Chapter 4: The Ugly Man

The third night changed everything and broke something inside me. Ryan and I had been watching a game and talking shop when the first video had arrived. When he showed me my beautiful Sarah talking with a short, heavy man with a beer gut, I was shocked. He was not the kind of man who should have been able to get within ten feet of her. He was only four or five inches taller than her, and he didn’t look like someone who would even be at a club like that. Sarah talked to him, and even though I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music, she smiled and led him onto the dance floor. Over the next hour and a half, a series of short clips followed, each worse than the last. For some reason, she kept dancing with him, and each video showed his increasingly inept attempts to impress her with moves that seemed out of an absurd comedy. He did the sprinkler, the Vanilla Ice leg jerk, the shopping cart, the lawnmower, and so many more. I watched my gorgeous wife try to contain her laughter, and I could see her trying to get him to dance like a normal person without success. Apparently, he was not used to clubs or dancing or flirting with women, or he was working on some secret seduction playbook that only he knew.

Ryan made jibes each time a video came in. They were meant as jokes because he clearly knew Sarah was well beyond anything this ridiculous man ever had a chance with. Ryan’s quips were cutting, and he would say things like, “I can’t believe she is spending so much time with him. She must really be desperate or horny or both,” with the implication that I was not taking care of her at home.

Other comments were more crude: “Shit, Nick, did you see that? She just ground her ass into him. If it wasn’t for his big stomach, I bet she would have been rubbing against his cock.”

But with all of them, there was an underlying implication that Sarah was not satisfied with her love life. In other words, I was failing as a husband and a lover. I did not respond to those little digs. He never outright said that I was not sexually pleasing my wife, but I could tell what he was doing. At one point, he realized he may have overstepped and then, to cover himself, reminded me of his and Roxie’s game.

“Don’t take it personally that she is spending so much time with that loser. Roxie loved to do that with me; she would pick out the fattest or grossest guy in the club sometimes and go flirt with them just to make me jealous. I know the idea of an ugly pig like this guy being with your wife is disgusting, but you know she is coming home to you, and I bet you two will have the best sex you have had in the past decade tonight. I know it was always that way with Roxie and me when she teased me like this.”