Another big thank you to blackrandl1958 for the invitation to participate in
this event
, as well as her editing.
It was my turn to pick the restaurant for our Friday afternoon strategy session, so I chose my favorite Hungarian place because I was in the mood for their Rakott Krumpli.
For the uninitiated, or those who don't speak Hungarian, Rakott Krumpli is potato casserole with bacon, eggs and sausages. Magyar's has the best I've ever tasted, and I've tasted a few.
The six of us from the "imagination team" at Isaacs-Forsman Marketing settled in at our table and ordered drinks from the waitress to start. Bob Isaacs, the son of our managing director and the head of our team, pulled out his ubiquitous file and legal pad, cleared his throat and got to it.
Every Friday afternoon, our team spent between two and three hours reviewing where our projects were going and what was coming up on the horizon. It was done in a casual, informal way, and since we did it on Friday, it enabled us to hit the ground running first thing Monday morning.
It also made for a pretty tight, cohesive unit. We had been doing this for almost three years now, since Bob took over the unit, and our success rate had gone through the roof. Bob might have gotten the job because of his last name, but his success endeared him to our team because of the increased wages we all had earned.
We had been at it for about 45 minutes when I just happened to glance over to the far corner of the restaurant, a popular spot for couples wanting a little more privacy. Marcy and I had requested that table before. We can leave it at that.
Needless to say, I was more than a little flummoxed when I recognized the profile of the woman at the table, even though her face was attached to the face of a man I didn't recognize, who was not her husband. Laura Wycliffe was my wife's best friend, and a co-worker for the past 22 years.
Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Until that minute, I had always thought Laura stood right next to the Mother Superior at our local Catholic church.
It took all my powers of focus to tear my eyes away from the couple and go back to concentrating on my meeting. I had to think Laura hadn't seen me yet, because if she had, I don't think she would have stayed in the restaurant, let alone be kissing... well, whoever it was.
I know my face turned red immediately, and I started to perspire. I peeked over a few more times, catching them kissing again one time and him rubbing her arm another time. I waited 10 minutes before making a plausible excuse for leaving early, and Bob—bless his heart—let me go early.
I drove home on auto-pilot. Fuck, how the hell was I going to tell my wife that her best friend—St. Laura—was kissing some unidentified man at a restaurant and might be having an affair?
I got home a little after 3 and knew I had about two hours before my wife got home from her job as an assistant vice president at Wells Fargo Bank. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt and poured myself a shot of Casamigos tequila. I took a sip and chuckled, thinking about the brand's incredibly stupid advertising campaign for its product. It's an occupational hazard. I see a product and start thinking about marketing plans. Anyway, much of their television commercial centers around the fact that George Clooney is a co-owner of Casamigos.
I get that the fucker is a handsome man's man, but I see the ad geared more toward women than men, and women don't historically drink tequila as much as men. Even with George hawking the product, I don't think that many more women are going to buy it. Just my opinion. Time will tell if I'm right, although I usually am. George should have used Isaacs-Forsman. Just sayin'.
I had just poured my fourth shot and was staring into space when I heard my wife enter the house from the garage. I didn't jump up and greet her like usual, so she looked concerned when she walked into our family room.
"Oh shit!" she rasped. "Are you going to tell me we need to talk?"
Marcy sunk down into the sofa across from my La-Z-Boy, looking like someone punched her in the stomach.
"We... we do need to talk, but not for the reason you think," I asserted.
Her head, which had slumped forward, came up and her eyes flashed optimism.
"We're good... as far as I know. This conversation isn't about us," I said.
She blew out a long breath of air. She raised her eyebrows, then shrugged.
"So whom are we talking about, then?" she asked.
"Laura. Laura Wycliffe," I responded. "Unbelievable, huh?"
I watched as my wife just about fell off the sofa. I had to assume she had no idea. Her look of surprise quickly turned to one of anger.
"Start talking, bub. This had better be good, or you won't be getting any for the next week."
I told her about what I had seen earlier in the day at the restaurant, including my thoughts that playing kissy-face didn't necessarily mean she was sleeping with the unknown man. Of course, it might have been a good indicator, however.
"Oh... no, no, no," she growled. "Laura would never... would she?"
"She's your best friend. You know her a lot better than I do," I said.
I sipped my tequila. Marcy just sat and watched me for a bit. Her eyes were unreadable.
"So what are we going to do?" I asked. "I assume you'll want to handle this, whatever we decide."
"Yeah. Yeah. I'll handle it, whatever we decide," she said.
It was my turn to raise my eyebrows.
"So I take it by that look that you're not going to tell Tim?" I asked.
"Why would I do that? You're not sure what you saw. How would we even broach this? I'd hate to throw a hand grenade into their marriage if we're not sure what we're looking at."
"We've got to do... something. We might not know how far this has gone, but what I saw certainly doesn't pass the husband test," I argued.
"You know darned well that if I told you Tim was kissing on some woman, you'd be over there right now helping Laura nail him to a cross."
"I am a lot closer to her than him. You know that," she said.
"Still, it doesn't make what she did right. You've at least got to talk to her. Hear her explanation," I said.
"But I just can't accuse her of something," Marcy said. "I'll have to be more diplomatic than you'd be."
"I'll be interested to hear her explanation for checking out someone else's tonsils," I said.
Marcy didn't say anything to me about Laura either Monday or Tuesday, so on Wednesday night after our daughter, Rose, went to bed, I asked my wife if she had spoken to Laura yet. She stammered around a bit and then changed the topic, essentially ending the conversation. I let it go for that night, but practically ambushed my wife the next night, insisting we talk.
"Look, if you don't want to be the bad guy, I'll bring it up to Tim. After all, I'm the one who saw Laura," I started.
"No. No. No. Don't do that. I'll talk with her tomorrow," Marcy said.
I'd been together with my wife a long time, and I could tell when she didn't want to do something. I started to have a very bad feeling about this whole situation.
"I want an answer, babe. If you're too afraid to push it, I'll just talk to Tim. If she's cheating on him and he finds out, and finds out I knew something and didn't tell him, he's going to be pissed as hell, and he'd be right. I know we're not as close as you and Laura, but he's been my friend a lot of years... and friends don't sandbag other friends. If my wife was cheating and I found out a friend knew it and didn't tell me, there would probably be hell to pay and a friendship would be ended. You just don't do shit like that to a friend," I explained.
Marcy looked pale while I gave my little diatribe. She promised to speak to Laura the next day and report back.
I didn't know it then, but the next day proved to be the beginning of the end for my marriage. Back then, though, I learned for the first time I had a problem.
Marcy wasn't exactly forthcoming when she got home the next day. In fact, I was pretty sure she was hoping I wouldn't bring it up. Finally, after Rose left to spend Friday night with some friends, I bounced her about it. She pretended to have let it somehow slip her mind.
"Laura explained what happened... it's not quite what you thought, Norm, but she admitted to crossing the line with some guy named Kenneth Attenborough. She promised me she wouldn't do that again... She says she just lost her head..."
I might have bought that answer, if Marcy could have looked me in the eye while she was talking to me. She looked at my waist. She looked over my shoulder. She looked everywhere but at my eyes. In 22 years of marriage, she had never avoided my gaze before, even when she wrecked my precious brand new 2015 Mustang Shelby GT500.
I was pretty sure the two had talked, but I was also pretty sure the Kenneth Attenborough thing was nothing but bullshit... and Marcy knew it as well. She was covering for her friend... and lying to my face. We had been together for more than half my life, and this was the first time she had ever lied to me that I knew. I was devastated beyond words.
I spent the next several days wondering about why my wife would lie to me. I didn't like any of the answers.
A couple of days later, Bob Isaacs invited me to a one-on-one in his office. That's a euphemism for getting called on the carpet for screwing up. It doesn't happen very often to anyone on our team, but when it did, Bob was good enough to hold the discussion in private, never chewing anyone out in public.
"What's going on Norm?" he asked after some quick chit-chat. "Your head hasn't been in the game for several days."
I told Bob about Marcy lying to me recently about her friend possibly having an affair, and how I wasn't sure what I was going to do about it. He looked at me sincerely and asked me if I would like to hire a private investigator to check up on Marcy's friend.
"It's all about peace of mind, Norm. You can brood about this or attack it head on, get an answer and move on," he said. "I've got a guy who's not too expensive and can get you answers pretty quickly. What's your game plan on this? Are you going to tell your friend if it turns out his wife is cheating on him? Because if you are, remember there's the old saying about killing the messenger. What if he gets pissed at you even if his wife is cheating?"
"There is that possibility. But what kind of a friend would I be if I didn't say something to him if she is cheating on him?" I asked.
"You are either the best kind of friend or the world's biggest idiot, Norm," he responded.
The next afternoon I spent an hour with Roy Hoover, the PI Bob suggested to me.
Two weeks later, I had evidence that Laura Wycliffe was definitely cheating on her husband. It was time for me to put up or shut up. What I wasn't going to do, however, was tell my wife, who apparently was covering for her best friend, much to my chagrin.
I probably knew Laura a little better than Tim because Laura had worked with my wife for two decades, so I heard a lot of Laura stories through the years. Basically, I knew Tim through his wife, the way he knew me. He was a nice enough guy, a little bit of a stuffed shirt, probably because he was an engineer.
We got along pretty well. We were both big sports fans and the four of us had what I considered an easy friendship. We held a lot of the same beliefs, one of the key ones being marital fidelity... at least I thought we all agreed on fidelity. Roy Hoover proved me wrong on that one. The jury was still out on what my wife believed.
I called Tim and asked him to meet me for lunch the next Tuesday. I would have made it Monday, but Mondays already suck, and I wasn't going to dump another suckfest on him. There was no way this wasn't going to suck.
I asked the waitress for a table in the back so we could have some privacy. I ordered a double Tanqueray on the rocks for me and dark craft beer for Tim. He was into craft beers, and this place had 16 on tap.
