A Cold Cup of Tea

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 994

The first time I should have wreaked revenge was the day I discovered my boyfriend in bed with another woman in my apartment. Instead, my first reaction was to offer them tea. I can only think that I was in such shock that the innate politeness my father had drilled into us as children took over as my default mode.

After I laid the tea things down on the coffee table, I excused myself and left my WestBeth apartment, and ran out onto Bank Street. Sitting on a low wall, outside HB Studios, where I had taken acting classes when I first moved to New York, but had since dropped out, was an acquaintance of mine, Tracy Pollan, the actress who later married Michael J. Fox. We had been friendly, but I wouldn’t say we were friends. She took one look at me and realised that something very odd had happened. When I explained the situation, she immediately whisked me up to her parents’ palatial apartment on the Upper East Side. We sat commiserating for a while, then she went into the kitchen and basically emptied her family's pantry into various shopping bags for me.

Heartbroken, at least I got to eat like a queen for the next couple of weeks. And that felt like a revenge of sorts since my boyfriend and I had been so broke that we had been subsisting on rice and beans.

The boyfriend and I drifted along for another few months. I never knew what happened to the woman until more than a decade later, when I was at one of those big literary soirées with the likes of Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tom Wolfe swirling among us mere mortals. And yes, I’m aware that I’m listing all male writers. But for the life of me, I cannot think of one single successful female writer who was at those damn parties.

Circling through the party to see if I could spot any more famous people, I came face-to-face with Morag. That’s not her name, but it’s close. Hers had a more Slavic turn to it. We fumbled a hello, and then I dashed off to tell my friends about my encounter. I guess my storytelling was so wickedly good that I soon realised that tales of my betrayal were being whispered into the ears of no less than McInerney and Gay Talese. Morag was last seen slinking out of the party.

Was that a good revenge? 

As girlfriends will, we have talked a lot about what we would do—and what some have done—should their partners betray them.  Most of us assume we would be content with demanding access to credit card statements, bank statements, and phone records, and perhaps slipping a tracker into the wanderer’s car. In our conversations, we always come up against the fact that we would most likely seek revenge on the other person and rarely on our partners.

When my husband revealed to me a year ago that he had been having an affair for the previous two years, my first thoughts were a million miles away from possibly seeking revenge. I was in shock, bereft, breathless, thrown, confused, heartbroken.

The first thought that I had any control over was, does she know anything about him? Has she lived with him, seen what it’s like to live with a man who has a wonky heart, is a boisterous drinker, and is more than a little self-involved? Does she know what it takes?  And on the flipside, I thought, does he know anything about her? I have since learned that she can't cook. How long could sex hold sway over a delicious meal?

So, when I stopped hyperventilating and got myself up off the floor, I looked at my husband and said, “Go. Go and live with her for six months. See what it’s like. See if she really is all that you think she might be. See how long frozen dinners can sustain you.”

He looked at me, absolutely aghast. “You mean not see you, not talk to you?”

“That would be the general idea.” 

I left him to mull that over and went and did something you can only do when living in the countryside. I walked up to the woods and screamed. I stole the idea, actually, from Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander, when the mother paces the room and screams through the opening chords of being a widow. I always thought that seemed a good idea, but one I couldn’t try while living in Brooklyn. Screaming into a pillow is not nearly as cathartic.   

When I came back, my throat screamed raw, my husband said, “There’s no way on earth I can leave you.”

In this crazy fucked up scenario, which one of us would have the last laugh, if last laughs are equated with revenge? 

Would I if he had left me and gone to live with that woman and been absolutely miserable? I doubt it. 

Will she get the last laugh? One way or another, she managed to penetrate and pollute what had long been a closed ecosystem.

Is Charles the one who gets the last laugh because he got to have a hot and heavy affair to bust up the monotony of a long marriage, and now is safely settled back into that very marriage? 

Revenge is a funny thing. I can think of no instance where it is clean-cut and utterly satisfying.

Should I ever run into this woman, I would probably make her tea. Although I can’t swear I wouldn’t pull an old waiter's trick and spit into her cup before serving her a cuppa of piping hot lapsang souchong.

Bex lives in France with her husband and their dog. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, Finnick