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Gossip Chain

Posted on November 25, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

She was frowning in concentration. He loved it when she did that. He felt like kissing her. It was one of his favourite things to do – to try and make her frown. He didn’t often succeed. He made her laugh though and that should have been alright but theirs was not that kind of relationship. Not because he didn’t wish for it to be but because she was clueless (or pretended to be anyway) about the way he felt. So failing the appearance of any acknowledgement on her part that he fancied her, he strove to make her frown because that was his favourite face for her. Her eyebrows sort of knitted together and she squinted her eyes, as if she was trying to see something clearly that was at a great distance. And in a sense she was but the distance separating her from the thing she was trying to see spanned space and time. He had just recounted another one of his work stories and she was trying to figure it out.

“So they don’t speak at all?”

“The big chill descends the moment both of them are in the same room together.”

“Any idea why?”

“Not a clue. One minute it’s nauseating to listen to them flirt with each other, the next minute they seem to have become invisible to each other.”

“No public argument? No cutting words before the conversation dried up?”

“Nothing. Everybody wondered what was going on with them because she’s married and he had a girlfriend (as far as we knew) so we had no idea why they always ate together and she was saying things like ‘I’m not like any other woman you know.’ I felt like I needed an insulin shot every time I was on the periphery of one of those scenes.”

Her eyebrows had risen, “You never told me about that exchange.”

He shrugged, “Well it happened.”

“Think they’re fucking? And the cold public front is just that – a front?”

He thought about that for a moment, “Doesn’t make sense no? If that’s what they were planning on doing, why do the whole courtship thing in public? Keep it in your pants and play grab ass when no one’s looking. I’m telling you, if he was as good with his tongue down there as he was when they were verbally fondling each other, no woman would ever let him out of her sight!”

She smacked his arm, “Don’t be gross.” And then she was back to frowning, “This has to mean something. She couldn’t have just stopped getting her authentication from her primary source unless she had found some sort of substitute. Is she doing the coy with anyone else?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Y’know I really need to see this chick. Maybe then I’ll get a sense of what her deal must be.”

“Sure. Come to work with me one morning.”

“Of course. Because I have no life. Can’t you figure out what bars she hangs out at so we can catch her after work?”

“Sure. Because I have no life! That’s what I want to be doing. Following a co-worker who may or may not be cheating on her husband. Thanks. I’ll pencil that in right next to getting kicked in the nuts on Tuesday.”

“But you said she was hot.”

“So?”

“How hard can it be to keep looking at her?”

“I don’t know what guys you know but simply looking at some chick is not my idea of an evening well spent.”

“So go up to her and say nice things. Maybe you can be the guy she takes up with.”

“Yeah, I don’t do MILFs.”

“And why not?”

“The Mom bit – it feels wrong. Just because they are ready to open their vaginas for business doesn’t make it okay. I mean I know that it’s ‘okay’ as long as it is consensual but I’m not cool with the idea that her kids might be really hurt if any of it gets out.”

She looked at him with an expression he hadn’t seen before so he asked, “What?”

She shook her head and followed up with, “But what if the kids are absolute spoilt shits? And all she’s really looking for is someone to make her feel like a woman again.”

“No sale. She could have done something about the kids not becoming spoilt. Just because you can fuck isn’t license to make babies.”

“Come on. People don’t always have control. Maybe she goes looking for love and a little warm sex outside her marriage because her own bed is cold.”

“Not my problem. Just like no really hot woman is going to agree to be my trophy wife if I’m not already rich. That I got distracted en route to making mountains of money is not an excuse she will consider. Most likely because she would be too busy jumping astride the next millionaire to walk through the doors of The Groucho Club.”

“Point taken,” she sipped her coffee and gave him a strange look, again. Then she felt the need to back the look up with actual words, “I wouldn’t have pegged you for this kind of guy.”

“Which kind would that be?”

“One with principles.”

“Wow. I feel so honoured that you thought of me as unprincipled.”

She waved his faux wounded look away and said, “Stop. You know what I meant.”

He shrugged it off and asked, “What about you? What’s new?”

Something went still inside of her and he had the immediate, unbidden image of a candle blown out. He frowned and she noticed and flicked her eyes off his, searching for some place else to focus on. Right before his eyes, even before he could prepare for the coming storm, her chin quivered and her eyes went wet. And just like that, she was crying. He didn’t know what to do but he didn’t look around like most guys would have to let even the most casual observer know that he had nothing to do with this. Instead he offered her a tissue and laid a palm on her shoulder. A single sob escaped and then she took control. Thirty seconds later it was as if the moment had never occurred. He didn’t do anything to scare her off. No questions about whether she wanted to ‘talk about it’, no suggestion that she ‘get it of her chest’, nothing except the comfort of his company and the soothing weight of his palm on her shoulder. They looked like a moment captured by Chris Doyle for Wong Kar-Wai and suddenly, in keeping with the type of scene they seemed to be enacting, she nudged his hand off her shoulder, whipped around at the waist, grabbed his face and kissed it.

The sex was everything he had ever dreamed of but he suspected that she was having him fuck away another man more than she was having him make love to her. He exhibited great staying power with his hips and sublime artistry with his tongue. He did a gentle walk along her spine with his fingertips and he massaged her feet while she slept. Somewhere along the way he nodded off as well and slept in the warm curve of her hip. A few hours later when both of them were awake at the same time she told him about the married man who had been her lover for sixteen months.

Unnoticed by her his genitals shrank a little at the admission. As she nuzzled up into his warmth and played with the curls on his chest she told him all about Adam and how, for her, he had literally been the first man. She had tired of the boys who thought they could be more than their individual life experiences. She had wanted someone who could show her what life really was all about. He bit back the question, “And you couldn’t find anyone other than a married man to show this to you?” But it was all pointless in the end because he decided he needed his wife and family more. After she talked for a while she dozed off again but he couldn’t sleep. He had lost some respect for her and even though he was willing to believe there were extenuating circumstances he wasn’t prepared to ignore that she had caused potential damage to people she had never met.

In the weeks that followed he made himself unavailable to her and though she had never really thought about it up until then, she suspected that she had somehow lost the true love she had so desperately been seeking. She considered herself a survivor so she put her best face on and went out into the night looking for her next tenuous connection with intimacy.

In a restaurant not far from where she worked, two young interns with fashionable haircuts and not enough money between them to cover the next month’s rent were talking about her. She was telling him about the lady at work who put the moves on any guy who looked like he had a bit of money squirreled away. At pretty much every other table in the restaurant people were exchanging some piece of gossip that made them feel better about themselves at the expense of co-workers, family or friends.

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