sitting in the small cottage I call home, reflecting on day number two of my new job. Invariably, my thoughts drift to David and I wonder if Karen Owenby is the woman Izzy saw visiting him. The mere mention of her name fills my mind with murderous thoughts, yet as bitter as my feelings toward Karen are, they’re nothing compared to what I feel toward David. His betrayal devastated me.
After catching him in the act on that fateful night, I drove home, threw together some clothes, and fled the house so I wouldn’t have to face him again. But I didn’t know where to go. I briefly considered heading to my mother’s house, but realized that would be a big mistake. My mother is a lifelong prognosticator of gloom and doom, a modern-day Nostradamus. Five minutes with her can induce a severe case of depression in me even when I go into it on the highest of highs. And on the night in question, I was already as low as I cared to go.
In addition to her role as the Great Depressor, Mom is also a professional hypochondriac. She’s a full-fledged, card-carrying, many-times-honored member of the Disease of the Month Club and revels in sharing her various aches, pains, and possible terminal diseases with David and me. She has a collection of medical reference books at home that the Harvard Medical School would envy, and getting a doctor into the family has been the pinnacle of her existence. I knew she’d never forgive me for letting David go. Nope, Mom was definitely out of the question.
I then considered my sister, Desiree, who, after a childhood of sibling rivalry and creative tortures, has become my best friend. But Desi thinks of marriage as a sacred, inviolable institution. I feared she would try to convince me that mine was worth saving no matter how grim it had become and that I just might cave under the pressure. Or worse, I might say something about her marriage that I’d later regret. Not that her marriage is in trouble—as far as I know, it’s doing just fine. But I can’t stand Desi’s husband, Lucien. He’s a lawyer, a good thing I think, since he’s a walking, talking sexual harassment suit waiting to happen. Half the words coming out of his mouth sound like dialogue from a bad porn movie and he’s been known to pop a chubbie over anything that has, as he so indelicately puts it, “two pairs of lips.”
Then there’s the matter of Desi’s two kids, Ethan and Erika, who sometimes seem like the perfect poster children for birth control. Erika is twelve, and if she isn’t actually the devil’s spawn, she does a damned good imitation. She’s weathering the hormonal storm of adolescence and is as emotionally stable as a crack addict quitting cold turkey. Desi doesn’t seem bothered by the wild outbursts, the sullen attitude, the constantly dyed hair, or the nose piercing. She says it’s just a phase, though personally, I think Erika is a by-product of the curse crazy old Mrs. Wilding cast on Desi back when we were kids and Desi peed in the old woman’s flower garden.
Ethan on the other hand, could be a sweet kid—is a sweet kid, I suppose. He’s nine and still at an age where he’s willing to hug and doesn’t think he knows everything. But I can’t get used to this fascination he has with bugs. Real ones. Live ones. When he sees a bug he gets this wide-eyed, eager expression—almost like a hunger—and within seconds, he’s on it. Every time I see the kid he’s got some kind of multilegged crawly thing with him—often as not, on him. Desi thinks it’s cute. I just think it’s creepy.
Having ruled out my family as safe havens, I turned to Izzy. We’ve been friends for more than a decade and I knew I could trust him to be horridly honest but nonjudgmental—exactly what I needed. Plus, he and his partner, Dom, love to dish dirt and I had two candidates who were ripe for the picking.
Dom, who is twelve years younger than Izzy and several inches taller, is auburn-haired, lily white, and slender. His eyes—an unusually deep shade of blue rimmed with long, thick lashes that any woman would envy—are his most distinctive feature. He’s a born actor and, prior to meeting Izzy, he tried his luck in both New York and Hollywood before giving up and heading back home to Wisconsin. Nowadays, he keeps house for Izzy and limits his acting forays to a local thespian group.
Since Dom and Izzy are not only my friends but also my neighbors, it took me all of two minutes to throw my suitcases into my car and drive to their place—twice as long as it would have taken me to walk over. Dom answered the door, took one look at my tearstained face, and ushered me into the kitchen. He shoved a box of tissues in front of me, hollered for Izzy, and then busied himself making tea.
Izzy walked into the room, looked at me, and said, “Uh-oh. What’s the jerk done?”
“The worst possible thing,” I sobbed.
Dom turned around from the stove, slapped a hand to his cheek, and looked aghast. “Oh, no! You mean he wore plaid with stripes again?”
I laughed despite my misery. “No, it’s much worse than that. He had sex with someone else.”
“That bastard!” said Dom.
“Are you sure?” said Izzy.
“Oh, yes,” I said, wincing. “I’m quite sure. I caught him in the act.”
“What a fool,” Izzy said, and for a brief moment I was flattered by the thought that Izzy considered me enough of a catch that David had to be an idiot to look elsewhere. But then he added, “How stupid is it to do it right in your own house?”
“It wasn’t in the house,” I said, pausing to inhale some steam from the tea Dom set in front of me. “It was at the hospital. In one of the operating rooms.”
“Eeeewwwww,” Dom said, making a face. “Aren’t those rooms supposed to be sterile?”
“Supposed to be,” said Izzy. “But you’d be surprised what goes on there. A few years ago I heard about a doc who was caught trying to use a suction machine to—”
“Hey, guys,” I interrupted. “Can we get back to the subject at hand please?”
Dom jumped in with “It was a hand job?”
“No,” I said, giggling. “It was a blow job.”
“Oh, well that changes everything,” Izzy said. “Blow jobs haven’t been considered sex since the Clinton administration.”
For the next hour and a half, I sat at their kitchen table alternately sobbing, laughing, whining, and listening as Izzy and Dom called David any number of nasty names and cast a host of colorful curses on his wandering, one-eyed trouser snake. By the time they got around to declaring Karen a whoring bitch and me a selfless heroine horribly wronged, it began to feel like one of those religious revival sessions. Several times I was tempted to holler “Amen!” at the end of a particularly rousing criticism or curse.
The fun didn’t last long, though. The hard reality of my situation kept creeping back into the forefront of my thoughts—that and the ominous silence of Izzy’s phone. In my mind, I kept imagining David frantic with worry once he realized I wasn’t home. I felt certain he’d be desperate to find me, to try to explain himself, or maybe even apologize. And I figured it wouldn’t take him long to figure out where I was. He knew Izzy and I were close friends, so I was pretty certain that once he determined I wasn’t with my mother or my sister, he’d check Izzy’s place.
But he didn’t. There was no knock on the door, no ringing of the phone, and when I finally gave in and called my mother to tell her not to worry, I discovered David hadn’t called there either. Curious, I called home, and when David answered I quickly hung up, stung by the truth of my situation. He was there, he knew I was gone, and yet he’d done nothing to try to find me or talk to me. That hurt almost worse than his infidelity. Everything I had come to believe about my relationship with him, about my life
