Rules of the Game

When I was growing up, I learned that in order to talk with my father, I needed to learn his language. That meant that since an early age, I was steeped in the rules of corporate leadership and finance that he used in running the family company. You probably have not heard of Kendal Property Management like you are unaware of most small businesses that fill a vital role before the end product.

Dad introduced me to his world with a simple statement: “A corporation is a tyranny.” That is, he explained, it has to act for itself first because no one else will. “A tyranny is just a power structure that runs to perpetuate itself, instead of for some social goal. It’s not so much that we can’t be nice guys,” he would say, “but that we have to keep the bottom line in view at all times. Otherwise, the shareholders revolt, they take your company from you, and they’ll run it into the ground chasing pipe dreams. There’s always some newly-minted idiot who promises the world and then gets a job in France when the ballistic excrement hits the oscillating rotor.”

I had to look up some of those words.

My name is Kay Kendal, and as you may have guessed, I work in the same firm. It’s not a terribly exciting business, since we’re a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), a corporation that owns and manages real estate. We negotiate hard for undervalued property, add it to our portfolio, and then our shareholders benefit from the increased value of our shares. The retirement accounts that your mom, dad, brother, or sister have probably include some of our shares, since we have for over forty years kept value rising.

At age 33, I consider myself fortunate to have it all: children, career, lover, and cats. You might notice there’s no husband in the picture. Let me back up a minute…

Rule 1: Always identify the bottom line.

“Daddy, Davy’s asked me to be his boyfriend.”

I looked up at the gruff bear of a man who usually spent his time in the office. When he talked on the phone, sometimes I got scared. He had a loud, powerful voice when he spoke to adults, but when he talked to me, he used his best indoor voice.

“Well, Peaches, what’s the bottom line? I mean, what do you get out of it?”

“Um…” I really had no idea. “Everybody at school has a boyfriend, and we can send valentines, and…”

“I think I understand,” he said gently. “It’s part of growing up. Just make sure you get what you want out of it. Tell him up front: you want the valentines, holding hands, kissing, conversation, whatever. then tell him what he can’t do. Make the deal, kid, and you’ll not regret it if he decides to change his end of the bargain later on.”

I think I scared Davy, and probably all the parents who heard the story facepalmed at the corporate logic, but Daddy won me over a few weeks later when the various “boyfriends” of my friends started shirking on their part of the bargain. Davy stayed true, at least through the end of sixth grade, when his family moved to Brazil to manage a tire company.

Rule 2: Never accept renegotiation.

By the time I made it out of middle school and into ninth grade, having a boyfriend meant something more serious. I had learned by that point to soft-pedal what Daddy (now usually “Dad”) had told me. If a boy asked me to go steady with him, I said, “So you mean… for like holding hands between classes, or kissing at the school dance? I can do that, but we’ll have to talk if you want more.”

Needless to say, my chance of going farther was very limited by this approach, but I was okay with this. My mom’s sister, our auntie, had gotten herself into a bad situation where she moved in with some guy and he turned out to be bad person. Then she got pregnant. “Now she’s locked in,” said Dad. “He renegotiated by getting her knocked up, so she’s tied to him.”

When I found myself thinking a lot about Michael Hamilton, the boy from two streets over who was developing muscles and wavy blond hair, I asked my mom what I should do. She said something about girls having to be careful about which boys they said “yes” to, and then wandered off when the phone rang. It was one of her church groups that promotes compassionate capitalism in the third world. I looked at her back for awhile, and went to ask my dad.

“So you see a property you want to acquire,” he began.

“Daddy!” — he got the full pet name for being so rude — “I — he’s not a property! — it’s just — I want — I don’t know!”

“If two companies decide to merge, what are they?” my dad asked.

“Uh… properties, I suppose,” I said.

“So you want a merger with this guy?”

“Dad! That sounds gross!” I said, wrinkling my nose.

“Oh, I know you teenagers,” he said, mock exaggerating. “Turn my back on you for a minute, you’ll be doing a horizontal merger in the back yard!” (It took me two semesters of economics classes to appreciate this humor fully.)

“Well, we’re just friends,” I said.

“And you want to be boyfriend and girlfriend?” Dad asked.

“Yeah…”

“So you’re negotiating that deal, aren’t you? Listen, Pumpkin, this sounds horrible, but life is like business. The rules we play by, they just work, because they take into account that most people are simply self-interested. They don’t know any better, and when push comes to shove, they fall back on that ‘I want’ and ‘Me first.’ They don’t think of others or give something back like you do in a loving family. So you assume that this is their motivation and account for it in your planning, and then you never get surprised.”

“I think I get it,” I said.

“You’ve got a few things of value. You have your time, your love or affection, and your virginity. They’re all worth something.”

“Dad!” I sang out in anguish, my cheeks reddening.

“Hear me out, darling,” said Dad. “Anything that people want or need has value. You have things of value to give. I know this because I love you more than anything else, but putting aside my love, I can see that you’re an intelligent, moral, and beautiful young woman. You have value. Love can overcome the self-interest of humans. When you love someone, you are bonding to them forever, pledging to care about them as much if not more than you care about yourself, like the man we read about in the news who died in a fire saving his family. He loved them more than his own survival.”

“Okay, so…” I said, not sure where this was leading.

“So this guy you’re tender on, he’s got to bring something to the table. If he’s not as intelligent, moral, and attractive as you are, then he’s the cheaper property and needs to throw something else into the deal. You have to make sure he knows what he’s trading for, and where he stands, before you give him anything. You won’t be a virgin forever, and you have to hand it to the right guy, preferably in trade for something good. If he’s your equal, that means his hand in marriage. If he’s not, he better be rich or really good-looking, but I won’t stand for you being with any man who isn’t quality. I’ll beat his ass and my lawyer will get me out of jail.”

“He’s just a boyfriend!” I was fully red in the face now.

“I know, Sugar, but you have to think of the deal in terms of your long-term strategy. Suppose you get his class ring or whatever, and things are going really well. You want to be able to turn around and transfer boyfriend-status into husband-status, someday, hopefully in the very distant future. But what if he turns out to be a creep, or a cretin, or just a boring disappointment? You want to be able to exit the relationship, like a contract between you, and git yourself on the high road out of town.”

“Okay, that makes sense. So what do I do?”

Dad thought a minute. “You have to decide how far you want it to go. Don’t ask your mother; she can’t deal with her lovely little babies growing up. I’m not sure I can either, but I’ll try. If I could do my life over to win everything the first time, I would have been a virgin at marriage. Yeah, I know. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know anyway. I thought I was in love, but really, I was just in a holding pattern until your mother came along. But, you figure out what you want a boyfriend to do for you, and then what you’re willing to do, and put that on the table. If he’s cool with it, he’ll let you know. All the experts say that ‘communication’ is essential to a good relationship, and I don’t disagree, but it starts before the relationship is formed.”

“No, Dad, I mean, uh… how do I ask him?”

Dad looked relieved. The pinkness faded from his cheeks. “That’s easy. Men are simple on the surface, difficult underneath. Keep it on the surface. Go talk to him about anything that’s not relationships. See if he smiles at you a lot, and if he does, hang out until he gets up the courage to ask for your number. Men are like bees, darling. They’re more scared of you than you are of them, although you should be scared of some of them. Just go there, and be there, until he’s ready to ask.”

Rule 3: The Three Categories

Michael Hamilton faded in the rearview mirror. I liked him, but he was younger at heart than I was, basically still a boy. We went out a few times, this got around the school, and I was accepted as being normal and having normal urges. He was good enough to spread the word that I was a good kisser after we “broke up” over the summer, and always treated me fairly. Ten years later I met his husband Bill. Well, I guess I didn’t have much of knowledge of things back then.

Having a few boyfriends like Michael got me through high school. I was in no hurry to lose my v-card, since I figured Dad was right about that one: girls who gave it away were a dime a dozen, but a girl who knew her own value was a mountaintop, and boys like a challenge. I made it to a decent college so I could be close to home, did okay in school, and got a job working for an investment firm that was impressed by my Business Administration degree with a minor in Economics. With a loan from my parents, I took on an MBA program at night school and really killed myself studying.

This meant that there really was no time to date, so I found myself a virgin at 26, with a good degree and a good job. This opened doors, and I met my future husband, Ralph Huntington, at a company party where my boss literally pushed me out of the archetypal smoke-filled room and said, “Be young, have fun, and have that report on my desk Monday… afternoon.” Ralph did not strike me as husband material at first, nor was I seriously looking. I’m my father’s daughter and if I was hunting husbands, there would have been research, a spreadsheet, a timeline, and a budget.

But Ralph did one thing that no man had done so far. That is, he managed to fail to flirt while showing strong interest.

I will never grace the cover of a magazine, but I’m a solid five nine with auburn hair, a slender but not thin figure (no supermodel) that has a good deal of muscle thanks to my habit of riding long distance in the Hill Country. My least saleable asset is my bust, which is not the 36D often talked about on internet erotica sites, but a rather staid B-cup, although they are firm and even slightly “perky.” I am told I have nice eyes and a good smile. For full disclosure, I have a slightly strong jaw and too much hair, so despite it having a nice color, its waves end in a shaggy tsunami down my back. But, did I mention I have an MBA, a reasonably high IQ, and can converse on just about any subject in three languages?

Ralph wandered over, with the hooded eyes of boredom but a carefree walk and smile, and casually asked me what I thought about Keynes. “What, do you have a paper due or something?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” he said, laughing. “I’m just curious, since I saw that you made the list of fresh-minted MBAs, and almost none of them have an opinion here.”

My eyes narrowed. Not just men like a challenge. “His theories aren’t bad, with two caveats. Because he brings in externalities through government action, his economic system becomes a permanent change to the national economy. Not good or bad, just a downside. Also, since he relies on a business cycle based on stimulus, he creates a forced growth cycle that is going to make inflation management a central issue.”

The hooded eyes woke up. “Nothing I can pick a bone with there,” he said. “My only riposte here is that the kind of cycle you talk about, stimulus leading to growth, might be what is required to drive technological advancement.”

And just like that, we were off on a wild tangent of our own. If it was a movie, the rest of the room would have faded away, with just us in a little circle of light. We got off of economics quickly — he was another MBA, with his undergrad in Economics with a minor in Pre-Law — but got on to culture, music, books, and travel.

People talk about just clicking, but it didn’t happen. We were at odds on just about everything, but not directly opposed, more like taking half of the other side and half of each other’s sides. It was for lack of any other better description simply a good, energetic conversation, and it drew in people around us. Later my boss said that I seemed in my element.

When I went home that weekend, my parents greeted me as normal, with a twist.

“You look well-rested,” said my mother, stepping back to look at me. “You must have taken my advice and gotten more sleep.”

“Not being in night school has done wonders for me,” I said. “I’ve even got Saturdays.”

My dad looked up from his book, scanned me up and down and sideways, and said: “Who is he? If he doesn’t treat you right, I’ll break his spine in nine places and shove a Corolla up his ass.”

“He’s just a friend, so far,” I said.

Dad made a grumpy sound. Then finally he said: “In life, like in business, there are three categories of people. There are those who are for you, those who are against you, and then everyone else. The third category is the biggest and the most dangerous. They won’t try to hurt you, but if you let them, they will take from you. They’re either unaware of you, neutral about you, or just opportunistic like your average person, who’ll take a wallet if it’s left out on the counter but won’t go out to mug people. They’re not bad, they’re not good… they’re a grey area. You have to figure out which category he’s in as soon as possible.”

I thought a moment. “I don’t know, but I don’t know him well yet. I’m going to suss him out with a few day-dates that are normal life stuff, like Mom taught me. It’s easy to be Prince Charming in a restaurant with a romantic setting, candles and flowers and stuff, and it’s very easy to be a suave stud in bed, but the man who can go with you to get your flat tire fixed, help you set up a barbecue, or go horseback riding in the country is more of a keeper.”

“Atta girl,” said Dad. “You remember my rap on the Three Answers, too.”

“Of course,” I said. “For any question, there are three possibilities: yes, no, and ‘no answer.’ The last one is the biggest category, like ‘undecided.’ It could mean ‘not now’ or ‘never,’ could mean a lack of relevance or unawareness, or it could be opportunism, just waiting for the right time. If someone else springs a question on me, he has the First Mover advantage, and that places me at a disadvantage, so often a strategic ‘no answer’ is the right way to regroup.”

“Atta girl,” he repeated, and went out to the porch for a cigar, one of his Montecristo Whites. He told me long ago that he went outside not because he had to, but because he wanted to avoid bothering my mother with the smell.

“Did you negotiate for something in return?” I had asked.

“No,” he said. “I love her. She gets something called ‘goodwill,’ an important concept in business. If you deliver a good quality product or service at a good price, people are going to keep using you until you fuck up. If you get their order wrong, cost them money, or worse, do something unethical or opportunistic, they’re going to start looking for someone else. Love is like ultra-goodwill. I do things for her to make her happy because her happiness is more important than mine. I don’t smoke out here because it makes me happy to do so, in fact, I hate it. But when I see her happy, all of my affection and respect for her intensifies. Same with you, Pumpkin. I do whatever I can to make you happy because love, love is like… it makes me feel that the universe has an order to it, and that things can be good. It’s a small price to pay.”

I had been all of sixteen. You might think that this was not appropriate for a parent, but the fact is, my parents treated me like a kid until puberty, then they turned up the dial marked ADULT and started treating me like a little person. That meant that they stopped the bullshit you get in children’s books and television shows where everything in life is happy. In the world of my parents, things were only happy when you handled the situation well, and most people were idiots who wouldn’t do that, so most things were a wreck and of mediocre quality.

I haven’t seen anything since to disabuse me of that notion.

Rule 4: Find the reason for any cost increase.

Our life began really well, and I was thoroughly in love, having gotten over “puppy love” and infatuation with a few hopeless boyfriends. I came to our wedding bed a virgin, but not inexperienced, since I learned that the most efficient way to silence a troublesome male was oral sex, and I could basically save myself hours of time and pain with a few minutes of having my hair in a ponytail.

I may be my father’s daughter, but even more, I’m an attentive student. I couldn’t escape those supply/demand curves. The more something is wanted, the more valuable it becomes; the more of it there is, the less it is wanted. Therefore, if you slut around, you reduce your value, and you’re not going to get one of the few guys who have the tripartite of desire: looks, brains, and a god soul. My dating was sporadic and picky, and unless I thought there was a chance of going further, he never got anything but some groping and a blowie.

With Ralph, I really worked the poor boy over. I didn’t ask him out on a date; I asked him to help me throw a party for senior staff. He was still groggy and incoherent, freshly showered with that adorable wet rat look that men get when they’re out of their depth, when I picked him up in my Kia (bought for 10% off list, which works out fine for the dealer because automakers pay the dealers kickback per unit sold, so they still make a handsome profit even on heavily discounted sales) and roared off to Costco.

You might ask, why would you take a man to Costco? The place is infuriating with long lines, ugly as sin, and filled with random stuff that no one should buy. But people love the experience, and it helps you take the gauge of people. Do they fall for the bad deals that look good simply because you get three liters of olive oil even though it’s the same per-ounce price as Kroger or Albertsons? Can they resist the gadgets, junk food, and fads that people post on Pinterest and Instagram?

One of my professors could work up a sweat talking about Costco. They make very little money on margins, and all their money from selling memberships, but their main gig is entertainment. They offer you a random selection of products, and people love to forage, so we all pick through the mountains of consumer excess and end up buying a 5,000 rpm blender we don’t need, then tossing it when we finally figure out, way too late, that we never needed it.

It’s a great place to test a potential boyfriend. Ralph passed the test, mainly by being able to ignore all the stuff around him and focus on our interaction together. He helped me get steak meat and vegetables for shish-ka-bob, a dozen dips and fancy cauliflower chips that tasted almost like the real thing, and a couple cases of beer. I carted Ralph and the food to the home of a fellow aspiring executive, we threw a heck of a picnic, and then I helped Ralph clean up. “Movie?” I asked, bright and chipper.

To his credit, he was game, despite being more than a few beers into the afternoon. I took him to the most girly girl chick flic I could find on the marquee, and he laughed at the appropriate jokes and generally seemed to enjoy himself and our whispered conversation.

“I wish I had his pecs,” he said, pointing at the male lead. “Or maybe his face.”

“You’re easy on the eyes,” I said cautiously. “I wish I had her, um, bosom.”

“Quantity is no substitute for quality,” he said. “You’re prettier than she is, and not to be a snob, but probably a lot smarter too. And can she converse? Can she manage a multi-load fund? What about all the other stuff you can do, like play music, run, cook, think, and read?”

What a sweetie! To complete the first test, I dropped him off with barely a peck on the cheek. I fired off a thank you email for all his work and asked if we could meet the next weekend.

Ralph passed all of my tests. The only warning sign that I saw was that, as Daddy had said all those years ago, he had a vigorous competitive streak. When you are swimming in the dating pool of people who work at finance firms, since no one else will understand you, this is not uncommon.

We graduated to romantic style dates six months later, then became exclusive six months after that, engaged six months after that, and married at the two year mark. Dad shelled out for a nice church wedding, but I started cutting stuff from the list right away. Bridesmaids? Unnecessary. Table decorations? Puh-lease. A program to hand to guests? You gotta be kidding. I cut that wedding down to the bone but ponied up for top-flight floral arrangements. It was a magical day!

As they say, after the honeymoon, the hard work begins. We were both working but wanted to get going on a family so we could have time to travel in our forties after the kids were grown. Cynthia came first, followed by Jacob, then Katherine and Mark. The Huntington family took off like a rocket, with my Mom and his mother to care for the kids when they were not in school, daycare, or “activities,” a broad spectrum category that includes everything from karate to counseling.

Yes, there were bumps in the road. This is real life, not a rom-com. A couple of the kids had psychological issues, probably because neither parent was ever home much since we worked sixty-hour weeks. Ralph spent a few too many nights out with the boys, and I suspected an affair, so I used some cash on hand to hire a PI. As Daddy says, “Trust but verify.” It turns out that Ralph really was out with the boys and drinking and smoking too much. I confronted him one night and he admitted that he was miserable in his job. At this point, I was working for Kendal, so I talked to HR.

The answer seemed to be, “if we’d normally hire him, it’s not a conflict of interest,” so I sent him on to their job fair despite Ralph being already too senior of an executive to normally bother with these. Swallowing his pride, he gamely went, impressed Adriana, our interviewer, and ended up with a porfolio at Kendal. This impressed my father.

“He must really love you,” he said. “He just went along with it, brave lad.”

At Kendal, Ralph really thrived, mainly because the environment was based on performance alone. You could show up wearing pink glitter pyjamas and eat nothing but vegan food and no one would blink an eye, as long as you delivered. If you wore perfect suits, had a Wharton degree, knew all the lingo, and were a card-carrying member of the Old Boy’s Club but did not deliver, you would get a discrete pink slip the next quarter.

Ralph did well in that environment because it let him focus on what he really liked, which was identifying market trends and how to exploit them while everyone else was chasing whatever fad fascinated the Chicago economists that year.

Life was good enough that we rolled into our thirties without much of a problem. At that point, however, the serpent entered the garden in the form of Miss Lisa Donovan. At five six and a hundred twenty pounds, most of it in the breast area, and bottle blonde hair with bold 1980s eyebrows, she was destined to be a cause célèbre no matter what she did. Having come through Yale and Stanford Graduate School of Business, she intimidated most men even before her porfolio started rising.

She had come recommended by one of our biggest investors, and her portfolio quickly began to rise toward the performance that Ralph had exerted from his own. We were in his BMW, hauling ass down I-35, when he received this news. I remember distinctly how he stiffened up and the rest of the call with the CFO was very formal.

“Fucking bitch,” he just about screamed. “Sorry, I don’t normally use that language for women, but that little Donovan tramp is trying to steal my lead. She’s coming for my head!” He raced down the exit ramp, took a U-turn, and we went back to the office where he worked his porfolio like a fiend.

I thought he was paranoid, but there was enough for me to tidy up in my own portfolio that evening, so I called my mother and had her take the kids. Little did he know, or I know, that he was completely correct about Lisa Donovan: she was coming for his head, but not in the way he thought.

If something went wrong, I think now, it was that she got in his head. He could handle another pretty face in the office; to be honest, Ralph always saw himself as not a feminist but feminist-aligned, and tried to treat women just like one of the guys, except without the fart jokes and craft beers. I always felt safe around him because he checked his feminist-aligned tendencies at the door if I was ever at risk. But treating her like one of the guys meant he saw her as competition in another form, and that blindsided him to how she was going to take him down.

My Dad always said, “If the price goes up, find out why.” In his opinion, it was usually a supplier cheating you, corruption, or a sneaky attempt to renegotiate by lowering their own costs. He mentioned a nuance here, which is that if you end up having to do more stuff to get the same result, that’s a de facto price rise coming at you from someone else. Those words came back to me one day as I considered the state of my marriage, something I did rarely but found myself inclined to do more of late.

It took Lisa Donovan just three months to steal my husband.

The first cost coming my way was realizing that my husband had carved out more time for his own use through a simple method: he was leaving a half-hour earlier, and returning a half-hour later, than normal. This means nothing to most people, but to me, it became clear that he had added five hours to the work week, which meant that he was displacing them elsewhere. This meant that I, as a diligent wife managing the corporation that was our family, as well as defending Kendal since I would someday inherit it, needed to account for the missing time.

Since we worked in a small office, I stuck a small camera I bought at the gun shop — where people understand justified paranoia — on top of my filing cabinet and angled it toward a mirror that reflect my husband’s desk. I did not require a good picture, just a sense of when he was in the office. After a week, I went through the pictures and noted the missing five hours: Wednesday and Friday afternoons, basically very good times to take off since Tuesday and Thursday were our real “go” days.

At this point I enlisted my friendly PI, adding another cost. Two former Miami cops started this agency, and they ran it out of a small office in a strip mall. “This looks like a nutrition center,” I said when I first walked in, prospecting.

“That’s because it was, and we’re too cheap to repaint,” said the receptionist. I asked them to follow my husband on Wednesday and Friday afternoons and get photographs. A week later, I had the classic proof: a man and a woman, holding hands in public, kissing, holding each other, a little covert heavy petting, and most of all, a disappearing act into a nearby motel for just under an hour. The receptionist said how sorry she was, and left me a box of kleenex in case I felt like weeping.

You probably know the cycle that one goes through in these cases. First, there’s denial, then a hope that maybe this could work out, then hot angry rage, then sadness, followed by depression, a white cold rage, and finally, the to-do list. That one really broke my heart, when realizing that the death of my marriage was ranking up there with mowing the lawn, buying toilet paper, fixing the attic stairs, and getting the oil changed in my car. It was the sadness within the sadness to see it all come down to another mundane duty, so like something at a job, with all of the romance gone.

Worst of all, I had to accept that my husband was cheating on me with Lisa Donovan. The final cost was loss of faith in another human being who had lost faith in me, and a hit to my self-esteem that I felt I could never recover.

Rule 5: Manage risks without losing sight of goals.

I have to admit this, but I’ll deny it if you repeat it in public: I was strongly tempted to simply forget what I saw. I could stop trying to have sex with him (he was always “tired,” mainly because the slut bitch whore had drained him) and get a lover of my own, if I needed one, or hire escorts to make the “itch” go away. I would still have my perfect-looking life, my lovely children, and the husband who was a top performer at work.

But then, I thought, who does this kind of thing? Not someone who cares about me. Somehow, he had fallen out of love with me, which meant that he was no longer an ally, but an enemy. He couldn’t go in the “undecided” category, since he was risking both me and the reputation of the company. That meant that, in his mind, he could continue on without us, and that meant to me as a woman that he had made a choice. He had chosen Lisa over me.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Did he get hit by a Martian manwhore ray? Did I make a mistake in marrying him? Who could possibly give up moi, with my radiant eyes and flashing smile, high IQ, slender curves, and disarming but charming manner? Maybe he had a brain tumor. More seriously, I think he just gave in to the stress. He put his job before his family and, when Lisa came around, he had to beat her and, once he did, he had to join her, to make sure that she was on his side.

I could forgive that, maybe. I couldn’t stay married to it. But he had also endangered the company. I shouldn’t have to put up with this shit, to be honest, and so it was reasonable for him to expect me to divorce him if I discovered him. It was also reasonable, since I am not just adorable but highly competent, to anticipate that I would discover him. That meant that he expected me to either suffer in silence or buy him out, knowing that word would get out and damage Kendal’s reputation.

My Dad used to tell me, “They’ll tell you a lot about managing risks in b-school. What they do not tell you is that the first risk you must manage is the risk of losing your goal, usually in an attempt to deal with other risks. If you fireproof your business so much that it can’t operate, or functions at a lower efficiency, you lose your business, just slowly instead of fast. You have to manage your risks without losing sight of your goals, and by ‘manage’ risk I mean detect it and eliminate it as much as possible.”

I did not fall out of love with Ralph right away, but the knowledge of his infidelity (and conspiracy against me, my company, and my father, who founded and ran the company) ate away at me like a worm in the apple in the Garden of Eden. People talk about disrespect, but I think that’s mostly a misnomer, since really what I saw was that he was no longer on my side. He had done things that would hurt me, the company, my father, my children, and my ego. Ralph never struck me, but I wish he had instead of doing what he did.

In turn, I also lost the illusion of his perfection. True, no one is perfect, but Ralph… previously I saw nothing bad in him. Now I saw his sneering opportunism, the need to compete against the people around him that bordered on megalomania, and the latent narcissism that allowed him to throw me aside for a younger but cheaper variety. Ralph… was an alpha male, full of power, but he had never quite learned to give back, and while he loved me, “love” for him was limited to what made Ralph happy. I learned this too late, apparently.

Once my emotions subsided, I saw his stupidity for being taken in by a woman as shallow as Lisa Donovan. Sure, she was pretty, but there are lots of pretty girls, many of whom cost as little as $200 an hour. She had great degrees, was a good performer, yadda yadda, but she was also a caricature of a human being. Beyond the money and looks, she had nothing. Her hobby, religion, culture, and sense of aesthetics involved shopping and luring otherwise good men into her bed.

Falling out of love is different than falling in love. You still care for the person, but you realize that they have made themselves impossible as a fit for your life, which reduces your love to infatuation, or desire for a person based on the illusion they project of being self-composed and having a joy in life that you want to partake in. I still swooned over his strong voice, great chin, gentle eyes, and muscular upper body, but now, I saw him more like a Chippendale’s dancer: eye candy that I would never admit into my life.

The question snaked into my mind of how to get rid of him.

Rule 6: Know the opposition.

Clearly research was required. I stopped by my favorite gun store and acquired a small gun safe. I thought about getting one of those cute little Glocks, but that method was too risky for both me and the company. I could not fail my father, my mother, and our other employees. I also couldn’t be in jail.

Two things happened that changed my path, as if by divine intervention.

First, I had a self-pity binge one night. The kids were asleep, and so I dragged out the box wine I had bought at Kroger. It was my mother’s favorite brand, and she once confessed to me why she drank it. “It’s not for the taste, which isn’t bad. Look at the ABV.” Sure enough, the box wines all had a bit more punch than the fancy crap that my father served as his parties but wouldn’t touch himself, being a beer man who believed in excessive moderation.

After a few glasses of that stuff, which tasted a little bit like vinegar and a lot like grape soda, I found myself on the dark part of the internet. Not the dark web, where people go to do illegal stuff, but the place where depressed people went to commiserate. They also shared dark news stories, like the article about an factory complex on the east side of town where apparently people vanished and were harvested for their organs to be sold in Mexico, Canada, and China. The horror of this stuck with me — maybe I was feeling sorry for myself — even when I woke up the next morning with a pounding headache.

Second, I spilled cranberry juice on my favorite silk professional shirt and, while raging at the demons from Hell who allowed this to happen, drove home in a fugue of frustration. After changing my shirt, I realized that Ralph had left his laptop at home, probably so it wouldn’t get stolen while he was at the No-Tell Mo-tel with the ickily plastic Lisa. I booted it up and faced a password screen. Shrugging, I pulled out his daily planner and opened it to the last page where he wrote his passwords.

There in his handwriting was the password: “lisa4ever.” At this point, I knew that there could be no bouncing back. My father had taught me years ago to make logical connections based on what any one step excluded from being possible. As Sherlock Holmes once said, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

If he wanted to be with Lisa, he couldn’t be with Kendal. Ergo, he aimed to burn the firm somehow, since he wasn’t going to get a reference there. This meant that every day I let the situation slide, he was doing damage to my company.

Something had happened to the man I loved. I blamed Lisa, but it may have been a midlife crisis just a decade early. It could have been the stress got to him. Maybe he had a psychotic break from PTSD left over from his MBA. But, like we used to say about kids who got into drugs or promiscuity, he had just “gone bad.” As I had these thoughts, I scanned through his email, but he was too careful to write to Lisa from work. Then I noticed that the Drafts folder had one entry in it, and clicked to see an unsent email addressed to my work address.

The letter was short. It said, basically, that he had fallen in love with Lisa and they were going to make a life together. He wanted me to be happy, so I could have whatever was in the house and our bank accounts, although I suspected that he planned on cleaning those out, too. I made a couple of quick changes, one practical and one vengeful. I included senior management on the To: line, and added “in Venezuela” after his quip about their new life together. I chuckled for the first time in I don’t know how many days.

Still, the password irked me. If he had gone bad, there was more to the story, because you never tell your adversary your full plans, unless you are in a Marvel movie. I drove like a fiend to the motel, worried about what might be going on. Luckily it was one of those built around a courtyard, so I could walk up to the door on the side away from their one window, crouch below the window as if tying my shoe, and listen.

The cheap, thin glass conducted sound almost perfectly.

 

 

Ralph: I’ll get more of them to come over. When we start up our firm, we’ll need as many to sign as possible so we can secure funding. I just regret what I’m doing to my wife Kay.

Lisa: She’ll never suffer for money. She’s got the old man wrapped around her finger. That’s why we’ll never get promoted there. He’s grooming her to take over.

Ralph: She’s good at what she does, Lisa. We just happen to be better… and more willing to, er, push the boundaries. The old man is going to fight like hell to get his clients back.

Lisa: I thought about that. Here (rattling noise). Take these and leave them in your medicine cabinet. Let her see the letter. When Kay figures out what has happened, she’ll take the hint. She’s on the edge as it is, and one little push…

Ralph: No, I can’t do that. That’s… illegal, or unethical… or something.

Lisa: (rustling noises) It’s the only way we get out cleanly.

Ralph: Oh.

Lisa: Mmmph!

 

 

It was clear that Lisa had learned also that the best way to shut up a male is a mouthful of penis. As the grunts and moans continued, I finished “tying” my shoe and backed away. It was too much to hear.

I’m not heartless, and I realized in that moment that I had considered the business case, but never the emotional one. When I got home I stopped and looked in the mirror. The woman who looked back at me was pretty, but sad. Her eyes had dark rings under them, her hair was listless, and she kneaded her fingers restlessly. If I saw her on the street, I would think that someone had died. Maybe someone had. If Ralph saw this, why didn’t he do something? Didn’t he care — anymore?

Back at my office, I thought it all over. Could I take him back? The way they talked, he had reservations, but he wasn’t stopping either. No amount of oral sex would induce me to think, “Why yes, I should encourage my spouse to kill himself!” He had fallen hard, both for Lisa, and in some moral sense. There was no coming back from this abyss. I got less done that afternoon than I wanted to, and waved my goodbyes before driving home. I couldn’t face the box wine again however.