By scqueen
Date: 10 December 2000
A Bathrobe and a Bottle of Gin
After a few beers, at our ritual Friday night gathering of friends
and neighbors, he went to his truck to retrieve a newsletter from work.
Sauntering back, prize in hand, he first tried to point out his name in a
short article and then made a diversion to a picture of a female coworker
who was on the job temporarily from another state. "Very attractive",
he described her. He seemed to feel the need to defend her
(or himself?) in telling us that she was happily married and flying
home that very night to surprise her husband. That was the end of that.
The next Friday night he walks in about to explode with a story and once
again retreats to his truck after a few beers. This time he pulls out a
bathrobe and a bottle of gin. He tells us he stopped by her hotel room
just to say good-bye after her job ended. She gives him a hug and
a designer bathrobe that she had to buy from the hotel spa for her stay.
Odd to me that it's a man's robe and she doesn't want to take it home
to her husband. So she offers it to him, and he thinks he's won a trophy.
She also leaves him with a bottle of gin somebody gave her, but she doesn't
drink the stuff. I wonder who brought her that, but he sees it as a
token of affection. He's hanging on her every action but she
only sees him as a friend.
We are uncomfortable, as his friends, to hear these confessions that
he absolutely cannot contain. We know his wife. And he's a role model
family man. He's feeling so guilty about what didn't happen that he can't
keep quiet. And he can't take the bathrobe home, nor the bottle of gin.
So not only do we know the story but we are to keep the evidence.
I wonder to myself, "At what point would he have cheated?"
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