Almost all, hey, no ALL of my social acquatinances (friends if you like) were either through Lee or through work. Before Lee moved in, and before my small but successful American company was swallowed by the Eutropean Cosmo-incompetent Medical Company there was only Henry. Henry was the one who had offered me the job in Hong Kong. I had known him for years back in Melbourne when we attended the Victorian Group Clinical Meetings, he or I maybe would give a talk, mine always verbose and divergent from the topic, his from the point of view of his pathology training, pithy and relevant. These meting developed in a camaraderie between us as he was a friendly outgoing bloke. Like me he had marriage trouble and perhaps this did some cementing. He told of a short-term incarceration in a marriage where the wiofe had screwed everybody except him and then she screwed him over in the divorce, even though she was in the wrong. Marriage can be like that. I’ve seen it a few times now, it always distresses me and makes me irrationally, some would say rationally , angry. Fucking bitches. But I was not misogynous. Only pissed at women who cheated, actually not so much cheating as those who lied. Henry having taken this beating was much more affected. He was charming and hid this pain, and he (often) made moves on girls in the meetings or in the labs where he worked. I’d like to say if, but it was always when his hidden attitude became more clear to them and they would nullify their dalliances, he would switch to dislike and outright derision. He would tell me what bitches they were, what personality flaws were destroying their chances of ever finding a good match, what amazing things they had wrong at work as well. He never went half-way on this.
But in Hong Kong he settled all this. He had calmed down. It was interesting to have see this transformation. I guess I saw it as evidence that was hope for me. Not as I said that I was misogynist, but more that I was so low in self-esteem after two cases of being deither divorced or dumped buy the women I had given my heart to.
First there was Sally, my wife - I keep saying “my first wife” like there has been, or if you like going into semantics, was ever going to be, another. Sally had just drifted away from me and Byron. She certainly loved Byron and liked me, there was animosity at first, no anger, just regret. Before our shotgun wedding we did not know each other. It was a long time ago, we where still not agnostic enough at this time, let aalone the atheism that later drove our families away, to follow the sensible plan and end the pregnancy before anyone foun out, and so we married way too young and before . Rule for you kids out there: don’t. Her long held dream of studying law was rising to the top. It became her main topic of conversation. Her friends were all lawyers, she cultivated this. One of her these friends, a woman called Ange, was the eminince gris in her life, insinuating all sorts of things about how she was in another intellectual league than me - and she was - about how she was not fulfilling her destiny, about the chain I was, holding her back on the path on her freedom and independence. I suppose I had better blame Ange for my first broken heart. When Sally said she was sorry, kissed me on the cheek, crying both of us had started crying and promised to cone back in the next week and grab her stuff, then moved in with Ange, the penny dropped, I wasn’t aware of all this background subterfuge at the time, not until they started fucking openly. They had actually been tribading, double-dildoing or whatever it was that lesbians do - like lebian porn wasn’t Sally favorite, mine too, and she had a few ideas and no doubt some skills - in secret and for a long time. Cheating, lying.
Ange only lived around the corner so Sally had unlimited access to Byron, as while I was angry, my heart was empty and I did not have vengeful thoughts, I didn’t to stop that relationship. Of course as I was working full-time by then anbd had to cover a lot of weekends and nights on call, she would either take Byron over or sometimes sleep in the spare room with us. I felt drained by the whole affair. Of course there was Woody Allen’s Manhatten - we both loved the slapstick of his early stuff, but this a favorite too #cue irony music# - where his wife, Meryl Streep leaves him for another woman, that’s how I felt. The divorce went smoothly, and later when Byron was going to University and she was high flying in New York with Ange, we sold the house.
Henry’s wife was a beauty and a model, she was chased by many, no wonder she slept around. I met her once, dark-skinned and slightly imperious. Not my type but obviously others disagreed. Henry had no idea how her caught her. Or why she accepted. But he counted it as a high point in his life, he was young, and so soon, such was height he fell from, a slough of despond took him down until he rose up to the mountains of misogyny. I liked him, he hid this, it was only later I found out, talking to some of his ex-colleagues, innocent talk until their disgust with him became evident, but I like everybody. Except people who cheat and lie. And Henry never did that to me.
However, the breakup with Sally had the effect of damping my romantic ambitions. Like Woody Allen I felt unmanned. Seriously. Marianne didn’t worry about so much about my performance anxiety. After the first few attempts, things seemed to work again, I guess it was trust concerns that held my hippocampus back from para-sympathetic action, and that stopped the required vasodilation, but it didn’t stop the affair.
This was years later , well after Sally had left. Marianne was also a friend from the Clinical Meetings. I was Chairman and editor of the newsletter by this time, and she was recently divorced. I think once at a meeting a long time before, way earlier than her divorce, so long ago that I was still Sally, in fact Sally was with me that night, it was a social function, it was unusually for Sally join me in these things, but tonight she did, Marianne made a pass at me. At least, looking back I think it was a pass. She denied this when I asked her about it. She’d probably forgotten, she was probably tipsy, if not outright pissed.
After Marianne’s divorce (her husband took the vibrators for his secretary whom he had been fucking for years) she made a move again me agin. She found out I was divorced, no I was chronically separated, and we hit it off, I had always liked her, so why not. She made it clear that this was going to be a private dalliance and not a boyfriend girlfriend this, just friends with benefits, although she never said that, the term wasn’t in vogue, but didn’t listen to that. She was more cultured than Sally - Sally’s was a raw intelligence - we went to movies with subtitles, she showed me how and why to eat sushi, it was delicious. Later in Japan, I go to Japan often with the Cosmo-bureaucratic Medical Company, I saw that she was nowhere near 100% on this how part.
Wordcount: 1304
Total: 3365
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