Perhaps it was fate that my client picked the place. It was a nice enough grille that I had not visited since friends dragged me there for a consolation dinner after a divorce I had not seen coming. Was it a year ago? No, more like a year and a half. I wasn't eager to return to those memories but it was not a big deal anymore. Although I still hurt from the betrayal of a wife I still loved, managing the pain of losing her was now much easier. Old triggers like this restaurant no longer put my emotions into a tailspin.
Still, I would have chosen to go elsewhere for lunch if I had known I would end up alone. The customer I was to meet had encountered some kind of office emergency and begged off at the last second. My iced tea was already on the table when he texted me, so it didn't make sense to leave hungry. Tall seat backs made my booth a sort of lonely cocoon despite the busy noontime crowd. I was perusing the menu when my nose twitched.
Women don't wear perfume so much anymore, let alone Chanel Chance. But I knew one who did. Or at least she did 18 months before. The scent arrived just as a thunk jarred my backside. The wearer and I were now sitting back-to-back, separated by a few inches of plywood and padding. I instinctively glanced to my right, toward the mirror above the bar way off to the side. I couldn't clearly see "Miss Chanel," but on the opposite side of her table was someone I knew much too well. It was Charlene, my ex-wife's best friend, who I felt sure had encouraged the infidelity that killed my marriage.
Charlene spoke and a voice belonging to Jilly, who had been my wife for six mostly good years, responded. I had not heard it since the last meeting in her lawyer's office, before a judge finalized the papers. The sound of her gnawed at the pit of my stomach. And I was trapped, literally. My only escape would be right past them, which risked a conversation I did not want.
"Have you decided, sir?" asked my waitress. I was lost in thought. "Sir?" she repeated. I began to order but stopped after one syllable, realizing that the acoustics favoring my hearing the women's voices might also favor their hearing mine. I pointed to the French dip picture on the menu. The waitress departed, looking a little confused about a customer whose voice seemed to fail halfway through his first word.
It was fortuitous -- or perhaps not -- that I could hear Jilly's closer voice better than Charlene's. The timbre sped my heartbeat a little, or maybe it was anxiety over what I might overhear. Was she still with Ansel, the bar lizard who swept her off her feet during a series of girls' nights out that Charlene had organized? Was Ansel's much larger cock still -- as Jilly coldly told me the night she announced her new romance -- providing her with orgasms beyond her dreams? Might she now have started the family that for some reason had always remained beyond my dreams?
"Yeah, it's been too long," Jilly said as I heard the sound of her handling a menu. Then mumbling from Charlene. Then Jilly again: "...a year? You're kidding. I'm sorry. Time gets away. And, of course, I don't do the party nights anymore. At first, I didn't need to." Her pace slowed and her voice lowered as she added, "Now, well, now I don't want to."
Huh? It's no surprise that Jilly would stop trolling for men once she caught a "big" one. But why would it even be an issue now?
"Did Shawn ever find out about you and Mike?" Jilly asked Charlene. (Aha. I always figured Jilly wasn't the only one screwing around on those nights out.) No sound at all; I assumed Charlene just shook her head. "Good," Jilly said. "He would have left you for sure."
An air-conditioner compressor did my curiosity a favor by shutting off about now. With the hum gone, Charlene was coming in more clearly if not loudly, in mid-sentence. "... have stayed if you had promised to drop Ansel and not gone all crazy about a divorce and a big dick?" Jilly sighed before answering. "I wish I knew. I wish I never met Ansel, but even after what I did I still might have been able to convince Joel to stay. Why did I have to go out of my way to hurt him with lies?"
The French dip arrived at my table with enough commotion that I lost the thread of the conversation. Jilly was still still talking, now with an emotional catch deep in her throat. "...at first. But the thrill was in being naughty. Being the dirty girl. Feeling the power of keeping a devastating secret. Seeing Joel, who was always so very perceptive, being clueless about his wife's cheating. God, I hate that word, cheating. I'd never done it before. I realized too late that the thrill and my fascination with the size of Ansel's dick wouldn't last." She paused. "The truth was that I couldn't really feel any difference. I just said things trying to drive Joel away. To make it easier for me to play." Long pause. "And I suppose it made it so much worse for Joel."
