, and I hope fair, she is a frustrated writer. As a young mother and teacher, she never had the time to write the way she wanted. Karen writes all summer long and whenever she can spare an hour or two, but nothing much has ever come of it. She would regularly submit essays and short stories to literary magazines, developing only an extensive collection of rejection letters, while the master work never materialized. If I were truthful, I do love to read what my wife writes, but as a writer she's never reached beyond formulaic and often melodramatic tales. She has a romantic idea of what a writer is supposed to be, and I suspect, not that I would ever tell her, that she is drawn more to the idea of being a writer than to the writing itself. No matter. If she's happy, I'm happy.
For most of our marriage, Karen has belonged to one writing group or another. These are people who get together for the purpose of helping each other, critiquing, suggesting, and discussing their work in an effort to make each other better. Some of the groups have seemed to me to be genuinely productive while others are more like mutual admiration societies. Her last group, which was her current group when it all fell apart, had a bit of both. They took turns meeting at each other's home and when they were here, I'd try to make myself scarce. I did try to participate once, but that got me some disapproving looks from Karen and a few others, so I gave up trying.
Karen's current writing group has about 10 people with both men and women. I like some of them. Others I could live without. Half are nondescript and half make a very definite impression when you meet them. Reggie (a woman) is heavy into writing histories and biographies. She does real research and writes books that have a strong academic vein while still trying to engage the reader. I have read them all and I like them a lot. I've told her so. Betty likes to write fantasy. I don't think she imagines herself the next J. K. Rowling; she's more the talking unicorn type, but she's pleasant and she seems to write mostly for her own pleasure. Who can fault that? Bill is the resident know-it-all. A little of that can go a long way, but he seems okay in every other regard. Then there is Frank. I heard alarms in my head the first time I met him, and those alarms have not stopped sounding since. When I was introduced to Frank, and I was most definitely made to feel that I was being introduced to him and not the other way around, he said, "So, Andy, what do you do?" I looked at my wife who pursed her lips and shook her head at me and I just said, "Engineer, Frank." Was that a smile or a smirk he gave me?
I told you that I gave up trying to participate in their group, but I tend to be more out of sight and out of mind, but not out of sound, when they come over. I'll be in the next room working quietly or on the back porch with an open window until they forget I'm there. I noticed early on that when Frank interacts with Karen it's almost like they have their own private jokes. Sometimes he inflates her ego and other times he seems to know her thoughts with an intimacy that I don't care for one little bit. He makes references to past conversations and I get the impression the rest of the group has no memory of them. It's just a feeling, but I don't like it and I've told her so. She just dismisses my concerns and I know better than to push it. I've made sure she knows how I feel about it. The rest is on her.
The group has a pattern to their meetings. After the working session, the group settles down with some wine and loosens up. That's when I learn that some of them are just pretenders. It was the middle of the spring semester, early March, when the conversation turned to the lifestyle of "real" writers.
"Oh, all the great writers were alcoholics!"
"True! They write in the mornings and drink in the afternoons and evenings. It loosens up the brain to new ideas and then in the mornings their creative juices flow and they write."
"Actually, the truly great writers all had love affairs. That was their real inspiration." That was Frank speaking. Thanks, Frank. I've got your number, asshole.
That's when Karen tied a knot in my stomach. "Oh, I know! It's the passion and the excitement of the unknown, the thrill of hiding it all from the eyes of others, that's where the real inspiration lies!" Some of them laughed at that and some didn't, so I told myself it was just a joke, but I kept one ear on them the rest of the night.
"Maybe we should just all have a wild sex night sometime and then we will all write the great American novel." That was Bill. I couldn't tell if he intended it as a joke or not.
"Character flaws are not the foundation of great writing. Humanity, compassion, and the challenge of the unknown are what great stories are built on." I told you I liked Betty. "Great stories are all about facing adversity, reaching for greatness against all odds, and making the world better than it was before."
"Well, maybe if you just cast the right spell, we can save ourselves all the trouble." That was asshole Frank again. To their shame, some of the group seemed to think that was funny. I doubt that Betty did, and I suspected that Reggie didn't, either.
Their conversation continued with this writer's drinking habits and that writer's mistresses and I continued to listen without tipping my hand. Then I caught an interesting discussion. "Is anyone else applying for the Illinois Writer's Workshop this summer?" It was Frank again.
"Oh, I already applied. I'm hoping they let me in. Six weeks to just write and talk with writers... It could be a real game changer for me." It was Karen and this was the first I'd heard about it.
