Les Hommes Ch. 02

Saturday morning I'm up at 5 am and will do just what I had planned to do, clear brush in the back yard, burn a whole lot of it and take the rest to the landfill. I work hard at it and it's good for me, cleansing. Sublimation or whatever it might be. I see Anna peek out the window a few times, but I never acknowledge her. Just before noon I go back inside and walk past her into the bathroom. I'll do exactly what I had planned. I have a date with Roger at his house, some lunch, a few drinks, some chat. He's a good friend. Get my mind off things.

Roger Williamson is my neighbor three doors down, a rather weird guy I'm happy to call one of my best friends. He and his beautiful wife Claire bought their place about a year before Anna and I came to our leafy suburban retreat. That was three summers ago. The four of us bonded right away, almost inevitably since they were so nice to us and were the only neighbors about our ages. Anna and Claire hit it off like a couple of long lost sisters, girl stuff like fashion and hair, and more serious stuff like politics and the economy since they're both so smart.

My wife and I could see that Roger was almost as eccentric as his wife was beautiful, so he was a bit more of a lift. It took me a couple of months with him to see beyond the goofiness, but since then we've become quite close. He's one of the genuine good guys, sweet natured, considerate and giving. The kind of guy you trust instinctively. The man certainly isn't perfect, but he has the biggest heart of anyone I've ever met.

One thing about old Roger, though, he is the kind that talks a lot, like a real lot, like a really real lot. He can drive you nuts with his talk. And not just a lot of it, sometimes it's just plain weird talk, like I can't figure out what he's talking about. Sometimes it's off-key weird, like did he just say that? Sometimes it's these funny non-sequiturs that made you laugh. Sometimes it's him mixing up words. He does that a lot. It all made me wonder how he functioned as a lawyer until one day he explained that his job was mostly churning out boilerplate legal documents from his home office.

I may have loved Roger from the start, but I often wondered if he was playing with a full deck. He is, I suppose, a major doofus when you get right down to it, pretty much all the time but especially when anything out of the ordinary occurs. That's when he gets nervous and excited. That's when the talk comes out bubbling and babbling fast. Sometimes it's weirdly funny, other times it's just weird. So, a doofus, but a lovable doofus. He has always been there for me and Anna, always a good, loyal buddy, a good man, a good heart, a good friend and a good husband to Claire.

When he called me two nights earlier and suggested a Saturday lunch on his patio I agreed right away. We hadn't spent much time together lately, he seems so busy.

That was before Anna dropped napalm on me. Now the question is: Do I unburden myself on the poor dope? Do I pretend everything is normal? The idea of pouring out my heart to him has real attraction. I was so hurt. Would I get advice? Probably. But Roger, for all his goodness, might not be the best guy in the world to get advice from. (From whom to get advice? Anna would know.) Likely he'd chew my ear off even more than usual, just babble a lot and whirl his arms around to show how seriously he took the problem. I hadn't a clue where to go with Anna's news, or whether even to accept her apology. Do I leave her? (Impossible.)

As I walk down the three doors to his home, I think to myself: No, it's too soon, I wouldn't know how to begin to tell him and I'm in no mood for ten million words of meaningless advice. Why ruin his afternoon with my problem? Why ruin mine? So no. Maybe someday when I get my own head straight, but not today.

Roger greets me with a hug and a slap on the back. He gives me a drink and we sit out on his beautifully shaded patio. Claire seems not to be around, which is a shame since it's always a pleasure to get a look at her. The conversation begins fast and light and breezy. What this one did at work, this whacky divorce he's working on, what this one said, this funny joke he had to tell three times before landing the punch line. (See there's like this minister, a priest and a rabbi and they're...) But it's easy to see that underneath the chatter Roger is nervous about something. He looks tense. Some of his laughter is forced. He even, on this beautiful and mild day, has to wipe his brow a few times as we sit with shish-kabob.

I'm just about to ask if he's OK. Maybe he was reading my face for some cue because just then he jumps in both feet first.

"Hey Bill, listen. Let me go serious here for like two secs, OK?"

"Sure Roger. I was..."

"Listen, my friend, I know this is none of my business, really none at all, like totally none of my business, but..."

Something no guy wants to hear from another guy.

"...but there's something, something serious, I gotta talk to you about."

If he hadn't seemed so nervous, and if it hadn't been for the "none of my business" I would have found it amusing. Roger is the kind of guy he has something he needs to talk about seriously it might be the best tires for a midsize SUV, or do I like his new socks, are they too much? But that "none of his business"? That was strange. I held back and waited.

"See," he went on, "thing is, to be totally up front about it, I know, old sport,..."

That's another thing about Roger. He has these little affectations. Today apparently we're going club-English. Other days he might be French or Spanish.

"...I know that there's some...heavy stuff...," he nods sympathetically, "...really heavy, heavy, heavy stuff...going down right now at home, going down with you and Anna."

WTF! But I kept it buttoned up. How would he know?

"It's like Claire and Anna were talking last week..."

Well, that's how.

"...and I was kind of moping around because I wanted that time with Claire for myself, but they were jibber-jabbering away. Women, right? Claire, well I guess both of them, at first they were all hushed and private and then they call me over to tell me what's what and tell me they want my help. I mean for me to help you, kind of kick the ball around with you and see if we can put three points on the scoreboard. And I'm like yeah, of course. Be more than happy to..."

Roger is also a very big sports nut. Likes his sports metaphors and cliches.

"Jesus, you know about it?"

He's nodding and wiping his forehead again. That's bad.

"You mean Anna told Claire a week ago? Even before she told me?"

"Seems like it."

"So you know."

"Yes, I do old sport, old pal-o'-mine, my old soul-brother." He has me blinking. "Anna told us quite a bit that day. Claire filled in some blanks later, after Anna left. And I want you to know, old sport, want you to understand that you have my very, very, very deepest symphony, or, wait, empathy..." He pauses, has confused himself but then goes on, "...or I mean sympathy, yes, of course, sympathy. But empathy too, Bill, actually both of them. That had to be a tough one for you."

"Thank you Roger. I guess." I was pretty pissed about this. You go to your neighbor friend for a quiet lunch and find out he was informed by your wife a week before you were that she's been fucking around.

Roger smiles as a signal to me. He's always been the upbeat sort. "But let's look to the future now, Billy-boy. Get our team out of the cellar, see if we get a win streak going for you, for both of you. See if I can help, was what the girls asked me to do. Which I think I can, you know, can help make it make sense to you. When you hear me out. I hope, anyway."

Roger stopped to mop his brow yet again. Now that he had broached it, I could see he was even more nervous. And when he gets nervous he talks even more and faster and makes some awful jokes. That's Roger, God bless him.

This new treachery on Anna's part has reboiled my brain. Not to take it out on him, an innocent bystander in all of this, but at this point there's no way I'm going to discuss any of it in Roger's backyard.

"Let's just drop it, Roger. Anna and I have some things to work out but right now I'm in no mood..."

"Wait, wait, please Billy-boy, hold on just a tick. It's pretty important that we talk, important for you I mean. I promised Claire, you know, but mainly it's for you. See, I sort of have some insight...not tooting my own horn here - honk! honk! toot! toot!," smile, "but real insight...at least I think I do...into things which maybe can help, really will probably help a lot."

"You do, do you?" Roger is not really excellent at picking up sarcasm.

"Absolutement!" Aha, we're going multi-lingual today. Roger appears to know about seven words of French but you never can tell when he might spring one on you.

I must have rolled my eyes at him in disgust. Somehow he takes it as a sign that I want him to go on and I let him. Nothing was going to make this worse, and listening to this poor deluded doofus' theories on marital fidelity would at least be something of a diversion.

He wets his lips and says "ummm" three times before marching forward. "Ummm. So let me begin at the beginning."

That hit me. "You mean this Farrell asshole? What? Don't tell me you know him?"

"Oh, no. Not that. Never heard of him before that chat with Anna."

"Then what?"

"Umm. well it's tricky...but well...ummm...get ready..."

"Ready for what?"

"For what I'm about to say."

"I don't have a clue what you're about to say."

"That's exactly what I'm saying."

"It is?"

"Yes, so get ready."

"I'm ready."

"I hope you are."

"I think I am."

"Lace up those shoes, what?"

"For Christ's sake just say it."

"Well then...OK." He does one more swipe at his brow and begins. "See, it's a club sort of thing, sort of a club I guess, that's what they call it, a club, more or less a club that Claire and I belong to."

At this point I could have said, "to which Claire and I belong" or I could have said, "Jesus Roger, get to the point" Those were my options. This grammar thing was rubbing off on me from Anna, a world class obsessive. But I let it go.

I take the easy way out and just say, "OK."