The Haunting Rage Of A Scorned Wife - Part 3

"I did not believe it either. Larry was a good man to me, and I always did my best to be good to him. And I guess he was so good he played me right under my nose for that long.”

“No, no. Look, my wife will not do that.”

“Why?” She asked, amused, taking a pause to choose her words. “Because she sings in the choir? Because she is the first to go to church? Because she says she is faithful? Because she prays in tongues? My husband is a church elder and a counselor. He is the only man besides my late father who had my unquestioned devotion and submission. I worship him; I adore him. I will fight in public over him. Mine was a mad love I had for him,” she said, staring at the nothingness in front of her.

“No,” Richard intoned, transfixed. “What? My wife is sleeping with your husband.” As the words sank in and Richard gradually woke up to it, his shock started metamorphosing into crippling rage.

“You seem shocked that your wife is sleeping with my husband,” Julia said casually. “But it seems ok to you that someone’s wife is sleeping with you. Interesting.”

“That is beside the point!” Richard yelled, the words mingled with spittle.

“Is it?” She asked. “When a man cheats on his wife, it is the wife’s fault; he is only a man. That is the twisted society we live in. The woman is the one who begs, who massages the ego of the man to soothe his lustful pride. Let the man find out his wife is also getting nailed by some other guy around the corner and all hell breaks loose. You thought this was an escape to a sexual grotto where your starved soul was going to be set free and nourished. You thought this was you being the man, me being the whore, and your legal whore being the blessed Mary. Nice imagination. Sadly, we are all screwed and screwing in this vicious quartet. So, mister, I suggest you shove your damn rage down your hollow throat and save it for your whore.” She simply spoke her heart out. She was so detached from her thoughts the words seemed to be coming from the next room.

“How the hell did you find out?” He asked between gritted teeth, refusing to respond to what Julia had said.

“I have ways and means,” she said bluntly.

“How do you mean by you have ways and means!” He yelled at her.

“I said a while ago to calm down; you need to save this for your wife when she comes home tomorrow.”

“I will not calm down!” He screamed, smashing his fist through the bedside lamp.

“Well, as it stands, you are scaring me,” she said quietly, trying hard not to allow the pain she felt when she discovered the affair to creep back in.

“Then tell me it is not true, Julia, tell me!” He broke down in tears.

“Do I look like a woman who is capable of sleeping around behind my husband? Why do you think I came to you? Why would I pick you, the husband of a subordinate to my husband; a man I have met only twice or so?” She asked and laughed at the thought of it. “I am older than you, richer than you, forgive me, but I am. And the truth be told, you are outside the sphere of the group of men I would even look at twice. What we have here is no relationship, Richard, it is not. I don’t call you, I don’t talk to you, I don’t send you all those lovey-dovey texts. Didn’t you think it was weird?

What we have here are two offended people taking revenge, except one of us is not aware of the offense and hence not aware of his part in this revenge. I guess you occasionally drown yourself in the guilt of knowing you are cheating on your wife. And how scheming to know you are doing it with her boss’ wife. Yeah, we are nothing but that; schemers. But for me, the glorious consolation in all of this is that, whether we did it once or a thousand times, I know the effect will still be the same; we found their little sin out and we paid them back in their own coins, in their own language, in their own scheme.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Richard said quietly, allowing Julia’s words to sync with his reality.

“Tell you? I was not out to get my husband back, your whore of a wife would leave you for him if pushed to the wall; that I can assure you.”

“Please do not call my wife a whore,” he said with a voice laced with rage and hopelessness.

“Please help me with a better name for her.”

“You are no different from her, Julia!”

“Well, you can postulate on that, but at least I am reacting to a wrong done to me. That gives two different motives to the same act. I am frigging different!”

Richard found his feet and got off the bed, grabbing his trousers with him. He paced up and down the room in a disorganized manner.

“My husband does not need to travel to carry out an audit. He is high up in the hierarchy, so why was he suddenly traveling? I wondered. Then someone hinted to me about this lady. I was told my husband was very close to her, but nothing was suspected. She was so innocent she couldn’t harm a fly. The story got interesting when this woman started traveling for auditing at places scheduled for official visits by my husband. So I invested a little money into it to see if God would smile at me. Well, he did, and I even got photographs. So here we are, paying bad guys back in their own bloody coins.”

“I do not want to pay back my wife in any bloody coin!” Richard cried out.

“Really? And how were you going to pay her back? Forgive her? Because you do not come across as the forgiving type. In any case, I had options, one of which was to show you pictures of your wife screaming under my husband. But I guess wisdom spoke me out of it. What if you actually forgave her and let it go?”

“It is none of your business what I come across as and what I do not come across as,” Richard yelled with the pain of a wounded werewolf. “You do not know me and what I can and cannot do, so stop patronizing me.”

“Please stop yelling at me!” Julia cried out in frustration. “Stop it!”

“Then stop making me,” Richard retorted, equally frustrated.

“For me, this revenge is over,” she stated quantitatively, after calming herself down. “You and I are over. It was scheduled to be over the minute I tell you why it started. This is the minute and this is the goodbye tune. I paid for this room so I suggest you put on your clothes and leave this very minute before I call the district commander of police and figure out what charge to slap on you.”

“What?”

“Why what? Were you expecting me to cuddle your tensed body and ruffle your hairless head? Not after this disrespect you have shown me. Go to your wife. I will go to my husband. I know what to do from now. I have it all calculated. I thought you would be smart enough to let us sit and scheme together. Who knows; we may become sex buddies in the end… you know… all options open. Anyway, those were the could-haves. What is, is that you are getting dressed and stepping out. Now.”

Julia got up from the bed and started dressing up. Richard looked visibly thrown off course in his head. He kept staring into the tinted glass windows overlooking the chaos in the choked Friday night streets of Accra.

“Sorry if you think of me as cold and insensitive,” Julia said reflectively. "I have had this moment you are going through. I have cried, believe me. I have considered many options including getting your wife dismissed from the firm. And believe me, I know people in there who will do anything to get a link or two from me. I considered having her lynched and burned; I considered many things. But then, the scale had to be fair – an eye for an eye; so I chose this path; a befitting revenge.

When I visited you the first time, I had their pictures together with me, I had all their text messages and WhatsApp chats emailed to me by loyal friends. I had it all sorted. I was going to show everything to you. That particular trip he was taking really hurt me; it was our son’s birthday the day before and he wanted him to be home. We wanted to spend it together like married couples do. And as a woman, to know that your husband was looking in your face and lying to you so he could have a weekend away in Akosombo with another man’s wife was too much to handle. I was hoping you would be a gentleman enough to resist the urge so it would be easy for me to show you the evidence and just walk away. But you did not, so I kept the evidence and chose to walk with you on this path.

I don’t know you and I don’t know the kind of demons you have on your right and left shoulders, but I thought you should know. For me, hiding what we have done is an act of cowardice, which is why I am going to send your wife a video of us having sex.

“You are mad!” Richard screamed at her.

“I am not!” She said, smashing one of her many Mac makeup products on the tiled floor.

“Look, do not push me into doing anything dangerous. Do not send anything to my wife,” Richard warned her.

“How pathetic. They hide and cheat on us and pretend they are holy. I am not a coward! I am bringing the game to their turf. I suggest you look under the bed; I think your balls are down there somewhere!”

“Julia, I am warning you.”

“You still love your wife. You still want to keep this a secret from her,” she stated.

“That is none of your business.”

“No, it is. I am in this cast and I need to know how your script ends. Let me see. You are going to tell her she is unfaithful, blow up and make her look evil, and then you keep your side of the sin. Mister. That is just not fair. Besides, what is sex revenge if your partner never finds out you got nailed by someone else because you know they got nailed too?”

“Stop the nonsense,” Richard yelled and rushed at her, not sure exactly what he was going to do.

“Oh come on, Rick. Nothing will show that you have done it, so it becomes you dying in your pain and yet laughing with pleasure at the revenge. For them, however, it will always be whistling Hallelujah chorus and pretending to be holy. No! Let them know you know. And let them know you have paid them back. Let the two of you burn with hatred… and blossom with pure pleasure concentrate; self-destruct! Now that is my definition of revenge.” She held his hand so affectionately she could be a mother trying to dissuade her son from a dangerous venture.

Richard stared at her as if the idea was making sense to him.

“So I will send her our video, which I have already recorded with a device you have no clue about, just so she knows I am eating your brains out. As it were; an elderly woman doing a better job. What can I say? I got swag!” She laughed at the thought. “Then you will send it to my husband. So he knows you have something that belongs to him. It is more of a Man to man… woman to woman kinda thingy. So here is how it will go; my husband most likely will confront me and your wife will confront you. But she may tell my husband first. You know women can be petty.” Julia sounded detailed and intensely premeditative.

“So when they do, then we show them their sex pictures. Luckily all four angles got their faces right. And we have their texts and the chats to back it all up. It’s no rocket science. I know men have the tendencies to deny even when presented with hard facts. So I am presenting him with voice recordings as well, which talk about work, mention names, and mention us. Gosh, I love me. I mean I know it is unethical on the part of the person who did this for me, but it had to be done.” She spoke calmly with a frown on her face.

“How did you get the chats and the texts?” Richard asked as curiosity crept in.

“Now you are coming around, Richard.” She said. “You have no idea the extent a woman, scorned by a man, can go to have her revenge. Let us just say I have a good working relationship with the boys in my IT dept who know people in the Telcos. And if you ever mention this to anyone, I will deny it. Simple.”

“Why would I mention it to anyone?”

“Well, I know you are a smart man, but you know, even when you shoot someone dead, you still want to stab them to be sure they are dead.” She burst into laughter at the expression.

Richard smiled.

Julia walked to Richard, having worn only her panties and bra.

"When I am through with these two, it will be a legendary story," she said softly. "Women from far and near will visit me for consultation on how to execute surgical revenge on unfaithful husbands. Who knows; with good pricing and branding, I may make a decent living out of it than being the Head of Corporate Risk in a godforsaken bank." Julia sounded so fulfilled in her scheme, she was almost born again in it.

“You are hurt, aren’t you, Richard? You feel betrayed, lied to, and disrespected,” she whispered.

“Hmm.”

“Look at me,” she ordered. He turned to look at her. “Let’s make this last one count.”

“Last what?”

“Defile me. With anger, madness, you can stab me, club me, and strangle me. But let the evil in you out and tear me apart. Be the avenging lamb chasing the cunning fox out of its hole.”

And so it was that Julia got more than she bargained for.

She lay next to Richard, gasping for air, with her cap weave-on strewn on the floor, panties torn, a few cuts on her back from the crushed bedside lamp, and bruises on her old wrinkled lips.

She gasped, but she smiled while typing the short note attached to the video of her and Richard having sex. She wrote: “My Darling Dear, good things are meant to be shared. Enjoy this video. Please watch to the end because the lesson is found there. Bliss. Mrs. Julia Ofei.” She pressed the Send Button on the WhatsApp chat she had been having with Naa, with links to the video from her Dropbox folder.

Richard sent his to Mr. Ofei, however drab his text was.

PG Sebastian