The Gins
an excerpt

“Yes,” she said. “But before I met Jack, I started back with Tim. He came back, he apologized. I was on the top of the world. I felt like the luckiest girl in the universe. He actually came back, and told me that he missed me. Perfect Tim. And then I found out that Perfect Tim wasn’t as perfect as I thought he was. He was lying to his new girlfriend, and he was lying to me. For him, it was no big deal, for me it was. It meant that when he and I were going out all those years, he could have been unfaithful then too. It was so easy for him. He must have done it before, was all I thought, and it scared me. It scared me that someone so close to home, someone I opened myself up to, could betray me. He lied and told me that he and I had a special relationship but the ‘special’ things we were doing didn’t really mean anything,” she explained, “because how could they? He was doing the exact same special things with another girl as he was doing with me.”
“So you broke up again?”
“Yes,” she said. “We did. I didn’t feel badly about the break up though. When I found out I wasn’t in denial about it either as I could have been years later. I accepted the that he was like that, I gave up on him and I tried my best to let him know I didn’t hate him. I didn’t respect him, and I didn’t want to be with him, but I didn’t hate him. I just let it go.”
“Hmm,” Dr. Baton said, typing into his little device. “And then what happened?”
“Well, I almost had an affair with Jack.”
“Almost?”
“Well I wasn’t exactly going to let it happen again to me, the second time around. So yes, I didn’t let myself actually go through with it this time. But I still got hurt. I got hurt because Jack, like Tim, wasn’t what I thought he was. Or, rather, I didn’t look at these men in a realistic way. I was a dreamer. I saw what I wanted to see and that maybe, wasn’t good for me. I was abused by Jack.”
“How did he abuse you?”
“We were companions. He explained to me that he was still married, but wanted to get a divorce. Secretly, in my own heart, I thought he was disgusting, a coward. I thought he had no integrity. I knew he had none. I heard him on the phone with his wife. He was kind, he said he’d bring bread home, he told her that he missed her, that he loved her. And then, the second he turned around, he was trying to kiss me, to poke me around, to persuade me to stay with him. He wanted to talk. He said he loved to hear me talk. And I was drawn to him, this I will admit. I felt like being around this man because I could watch him do these things right under his wife’s nose and somehow that made me feel better about what had happened to me with Tim. I thought, well, it’s happening to this other woman and it’s not happening to me. I took a guilty selfish pleasure in watching it happen to someone else even though I knew how agonizingly painful it would be for her. It was. It was agonizing for her.”
“How did you know?”
“Because then my relationship with Jack shifted. I took more interest in what was happening with his wife. I wanted to know her. I was curious to know how another woman would deal with that type of betrayal, rejection, lack of loyalty and dishonesty. Would she be more graceful than I had been or would she be the same blubbering tearful mess? I was so interested. I wanted to know. So then I did something I thought I’d never have the guts to do. I arranged it to become friends with Jack’s wife. Our friendship lasted for almost a year, until I blew the whistle and couldn’t take it anymore.”
“But you said that you and Jack didn’t have a sexual relationship.”
“We didn’t. But that was because I wouldn’t allow it. It wasn’t his choice. I firmly believe, I have reasons to believe, that he would be willing to break the promises he made to his wife on their wedding day and even the promises before and after.
But he was predictable, and that had become boring to me. I wanted to know Olivia. She was beautiful. She had straight shiny black hair down to her shoulders, and these green eyes. Her nose was slender and majestic, snobbish, as if she could only smell beautiful scents. She was tall and had freckles on the tops of her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, and when she talked to you, she listened.
If we were in the kitchen, I remember her leaning against the counter, arms crossed, and smiling in a kind way, nodding her head and listening. She made you feel good. And then, after compiling my information, that she was a tremendous woman and Jack was not only lucky, but smart enough to have found her and then kept her with him, I thought about why I was doing what I was doing. Initially it was because I wanted to see her suffer the way I had suffered. Tim was bad, but Jack was worse so I was eager to see how the wife handled it.”