The day Mulhausen shot the CIO in Weekly Staff was bad for worse reasons than that. It was also the day Blair found out I had sex with my wife.
“You fucking prick!” She yelled, standing in the doorway of my meager 120 ceiling tile office.
“It didn’t mean anything,” I said defensively.
“So you admit it?”
“I meant, the message she left me. You admit getting into my voicemail again?”
“You fucked your wife, you sonofabitch. That means something.”
Some people believe a married couple should have sex occasionally. Both Blair and my wife did not. It was a rare thing in my marriage, but it did happen from time to time. I felt ashamed whenever it did.
First thing in the morning, even before coffee, and before picking up voicemail messages, and before opening pornographic email attachments sent by Gladstone to my company email address, I was confronted by those beautiful, alluring angelic black diamond eyes full of murderous rage. Half Latina, Half Irish, one hundred-percent psychotic. I was madly in love with her.
“Mind keeping your voice down?” I said. “I don’t need rumors going around the office that I’m having sex with my wife.”
By this point, I had known Blair for about two years. She first noticed me because I did not notice her. And although I did notice her, I did not let her know it; otherwise she would not have noticed me. Frankly, she looked like a bitch. The cultivated prissy glower and that veritable fuck you look slathered all over her flawlessly gorgeous and purposely listless face. When I saw that look, I immediately became infatuated with her. Which is why I acted like a complete asshole.
There she stood waiting for the elevator, this stunning Hispanic woman exuding stone cold apathy and completely, unabashedly unaware of my presence. That was the moment I knew I had to have her. Her skin was immaculate, brown and smooth. She had thick, painted lips that puckered just slightly as she waited impatiently for the elevator. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. So I ignored her completely.
I rushed onto the elevator in front of her as if I didn’t notice she was a woman. That’s when she noticed me for the first time. Blair knew better than anyone just how beautiful she was. And although it was fine for her to ignore everyone, it was not only unacceptable for someone to ignore her, but inconceivable. And yet, there I was completely oblivious. I felt her confused and irritated eyes staring hard at me, but I continued to pretend my mind was a million miles away. I could tell this frustrated her greatly because of the sudden fidgeting and deep sighs. Then she broke into a coughing fit, which I can only assume was intended to draw a look from me. I continued to ignore her for a month.
“It’s not a rumor, you cheating fuck.” she barked.
“Technically,” I said, “I can only cheat on my wife.”
“Marriage has nothing to do with it.”
She may have been right about that. Marriage had very little to do with anything at my company. Even so, Blair lived in a different world than the rest of us. On the surface, her thought process seemed to defy logic. Peel the onion a little more and her twisted, seemingly fucked-up syllogisms started becoming more sensible. For example: if I had sex with my wife, I was cheating on Blair. However, if Blair had sex with her husband, she wasn’t cheating on me. Even so, she would never have sex with both of us on the same day. According to Blair, having sex with two different guys on the same day made a woman a whore. Apparently, adultery on alternating days did not. Regardless, she believed that having sex with her husband could never be considered cheating on me, because she only had sex with her husband when he wanted to have sex with her. As a wife, she felt she was obligated to accommodate her husband’s sexual needs. However, the only reason I would have sex with my wife was because of my sexual need. In other words, I wanted it. And the only reason my wife would have sex with me was because of her obligation as the wife to accommodate her husband’s sexual needs. Since I apparently wanted to have sex with my wife, I was cheating on Blair. Since Blair did not want to have sex with her husband but did it out of obligation, she was not cheating on me.
“I did not have sex with my wife.”
“I hate when you call her that,” she said, even more irritated.
“What should I call her?”
“Anything else.”
“Spouse?”
“Worse,” she said as if tasting bile from her stomach. “Bitch, whore, slut. Those all fuckin’ work for me.”
Blair had the mouth of a sailor. It was very difficult for her to form a sentence without at least two or three expletives to really drive the message home. Her favorite word was fuck. She loved saying it. And she also loved hearing it, but only as a reference to sex. There was nothing she got off on more than dirty talk during sex. She did not like talking dirty in bed, just hearing it. And the more foul and graphic you were, the more she got off. But if you used the word fuck in a derogatory way, you got the Blair Glare and a shitload of trouble. It was never the word, but the tone. She hated a bold tone. But since she also admired a bold tone, there was usually a fifty-fifty chance of either pissing her off or getting her wet. That’s why I didn’t fear Blair. Being bold with Blair got me laid as much as it got me shit.
Nobody used foul words like Blair. Not even Petrizzo. Blair could use the word fuck as a verb, noun, adverb, adjective, pronoun, or even a preposition. And sometimes all in the same sentence. She frightened people at the Company in which we worked. Her words, her tone, and especially her voice, which often erupted cold-fistedly from her diaphragm with sheer dominance and loathsome grit. Even when calm, her ebony eyes blazed fiercely, forecasting destruction if things didn’t go her way. Rarely was she delightsome; often she was the spawn of Satan.
I was insanely, erratically, irrationally in love with Blair.
Erratically insane.