The Other Woman
God damn, I wish I were writing about the movies Kate and I saw to use up the last of her Film Festival tickets this afternoon (girl went through two books of ten!). Or how she told me about this Sunday-morning film series at the Brattle Theater, including the most important part - they serve donuts. How brilliant an idea is that? Every movie theater should serve donuts. Or how annoying it is to go down to the laundry room and find that someone else has taken your clothes out of the washer... I've always hated having other people handle my underwear (and considered it something of a relief when the washer destroyed Michelle's a lot of old stuff).

I wish those were the day's big events. But they weren't.

Kate and I were taking some time between Anything But Love and The Kiss to get something to eat in the Prudential Center's food court. I wasn't quite as impressed with Anything But Love as she was - just because I've got the plumbing doesn't mean I'm automatically going to go for the chick flicks - when Kurt walked into the food court. With someone else.

It was the girl from the bar, the other one, the cute redhead who was in town for a wedding party the night we first met Michelle. Denise, I think her name was, although reading the entry I posted, I was somewhat tipsy that night. She and Kurt were holding hands, kissing, joking around with an 18-year-old girl in a Northeastern University T-shirt who looked enough like her to be a sister and a guy the same age who must have been little sister's boyfriend. I stared, and then quickly turned away when Kurt started to look in our direction. Kate, being awfully smart, picked up on it in about two seconds, and asked what was up.

So I told her that was Kurt (Jen had met him, but not Kate). She asked if we'd had a fight, and I said no, not really, and then suggested that maybe the girl was Kurt's sister. I told her I'd seen pictures of Kurt's family, and she wasn't in 'em. Maybe a cousin, she said, and I allowed her that possibility, even though I knew it wasn't true. After all, how could I explain that I knew Kurt had gotten her phone number a couple hours before he'd hit on "Michelle"? A girl might notice that a guy in a bar is hitting on everything with breasts, but is she cataloguing how he hits on? Remembering it two months later? I kind of doubt it.

Kate wanted to drag me over there to confront him and then, as she said, "dump his ass". I told her no, I'd handle it myself, at another time. She shook her head when I said I'd give Kurt a chance to explain himself, probably having been down that road herself. But it's more complicated than she knows.

The hell of it is, thinking as a guy, which I still manage most of the time even with all the girly hormones and shit running through this body, I can't really fault Kurt that much. He met Denise and Michelle the same night, and for all I know had probably gotten in touch with Denise before I had freaking thrown Michelle at him. And, damn it, I remember liking her - I didn't go for redheads quite the way Kurt did, but she struck me as funny and smart. And it's stupid to decide on one of two perfectly good girls whom you've barely said ten words to, when that relationship could peter out before you'd even had sex.

But at a gut level, in my unwanted female guts, I was pissed. There just seemed to be something calculating about the way he was going about it - Denise lived somewhere in Springfield or something, so she could only come out to Boston during the weekends. So was I some kind of "other woman", his weekday girlfriend? Why couldn't he have been up front with me? Why couldn't he just say "I met another great girl the same night I met you, and just want to make sure..." Okay, it sounds stupid. But the other thing is that Wei must know, and she apparently hasn't seen fit to tell me. She's my friend, damn it, even if she doesn't realize it. Hell, Kurt's my friend, and he should treat me better than this.

I couldn't tell this all to Kate, of course. She just made a show of noticing that the next movie would start soon and getting us out of there.

Needless to say, neither of us enjoyed The Kiss very much. It wasn't a great movie anyway, but we just weren't in the mood for grand love affairs that even outlast death right after that.

-Martin
- posted 8:57 PM - - (archive use only)