Chapter 2

Thank god I didn’t have any meetings to deal with today. Friday is usually paperwork day, I pulled a file from the top of my inbox and started reading.

An hour later, I realized I had no idea what I’d been reading.

Fourteen years! Fourteen and a half. Well, I knew it would be coming eventually. She was a goddess, I was a mortal. When the gods mixed with mortals, it was always the same: the mortal got screwed. And just not literally.

Now what? Divorce? Well, the marriage was over, that was for sure. One weekend with Lucas? Come on. It had been going on for five months. And what was the ‘now and then’ portion of her announcement?

Lord knows she had opportunities. She had traveled to New York lots of times. I had no real idea what went on there. I didn’t want to know, I guess. She’d fucked me to shivering pieces before she left on the trips and did it again when she got back. They were usually week-long trips. I was blinded by two things: the sex, certainly was a part of it, and she was a goddess. We finished each other’s sentences. We were perfect together. Old news.

I looked it up on the internet. ‘What to do when your wife is cheating?’ There were only 1,342,502 pages that were listed. And Google wanted to know if I wanted to see more, with a slight change to the question: substitute ‘spouse’ for ‘wife.’

Things to do when your wife cheats: 1. Check your finances. HAH! That was a laugh.

Yeah, I was a fourteen year employee of the DOJ. I made good money. Low six figures. Very low: the first digit was a ‘1.’ Still, it was damn good. Her last year-end bonus check was ten times that. We didn’t even bother to have a joint account. Okay, so I’d have to move my IRA money – what there was of it – out of her control. She wasn’t that great at making it grow. So, no biggie, there.

I’d have to move, I guess. I mean, I couldn’t afford to pay the utilities on that condo, forget the mortgage. She was paying the freight, so it was hers. So where could I move to? A smaller apartment, seemed likely. But I liked the condo. And I used to love the woman who lived there. C’est la vie.

I was still looking at page one on the folder on my desk.

Things to do when your wife cheats: 2.Find out how bad it is. Get the truth.

That was going to be hard to do. Wait. We shared access to the AMEX card. I never used it. She paid all the bills, but probably I could see the records. I hit the internet again. Da Da Da DUMMMM. Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony was running through my head. Let’s see. Account number ... I had that. My password? I never signed in, so I didn’t have one. I tried hers. No go; she’d changed it sometime in the last fourteen years. Not a surprise. Press here for help. I pressed.

The nice AMEX Customer Service person on the chat line would be glad to help me set one up. I entered my new password: mortalVgoddess. I think it was appropriate.

And there it was: The Four Seasons Hotel, Manhattan. Every month. But she checked out on Thursday, never came back to Atlanta before Friday night. Delta Flight 1302, arrival 8:17 p.m. The same every month.

Thanks, AMEX website.

So where was she on Thursday night and all day Friday?

Well, I’ll just call my buddy in New York. Oh! That’s right. I didn’t have one. My hobby was Kathy. Spent all my time on her. So, I’d have to go up there myself. Yeah. I could take a long weekend off from work.

I called up my schedule – same as her schedule, ‘cause we did everything together. I needed to get to her personal diary at work. Her next trip to NYC was April 7-11. I was to stay at home, because I didn’t have anything planned. Except wait for the goddess. I booked a flight. Delta. Atlanta to Newark. Arriving 9 p.m. Hotel Reservations at the Stalwart Hotel on Reade Street. “Easy access to the Financial District,” $250 a night.

Things to do when your wife cheats: 3, Get an STD test.

Holy crap! She’d been with Lucas for five months. Well, the good news was that he didn’t have crabs or the clap or something easy. That would have shown already. But HIV? That didn’t show for six months or more, I think. I called the state help-line for STD testing. The earliest appointment for a non-emergency was on Monday. I hope it wasn’t an emergency.

Things to do when your wife cheats: 4.Move out. Not gonna do that.

I did call Goodwill Industries, however. I wanted that couch out of the office. I took a long lunch and I went shopping. I got an electric piano. A full 88 key model that came with a headset. It was pricey, but what the hell: the AMEX bill wouldn’t come in for a month. All you could hear was the clacking of the keys when the headset was plugged in. I tried it in the store with the loudest thing I could remember: the last movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata. Beethoven, No. 29. I could hear only the keys clicking. I didn’t play it very well, and could only remember the opening bars. But it was just a test of the sound system, not a concert.

I laughed at my ego. Why play if you couldn’t play it correctly, right? For that matter, why be married if you couldn’t be married correctly? Yup. Ego all the way. Lucas and Mr. NYC, too? Busy girl.

I had the piano delivery scheduled for the same time as the Goodwill movers.

By the way, who was Lucas? I called up her schedule again. Nothing.

I signed on to our personal computer at home and then switched Users to her account. I entered her name. ‘Kathleen’ got me in on the second try. No password. For shame. The browser supplied her user ID and password for her business account. SHAZAM! I was in.

Yep. Friday through Sunday had a ‘L’ at the top of the page. Why not check the March meeting dates? She’d just gotten home from the NYC meetings. Tuesday through Thursday had a ‘C’ in at 7 p.m. And a ‘C’ at the top of Friday. ‘Clients’ was on Wednesday. ‘Board’ was on Monday and Tuesday. ‘Seminar’ was on Thursday. ‘Flight home’ was at 5:30 p.m. Friday. The following Tuesday showed an ‘L’. Wouldn’t do to deny ‘L’ his usual.

It was so convenient that she kept such a detailed diary. I looked back at the previous months. Every week had the same ‘C’ penciled in for three dinners (and who knew what afterwards) and all day Friday. Is it really ‘penciling’ in something when it was a digital diary? Pixeling it in her diary? I was so easily sidetracked.

I assumed it was the same ‘C’ – but maybe not. It could be ‘Claude’ or ‘Charlie.’ I went back for the two years she kept on file. ‘C’ every time. So it was going on for at least two full years.

What about the baby thing? I went back a full year of records. The female menstrual period, with allowance for birth control pills, is four weeks long. The monthly meeting happened four weeks to four and one-third apart, “months” being what they were. So inevitably her period would intersect with the meetings. I backtracked, and last July, there were no ‘C’s on her schedule. I figured that was when she was menstruating, and I counted forward.

This weekend was half-way to her next menstrual period. That put her weekend tryst with Lucas smack dab in her most fertile time.

So, who was Lucas? The putative daddy-to-be, obviously. I knew that he was a big shot in some company and that he was ‘big.’ Who knew what that meant?

Her client list showed no men with an initial ‘L’ and nobody with a last name of ‘Lucas.’ That’s a strange name to pick for an ‘I love you’ cutesy name. ‘Honey’ or ‘Baby’ or ‘Daddy’ or even ‘Stud’ ... but ‘Lucas?’ There were 220 guys on the list plus several hundred more that were company names. I wrote a little script that would take the name, switch over to Google, input the name and display the guy’s picture. Then I’d have to decide if it was the one I was looking for. Then I’d do it again for the next name. It took about two minutes to run a name, but only took me a second or two of my attention to look at the picture.

So, I looked at 177 pictures and selected 3 possibles. Number 177 had a middle name of Lucas. He was about six foot three inches. A shock of thinning gray hair. His broad shoulders were, apparently, 55 years old. He was the owner of Pendleton Inc., a manufacturer of specialty car parts for the after market. His account size was over $4 million. And he was married to a Mrs. James Lucas Pendleton, age 53, aka Corine Pendleton, nee Elsworth. The Elsworths were a well-known name in Georgia Society circles. Probably she had some of her own money. A mother of three, all of them through college. The two boys worked at Pendleton, Inc. and the daughter was a nurse. Nice looking family, from the looks of JL, Junior’s pictures on Facebook.

Maybe Junior was the paramour? Nah, I didn’t see my goddess slumming with a recent grad, junior executive. He was fairly attractive in a gangly sort of way. No, she said he was an important client. It was the old man, having a mid-life crisis with a Victoria’s Secret type model, 20 years younger.

I’d worked through the afternoon, ignoring my in box. I stopped looking, and went home at 7:10. Kathy, or Kathleen as her computer knew her, was off to her love nest with J.L. Pendleton. I considered calling Corine – aka Mrs. Pendleton – but decided against it. For some reason, I wasn’t angry with JL. Kathy, on the other hand, had earned my ire. What was all the bullshit about the baby? I was supposed to raise it as my own? Not bloody likely.

The goddess wasn’t at home when I got there, an hour after my usual time. There was a handwritten note propped against the coffee maker.

“Mark,

“I hope you’ve had time to think things through. This weekend means nothing to us. I love you as I have for fourteen years. I’ll be back on Sunday night and I’ll be yours again. PLEASE consider all that we’ve been to each other all this time, and just allow me this little fun time.

“Love,

“Kathy”

I pondered her words. It didn’t mean anything to us? It certainly meant something to HER. She wants to return to ‘everything we’ve been to each other for fourteen years.’ Does that include the 25% of the time she’s spent with ‘C?’ Should I consider things about the baby-making time of the past two months?

I shook my head, and slipped into the bedroom. I checked her closet. Well, at least she took her best negligee. As I may have mentioned, she came to bed nude every night. She only wore that negligee on special occasions. She wore it when she tried to make a baby with me. Supposedly. It was only about a week after she had three days of ‘special days’ with ‘L’. She said it was her ‘prime days’ for making babies. I can count, and I knew that was past her ‘prime time.’