If my life were a detective novel, I’d have slipped him 20 bucks. But I’m not a tough guy. I’m a negotiator and manager and I’m very good at both. We talked, the desk clerk and I, and he soon understood that it was better for the hotel if I watched the monitors in his presence, where he could see what I was doing. If I left, I could be watching outside and he would have no way of preventing any crazy act. The hotel would still be sued, so the best way to minimize his risk was to keep me in sight. I love coming to an agreement when both sides get what they want.
I bought us lunch at Subway – a Classic Tuna sub for me and a Chicken Bacon Ranch for him – parked my car across the street and walked back to the hotel. We watched the noon local news. I shared information with him, told him about the notebook and the condom. He told me about his family, about his nephew in prison, about his father’s bad heart. We ate our sandwiches and talked about fat calories and diets. He’d tried Atkins. We agreed the hardest part is keeping the weight off. We were fast becoming friends who would never meet again.
She arrived at 1:25. She sat in her car next to the entrance around the back, the one furthest from the street. I could see her clearly on the monitor, talking on her phone. She hung up and fiddled with her hair in the rear view mirror. At 1:33, a blue BMW parked next to her driver’s side. A tall man with brown hair got out and walked to the hotel door. He swiped his room key, opened the door and looked back at my wife. Sherry opened her car door, took one last look in the mirror, got out and walked toward the man. As she passed him, he put his arm around her hips and squeezed her to his body. The door closed.
I have never used the word “cuckold”. Not in conversation, not in reference to any guy whose wife has cheated on him. The word never existed in my consciousness. It derives from the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest so that bird will hatch and raise the cuckoo chick – which then grows bigger than the other chicks and takes over. As far as I knew, Sherry wasn’t pregnant, so I wasn’t raising a cuckoo bird’s egg, but I still felt like a cuckold.
The best case would have been that she was meeting a guy I didn’t know, someone she’d met at her gym or through a friend, a casual affair that had become more intense with time but which maybe just maybe was running out of steam – and which was never based in love. It’s not hard to understand the concept of a fling; we’ve all been tempted. You can recover from that kind of affair. With work and time, after you recognize the hurt and understand the reasons, you can recommit.
The worst case would have been that she was fucking my worst enemy. That would have been the kind of betrayal that says “I want to hurt you so badly you feel like the dirt I wipe off my shoe.” You can’t recover from that. The knife has been stuck in your back straight through to your heart. If it’s the worst case, you have to wonder whether your judgement is fatally flawed, whether you’re naturally attracted to vipers or if you were misled by this Delilah who cooed in your ear while conspiring to bring you down.