I spent much of tonight with G who was angry because the Firefighter Builder wasn’t home and hadn’t called her (a fair cop in my book).  Her house is on my walk from work and I stopped by to say hello.  When her husband hadn’t answered his cell phone a few times I said I would go with her to check out where he might be.

So we got in her car with my small dog and her forty pound puppy and a large senile mutt she’s kind of inherited.  We cruised by a few usual haunts while she got it into her head that she saw his pickup truck where it shouldn’t have been.  Back at my house she made calls to friends, and friends of friends, and husbands of friends, and husbands of friends of friends, and friends of husbands of friends, to ask them to drive their own trucks by where any husband’s truck shouldn’t be, to see if her husband’s truck was there. 

After a while the guys stopped returning her calls. And her husband definitely wasn’t responding, even to my one pound sterling a minute United Kingdom cell phone that I obligingly lent her because it was a particularly good disguise.

G suspected that the Firefighter Builder was at the house of a woman who sleeps with married men and wants sympathy from other married men when she feels neglected. G didn’t believe her husband was in the first group, but was furious at the possibility he might be in the second. Also, besides being an adulterer the woman used to be a department store decorator and now her home looks exactly like a three bedroom Neiman Marcus.

G’s other complaint was that even if he wasn’t at Neiman Marcus with the Adulterer, at the very least the Firefighter Builder preferred drinking beer to doing the family taxes which had been her suggested activity for the evening.

Just as I was about to throw G out, her husband and a friend (male — not the Adulterer) showed up here. I didn’t wait for explanations and pretty unceremoniously told all three of them, plus the puppy and the senile mutt, that it was time to go home. G had drunk most of a bottle of wine, and the puppy and the senile dog had eaten all of Eloise’s cat food, and meanwhile I really, really wanted to get into the bath and read Trollope.

But I should not exaggerate the drama of the evening. How unlike the home life of our own dear queen was one perspicacious late Victorian’s response to seeing the play Antony and Cleopatra. And I would like to confirm that not once this whole evening was anyone bitten by an asp.