With Friends Like These…

I’m writing this from the train, on my first business trip with the new job. Compared to the road marathons of my last job, this one – up and back, overnight – is going to be painless. No one is at home to miss me, unless you count the piles of unopened boxes and two very independent minded cats….

While I ride the rails, my husband is making the rounds of going away parties held in his honor this week. I don’t think I mind that none of them were scheduled last week when I was still in town – his friends have never been quite sure what to make of me, and I don’t really need them to blame me for taking their best bud away.

I’ve never been particularly fond of the ringleader of my husband’s group. As a long-time single girl, I got to be pretty good at recognizing bullshit artists; I learned to play their game, but also knew how to keep a healthy distance. After 15 years in the big city, I thought I’d seen it all. But my husband’s Buddy is in a class by himself.

When I met “Buddy,” he was married to his high school sweetheart. Though he professed to be happy with her, he never met a skirt that he wouldn’t chase. Pretty, ugly, fat, skinny, blonde, brunette, all natural, surgically enhanced, single, married, married to his friends – he didn’t discriminate. The Ice Princess, however, was impervious to his charms – the reason, I suspect, he never really warmed up to me.

My husband told me that he loves being a voyeur in Buddy’s life because Buddy’s lack of impulse control makes him so, well… interesting. His biggest coup: managing to be in the delivery room for both his wife and his mistress, who gave birth to his children within weeks of each other. When his wife found out that her daughter had a brother with a different mommy, she kicked Buddy out. He moved in with the mistress for a while on the theory that he could save on child support that way. It wasn’t long, however, before she had a restraining order and he was back out on the street.

It was during this time in Buddy’s life that my husband was having his affair and the string of one-night stands. The two of them were quite the men about town: I heard the stories, but they were always of Buddy’s exploits – my husband was just the wingman along for the ride. But people talk, and when I learned what to listen for, I realized that my husband was never the innocent bystander he made himself out to be.

These days, Buddy claims to be a changed man – swears he’s met the woman of his dreams and that his rambling days are behind him. I like this woman a lot, though at times, I question her sanity. Because I still see Buddy out and about, and when she’s not with him, he just can’t help himself. Despite this being a week of blow out celebrations and last times and farewells, I’m choosing to believe that my husband can.



The Wife Who Knows