I Hate Surprises Ch. 01

For the first six months I worked incredibly hard, including late nights in my office and occasional out-of-town trips, but things were starting to come together. I had recruited three or four substantial clients, enough to sustain the business and give me time to grow it further.

I had hired my closest friend Terri from my previous job to be my assistant manager. She was a divorced woman about five years older than I was, who had become good friends of both Jennie and me. She was pretty (though not like Jennie—who was?) and really smart, and I knew she was utterly dependable.

So all was going well, and I thought I had the world by the balls. Until I found out it was the other way around.

On a Thursday afternoon I was in the restaurant kitchen of the Commonwealth Hotel, talking to the manager about becoming a client of my firm. The meeting had gone well, and I was hoping that he'd call me in the next week or so and sign on. He led me out to the hotel lobby to say goodbye, and as we were chatting he suddenly looked over my shoulder and interrupted me, saying "my God, is that a beautiful woman!"

I turned and looked across the lobby, and sure enough the woman he was staring out was absolutely gorgeous. She was slim and blonde, wearing a tailored suit and a light blue silk blouse, and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was also my wife.

She was walking arm-in-arm with a tall, distinguished-looking man in his late 40s. After a minute I recognized him: Marlon Anderson, the loan officer at the bank who had given me the start-up loan for my business. They headed for the elevators, chatting amiably, and both the restaurant manager and I watched them in silence.

They hadn't seen us. When the elevator doors opened they got in, and just as the doors closed again I watched him pull Jennie into his arms, and I saw them kissing. I wanted to throw up, but I kept my cool. The restaurant manager said, "boy, she was something! I guess he's in for a nice afternoon."

Of course, he had no way of knowing that it was my wife! I just said, "yeah, she was really something," and we went on to say our goodbyes.

As I've said, I tend to be calm and organized in moments of emotional stress, and this one certainly qualified. I sat quietly on a bench outside the hotel for a few minutes, working out how to handle the situation. It was about 2:45. I knew they'd be in a hotel room together for at least an hour—how could he possibly want less time than that with her? And I also knew she'd have to leave the hotel by 4:30 at the latest to pick up Diana from day-care.

So, after careful thought, I went and made some preparations. I had a quick lunch at a sandwich shop; then I went and bought an elaborate floral arrangement and a white jacket that looked like a delivery boy's coat.

Returning to the hotel, I approached the desk and asked for Marlon Anderson's room. The bored clerk looked at me and the flowers and told me "617" without hesitation. I took the elevator up to the 8th floor, left the flowers by someone's door, ditched the jacket, and walked down to the 6th floor. There was one turn in the corridor between 617 and the elevators, and I waited just around the turn, so I could see the door to 617 but avoid being seen.

Standing there and waiting, I thought back to my first meeting with Anderson. I had taken my wife to the bank for the loan meeting, knowing what an effect she tended to have on people. Sure enough, she had bowled Anderson over. A Senior Loan Officer, he was tall and extremely handsome, like what a U.S. senator looks like in the movies. And he clearly knew it. He was the consummate smooth banker: great-looking suit, mid-40s, some silver in his slicked-back black hair, with the easy smile and the glib words.

He met me at his office door, saying "Mr. Holywell? Pleased to meet you! Marlon Anderson, with an 'O', not like the fish!" I bet it was a line he'd used a thousand times. Then his eyes took in Jennie, and they widened visibly. He drank her in, as I had seen so many other men do over the years.

"Mr. Anderson? This is my wife, Jennie." "VERY pleased to meet you, Mrs. Holywell," he said, turning the charm up to full. And then to me, "you certainly have a lovely wife, Mr. Holywell!"

Getting the loan had been pretty easy after that. I had prepared a solid proposal, with everything just so; and once Anderson got a look at Jennie I don't think he would have said no anyway.

In the months since then I'd neither seen nor heard from him. Until, I remembered, about ten days earlier. He'd called out of the blue, apparently just to see how my business was progressing. He'd asked a few casual questions, and I recall he'd wondered whether I had been doing a lot of business traveling. I'd told him about some of my trips, and mentioned that I was heading to Chicago for a few days the next weekend (that is, the weekend before I saw him with Jennie in the hotel).

Now as I stood in the 6th floor hallway, it wasn't hard to put two and two together. He'd been scouting out for when I'd be away, no doubt hoping to get a little private time with the lovely wife of his client! If I was right, then today in the hotel wasn't their first tryst. That kiss in the elevator certainly hadn't looked like a first-time get-together. He must have been with her the past weekend as well.

I used my cell phone to get his home phone number and dialed it. When a woman answered I said, "Hello, I'm calling for Mr. Marlon Anderson, please."

The woman replied, "my husband is at the bank. Shall I give you that number?"

"No thanks," I replied. "I tried him there but he was out. I'll call again later." I hung up and made sure the number was ready on my re-dial button.

The hallway was quiet, with no one coming or going, until about 4:10. Then I heard a door open and peeked around the corner. The door to 617 was partway open, and I saw Jennie and Anderson, both fully dressed, coming out. They stopped for a long kiss. I saw his arm holding her tightly around the waist as he bent down a bit to reach her mouth. Then they smiled at one another, and started down the hall towards the elevator.

I stepped forward, waiting for them to see me. Jennie looked up first and froze, in total shock. Her face went white.

"Brad! What ... you ... wait, I can explain! This isn't what you think!"

"Jennie," I said quietly, "do me the courtesy of not insulting my intelligence, OK?"

I began to turn away, but Anderson grabbed at my shoulder and turned me back around to face him. He looked at me with an extraordinary expression on his face. It was a mixture of embarrassment, disgusting smugness, and glib affability.

"Brad," he said in his unctuous voice, "your wife is an unusually lovely woman. I'm sure you can understand how something like this ..."

I didn't let him finish. Up until that moment I hadn't decided how I would deal with Anderson, but his bland insincerity made the decision easy for me. I gave him a solid left hook to the belly, doubling him over. While he groaned, and Jennie backed away in fright, I grabbed his head with my hands and brought up my right knee, smashing it solidly into his face.

I could hear the cracking sound of his nose breaking, and he cried out in pain as blood spurted all over his pants and mine. Jennie screamed, and as Anderson crumpled to his knees I turned and walked to the fire stairs.

I had already planned out what came next. I grabbed a cab and was quickly back home. I knew I had a little while before Jennie could get there, so I packed clothes for a few days, took my laptop and a few important business files, got back in the cab, and went to a Marriott around the corner from my office.

On the way there I hit re-dial and was soon speaking to Mrs. Anderson again. "Hello, Mrs. Anderson? I'm sorry to have to give you some bad news. I just caught your husband coming out of Room 617 of the Commonwealth Hotel with my wife. They had been in there about an hour and a half. If you call the front desk, you can confirm for yourself that your husband took the room."

I heard her gasp, and say "who is this?" I just went on. "When you see your husband tonight his face is going to be in pretty bad shape. I'm afraid I broke his nose. I'm sure he'll have an interesting story to tell you, but the truth is I caught him coming out of the room with my wife and I broke it with my knee.

"I'm very sorry to have to tell you this in this way, but it seemed to me that you should know the truth about the man you're married to. Good luck."

I hung up, turned off my phone, and sank back in the cab. I had one more immediate piece of business, but it would have to wait until the next morning.

In the room I unpacked, ordered a sandwich and three beers from room service, then lay on the bed. The adrenalin that had fired me up for hours, helping me act coolly and decisively, drained out of me, and before long I was sobbing.

I guess I felt at that moment like every unsuspecting husband in history has felt when the moment came and the roof fell in. I thought I was happily married. I was sure my wife loved me, just as I adored her. I couldn't imagine why she would want to cheat on me (let alone with that glib asshole, though he was the least of my worries). What was wrong with me? What had I not given her? How had I failed to meet her needs? Or did it have nothing to do with me—had I fallen in love with a cold, selfish, unfeeling bitch?

I had stopped crying and was brooding, chin in my hands, when my dinner came. The beers didn't help—I just felt a bit fuzzier, no better. I called my friend Terri and asked her to come over for a drink. When she arrived I immediately filled her in.

Terri looked truly shocked. She knew Jennie well, and I didn't see even a whiff of anything but horror and disappointment in her face. That made me feel a little better—at least I hadn't missed some obvious signs that even our friends had seen.

After listening to the whole story, she just sighed. "Jesus, Brad. I have to say you're the last husband in the world, and the last friend of mine, I ever expected to hear a story like this from. I am SO sorry. I think if anyone but you had seen her, I simply wouldn't have believed it."

After a minute she asked, "what are you going to do?"

"Christ, Terri, I haven't any idea. Talk to her, I guess. But not for a couple of days. Let her sweat, right?" I gave her a bleak smile. "In any case, I'm so angry and hurt I don't know what I feel. I still love her—and I want to wring her fucking neck! I want to be with her—and I'll never trust her out of my sight again for more than 30 seconds. How can I?

"We have a little girl that I can't live without, that's one thing I know for sure. If for no other reason, I suppose I'll think about seeing whether there's some way to work this out.

"Maybe I'm finally learning the error of my ways, huh? People say 'Don't ever marry a beautiful woman', and I married the most beautiful woman any of us has ever seen. So maybe I had this coming."

"That's bullshit, Brad, and you know it." Terri spoke firmly. "I don't know why the hell Jennie did this, but it isn't because she's so damn beautiful, and it isn't because you're not a terrific, loving husband. At least from where I sit. It's just a mystery to me. You didn't 'have this coming'."

We talked for a couple more hours, and then I sent Terri home to get some sleep. "What can I do for you?" she asked me.

"The main thing is to keep Jennie off my back. I'm sure she'll call tomorrow at work—can you make sure Alice and Don get word that they're to tell her I'm out of the office? I want to wait until I'm sure I'm ready before I go see her."

"Are you coming in tomorrow?" she asked, looking at me.

"Yes—I think we're close on a couple of accounts, and I need to follow up with letters and phone calls. Also, if I don't work, what the hell am I going to do with myself?

"So, yes, I'll be there. I just have one early errand to take care of first."

The next morning I was at the bank when it opened at 8:30. I asked to see the Director of Business Banking—Anderson's superior—and by being firm and unyielding, and threatening several times to raise my voice, I was sitting in Mr. Daniel Greenwood's office by 8:50.

I wasted no time. "Mr. Greenwood, I am here to register an official complaint about the misconduct of my loan officer, Marlon Anderson. Not only has Mr. Anderson been conducting an affair with my wife"—I saw Greenwood's eyes narrow—"but he has pumped me for information about my business and taken advantage of that information to further his affair. I am considering legal action against your bank, but I wanted first to give you the chance to deal with this matter."

He hemmed and hawed and sputtered, said that this was a grave allegation, and he'd need more information, and so on. I told him all about it: Jennie's and my meeting with Anderson about the loan, his mysterious phone call to me about my planned business trips, and above all my seeing him with Jennie the day before. I briefly mentioned the broken nose as well.

By the time I left his office I was pretty sure that Anderson was through at the bank. Greenwood as much as promised that if my story checked out, he would fire Anderson for inappropriate conduct. It also seemed that he was resigned to having to settle with me financially—and since the bank's insurance company would cover it, that didn't seem to worry him much. I would contact my lawyer later in the day, and see how much he could wring out of the bank. From the sound of Greenwood's words, it might be almost the six-figure range.

(Anderson did get fired. His wife left him, and he found another banking job out of state. I suppose he could have charged me with assault, but as I figured he didn't want to explain in court what he'd been up to. Eight months later, my lawyer happily handed me a check from the bank: $112,000. It went straight into Diana's college fund.)

All that remained—all!—was to deal with Jennie. I avoided that matter until Sunday. She had left a couple dozen messages for me at work and on my cell phone, but I ignored them. They had been full of tears and apologies, as well as fears for my well-being, and they all just made me angrier. Those goddam words of love and sorrow, coming just a bit too late!

Sitting in my bland, anonymous hotel room, I went over it and over it. What had I failed to do as a husband? Surely she had to know how much I loved her and appreciated her. I had given her lots of surprises—but were they not enough? Had the routine nature of married life left her feeling neglected, despite my efforts?

Was the affair about sex? Was Jennie unsatisfied because we didn't make love enough, or not wildly enough? It seemed very unlikely to me. She rarely initiated sex, and always treated it more like a chance for emotional connection than an opportunity to go wild with me. Was there something about our conservative sex life that left her yearning to be a slut with someone else? (If so, the dapper and smooth older banker hardly seemed like the right choice—she would have gone out and found a truck driver.)

I couldn't come up with a reason. Perhaps there wasn't one. I knew I'd been mildly tempted to stray myself, once or twice. In a hotel bar in Chicago or Cleveland on a business trip, lonely and horny, looking at someone fetching down at the other end of the bar. But the mild temptation had remained just that—I'd never done so much as buy a woman a drink or start a conversation, let alone try to get laid.

My sex life with Jennie was a little bland, but it was rewarding for all the other reasons: because it was close and intimate, it was relaxed, and it was with the person I loved best in the world, and trusted most. (Or HAD trusted most...)

********

I waited until Sunday morning to go home and see Jennie. Normally we would have been at church, but I doubted that she took Diana there by herself—she would have had to explain why I was absent.

I got to the house just after 11 am, when Diana would usually be napping. I quietly went around the side of the house and peered in the kitchen window. Jennie was sitting at the table, a coffee cup in front of her, gazing at nothing. She looked tired and unhappy.

I went back to the front door and came straight in. When I walked into the kitchen she jumped up. She looked as though she wanted to run into my arms, but the look on my face must have made her change her mind.

In a quiet voice, hardly daring to look at me, she started to speak. "Brad, thank God you're here! I've been so worried! Darling, I am SO sorry for ..."

I interrupted her, putting a hand up to stop her. "I'm not letting you have custody of Diana."

She gasped, and then literally staggered. I thought she might fall. Instead she collapsed back into her chair and started to cry.

I had done it on purpose, of course. Years ago I had a boxing match against an older, more experienced fighter, who expected that I'd be easy pickings. Instead of beginning the fight in the typical way, by dancing carefully and using my jab to keep him away, I answered the opening bell by coming straight at him and launching an overhand right to the side of his head. It rocked him, and the fight was essentially over at that moment. I'd taken away his confidence.

This moment reminded me of that one—I was furious beyond words at Jennie, and so I got in the first blow. But it saddened me almost to tears that I was thinking of her as an opponent! How had we gotten to such a sad point?

I watched Jennie cry, compassion and sorrow and love and fury mixed together in my mind. I loved her so much, and I thought I had been a loving and attentive husband. Was I wrong? And if not, how the fuck could she have done this?

Finally, still crying, she looked up at me and said, "are we really at that point, Brad? Are you going to divorce me? Won't you at least let me talk to you?"

"Is there any point in bothering?" I asked.

She cried harder. "Don't you know that I love you?" She struggled to get the words out between sobs.

"Let's just say that my faith has been shaken a little," I said coolly. "Your behavior the other day didn't seem like that of a wife who loves her husband."

"I know I deserve that," she said. "I deserve whatever you want to say to me. You have no idea how ... low I feel, how ashamed I am.

"But please, Brad, please! Won't you ... listen to me, give me a chance?"

I sat quietly for a minute. I knew I couldn't end our marriage without having the conversation that she wanted to have. And in fact I didn't want to end our marriage—I wanted it back the way it was.

But I knew I could never have that again, and it made me furious. As I sat thinking, Jennie gradually calmed down, watching me.

"All right," I said finally. "Why don't you go wash your face, and I'll get a cup of coffee. Then we can sit and talk."

"Thank you, Brad," she almost whispered. Then she stood and left the room.

When she returned I said, "OK, here are the ground rules. You tell me the truth, and you tell me everything. You don't know how much I know already, and if you lie to me our marriage is over.

"In fact, it may be over anyway—I don't know about that yet. But if you won't be totally honest with me, it'll end right here, right now."

"I understand, Brad. I will tell you all of it. There isn't that much to tell, actually."

What followed was one of the saddest half-hours of my life. The story was so predictable, I felt like I was a human cliché.

As my new business had started to take off, I was deeply involved with it, working longer hours and spending less time with Jennie and Diana. She was proud of me, but she also felt neglected. Keep in mind her life history—an astonishingly beautiful woman who never lacked for attention.