Angie’s A Tramp

I made a New Year’s Resolution to come back to this journal, and while I don’t expect to fulfill that resolution, given past history, I’m once again going to give it a shot.  And if this is the only post I ever write again, I owe it to Matty to state the following for the record:

Angie’s a tramp.

If you check out this post, you’ll see that I had an uninvited houseguest for a period of time. As it turned out, that was Matty, and he was a houseguest for about four months. A few years ago I had given him a key to the place for no other real reason than he and Angie gave me a key to their place, and I felt like I should reciprocate. Close friends, they take care of each other, right? I hadn’t forgotten that I gave him the key… he had just never used it before, so it wasn’t really on my mind.

I came back from Idaho early in September and got a message from Chapter that Matty had been living in my apartment for about a month.  Naturally I feigned surprise when I arrived home and found him watching Fox Sports Northwest on my television set. Matty had been “kicked out of the house” before, but it was always for a few hours or maybe the bulk of the day while Angie worked on stuff for the law firm (she claimed his presence was distracting). As it turns out, they were having more serious problems than just that, but some couples tend to be very good at keeping that stuff private until late in the game, and since I wasn’t around all that much, I wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

Matty was becoming increasingly frustrated that his wife was either too busy to spend time with him, or didn’t have any interest in him when she wasn’t busy. She didn’t want to go to his company’s holiday party, she didn’t want to go on vacation with him (instead telling him that some of the girls from the firm were planning an Alaskan cruise for themselves), and whenever he broached the subject of having children, she complained about not being ready to give up her career. All of these things are valid on their own, but combined it signals a real issue with a relationship.

Again, this is all stuff I had no idea about.

What Matty had no idea about was that Angie was not only screwing half of the partners in the firm, but apparently some of the associates and one of the interns as well. She’d been doing it for some time, and when he told me about it, I assumed it was because she was trying to break some glass ceiling or something, but the truth is that she’s just a sexual predator. It’s a power trip for her. I know this because when Matty found out she was cheating and confronted her about it, she freely admitted it, as though there were nothing wrong and being caught had liberated her.

So why was Matty sleeping on my couch?

Because Angie owns the house. Matty would have kicked her out, but that’s tough when you don’t own the house. So Matty grabbed a backpack and headed on over. A few days later, he put most of his stuff into storage.

He was in a pretty serious funk when I found him, and I let him chill out for a few weeks, figuring he’d eventually snap out of it and look for an apartment. After about a month and a half it was clear he wasn’t going to do that… he was pretty content to sit on the couch eating kids cereal while watching cartoons in his boxers.

I had a long talk with him, partly about getting on with life, and partly about getting another apartment. From the way the conversation went, I think he was hoping I’d invite him to stay, but I made it clear he needed to find his own place and start picking up the pieces. “You’re 31,” I told him, “And I know what happened sucks, but you’re still in your prime.”  Yeah, I’m an advice man.

It’s going to be a while before he realizes that, especially since Angie screwed him over in the divorce proceedings, but he did get his own place, and he’s still working at the same job, which is also good considering the economy. I don’t see him as often as I did before, which wasn’t all that often anyway, but he still hasn’t started dating, or even looking at women the same way, as far as I can tell.  More than a year later, he’s still a shell of man.

Angie made partner this past fall.