Homewrecker
 

The day after Kurt found out his wife was cheating on him, we were getting hammered in the middle of the afternoon at a joint called Clyde’s in northern Virginia. You know how it goes. A bourbon while we looked over the menus. Then a salad and a bourbon. Then a cheeseburger and a bourbon. Then a bourbon with the check. I was between jobs and he was doing the ‘work from home’ thing, so neither of us had any place better to be.

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He was irritable and short-tempered that day. I asked him several times if he was okay, and he said he was fine, but it was obvious that something was wrong. Normally the waitresses would stop by to flirt and chat with us, because Kurt is a charmer with the gift of gab, but that day he was very abrupt with them. They got the message, and damned if I didn’t have to wait half an hour for a basket of bread to help soak up the bourbon.

 

A week later we were out having dinner after going to the Nationals game, and Kurt finally spilled the beans. 

 

Apparently, some French dude named Francois Laroux, who Kurt’s wife Maddie had dated in high school, had contacted her on Facebook. She was going to a conference in Chicago, and they’d arranged to meet there. Kurt learned all this when he stumbled onto some receipts and a hotel bill while cleaning out her suitcase. The next day he rifled through her home office after she left for work, found her Facebook password on a scrap of paper, and accessed her account. Then his world turned upside down.

 

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “This is a message from Francois to my wife. Last night. 3 a.m. I printed it out. You want to hear it?”

 

“Not really.”

 

He cleared his throat and read it out loud in a dramatic voice: “I am thinking of you right now, mon petit choux, and I’m so rock-hard there is literally not enough blood left to course through the rest of my body. I feel weak!”

 

He crumpled the paper into a ball and said in a sour, quiet voice, “Mon petit choux. It means ‘my little cabbage.’ I looked it up.” Then his face flushed with barely contained rage, more than I had ever seen in him before, and his voice doubled in volume. “That French fuck is calling my wife his little cabbage. What do you think about that?”

 

“Jeez, man…I don’t know what to say. People talk big talk on the Internet. It might not be what it seems.”

 

Kurt nodded in a matter-of-fact way and regrouped, and for a minute I was impressed by how well he was handling the stress. Then he started crying right in the middle of the restaurant. Adult crying, not baby crying. No bawls or screams or wails of despair. His face scrunched up and tears rolled quietly down his cheeks, and it was very sad.

 

Kurt had always been a strong and resilient man, but everyone has a breaking point. His was reached when he found out his best friend of the last twenty years–the mother of his two children–was banging a French guy in the Holiday Inn at O’Hare Airport. Not even the Hilton at O’Hare, where at least you could picture them in sort of a classy, upscale tryst. People don’t meet at Holiday Inns to share their favorite poems at a fireplace and pursue their forbidden but somehow all-too-human affairs of the heart. They go to the Holiday Inn to slam the headboard into the wall from the torque of their writhing, sweaty bodies, on the way to the volcanic orgasms they no longer have with their spouses.

 

Kurt and I headed back to my house. It was midnight, but my wife Kendra was still up watching TV. She took one look at me and Kurt and seemed to sense there was private guy stuff going on, so she said a quick hello and goodnight and scurried off to bed.

 

I broke out a bottle of Buffalo Trace, and Kurt and I had a few drinks. He suggested we fire up the computer and do some online intel on Francois. He said that he didn’t have the web chops to hunt down the real scoop on the guy, but that I did — which was true. I told him I was too tired, but I was really thinking it wouldn’t do any good for Kurt to torture himself.

 

We had one more drink — one too many, I realized — and I offered him the guest room for the night, but he declined. He pulled out of my driveway too fast, crushing my azalea and taking out a chunk of my garden’s retaining wall with the rear left tire of his truck. I loved that plant; now it was just another casualty of rock-hard Francois Laroux.

 

As soon as Kurt was gone, I opened my laptop, cleaned the porn out of the cache because Chrome was running slow, and launched a comprehensive search on Francois Laroux. I was angry on Kurt’s behalf, and I guess I wanted confirmation that Francois was the kind of uber-douche who would wreck a marriage and a family just to get his rocks off. It’s much easier to cope with things when you can sort them into a Manichaean struggle between good and evil. My best friend: good. Homewrecking gigolo: evil. Francois didn’t cooperate.

 

It turned out he was the owner of a large martial arts and yoga studio in Philadelphia that gave a fifth of its profits each year to a charity for children with cancer. He maintained a popular blog of French cuisine recipes, based on his years as a Sous Chef at a 2-Star Michelin restaurant in Paris. He spent his weekends volunteering at an animal shelter, looking after the kittens. Many were adopted out and given names like Francois, Francine, Francesca, and Francy Pants by their enthralled new owners, in honor of the man who had lovingly rescued and cared for them.

 

It was all so over the top. The only thing missing was maybe that he loved cuddling or something. Oh wait, there it was, on a dating site. Francois’ favorite thing in the whole world, according to his profile, was…yep, cuddling. The thing is, I believed him. He was without a doubt the nicest, most likable homewrecker I’d ever encountered.

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Over the next few hours I visited the many dating sites, discussion forums, and social media hangouts he frequented. Let’s just say that Francois was not stingy with his affection; he had ‘friends’ all over the world. Many of them were not the least bit shy about it. On one French cooking forum, there was a running joke among the women in the comments section that every single one of them had done Francois at one time or another. He was right there with them in the comments, laughing about it and chiding them gently for being more interested in love than Hollandaise sauce.

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I eventually got tired of reading text and hit the Images button in Google. There were about twenty pictures of him. He was in his early forties and extremely handsome. He had a sensitive, sophisticated European look and a strong, manly face. I was clicking on the pics when Kendra came up behind me. “Wow…he’s sexy. I’d do him.”

 

“I’d do him too,” I said. It was a joke. I’m as hetero as they come.

 

“No seriously. I’d do him.” Her tone told me that my monogamy-loving, homebody wife was not entirely kidding, which made me even more aware of what a Rasputin-like calamity Francois Laroux truly was. “He’s super-hot. Who is he?”

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“He’s the guy Maddie is sleeping with.”

 

Kendra pulled back. “Maddie? Kurt’s Maddie?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Oh man.” Kendra shook her head sadly. “That sucks.” She grabbed a chair and joined in the voyeurism as I back-buttoned through the dating sites and Facebook pages and everything else I’d found.

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“He has a lot of…friends,” Kendra said, when she saw the posts from Francois’s harem on the French cooking blog.

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It was almost dawn when we put his name into a final Google search with a few new search terms, and landed on a site called DontDateThisDickhead.com or AvoidThisJerkoff.com or some such.

 

The Francois I’d come to know over the last few hours — the scampish but charming Lothario — was nowhere to be seen. Here, it was all about Francois the Homewrecker.

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In a flurry of posts from four years ago, several women noted that Francois openly talked about his contest with his best friend to see who could bag 1,000 women first; he was already up to 790 at the time. There was a thread by some very upset women who were convinced he’d given them an STD. They all shared the same malady, but the only thing they otherwise had in common was that they’d all slept with Francois within the past six months. Strangely enough, he’d neglected to mention that small problem to any of them.

 

The most disturbing thread was started by a married woman who got pregnant at one of his airport hotel trysts. He promised he’d help her financially so it could be handled discretely. And then: “He never sent the money. Never returned my calls. Don’t fall for his accent. He’s just another player. My husband divorced me. I lost everything.”

 

“This is just sad,” I said. “I was really starting to like Francois.”

 

“You have to talk to Kurt about this,” Kendra replied.

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“And say what? Hi Kurt, not only is your wife sleeping around, but she’s sleeping with a serial predator who’s carrying STDs and getting married women pregnant?”

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“Yes, that,” Kendra said.

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“Oh, okay, I’ll get right on that, Kennie. Thanks.” But I knew she was right. Francois was a velvet-covered monster. We’d learned too much to just stand there gawking as the monster stomped on Kurt’s family and life.

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Kurt was traveling over the next week, and I was happy to get a delay on The Big Talk. After he returned, we were all invited to a dinner party at a mutual friend’s house. Kendra and I worked out a plan. She would get with Maddie and the other women at the party to talk about normal, everyday mom stuff like the bondage scenes in Fifty Shades of Gray, and I would corner Kurt and suggest we head out the next night — just the two of us. Then I would tell him everything I’d learned about Francois, and he could do whatever he thought best with the information.

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Our plan never got off the ground. We thought we’d see obvious awkwardness between Kurt and Maddie at the party: from Maddie, because she was cheating on him, and from Kurt, because he knew it. It had to show up in their body language and behavior, right? Instead, Maddie was all over Kurt, holding his hand, kissing his cheek, and telling everyone old stories that were larded with affection for him. Kurt looked content and happy with his wife’s attention.

 

Later, I got with him one-on-one on the deck and he said quietly, “I was wrong about Maddie. It was probably just a business meeting in Chicago. I read too much into some scraps of paper. Just…just disregard it all.”

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“Okay,” I said.

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That night, Kendra and I tried to figure it out. We decided that Francois and Maddie must have ended things. Maddie had returned to her real life and was making up for lost time – and maybe some guilt — by being extra-affectionate with Kurt. It was possible that Kurt had taken her new affectionateness as a sign that he’d been off-base about the whole thing. It was also possible that he’d just decided he wanted to put the whole thing behind him.

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“If a tree falls in the forest and everyone knows it fell but pretends it didn’t, did it?” I asked Kendra.

 

Kendra shrugged. “She’s happy. He’s happy. Maybe the affair was just a one-off. They have a beautiful house, a family with two great kids, and a good life. Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. It just forces you to make choices you don’t want to make.”

 

Almost a year went by without another mention of Francois. Kurt and I settled back into our pre-crisis friendship. Kendra saw Maddie at their book club and neighborhood cookouts, and nothing ever came up about affairs or French guys.

 

Maddie got pregnant, and we were the first non-family guests admitted to her room at the hospital after she gave birth to her third child, a beautiful baby girl named Olivia. Kurt was cradling Olivia and beaming with pride as he stood at Maddie’s bedside. I swear to God, their family never seemed more in love than at that very moment.

 

When I got home, the thought did cross my mind of asking Kurt if he planned to get a DNA paternity test for the baby. Then I realized what a stupid question that would be. A DNA test was the last thing Kurt would want. He had made his choice: he could have his family, or he could have the lonely truth and start his whole life over. He chose his family. I still don’t know whether that was courageous or cowardly. Both, I guess.

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Several months later, we went over to Kurt and Maddie’s house for dinner. It was chaos and mayhem, with a six-year-old, a three-year-old, and now an infant. Toys were all over the place. Kendra gave Maddie the bottle of Cabernet we brought, and Maddie went into the kitchen to get some wine glasses.

 

“Daddy, Daddy, she’s chasing me!” It was three-year-old Emma, who came darting across the living room. A teeny-tiny kitten charged after her, squeaking and nearly tipping over, because it was so young that it didn’t yet have the coordination for a chase. Its paws were huge, but its body was about the size of a salt shaker.

 

“Be gentle with the kitty,” Kurt admonished his daughter. Emma turned, and the cat instantly understood it was now in the role of prey. It darted back across the room with Emma in hot pursuit. Kurt turned to us and chuckled. “We got the little beast a few days ago. Maddie was up in Philadelphia for one of those incessant strategy meetings her company’s been running there every month for the past year. She stopped by some animal shelter, and next thing I knew, we had a kitten.”

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Maddie emerged from the kitchen and handed Kurt a glass of wine. He took it with a smile, and she smiled back and put her arm around his waist, and everything was perfect.