Wingman

That started her tears but, by then, I had come back downstairs, grabbed some plastic trash bags and was stuffing her clothes in. The fight went out of her. Before I got the bags, she had been gathering clothes, apparently to take them back upstairs, but gave up and switched to Plan B when she saw them. I think she had imagined that I would be the one who was moving out. I did, eventually, but on my terms, not hers. In the meantime, I was so angry that I had to go run ten miles to keep from hitting someone or something.

We had certainly been in a rut. The rut had started months before she got the new job. I was spending more time at work at the job I got after graduation, and Lori had just quit one of her sales jobs because a boss got too handsy. She was moping around the house, trying to figure out what to do next, when a friend invited her down to the beach on the Gulf Coast of Florida. She was driving me crazy, so I told her to go.

The trip was a washout in terms of enjoyment. The weather was awful. A hurricane was unexpectedly on track to hit the beach but then fizzled out. It was generally rainy and dreary. By pure, dumb luck, as Lori was lounging on the beach on the one day of good weather before she had to leave, wearing a somewhat-but-not-quite-conservative bikini, she got interviewed by a local news team from our town. They had gone down to cover the hurricane but were making do with a report of a sighting of a water spout off the coast that morning. They were looking for witnesses to interview. Lori had not seen anything, but she was rocking a bikini, so they talked to her.

In a moment of comic improvisation that I truly did not know she had in her, Lori launched into a two-minute faux weather report about how the weather had been horrible for the past four days, resulting in a 90% chance of continued lameness with a high chance overnight of everyone going to bed early, the whole thing delivered as if she were a local weather reporter standing in front of the map board, but standing in front of the ocean instead.

She turned out to be a hit. In the following days, there was a groundswell of demand to hire the "sexy weathergirl." She had a job by the end of the month. Sure, there was bitching in the webosphere that people were objectifying her. The station got around that, and the fact that she did not have a meteorologist's academic credentials, by calling her a "weather reporter" and making sure she was dressed modestly on the air. They let her body and face do the talking for them.

When she got the job, Lori was jumping up and down she was so excited. Her breasts were bouncing up and down on a slightly delayed wave pattern from the rest of her body. But I was honestly happy for her, too. Little did I know.

It was great at first. With the extra money she had coming in, we paid off my remaining student loans and rented a nice house. The sex picked up, too, after a slack period. Then, things began to go sideways. She began spending more time at work. She had fans. She had a Twitter account on which she posted a lot of selfies. It was quite popular. She finally began to think of herself as not just beautiful, but as drop-dead gorgeous. She was, so I had no problem with that. But she began to get an attitude. That was a problem. She started sniping at me. She started talking down to me and knocking me when her work friends were around. We would be at social gatherings related to her work, and she would flirt shamelessly. She brooked no criticism about it. Her dress was modest on the air, but I did notice that we--but more often she, and alone--appeared in public when she was wearing provocative outfits. The sex, which had slackened back when she had been moping, before picking up briefly, dropped off again and dropped off even more than before. So did any basic intimacy, like time alone together or just plain physical closeness. I saw where this was going, but she shut me down when I tried to say something. I was jealous of her success, she said. When she dropped her bombshell about wanting to separate, it was not a total surprise. I assumed she was already banging someone and that she had been for months. As a result, she got a significant amount of pent-up frustration for a response.

"I never fooled around with D'Sean while we were together," she finally said at the café.

I was surprised. This lie had nuance. It depended on what you meant by "together." Just plain together or together-together? She must have learned something in broadcasting.

D'Sean White was a former wide receiver for the local pro football team. He had a brilliant college career and a promising pro career when the team's owner decided he had to go. The rumor mill said the disagreement involved a woman. The nasty rumors said the woman was the owner's wife. Or daughter. It depended who you talked to. It could have been both because he was handsome and charismatic. His wife was a gorgeous, Asian American swimsuit model who had to retire because she was close to thirty. D'Sean loved to hear himself talk. It was not that hard to persuade him to leave football for a media career. He was a natural fit on the local news show with Lori. His segment was before hers.

Strictly speaking, Lori was not lying. She did not, in fact, fool around with D'Sean while we were together, as in "living in the same house together." She waited until after I kicked her out of the house to bang him, when we were only together legally as husband and wife.

D'Sean's wife, however, was a different story. She and Lori had been getting busy for about two weeks before Lori told me she needed space. Apparently, D'Sean and Mrs. D'Sean liked threesomes. They worked as a team to set them up. Usually, Mrs. D'Sean would lure the girl close, and then D'Sean would "catch" them together, watching at first and then persuading them to let him join in.

The D'Seans tried their standard operating procedure on Lori and had her interested to a point. They were able to convince her that it wasn't cheating if she was having lesbian sex, but she resisted doing anything with D'Sean.

Changing tactics, they started working on her frustrations and insecurities. She seems to have had plenty more than I knew about, which tells you something about the health of our relationship. Besides the worry that she was losing her entire identity as a person to be in a marriage, she was also worried that she was missing out on what sex with other men was like. And women. I had been her only lover and, now that she was spending all day with a lot of good-looking people, she began to get curious.

They sold her on the idea that sex that happened while you were separated didn't count, especially if it happened on a vacation trip to Europe, kind of like the rules that applied when you went on a trip to Las Vegas. She could go with them for a couple of weeks and let herself go crazy where no one knew who she was. It would make our marriage stronger in the long run when we got back together, they told her.

Things changed fast after I booted her out, however, especially her idea of what cheating was. Lori moved in with the D'Seans and started sucking the marrow of life, and D'Sean's cock, that very night. Unfortunately for whatever future that Lori imagined involving me, D'Sean was not discreet. The day after they started fooling around, Sean told friends at the station that he was already making it snow on the Sexy Weathergirl's mountains. Those friends told other friends. Then, a staff member at the station who did not approve of sex outside of marriage, or adultery, especially that involving Black guys and White women, helpfully told me anonymously.

That is when I got the lawyer. The retainer I gave him was more than enough to hire a private detective, but the money was not really necessary. Three days out of the house and neither Lori nor the D'Seans were even trying to be cautious anymore. The investigators got plenty of photos of the three of them in plain sight tongue-kissing with their hands down each other's pants. They also had photos of D'Sean's equipment poking outside his pants while Lori massaged it. There were photos with all three of them together kissing each other, and then in various one-on-one and two-on-one combinations with and without pants or shirts.

My attorney thoughtfully gave copies of the divorce complaint, which included some photographic exhibits, to his media contacts. I helped fan the flames. I updated my Facebook status to single and changed my profile picture to a photo of Lori in a tongue-lock with D'Sean, her hand groping his groin outside his pants. I wanted it to be family-friendly for maximum circulation. I posted to Twitter, too, making sure to tag her.

I wrote, "When the preacher said 'forsaking all others,' she heard 'for sucking all others.' H/T @Just_Words (paraphrased)."

The story blew up like a napalm fireball after all that but, like an inferno of that intensity, it burned out quickly, and everyone forgot about it as the divorce wound its way through the court. Despite Lori tearing up all the documents served on her, the case plodded through the system. My lawyer just had to go through all the extra work of proving our case because Lori was not cooperating. It was not hard to do, but her lack of cooperation slowed everything down.

Lori blamed me for what happened, of course. My aggressive response to her request to take a marriage siesta was a total surprise to her. She apparently thought we could still date, when she had some free time. It would be my opportunity to wine and dine her and make her fall in love with me all over again, when she was not busy having sex with someone else. The whole problem was my lack of reasonableness in letting her find herself.

I learned this after the D'Seans got deposed during the divorce proceedings. Lori had emptied her heart to them after D'Sean had finally emptied his balls into and onto Lori, and they were happy to tell everything to my attorney and the court reporter. The D'Seans were bitter that he got fired--excuse me, "was asked to consider his career options, perhaps at some other workplace," pending which consideration he would be on unpaid leave--while the blonde, White girl with the prodigious tits, flat tummy, and nice, round, bubble butt, which looked outstanding in the doggie position, got to keep her job. Of course, it was not like the station left him penniless. The unpaid leave status was a tactic for the termination negotiations. D'Sean made out okay. Very okay, truth be told, especially after his lawyers started making noise about a wrongful termination lawsuit.

D'Sean and Lori had broken the law, you see. Yes, there was a no-fraternization policy at the station, and that was the legal basis of the station's response, but that was not the law that was broken. The law was that public images of the on-air personalities belonged to the station, and this crap was a distraction with marketing, especially with the nutball husband--that was me--and his lawyer making a huge stink about it. The station wanted happy news about visits to sick orphans in hospitals or about some cute girl who makes her living building large domino displays. What it did not want at all, not even one little bit, was stories about scandals that upset the old people who watched the show and bought the stuff advertised on it. Sad news or news that made you angry was what national news programs were for.

Thus, the station wanted to fire Lori, too, just to be fair, but after the prurient interest in the circumstances of the meltdown calmed down, Lori's Twitter-based supporters group raised a stink about slut-shaming and the patriarchy and the harassment that women in the workplace encounter every day from men in positions of power. There were also plenty of comments, I was told, about how the only real surprise was that she was with a loser like me in the first place. Oh, and she was pregnant, too. I learned about that later, but the station learned about it pretty soon after it happened. So, the station folded like wet toast, put her on paid "maternity leave" without advertising that they had done so, for privacy reasons. After all, she did have that one miscarriage back in college. Then, they gave her a morning news/talk show after she gave birth, where she could prattle on about whatever was on her mind, which lately involved a lot of talk about breastfeeding. When she talked about dieting to get back to one's pre-pregnancy weight, she occasionally wore a bikini. Advertising bonus!

Okay. I now admit that I am doing her a disservice there. She turned out to be a very personable interviewer. Not that I was checking up on her but, once or twice, a friend did, and I watched for a moment or two to be polite and to seem like I did not mind. As Lori became more self-confident during our marriage--a confidence multiplied by ten when she got into broadcasting--she became very good at putting people at their ease and finding things to talk about. And she was not afraid to let that hidden sense of humor, the one that got her the job, shine through. I had seen brief glimpses while married, but Lori had apparently decided that she needed to act in a particular, more serious way when she was around me. What a lost opportunity.

In a moment of self-reflection, when I allowed myself that, it was obvious that we did marry too early, just like everyone said. And our marriage had been stopping us from developing as individuals. We should have been each other's memorable first loves, and that was all. Who the hell wants to admit that though?

But we were married. And we had taken vows. And if you cannot keep your promises, then who or what are you? What do you have to offer the world, if your word is not your bond? If she wanted to play, we should have just talked and called an end to the marriage. There would have been screaming and crying, but it would have been more honest. I suppose neither one of us wanted to admit to having made a mistake. That's what we got anyway.

At least me. I have no clue what she thought she was doing with tearing up all the divorce papers and thinking we were married, especially not when she had been spreading her wings, or legs, since I had left. Yes, people still kept me informed, even though I had made it clear that I did not want them to.

I assume she wanted to stay in the marriage because of the security it offered. She never explained all of what she was thinking to the D'Seans because she stopped talking to them after getting served at the airport. When he saw the debacle at the airport on social media while he and his wife were getting close to security screening, D'Sean promptly cancelled the European trip. It was not a matter of not being able to enjoy the travel. Instead, D'Sean and his wife immediately realized the public relations problem they were facing and needed to address, so they told Lori to find somewhere else to stay and to have a nice life.

It was then that she went home but, by then, I had made some slight changes to our prior living arrangements. I was out of that place within two days of her leaving. I kept two suitcases' worth of stuff and put the rest of my things in storage. I went to stay with my sister.

As for the rented house and furniture and all Lori's stuff that she left behind when I could not stuff it in trash bags as I tossed her out, I did not do anything to it, strictly speaking. It is just that, while walking downtown, I recalled the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says, "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me." Inspired in that way, I went to the Home Depot, made twenty copies of my house key, and handed them out to the homeless people who were camped out under a railway bridge in the center of the city. I also gave them the address and letters stating that they were allowed to stay in the house as my guests and use anything there. I also passed out twenty-dollar bills for taxis to get there. Yes, I had gotten the money from the cash advance on Lori's credit card.

The group of them was doubtful of what I was up to, but then the weather report said that we were in for a lot of rain that night, so they figured they would take a chance. A couple of them settled for camping in the yard for the first night or so, but then decided after getting drenched that they would move inside after all.

They had been in the house for nearly ten days by the time Lori went back. I understand that she was surprised to see them. I heard that it took her two days to get rid of them all. She finally paid them to go. Fortunately, they did not leave a mess. They did not leave much of anything. Somehow, they even took the toilets. They tried to take the washer and dryer, too, but could not figure out how to maneuver them out the door of the laundry room. I don't think Lori got the security deposit back.

By then, though, I was hiding at my sister's place. When asked, my sister told her I went to Norway. I did, in fact, go to Europe, but not until a little later and in a different direction. I knew Lori was getting a refund for her own airline ticket, so I was sure that she would have wanted me to go instead. After all, why should both of us be miserable? The airfare for my trip was my last charge on her card.

Strike that. Second to last. The last purchase was the Eurail "10 days within 2 months" youth pass. I never thought of myself as a "youth" at 23, going on 24, but Eurail says you are a youth until you turn 27. And this ticket gave 10 days of unlimited train travel within the two-month period, plus ferry discounts. Perfect. Add to that the fact that I had been taking some adult extension learning courses at the local community college and, with my student identification card, I was a "student" as far as all the museums were concerned, so I got all the discounts the kids did. Very civilized.

My third to last charge on Lori's credit card was an advance payment of five nights at the DoubleTree Hilton in the Chelsea section of London near Imperial Wharf on the Thames. I had never traveled overseas before and had heard that jet lag could be a bear and that comfort while adjusting was important. That was good advice. I had checked in early, showered, took a nap and had just spent the day riding double-decker buses and strolling around Westminster, the palace, Hyde Park, and Kensington. Of course, I had fish and chips and delightful beer. It was the first time I had a smile on my face that was not because of how malicious I was being to Lori. It felt like the beginning of letting her go.

That's not to say that I was not sad. I was. I felt like a failure. But weeping is not in my nature. Granted, I get teary-eyed at schmaltzy stuff on television or in movies, and certainly did on the plane across the Atlantic when they turned off the lights, thinking about how I had wasted five years of my life with a woman I could not count on when it mattered.

I thought of that as I looked at Lori in the café, sipping her Cosmo.

She put her glass down on the table and looked at me with determination.

"You've left me no choice. I'm going to have to get the big guns."

Just then as I tried to imagine what the "big guns" were, my phone dinged to signal the arrival of a text message.

"Inbound on afterburners, Maverick!"

I smiled and looked up. Suddenly, she was there, sweeping in, putting her left arm around me, twirling around to sit down on my lap, and using her right hand to pull my head close so she could kiss me on the lips. Then, she looked at Lori, who was watching in shock and the beginnings of fury.

"There's Malibu Barbie!" my wingman said with a smile. "Hi!"

"Give me a Lonely Vodka, toute suite, garçon. That means I want it all by itself," my wingman then instructed the waiter who had suddenly appeared as if he were expecting--indeed, hoping--that the girls would get into a catfight where they ripped each other's shirts off.