“Does Jack know that you know?” asks Maddie, pulling her blond bob off her face and tying it up in a knot at the top off her head.
“No, not yet. I tried to confront him last night, but the words just wouldn’t come out. I don’t know why. I felt so… pathetic.”
“Hey, pathetic is not a word that anyone would use to describe you. You were in shock.”
It’s not the first time Maddie’s sweet words have helped make my world more bearable. We’ve been inseparable since meeting in San Francisco when we were teens. My family moved there for a year for my father’s job and met Maddie’s family during a protest against pipelines. She moved to New York about five years ago and has never wanted to go back since. She’s five years older than me, but I’ve never felt it. Maddie’s one the smartest, funniest, warmest women I’ve ever known, as well as being totally and adorably eccentric. In her jam-packed twenty-nine years, no girl has been on more mortifying dates than this one and yet every relationship she’s ever had has petered out after a few months or downright imploded, with either outcome leading to weeks of crying, smoking, cursing and drinking whiskey while a friend—usually me—consoles her.
Stella, on the other hand, a fiercely independent thirty-year-old with a history of dysfunctional romances, seems to have the same attitude towards long-term relationships that most people have to being sentenced to maximum security prison. Stella doesn’t have boyfriends; she has “friends” or “lovers” or “fuck buddies” or “some guy I fucked” as well as the cell phone numbers of about ten barmen around the city. The fact that she and her polar opposite, Maddie, are friends at all is one of life’s mysteries. Watching them together sometimes sends me into fits of hysterics as Maddie starts planning the wedding bouquet she wants to carry three weeks after meeting a new man, while Stella rolls her eyes and gets drunk.
Maddie had believed in Jack and me more than anyone else I know. Stella knows too much about men to be able to see beyond Jack’s looks, money and power, while Kevin has seen way too much in his colorful twenty-seven years and had way too many dalliances with respectable, married, so-called straight men to be able to take marriage even remotely seriously anymore. More than a couple of people proffered unrequested opinions about my dismal future if I got together with a Wall Street banker with a questionable reputation like Jack. I even lost a dear friend whom I cared about deeply—Cameron O’Neill, one of my closest college friends from whom I’d been inseparable for a time, but whose hatred of Jack and inability to accept my relationship led to the implosion of our friendship.
But Maddie, she always believed in us, even in the beginning of the relationship when I didn’t myself. She would beam as I told her about the ecstasy of being with Jack, gloss over the numerous fears I had and stand up for him on the frequent occasions I tried to talk myself out of the relationship. She believed in us when so many people around me couldn’t see past the dangerous and intimidating beauty, power and ruthless determination of Jack.
I met Jack during my third year at Brown. He’d graduated from there a few years earlier and was already a trader on Wall Street by the time we met. I had very little time for the shtick of rich Wall Street types and even less time for the women who would shamelessly flock to them. The first six months of knowing Jack, I would roll my eyes at half of the things he said—at the overly confident way that he carried himself and the reputed ease with which he picked up and dropped women. I ribbed him mercilessly for it all. When I finally gave in to him, after over a year of resisting his advances, and fell desperately in love, Maddie was one of the first and only people to get it and not think I’d transformed overnight into some vapid, money-hungry groupie.
Sitting opposite her now as she scours his text messages, her wide eyes scanning the screen fiercely from behind her burgundy glasses, I wait for her to say something, to comfort me, to rationalize, to convince me that I’ve misread the whole thing and that there is an innocent explanation for it all.
She glances up at me, her somber green eyes making their way over to mine. “This is bad, Jess.”
Although I knew that from the start, her words still hit me like an unexpected blow. Her expression softens at the sight of my forlorn face, but she remains resolute.
“It’s really bad,” she continues. “There’s no excuse for this.”
“Ya think?” yells Kevin.
“There is nothing he could say to possibly justify this,” Maddie continues.
“No shit!” exclaims Kevin.
Stella watches me, her hazel eyes soft but betrayed by body language indicating that she is visibly trying to restrain herself from getting up and going to find Jack so that she can use his face for target practice.
“I know,” I concede, putting my head in my hands as fire and frustration overload my system. “I can’t believe that he would do this! We talked about this kind of thing—about people throwing their marriages away for shit like this. We swore it wouldn’t happen to us. I just don’t understand! After everything he did to get me to marry him, after everything that we’ve been through with me being sick, getting better, to do this now that things are perfect… It just makes no sense!”
I can’t hold my emotions in any longer and finally break down into a pool of messy tears. Stella sits down next to me and wraps an arm around me. As she tries to wipe away the flood of interminable tears, Maddie reaches across the table to hold my hand, uttering consoling words that do little to dull the pain.
Kevin picks up the phone and looks at the images again. “Lydia Bulgova!” he shouts. “I know of three other married men that she’s fucked. She’s a ruthless, cold-blooded bitch. How the hell could Jack even look at a woman like that compared to you?”
“She’s a fucking whore,” hisses Maddie.
It’s a word I can’t stand. I generally sputter annoying protests whenever I hear anybody use it, but right now it seems extremely fitting, as though calling her that dulls the pain by a couple of percentage points.
“I can’t believe he would throw a marriage away for someone like that,” I utter, my voice quivering like jello.
“I know, baby,” says Kevin, wiping tears off my flushed cheeks before lighting up another cigarette.
“Then, why?” I manage.
“You know, society fills women’s heads up with fantasies of heroes and soulmates and bullshit like that,” he responds. “Honestly, women are just naïve when it comes to the reality of relationships. I’ve slept with enough so-called straight men to know that. It’s not necessarily the man’s fault either. They have their own shit they have to put up with too. Men and women are just… different, and women still don’t seem to get that.”
“I just thought I was smarter than that,” I mutter. “I did everything I could to make sure Jack was satis—” I pause. “I didn’t think I’d be just another idiot wife getting screwed over.”
“No one’s immune, baby,” he says lovingly. “Not even a gal as smart as you.”
I offer him a smile of gratitude, aware of how lucky I am to have the love and support of these awesome people. As I wipe my eyes, Stella picks up my phone and flicks through the messages again.