Nine Women, One Dress(14)

Dora pulled off her stuffed head. “Hola, ladies.”

It was CC, our other college roommate. Clearly I was not the only one with troubles.

“Gotta go,” Allison said into the phone, and hung up. “What the hell, CC?” she shouted, as if Dora’s presence alone weren’t enough to draw attention our way.

CC shrugged. “Brett’s been out of work for six months,” she said matter-of-factly. “I needed a job.”

“You graduated magna cum laude from Wesleyan, for god’s sake—this was all you were qualified for?” Allison was still in outraged-lawyer mode.

I came to CC’s defense. “She was a Spanish major.” Allison didn’t have children; she stared at me blankly. “Dora’s Spanish.” I smiled.

“It did help me get the job,” CC happily chimed in. She looked at Allison’s disappointed face. “Come on, Allison. What do you think my résumé looks like at this point? It was basically this or sex worker.”

Allison wasn’t having it. “That’s BS. You can do anything.”

CC’s problems simultaneously made me feel better and further scared the crap out of me. I thought about my dilemma while Allison continued her interrogation. I knew it was only a matter of minutes before CC would no longer be able to take it and would turn the conversation toward me. After all, I was the one who’d called the emergency session.

I looked over at CC, her Dora backpack squeezed up against the rim of the table, and decided to spare her further misery and just come out with it. “Derek is cheating on me,” I said, stopping them dead in their tracks. I love it when people act just as you expect them to. I pulled out a folder; I had compiled a treasure trove of damning facts, incriminating photographs, and logically drawn postulations. I’m not one to fall quickly into paranoia or victimization, and Allison and CC know that about me. So they knew this was serious.

I’m a good judge of character, and when my gut tells me something, it’s usually correct. There were not a million signs of infidelity, like people say to look for. “Is your spouse wearing new aftershave?” He wasn’t. “Is your spouse suddenly working out more, concerned with his appearance?” Derek was always vain and in good shape. There was just this one thing that was bothering me. I told them the whole story.

For years we had fought the same way, and suddenly he was fighting differently. Like intentionally picking a fight and then storming out to “cool off.” After it happened a few times I thought maybe he’d started smoking again. We’d made a pact to quit together a few years earlier, and I thought maybe this was what he was hiding. I started smelling him when he came back, and at first I thought I was right. He wouldn’t smell like cigarettes, but he always smelled so clean. Like someone covering it up with soap and toothpaste. It went on for months, and I just never confronted him. I thought there were worse things than smoking and covering it up. Like cheating, for example. Then one day he picked a fight with me over a game of Words with Friends. I put down the word muzjiks on a double word score, using all seven letters for, like, 147 points, and he was like, what does muzjiks even mean? And I kind of knew what it meant but didn’t feel like defending myself, so I just said I didn’t remember. He accused me of cheating. Said there was something called Words with Friends Cheat and that I was a cheater. He stormed out, without a coat, which I noted because it was raining. I went over to his computer and clicked history and there it was—Words with Friends Cheat. He was the cheater. I said it out loud to myself right there alone in our apartment: “He’s the cheater.”

“Oh my god, Andie, seriously?” Allison interrupted me, laughing. “You had us worried.”

CC was annoyed. “I ditched a book fair in Tribeca to come here, and he was cheating at Words with Friends?”

Looking at CC, Allison again shook her head in disappointment. CC attempted to defend herself. “Swiper and Diego will have to cover for me all day.”

“Let me finish!” I protested. “All I’m saying is that before that point, it never entered my mind that he would cheat. But the minute I saw the word cheat a lightbulb went off in my head. I jumped in the elevator and went to the lobby, hoping with all my being to see him smoking with Miguel the doorman. Miguel was outside smoking, but he was alone. So I asked him, ‘Miguel, which way did Mr. Banks go when he left?’

“Miguel was nervous, said he hadn’t seen him. But I pleaded with him. I told him I wasn’t mad at all, I totally knew what Mr. Banks had been up to, and I really didn’t care that he was covering for him. He panicked and started blabbering about how maybe I wouldn’t be mad but Mr. Prescott would be furious, and he hadn’t wanted to be their lookout, he didn’t want to lose his job, but at that point I stopped hearing what he was saying because I had put it together: Derek’s been having an affair with Chelsea Prescott from the sixth floor of our building. Every time Rick Prescott leaves to ride his bike around the outer loop in Central Park, my husband’s riding his wife around their bedroom.”

I pointed to Exhibit D in my folder, a picture of Derek getting off the elevator on the sixth floor. “Miguel is on my payroll now,” I said. “So I have the elevator pictures to prove it.”

CC was silent.

Allison was outraged. “Did you confront him?”