Tuesday, April 1  

Cheat

There are two kinds of cheating. There's the kind where you mean trickery and the kind where you mean adultery.

cheat: verb 1. to get money by deceitful trickery. 2. to be sexually unfaithful.

You can also use the word as a noun to call a person "a cheat". But that you'd reserve for someone who cheats a lot. Not an amateur cheater, a part-time huckster, a fairweather forger of truth.

Vic's only cheated once (outside small, annual fibs to the revenue and customs agency) so she doesn't think that counts as "a lot". Though it was of number 2 variety which weighs in somewhat heavy on the scale. She was never proud of it, but she believed in some way that she was programmed to cheat. Her father was a cheater. Or, at least, Vic's childhood sleuthing drew the conclusion that he did. Her dad missed dinners, had a distant look about him and didn't seem to recognize her mother when his eyes scanned over her. Her mother spent a lot of time with her head on the kitchen table, sobbing. Pretty easy to draw some weighty conclusions.

As they say (whoever they are), "once a cheater always a cheater", "can't change his cheatin' ways" and don't forget, "your cheatin' heart will tell on you."

Vic doesn't exactly dig country music, but she has to admit, they have an impressive handle on cheating.

This inscrutable evidence (gleaned almost entirely from Patsy Cline and Hank Williams inserts) points out that a cheater cannot be reformed. It's in the blood like alcoholism or a predeliction for heart disease. Both of which are also hereditary. Which meant Vic was destined to be a cheater too. By her reasoning, if she did happen to stray from the fidelous path it could only be blamed on her cheatin' genes.

She has to admit, she felt pretty badly about her one cheating episode, even before she knew she discovered her genetics excuse was a sham.

Vic cheated on William. (why do we say "cheated on" rather than "cheated against" since you're really not doing it ON the other person at all -- wouldn't be very secret that way at all)

It started when he did something that Vic didn't like. He invited his friend Allan to stay with them for a while, to invade their private place with his gym bags and his notebooks and his dark eyes always watching her move around the kitchen.

It middled when William kept not coming home at night, or coming home so drunk, he'd pass out on the bathroom floor.

It ended when Vic started watching Allan back. He saw his chance and pulled out all the seduction stops, going so far as to send potted lilies to her workplace. She never actually fucked Allan, it's true, but she did find herself with her pants undone, his fingers inside her and his tongue down her throat once. Maybe twice.

Call it what you want, that's still cheating in Vic's books. And she feels badly about it. Even when she sees William now, she's still plagued with secret guilt and long to scrawl "I cheated on you. I’m sorry." on a napkin and run out of the restaurant where they meet for lunch every month.

Later in her life, Vic found out that her father hadn't so much been a cheater as he'd just been apathetic. Which left her without much of an alibi.