End of an Era

His eyes swung back to mine, and this time they held their lock. "Get this through your thick head, Thackeray. Tess is single. Divorced. And so am I." He paused. "Two single people together does not constitute an affair."

I waved my hand. "Semantics. Besides, you were fooling around with her even before Tess and my marriage was over."

Klicks’s voice was ripe with indignation. "I never touched her — not even once — until you and she were as extinct as your bloody dinosaurs."

"Bull." I put my hand down on the lab table — really, I’d just intended to gently place it there, but all the instruments clacked together. "Tess got her divorce on July third, 2011. You were boffing her long before that."

"That date was just a formality, and you know it," Klicks said. "Your marriage had been over for months by then."

"Its end hastened no doubt by your constant flirting with her."

"Flirting?" There was now a hint of derision in his lilting tones. "I’m not sixteen, for God’s sake."

"Oh, yeah? What did you say to her that night the three of us went out to see the new Star Wars film?"

"How the hell should I remember what I said?" — but the slight change in his vocal tone told me that he did indeed remember very well.

"She’d just gotten new glasses that day," I said. "The ones with the purply-pink wire frames. You looked right at her and said, ‘You certainly have a lovely pair, Tess.’" I could see that Klicks was fighting not to smile, and that made me even more furious. "That’s a hell of a thing to say to another man’s wife."

He drained his remaining coffee in a single gulp. "Come on, Bran. It was a joke. Tess and I are old friends; we kid around. It didn’t mean anything."

"You stole her right out from under me."

He absently broke a piece of Envirofoam off the cup’s rim. "Maybe if she had been under you a little more often, it never would have happened."

"Fuck you."

"Why not?" he said, lifting his eyes. "You certainly weren’t fucking her."

I was quaking with anger. "You son of a bitch. We did it once a week."

Klicks nodded knowingly. "Sunday mornings, like clockwork. Right after This Week with Peter Jennings. Pretty poor excuse for foreplay."

"She told you that?"

"We talk a lot, sure. And about more than just the latest find reported in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Face it, Brandy. You were a lousy husband. You lost her all on your own. You can’t blame me for recognizing a good thing when I saw it. Tess deserved better than you."

I tasted bile in my throat. I wanted to lunge at the man, to make him take back every one of those cruel lies. My hands, sitting on the lab table, clenched into fists. Klicks must have noticed that. "Just try it," he said, ever so softly.

"But you didn’t even give us a chance to work things out," I said, forcing a semblance of calm back into my voice.

"There wasn’t any hope of that."

"But if Tess had only said something to me … This — this is the first I’ve heard of any of this."

Klicks sighed, a long, weary exhalation, then shook his head again. "Tess had been screaming it at you for months — with every glance she made, with the look on her face, with body language that everyone but you could read." He spread his arms. "Christ, she couldn’t have been much more obvious about her unhappiness if she’d had the words ‘I am miserable’ tattooed on her forehead."

I shook my head. "I didn’t know. I didn’t see any of that."

The long sigh again. "That was apparent."

"But you — you were supposed to be my friend. Why didn’t you tell me about this?"

"I tried, Brandy. What do you think I was getting at that night in that bar on Keele Street? I said you were working too hard on the new galleries, that it was crazy not to get home till ten o’clock each night when you’ve got a lovely wife waiting for you. You told me that Tess understood." He frowned and shook his head. "Well, she didn’t. Not at all."

"So you decided to make your move."

"I’ve got news for you, Brandy. I didn’t go after Tess. She came after me."

"What?" I felt my world crumbling around me.

"Ask her, if you don’t believe me. You think I’d go after my best friend’s wife? Christ, Brandy, I turned her down three times. Do you think that was easy for me? The Tyrrell Museum is in a pissant all-white Prairie town, for God’s sake. I’m middle-aged and have permanent dirt under my fingernails from years of fieldwork. How many of the women in Drumheller do you think wanted to get down with me? Jesus, man. Tess is gorgeous and I pushed her aside three fucking times for you. I told her to work it out with you, to return to her husband, to not flush nine good years down the toilet. She kept coming back. Can you blame me for finally saying yes?"