A Guilty Man, and a May 1987 cassette

Cynthia and I had just finished one of the world's most awkward dinners with our non-profit's board of directors and we retired to the restaurant's bar. Our boss, Bob, had encouraged us to attend because he felt meeting the board would be interesting for us. Since he and the board sat at a completely different table and no one bothered to introduce us to them, it was more like being at the kid's table at a wedding. We went to the bar so we could escape and the two of us could gripe about Bob's failure to facilitate interacting with the board.

When Bob and his wife came over to the bar to talk to us (uninvited), Cynthia, who was not normally confrontational, angrily talked to him about his lack of social skills. He said we should have taken the initiative and approached these strangers ourselves. Sure, we could have walked up to a bunch of pasty, middle-aged strangers stuffing themselves with bread and interjected ourselves into their meals while standing inelegantly behind them, but it would have gone more smoothly if he had just introduced us like a civilized adult would have.

As Bob stood there sparring with Cynthia, he never once looked at me. Even when I spoke up in support of her arguments, he kept his eyes directed pretty much anywhere else. It was as if there was nothing but an empty seat next to her. His wife occasionally looked at me, and even went so far as to exchange a few pleasantries, but I was the invisible woman to Bob.

Months before this experience, Bob had treated me coldly and rudely at the office after being flirtatious with me for a few months prior. He flirted with everyone, but I was somehow a problem because I was younger and single. As I discussed in the book, a coworker told him it was becoming an office scandal and his response was to go too far in the other direction.

Since that situation, things had returned to more of a normal exchange. Bob didn't flirt with me, but he also didn't behave as if I was an evil that needed to be warded off at all costs. That was fine because I didn't carry on with married men. Because things had warmed up to a more appropriate level of professional interaction, I couldn't understand why he behaved so poorly at the restaurant when I talked to Tito about this experience on my tape. Decades later, when I revisited both this story and Cynthia, I figured out why.

Cynthia and I caught up in 2013 and she told me that she nearly had an affair with Bob within the year after I had left to be with Tito. They flirted intensely with one another for awhile and he even showed up at her house one night with the intention of consummating their attraction. She wasn't home and he retreated to his wife and confessed his intentions to her.

Cynthia was blamed, though she never did anything. Bob was a weak man with poor self-control, but he blamed the women he was attracted to instead of taking responsibility for his own passions. My best guess—many years after the fact and hearing myself tell this story on the pictured tapes—is that he didn't want to look at me for fear of betraying any lingering sense of attraction he felt to me in front of his wife. After hearing Cynthia's story, I could only feel sorry for his wife who was at that time a perfectly pleasant, average middle-aged woman who probably didn't know that her husband flirted with other women not to just have fun, but because he was filled with genuine desire for them.