I've always loved peace in the home, the houseplant (google it, it's cute) as well as the real thing. My home office has two small pots with the plant, also known as baby's-breath, as a reminder to anyone entering that peace in the home is of high value to me. At work, my office desk has one on the credenza, to remind me that business is not just about making money. I owned a modest-sized network security business, serving the local business community and a few high-end individuals.
For the twelve years we've lived in our four-bedroom house, it worked--we did indeed have peace. However, in the past year I learned something: the opposite of peace isn't always strife. It can also be coldness, apathy. Yeah, it's a cliché. To be expected, of course, because if it didn't happen so damn often it wouldn't be a cliché, now, would it? A year ago, my wife, Brenda, finally got the promotion she'd been angling and kissing ass for, and became executive assistant to the head partner of the law firm she worked for. I'd dreaded this promotion for some time, because said chief was another cliché, Ross Chisholm, the arrogant, narcissistic, jerk boss. You'd think Brenda, working in the firm for so long, and seeing him up close, would see through his god's-gift-to-women act, but you'd be wrong. Sadly.
Again, since we're riding the cliché thing, she also started working late after the promotion. Got to keep up with the boss's hours, don't you know? And of course it wasn't long before the final snake in the goodbye garden reared it's devious head: trips out of town. Just the notion of Chisdick needing to go out of town was a red flag. Their law firm only did local work, with local clients on local issues. When I asked the first time why the asshole had to go out of town, the reply I got amounted to little more than hissing, bluster and insults. When I had the temerity to ask why she had to accompany him, it escalated to a full-blown fight. Who the hell did I think I was to question the mighty and wise head partner's judgment? And that, as they say, is where the fecal matter inched closer to the rotating air circulation promoter for our marriage.
Yes, I love peace in the home and I'll go to great lengths to maintain it, but I'm not devoid of brain cells. Like a few million other guys, I have access to the internet and the odd story about cheating spouses.
Once I got over my disappointment, hurt and anger, I figured I had to do something, because a cuckold I most certainly am not. I was too late to do anything about the first trip to Aspen, but by the time they planned the second trip, I had a few ducks lined up. My loving wife and her Chasshole boss seemed to like upscale locales, the upcoming one being some ritzy beach place in the Hamptons on Long Island.
In my younger days I'd fallen for the oxymoronic idiocy of 'fighting for peace,' and I buried a few misspent years after high school in the military. Other than an IT degree, I gained from those years a few friends, some still in, but most spread across the country in peaceful occupations. One of them, Paul Halsbury, happened to reside on Long Island, doing home security work for the millionaires who own expensive homes they almost never use, and therefore need to protect. It was a logic which escaped both of us. I mean, if you're only going to use a house out there for a couple weeks a year, because you're spending the rest of the time making money for its payments, why not just rent one for those two or three weeks? Oh no, in that crowd it wasn't the use of the house that counted, it was the
owning
of the house. Every village, they say, has an idiot, but the Hamptons seem to their breeding ground.
I had to grudgingly concede that ole Ross Chissass was not one of those idiots--he simply rented a house to rub shoulders with the celebrities. However, he was not smart enough to make his law practice computer network impenetrable. In all likelihood, he was too self-absorbed to realize the woman he was bonking had a network professional for a husband. Granted, it took a week or so of evening poke-around, but I eventually broke my way into his firm's email server.
Being the bossman, and having Brenda under him in the firm (pun intended), it apparently was a no-brainer for him to use his work email to set up their plans for the July 'conference' in New York to prep for some large lawsuit. His other emails showed the 'conference' consisted of a half-hour meeting when they landed, to hammer out the details of a settlement between one of his local clients and a company in the Big Apple, and another half-hour the day they were leaving to wrap it up. In between it was
Weekend at Bernie's,
baby, party, party, party.
Karma is not always a bitch. At times she can be a sweet and loving babe, and for some reason her heart bled for me this time. The house Brenda secured for their fling--err, conference--happened to belong to a customer of my good friend Paul. Which meant it was already wired for video and sound, and all action would be streaming into his servers and recorded. All we had to do was sit back. Well, sit back and do some things to take care of the home front.
Including nurturing my little peace in the home plants.
Time to take a breath and describe the players, I guess. Brenda was 34 and a classic Brazilian beauty, tall and tan and young and lovely like in the song. In case you were wondering, yes, she did have a permanent Brazilian, courtesy of laser surgery. The edginess of her youth had mellowed into soft curves and, to my mind at least, she was tanned perfection. No kids to spoil her body--two busy professionals, what can I say? Apparently ole Ross the boss also thought she was perfection. On heels, she looked all six one of me (Brent Maher, 35) straight in the eye. With Ross, though, she had to stay with flats so as to not embarrass the man. Both of us believed in using the gym our gated community clubhouse had, so we were fit. My eyes were green, hers brown.
Here's the thing I didn't understand. Ross was hardly Mr. Universe or Einstein, but he had managed to land a real-life beauty queen for a wife, Miss Central Ohio or something like that. Central casting couldn't have done any better: blond, blue-eyed, Barbie in every way. She wasn't an airhead, either--she had a framed MBA from one of the top Ivy League schools, and when you talked to her, you knew: somebody was home and taking care of business. Why in the hell would he pork somebody who, though pretty and sexy, definitely wasn't in Barbie's league? (Nobody is perfect, as they say, and Barbara, to her chagrin, got tagged with the Barbie name in high school. To her face everyone called her Barbara, but everywhere else she was Barbie.)
Don't ask me why, but apparently I was one of the few men in Barbie's (so sue me) orbit who happened to not be intimidated by her, which meant when we met at company gatherings, we always had good conversations. To use another cliché, we clicked. In time, we acquired a mutual respect, oh, and each other's phone numbers as well.
And so it came about that Brenda informed me late June that she and her brilliant boss 'had to' take a weeklong trip to New York for the abovementioned 'conference,' which would span the Fourth of July. My forays into their email system had already delivered up the sickening details. I merely nodded and said okay.
As I mentioned earlier, I'd read a few Lit LW stories, and in most the about-to-be betrayed hubby would plead with the wife to stay. Not me. If she was too stupid to realize that cheating spelled the end of our marriage, she'd be too stupid to see reason. Fidelity was not something I felt a husband (or wife, for that matter) should need to lobby for. It's in the contract. If you don't believe in fidelity, don't marry. Zero rocket science needed.
So, while she spent her time and energy setting up plans for their weeklong honeymoon, I spent the time taking care of number one. From the first time I realized that my loving wife was spreading her legs for the bossman she now adored, I'd started moving money places. My business, from its inception, was set up as being owned by a foreign trust outside of our common assets and I'd been an employee and not an owner. So I simply 'invested' more of our money into the business, a little at a time, until our private joint savings account was down to barely an emergency fund level, as opposed to the retirement level it had been before.
--
The big day arrived and off the two love birds went to nest in New York.
My company, with the infusion of capital from our savings account, had decided to invest in a new line of business, marine security I called it. With technology, you never know where the next opportunity will open up, do you? This, of course, required the company to acquire a decent-sized boat, one that could easily reach places like the Cayman Islands, and included decent-sized accommodations. Being owned by the company, for company purposes, it would not form part of our community assets. In fact, Brenda never knew about the boat. I meant to tell her, of course, but she was working late all the time, so when was I supposed to?
So... I spent my time tending my peace in the home plants which, quietly, had been moved from my home office to said boat in the marina.
While my loving wife and her boss worked their busy asses off in the Hamptons on their 'big deal,' I got busy. The first morning of their 'conference,' Paul, my security buddy, sent me links to videos his system had recorded. It didn't take more than five minutes to verify serious adultery was taking place, so I stopped watching, downloaded the files to my home laptop and stored a copy in the cloud.
After taking a deep breath, I called the asshole's wife. "Hi Barbara, Can we meet for lunch today?"
"What? Why?" While not hostile, her tone sounded a trifle cool, like she suspected I just waited till our spouses were out of town before hitting on her.
"Something happened last night I need to show you in person."
If anything, her hostility escalated. "What happened?"
Pressing my lips, I escalated my hostility right back. "That's what I want to show you. It affects you directly. But if you're not interested, let's forget it. Just don't complain afterward that I didn't tell you."
That did it, and she backed down. "Sorry. Okay, let's meet. When and where?"
Deciding to rub her nose in it a little, I said, "I was going to give you the option to pick a time and place, but if you're pressed for time, let's do noon at the McDonald's on Bridge and Seventh. That'll be fast."
As I suspected, the location did matter to her. After drawing in her breath in a bit of a huff, she said, "No, let's do Chipotle in the Lodent Mall. Noon is fine." Apparently, that was as low, and as fast, as she was going to go.
While waiting for noon to arrive, I moved most of my belongings, including my desk, to a small storage space. I didn't have family anywhere close, nor friends I wanted to move in with, so I took residence in the boat, and fired up the internet to look for an apartment. Time marched on and I decided to do the banking stuff after lunch. No rush--it's not like Brenda was going to interrupt her sexual marathon to check on bank balances. In her mind, Mr. Peace in the Home was happily twiddling his thumbs and watering his plants, waiting for the beauty queen to return, bearing her charms of allure.
--
I beat Barbie to Chipotle, got my food and found us a table as far back as I could. Waiting for her, I fired up my laptop and burned her a copy of her husband's porn scene onto a thumb drive.
When she dropped her food on the table, her greeting was, shall we say, brusque. The husband of her husband's subordinate had, after all, interrupted her day chockful of beauty treatments, book clubs, clothes shopping, and whatnot. Not feeling motivated to soften the blow, I simply turned the laptop to her and hit Play.
Iced tea blew out of her mouth and nostrils as the (muted for public viewing, of course) nasty sex scene filled the screen. Brenda rode Barbie's scummy hubby cowgirl-style while he squeezed her tits and tweaked her nipples. Pretty soon they shifted to doggie style.
Barbie slammed the lid of the laptop shut with a hard slap, dropped her head to her hands and sobbed. "Sonofabitch," she blurted out between the snot and tears. "He told me this was an important deal, and he did not tell me he was taking his floozy." She patted my hands. "No offense."
"None taken," I said, waiting for her to get over her shock. Admittedly, the way I sprang it on her was a bit mean, but in my view she'd asked for it. The least she could have done is realize I wouldn't call her without good reason, and keep an open mind until she heard what it was. On the other hand, ripping the bandaid off was probably going to result in a quicker and more decisive reaction from her. So I waited and finished my massive burrito elephant-style (one bite at a time).
"How long have you known?" she asked after using a handful of napkins to clear the tears and snot.
