All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,100

not mine. So I hope you don’t mind if I don’t cry over the fact that she cheated on you. She probably saved you half of everything you own, which she would have gotten in the divorce if you had just told her to hit the road. So, it’s been great seeing you again, let’s do it again real soon. I think I’m done for the evening.”

I stood and started toward my bedroom. I was a step from escaping when he said, “Kat, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but the truth is it wasn’t her cheating on me, it was me cheating on her.”

I stopped. I didn’t turn back toward him but I listened.

“I’ve been running around for years. Started probably the second year of our marriage, even though I was happy at the time. As crazy as it sounds, I just did it because I could. I kept it away from work, but that still left plenty of other options, on airplanes, in hotel bars, at health clubs. I could get any woman I wanted and I did, and I never gave it a second thought. I didn’t view it as a referendum on my marriage or my feelings for my wife or even on my own morality, it was just something I did because there didn’t seem to be a compelling reason not to.”

“Not if you’re a narcissistic sociopath, I can see that,” I said. “Go on.”

“In recent years, it changed. Not the frequency of it but the meaning. I was completely disillusioned in my marriage. I started looking for more from these other women. It wasn’t just a little flattery, a little jewelry, a lot of sex. I wanted to talk. I wanted to have dinner. I wanted it to matter, and that was when I knew it had to change.”

He paused. I turned to face him. He was still seated, looking smaller than I could ever remember. Phillip is a big man, in every way. But not on that couch. Not today.

He continued, “The question was, what to do? I wanted out, but getting out was going to cost me about a hundred million bucks. And then, before I could figure it out, I noticed this thing on my dick. Just a little thing, you know, like a pimple. It got bigger and bigger in just a couple of days and then—”

“Stop telling me this part,” I said.

“I finally went to the doctor and, of course, it was herpes. The doctor asked me how I thought I got it and I told him I had no idea. And he asked what I meant by that and I said it could have been five or six different women, and he asked if one of them was my wife and I said that was probably the least likely.”

“This is the worst story I’ve ever heard,” I said.

Phil ignored me and kept going. “I asked the doctor what I should do and he said I had better explain to my wife how it happened because she was about to find out anyway. And I told him she would probably leave me, and he said: ‘Phil, unless you can convince her that she was the one who gave you this, I’d say you’re completely fucked.’ And it was like a lightbulb went on over my head. I went straight to the bar at the St. Regis and had three drinks, and then I went home and started screaming at her: ‘How could you do this to me? I trusted you and now I’m totally humiliated!’ I tried as hard as I could to convince her I had no idea how else I could have gotten this disease and I laid it on thick. And after about ten minutes of nonstop cursing, I’ll give you one guess what she did.”

That was when I got it. “She admitted it.”

He smiled. “That’s exactly right. She broke down and told me she’s been sleeping with her tennis pro for two years, and she’s apologizing like crazy and begging my forgiveness, and I’m drunk enough that I sort of forget how we got there in the first place, so I’m yelling, ‘You bitch! You betrayed me!’ And right there in the living room I told her I wanted out of the marriage, that I would make sure she and the boys were always taken care of but that if she went after any of my money I would let the whole world