The Cheater Calls

Thursday, 1pm, Corner of Lexington & 42nd Street

It's drizzling a cold sleet. People are using their umbrellas like bumper cars, slaloming their way down the icy sidewalk. I'm waiting to cross Lexington, when a woman behind me starts yelling angrily into her Bluetooth earpiece.

"You have got a lot of fuckin' nerve to call me. You piece of shit. What am I, the biggest schmuck in Manhattan? Don't tell me to calm down. I've never been so fucking betrayed in my life. I'm humiliated. My soul is broken. No. You go fuck yourself, you fuckin' cheating bastard!"

I hazard a look backwards. The woman is in her early 40's, wearing a Donna Karan power suit. She catches me looking at her and I snap my attention back to the Walk/Don't Walk sign. She continues.

"Am I leaving? Are you fucking serious? I'm already gone, fuckhead. I'm coming by later tonight to get my things and you better not fucking be there or I'll don't know what'll happen. You hear me? Do those scumbag friends of yours in your office know what you did to me? Cuz they are gonna find out!"

The light changes and the woman strides past me, her black pointy-toed boots snapping icy water back onto my feet. I'm thinking that she looks remarkably clear-eyed for someone in the middle of such an enormous emotional crisis. She appears to be listening intently to the other person, and when we reach the far curb, then comes the resolution.

"You can beg forgiveness until your fuckin' mother comes outta her grave. But I'll telling you right now, I'll going straight to your office and telling everybody what you did, and then I'm going down to my office and doing the same thing. Then on Monday morning when everybody knows what a scumbag you are and how you cheated me out of my fucking commission on this project, a project that everybody knows I have killed myself on for you, then you see how many fucking traders you have left at the end of the day!"

I watch her head into the lobby of the glass tower on 42nd Street and I wish I could go with her to watch.

.