No I haven't fallen off the edge of the blogosphere.
A little story that happened while I was away.
How it started.
L has a good friend form back in high school (we'll call her friend BigO). She and L go way back and her ten year old daughter calls us aunt and uncle. Up until about a month ago we assumed BigO was happily married to her husband of sixteen years. L gets a call from her friend late last week where she frantically explains to my wife that her marriage of sixteen years has crumbled and she has moved out into a local (BigO lives in another state) friends house. While the whole thing is a shock to us, it's not completely unexpected. They had a rocky section a while back that, we thought, had been worked though. I had always speculated that he (her husband) was a little controlling of BigO and had mentioned it to L in the past. What is a shock to L is that BigO moved out and she and her husband have agreed to a divorce since before Christmas. The two (L and BigO) have an interesting relationship. They rarely talk to one another more than two or three times per year but always seem to pick up where they left off and talk as if they had just seen each other yesterday. L was still a little hurt that her long time friend had waited almost two months to let us in on what's going on, but forgave BigO for this because of the turmoil she was going through with the separation. L expressed concern for her friends financial situation because BigO was basically a house wife until about three years ago when she finally went to work for a travel agency. L asked me later if we could send BigO some money. I agreed and the check was in the mail. This first conversation rattled L and she was in a daze about the whole thing. It was also much shorter than their normal three or four hour conversations so L also felt like she wasn't getting the whole story. What she did retrieve from the conversation was that BigO had an affair with another man on one of the travel agency sponsored cruises. BigO also said that she might be heading down here to Atlanta in the beginning of February. Only later did it dawn on us that the beginning of February was a couple days away.
More from BigO.
Just as L is starting to go nuts about BigO and what's going on she gets another call from her friend. Once again the conversation is shorter than usual but BigO says she's flying down to see us. She doesn't have all the details ironed out yet but she will be here on Thursday and leaving on Saturday. We go into panic mode because the house is thrashed and we need to get everything in order to have a house guest. In the course of the conversation, L learns that the man BigO had an affair with (we'll call him Frisco) is eleven years her senior and not what you would call "traditionally" attractive (which tells me he's old, bald, fat, and probably smells funny). BigO is enamored with the dude and emails him several times per day. This turns out to be their primary source of communication because, you guessed it, Frisco is married and lives on the opposite end of the country. Alarms start going off in my head when L tells me this new information. Nevertheless, L gets excited about seeing her old friend and starts planning fun activities for a newly separated woman to do while she is in town with an old friend. L manages to get Thursday and Friday off after having a small war with her boss about it. It's going to be a girls weekend. Everything gets all lined up for L's friend to come to town.
Are we missing something?
Wednesday rolls around and BigO has yet to get back with L about the flight information so we can arrange to pick her up from the airport. L calls BigO, who is on her way home from work, and tells my wife that she doesn't remember the flight number but it's supposed to arrive at 12:30 PM. BigO goes on to say that she will email the information to L when she gets back to her house. Wednesday rolls on over to Thursday and L gets no email. L tries to call BigO on Thursday morning but gets voicemail. She leaves a message for BigO to call during her lay over. The twelve o'clock hour approaches and we hear nothing from BigO. I tell L, after checking the delays at the lay over airport, that BigO probably didn't have time to call between one flight an the next. She agrees that this is probably the issue and heads out to the airport to pick up her friend. I wanted to go but I had to work.
Yep. We're missing something.
So L arrives at the airport and drives around the loop four times to avoid paying for parking while she waits for her friend to show up. After an hour of fighting airport traffic and still no word from BigO, she decides to drive up the interstate to get some coffee and wait for a phone call. Buzzed from caffeine and dealing with traffic, L's phone finally rings. Vibrating through the speaker is BigO saying that the is delayed for weather at the lay over airport. She won't be getting on a plane until after five in the evening. L asks BigO what time
that flight will be arriving so she can pick her up later. BigO says that she doesn't need to be picked up because she's staying with Frisco here in town. WTF?!?!?! Although I wasn't there for the conversation, I can almost see L's expression when BigO tells her this. Evidently we
assumed that BigO was staying with us when, in fact, she was coming to town to see her new lover. L managed to keep her composure, and didn't even tell BigO that she had already been to the airport to pick her friend up. So BigO takes this opportunity to tell L that story of how she met Frisco and how they were both dissatisfied with their marriages and, despite her best efforts to avoid Frisco on the cruise, they kept bumping into one and other. L is pissed at the whole situation because she always thought of BigO as the good girl who would never cheat on her husband, let alone with someone who was already married. So BigO goes on to explain how it "just happened" and now Frisco is going to be a part of her life. And, by the way, he's the first man to ever "take care" of her in bed, she tells L. This is a woman in her mid thirties who has been married for sixteen years and never had a man give her "the big O." After all the shock and awe, L ends the conversation with a request for BigO to call when she arrives in town and they plan to get together for dinner on Friday so L can meet Frisco.
Something stinks.
Later that evening L and I are talking on the phone about the whole situation. She feels icky about the whole thing and the thought of meeting Frisco for dinner makes her sick. L is mad that a trip she thought was going to be a chance to see her friend and catch up on whats going on has turned into a fiasco of miscommunication and confusion. I tell her that BigO has gone off the deep end and speculate that a woman in her thirties who's never been to pleasured by a partner could probably diagnosed as clinically insane. L agrees. So since Frisco seems to be taking care of BigO, we cut her some slack. We do decide, however, that this dude can't be right for her and she is on a bigger rebound than any other woman in history. A future Frisco intervention is in order. About this time L gets a call coming through on call waiting. It's the area code of BigO so she ends with me and picks up the other call. On the other line is BigO's ten year old daughter asking if her mommy has arrived at our house yet. L has a conversation with the girl and tells her that mommy will be here soon and, when she gets here, aunt L will give her a big hug from you. That was at about 8:30 PM Thursday. We never did hear from BigO that night.
Are we worried yet?
I checked the flights inbound from BigO's lay over airport and found that the one I speculated she was on could have been laid over in yet another city. If that was the case, she wouldn't have arrived until very late. L and I decided, before we went to bed, that BigO probably was scared to call us if she arrived at the late hour. We went to bed thinking all was well. The next day I go to work and L decided to pick up a new outfit to go to dinner in. At this point, it bothered me that BigO hadn't called more than it bothered L. I called a few times during the day to ask L if she'd heard anything yet. Still I wasn't' too concerned because BigO probably has a big night with Frisco. We were starting to get pissed at this woman though. Evidently we were BigO's alibi for the trip to meet her lover and she had failed to let us in on her plan. Now we had her daughter ( no doubt spurred on by her jealous daddy) calling us to see if she arrived.
Hell yea we're worried.
Friday continued to wear on with no word from L's high school friend. Dinner time had come and gone and still nothing BigO. At this point, we had no idea if she had even made it into town. We started to speculate why she hadn't called. Our best guess was that her phone died and she didn't remember to pack a charger. No one remembers anyones number anymore and the thought of her having to call her husband to get the number of people she's supposed to be staying with was probably out fo the question. I was officially in over drive and my imagination started to take over. I wondered if she was stuck in another town sleeping on an airport bench. BigO may a little bit of a misnomer, she' s actually a tiny woman about five feet tall and maybe a hundred pounds with a wet sweater on. The thought of creepy Mr. Frisco picking her up from the airport in a strange city started to sound very frightening. We called the hotel where she said she would be staying in her last conversation with L. No luck, but all we had was her name an Frisco's first name. We called the airline to find out if she made her connecting flight. The first person I talked to said they won't give out that information. The second person I talked to said she canceled her reservations before she even left her initial departure point. Now we had visions of her being kidnapped before she ever got on the first plane. We googled her name to see if she showed up in a news story or something. We called the hospitals. We were officially out of our minds and convinced that something bad had happened. I kept arguing to call BigO's husband or her mom to see if either had heard from her. L refused to involve either one citing that we would kill her mother with worry or destroy her life by blowing her story to her husband when a custody battle might be looming. I asked L at what point do you risk turning her in when she could be in mortal physical danger. Finally she had me convinced that her mother or husband were both bad ideas until we knew something. We were in a quagmire. We kept saying that she better be in a coma or in a ditch somewhere because putting us through this crap was complete bullshit. We finally hit on the idea to call the people she had moved in with. We didn't have their number but we were able to get it from information. We sat in the living room trying to decide if ten PM was too late to call these people we didn't know. Declaring "Fuck it, I'm calling." L dialed the phone. After she hung up, all we had managed to do was worry another couple about the whereabouts of our friend. They were very nice people and agreed that if one or the other of us heard anything, we would call each other. No sooner did she hang up the phone than it started ringing again. She looked at the number and recognised it as that of BigO's husband. She let it go to voicemail. checking the message, L heard the ten year old girls voice coming through the speaker pleading for aunt L to have BigO call home to say goodnight. At 10:30 PM! That set us both off into a frenzy of inaction. We had no idea what to do. We were at a complete loss. In desperation to know anything we tried the airline one more time. L managed to find out that BigO did, in fact, make it to her destination. Somehow this made us feel better. Like knowing something, anything, about her helped ease our concern. We decided to hunker down for the night and hope that we heard something by Saturday evening. Hopefully she would turn up at home.
We're glad you're OK...Bitch!
After a long Saturday of worrying and calling airlines, BigO turned up safe and sound back home that night. She called L at 6:00 PM. My sweet wife, who spent the day falling behind at work worried sick about her friend, promptly tore into her old friend screaming at her over the phone. To which BigO's reply was "I'm sorry. I'm a flawed person." WTF does that mean? Is that an excuse?
The results of not making a simple phone call.
L hasn't talked to her old High school friend since that day. She figures that the ball is in BigO's court. This could be the beginning of the end of a long friendship. The people that took BigO in during her separation with no deadline to move out and who haven't collected a dime for rent or food have decided that she must go. The check we sent the woman is being returned by her current roommates. They also called her mother at some point on Saturday and did what we avoided. they worried the poor woman needlessly. BigO's husband now knows the reason for her trip to "see us" and I'm sure this won't make her divorce any easier. Her ten year old daughter is being turned against her by her husband. Basically, BigO has alienated every single ally she has during the time she needs her friends most. It seems to me that L needs to swallow her pride or pain or whatever and help her friend but she's so mad that she absolutely refuses to make the effort. In spite of the whole fiasco, I still worry about BigO. It seems that all this rejection will force her further toward Frisco. I personally think this is the wrong person to be her only friend during this delicate time in her life.
Somehow I need to convince L that her friendship is worth saving but I don't know how.
All of this for an orgasm!
Labels: relationships
