Nila's Long Con: A Hotwife Adventure

by Arnica Butler

  Little things.

  I’d like to be able to say that I wasn’t the kind of guy to take to the internet to search for: how to tell your wife is cheating on you.

  In a moment of clarity, I called my buddy Peter. Really, I called him with the intention of having him talk me down from the ledge of mindless, suspicious, insanity.

  Ironically, when you look back on it all, Peter’s really the point in this story where everything went spiraling out of control.

  4: P ETER

  Peter looked like shit the last time I saw him, so I was surprised to see him with a brighter countenance, a trim beard that made him look younger and hipper, and a smile on his face.

  “You look like a douche bag,” I said, pointing at his beard.

  We slapped hands and I sat down. He rubbed his beard. “I have a new lady friend,” he said. “She likes it.”

  “That’s great, Peter,” I said, and I really meant it. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  We shot the shit for a while, and all the while I was fairly distracted. Maybe Peter, who was happy now with his new girlfriend (Nadya, Russian, twenty-seven, hot) was not the guy to be asking for advice.

  “Man,” he said finally. He leaned on the table. “So tell Uncle Petey why you called.”

  “I just wanted to see you,” I said, but the premise was so patently ridiculous that I couldn’t finish the sentence without laughing. Peter was probably my best friend, which meant that he knew I was full of shit saying something like that. I didn’t really do “hanging out” with other guys.

  He was rolling his eyes. “Come on, man. You’ve hardly listened to a thing I’ve said. You look like you have the mob after or you or something.”

  I looked over at the door at the moment, as I had been all evening. I had shifty eyes, for sure.

  “Oh. Do you? Have the mob after you?” Peter said, suddenly serious.

  I flicked my beer bottle. “No. Nah. It’s... something else.”

  Peter was not picking up on it, He was looking at me with genuine concern, but I was going to have to lead this horse to water. Which I supposed I should have taken as a good sign of how other people viewed my relationship with Tennile.

  “It’s... uh...” I coughed into my hand. “Tennile.”

  Peter sat back, deflated. “Oh fuck man. Don’t tell me you two are getting a divorce.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “No. No, not... it’s um...” I started peeling the label off my beer. “How did you know, you know, when Jen was, uh...”

  “Cheating on me?”

  I looked up to see that Peter’s features had hardened a little. Nadya might have been young, hot, and Russian, but Jen’s cheating had not evaporated from his mind. He began to pick at the label on his own beer.

  I looked away. “It’s... I don’t know. I’ve got this thing in my head, and I feel like I’m being crazy sometimes, then I think I’m being an idiot the rest of the time. I don’t want to accuse her if, you know...”

  Peter had balled his fists up. “Yeah, man, I know.”

  “But... I don’t want to be a fucking schmuck, either.”

  Peter looked up at me, and then I realized how shitty that sounded.

  “Oh, Peter. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  He gave a brave shrug and a scowl. “Nah, it’s okay. That’s how it is. Shit. Fucking women.”

  He got up and ordered two more beers without saying anything else.

  He sat back down and pushed one over to me. “Look. I know I’m supposed to tell you, go talk to your wife about this. That’s the advice everyone gave me, and it was probably good advice. But... I’m the first to understand, it’s more complicated than that.”

  Fucking Peter. I knew he’d come through for me. “Thanks, Peter.” I felt relieved. “It’s why I’m here,” I added.

  Peter nodded. The pain of his divorce, and of Jen cheating on him, was evidently not entirely healed. His expression gave me a sense of foreboding: was this going to be me, in a few years?

  “So what is it that has you suspicious?” Pete asked, looking at his fingers.

  I tapped my beer again. I sucked in my breath. “Fuck. I don’t know. Now that I start to say it, it seems -”

  “Crazy?” Pete looked up at me. “See, that’s the problem, man. That’s exactly the trap I got into with Jen.”

  He pointed at me to exaggerate each word.

  I looked around again. I was tapping my foot under the table.

  “Just spill it, man,” Peter said. “Get it off your chest. You know I’m the last guy who’s going to judge you. Anyway, you helped me out, you know...” he looked at his hands. “Back then. So.” He cleared his throat.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  I knew I didn’t want to talk about it because the adage is true: it would be real, then.

  There’s part of you that wants it to be.

  But did I, really?

  Just talk. Peter’s a discreet fellow.

  I sucked in my breath, gave one last look around the bar to make sure no one else was listening, and dove in. “So... it’s this. We, uh, ran into an ex-boyfriend on that trip we took to West Palm Beach, right?”

  Peter nodded, and he did it like a therapist. Peter knew. He understood.

  “And this guy is like... well, first of all, she never told me about him. And he’s this sleazy guy, he has tattoos and this slicked-back hair, he’s just screaming con artist -”

  “She never told you about this guy,” Peter repeated. “Did it seem like he really just showed up? Like she was really surprised?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and then I scanned my memory. “Yeah... she kind of, went past his table, like to check out if it was him or not...” My voice trailed off. I was unsure of the memory now, unsure what had happened. I could see him leaning on his plastic chair, balancing it, looking at Tennile’s ass... but had she recognized him? Why hadn’t she seemed more flustered when she came back to the table?

  Peter was staring at me. I shook my head and moved on. “Anyway, he shows up the next day, too. And he’s this... yeah, sleazy guy, he says he needs a lawyer, and then he just implies something, like he’s looking at Tennile with this, I don't know, look, and she goes all weird and gives him her business card. Says he can call her.” I paused. “Yeah, see, now that I think about it, she was flustered.”

  Peter nodded, almost like he was agreeing with me. “And so...”

  I exhaled. This part was tricky to navigate. I had sworn to Tennile that I wouldn’t tell anyone about her previous occupation, and so far I’d stuck to that agreement.

  I shrugged. “So I get back to the hotel room, and I’m kind of like, what the hell, because, again, this guy has a really bad vibe...”

  Peter was raising his eyebrows. Naturally, this part of the story was the most intriguing to him, because he only knew Tennile The Lawyer, Tennile Of The Dry-Cleaned Blouses. Suburban Tennile, who would someday be on the PTA. The Tennile he knew did not give “sleazy” the time of day.

  “And that’s when she says, ok, I know this guy from a place I used to work, and I used to kind of hook up with him, and it was no big deal but I did sort of tell him I’d help him out if he ever needed a lawyer.”

  I took a sip of my beer, not sure where to take the story next.

  “And that was that?”

  Sure. That was that. That was that, if you left out the stripping and the alpha-male stares, and the fact that I had jerked off in the shower thinking about this man fucking my wife.

  I shrugged. “Now... we get back – she said, back in Palm Beach, she’d just pass him off to some other lawyer, right? - and so I don’t hear anything about him. And then we were both working a lot, and then I get home the other day and she’s not there. I call, I text, nothing.”

  Peter nodded.

  “And so, then she calls me really late, like ten to nine, and she says she’s sorry, she was in a meeting and it was four hours long. Which – this could happen, you know? She
’s a lawyer, this happens.” I could hear Peter in my own voice, Peter from two years ago, first accusing his wife and then building defenses for her, making excuses for her. Charging ahead and retreating.

  I continued: “But... then she says, oh, I’m gonna go get Jiang’s, and I say fine. She calls like two minutes later, and she says, never mind, I’ll get Tom’s, and then... you know this sounds really stupid, now that I’m talking about it.”

  “No way, man, just tell me what you’re thinking and I’ll tell you if it’s crazy, okay?”

  I sighed. I watched my hand on the table, tracing out a map of her path. “So when she called, the first time, she said she was getting in the car at the office, right? And then she would have driven, changed her mind, had to go back this way to get to Tom’s, and then go home. It all takes like 26 minutes, to get from Tom’s to our house, just driving, right? Not including getting the food.”

  Peter nodded. He already knew what was coming, but he wanted to hear it anyway.

  Maybe he was happy. Happy someone else was getting as fucked as he was.

  “But she gets home like 20 minutes later. She has the food, the food from Tom’s, and she’s home in this amount of time that just...”

  Didn’t add up.

  It doesn’t add up, no matter how you slice it.

  Peter pondered this for a moment. He took a sip of his beer.

  “Look man,” he said. “I’m gonna say something you maybe don’t want to hear. I think... look, there’re a lot of other explanations for this, like... she could even be hiding something that’s more like, I don’t know, she’s planning a surprise party -”

  “My birthday’s in eight months,” I said, bitterly.

  “It’s a hypothetical,” Peter said, annoyed. “But you’re seeing the worst thing because of this guy. The ex. You can’t get it out of your head.”

  This was all true, but it kind of got under my skin.

  “Did you ask her about the time?”

  I leaned my head back. “No. No, I didn’t want to seem like a fucking crazy man.”

  Peter was nodding. He sighed.

  Then he pulled out his phone. “Look. I’m saying this as a friend, I would have done things a lot different with... Jen. But, that’s easy to say when you already know what you know. You know?”

  Maybe.

  He slid his phone over to me. “You should probably just talk to her. Really. But...” he tapped his finger on the phone. “I used this app. You can put it on her phone and get real-time updates of all her texts, emails, whatever.”

  I gave the app a good, long, hard scan, committing the name to my memory with fire, just before rolled my eyes and shaking my head. “Man, that’s intense,” I said. “I don’t think -”

  Peter put his phone away. “Look, I thought that to. Just puttin’ it out there. You have anything else?”

  I was still thinking about that app, imagining myself looking at it in the dark, watching Tennile’s unfaithfulness unfold in front of my eyes. It was giving me a thrill, sitting around inside of me, but in a way that was more good than bad.

  “Like what else?” I said, coming back to reality. “What else did Jen... what tipped you off?”

  Peter sighed. This was a heavy subject for him, and I felt like bad person, getting off on it a little inside my own skin, prying into his pain because it was semi-enjoyable for me.

  Not really. I didn’t really want Tennile to be cheating on me.

  I just liked the idea of it, somehow.

  “So I caught her, finally, with a bill for a hotel. You know she said she was visiting her sister, and she did do that, but she stayed at a hotel in Lansing, right? Her sister told me, and then she never had a bill for the hotel. That happened twice. Then I got this app. But yeah, before that it was just... little things, you know? She started working out, she started buying all these new clothes. The thing that... the thing that really burned was she kept talking about him. She didn’t say his name, she just... talked about him, what he said, things he did that were funny. Telling me all these stories about work, about ‘Mike.’ And I just listened, like a chump. Or maybe I didn’t listen. Maybe that’s what happened.”

  Peter had peeled the label off his beer now, jabbing at it with increased anger. “Stuff like that.”

  I leaned back again. “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t...you know.”

  Peter shrugged. Then he looked up at me. “And here’s the other thing. This was really fucking weird. Jen started getting really weird about sex.”

  “Avoiding it.”

  “No. Nah. That’s the weird thing. She started getting into it more. Starting it. Doing things that...” he made a sound. “It’s something they do, because they feel guilty, you know.”

  And then Peter smiled.

  “It’s a good tactic, the little bitches. Because who’s gonna think twice about that?”

  I smiled. It was a dark moment, but Peter seemed to be coming around to laughing about it.

  Then he got dark again.

  “You will, that’s who,” he said solemnly, and pointed his finger at me. Then he jumped up to order two more beers, and we switched the subject to something I can’t remember a word of.

  5: T RAP HER

  It’s hard to explain the shiver this app gave me when Pete slid his phone over the table and I looked at it.

  Of course there was an app for that. Of course there was. I never would have thought to search for it in a million years, but of course there was.

  I was both repulsed by the idea and found it wildly intoxicating.

  Not only was it wrong at a marital level, it was legally wrong and broke scores of confidentiality agreements. Tennile like to say, whenever I got an idea that was somewhat stupid: think of how you would feel if you had to explain what you did in court, for whatever reason.

  I thought about it. I thought about it so hard I could actually feel a trickle of sweat snaking down my spine under a dress shirt while I sat there telling a judge how I’d downloaded it, how I’d plugged it into her phone while she was asleep.

  I could almost feel myself blushing and lowering my eyes as I recounted for the court (probably divorce court) the way I’d sneaked around my own house, heart pounding, Rich Mathews, age 34, college-educated, old enough to know better.

  How I'd done it, even though I knew I could ruin her career and our marriage and a hundred other things.

  But under those trickles of sweat, under my skin and the flush of embarrassment, there was a coiled-up excitement that was just clawing at my skin, to be let loose.

  Also, like any guy, I believed deeply in a version of the future where of course, I would never get caught.

  Not me.

  I simmered in the car, driving home, going over the things that had happened and the things Pete had told me, swinging wildly back and forth from believing in Tennile’s total innocence – coincidences, after all, did sometimes just happen – and believing in Tennile’s fathomless guilt, because there is no such thing as a coincidence in this world.

  When I got home, Tennile was on the couch watching TV. She was looking so incredibly ordinary: her hair in a bun, her face washed and fresh. She was eating a bowl of ice cream, defying so completely all of the warnings that Peter had put forth, that in a moment everything seemed utterly ridiculous to me.

  She put her elbow on the back of the couch and turned to me.

  “How was Peter?” she said. “Still sad?”

  There was nothing guilty in her voice, nothing off.

  “He has a new girlfriend. Nadya.”

  “Russian?”

  I nodded.

  Tennile smiled and turned back to the TV, nodding, as if it were the most predictable thing in the world that a man would have a heart-wrenching divorce and then take up with a Russian girlfriend name Nadya.

  I sat down in the chair next to her, eyeing her for details that might be amiss. My mind was in another place, sifting through all of our inte
ractions, all of her late nights, searching for a memory of her shopping. Wondering when I could look at the bills. Wondering if my wife would be so careless as Jen. Thinking she probably wouldn’t.

  Tennile looked over at me with the spoon in her mouth, concave part down. She raised her eyebrows. “What? Did something else happen?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “I’m just tired.”

  “I’m fucking exhausted,” Tennile said. “But I started watching this fucking show and I can’t stop.” She pointed her spoon at the screen. “This guy, is a serial killer. And a grief counselor. Sculley is in it, from X-Files. She has a British accent. It’s really good.” Her attention went back to the TV.

  “And the ice cream?” I said.

  Tennile didn’t answer. She had been drawn back into the TV series on Netflix, having never paused it – as if she couldn’t. But after a few seconds she turned to me, quickly, like the question had very suddenly made its way to her brain, and she said, “Hmmm?” And then very quickly. “Just... I don’t know. I felt stressed out or something. It was in the fridge. You want some?”

  She was eating it out of the container. I raised my eyebrows.

  “I hope I’m not pregnant,” she said, absentmindedly, her attention drifting slowly back to the TV.

  I closed my eyes, and opened them very slowly.

  Of course this all seemed the very opposite of the things that not only Peter, but the whole of the internet had advised me to watch out for.

  My wife wasn’t having an affair.

  “I’m beat,” I said again. “I’m going to bed.”

  “I should do that,” Tennile said, and she was neither avoiding me nor throwing herself at me, she was not chatting away about some new friend, she was not feeling guilty. She was just watching TV.

  So I went to bed, pretty sure Peter had delivered his best advice when he told me I was letting the fact that Shane’s appearance in our lives bother me, and make me paranoid about other, unrelated things.

  The subconscious mind work differently, though.

  I can’t remember how the dream started. I kept waking up, thinking about my dreams, and then going back to sleep. It’s possible I dreamed that as well – it’s been known to happen. There were dreams about Jen, about barbecues with her.