Week 14 Story: Your Lying Eyes

(waitbutwhy)

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did!”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I saw you!”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Seriously, that’s the defense you’re going with? Even though it was in the house that you live in, where I saw it happening?”

“Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Brenda and David glared at each other from opposing ends of the therapist’s couch. As the argument raged between the couple, Dr. Markoff, a marriage counselor with fifteen years of experience, attempted to massage away her growing headache. She took a moment to imagine suffocating the two with a pillow, a brief look of longing crossing her face as she imagined the quiet that their deaths would bring.

“Please, this conversation is no longer productive. We need to move past the accusations and get to the real root of the problem. I would like each of you, in turn, to lay out the events as you remember them, including your feelings and thoughts at the time. I hope that this will allow you to empathize with each other. David, I would like you to start.”

“So, Brenda has been acting really distant lately. It just seemed like she’d lost interest in our marriage and me. Plus, I kept catching her giggling on the phone, but she’d always hang up when I walked in the room. I started to suspect that she was cheating on me. I knew she wouldn’t tell me the truth, even if I asked, so I set up a trap to catch her.”

Dr. Markoff raised a hand to interrupt his story. “What you’re telling me is that you did not trust Brenda to be honest, and you thought that the proper approach in that situation was to be dishonest yourself?”

David squirmed in his seat for a moment. “She started it.”

“Uh, huh,” Dr. Markoff responded drily. “Please continue with your story.”

“Anyway, I told her that I was going to be out of town for a few days at a convention. I waited for her to leave for the day, then hid back inside the house. She came home with some guy and went up to the bedroom with him, proving me right! I was so angry that I didn’t know what to do, so I just left. That was two days ago. I agreed to meet her here, because it will help with the divorce mediation.”

“Okay, thank you David. Brenda, if you could give us your version of events.”

“David has spent the last two months being a complete jerk. I spent a lot of time talking to my sister about it. She always makes me laugh. So, when he told me that he was going out of town for a few days, I thought it would be nice to have a surprise for him when he got back. I have an old friend, John, who I invited over after work to check out the upstairs and give me a quote. He’s a contractor. I was going to have him build an in-home movie theater. Apparently, Jerk-face decided that it must mean I was sleeping with John.”

“David, do you have something to say?” Dr. Markoff asked.

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry! I can’t believe I jumped to conclusions like that. I’m a terrible husband. Can you ever forgive me?”

Brenda patted her husband’s hand. “Of course, I forgive you. I love you. Also, John’s going to be moving into the guest room for a little while, and I’ll be spending a lot of time with him. He needs a lot of time and attention, but that’s how he does his best work. I want your movie theater to be perfect.”

Author's Note: The story about The Carpenter's Unfaithful Wife is about a man who believes that his wife is not being true. So, he tells her that he is going out of town for a couple of days. Excited, his wife gets dressed up and goes to tell her lover to come over that night, since her husband will be gone. The husband returns while she's away and hides under the bed. The lover arrives and seats himself on the bed. When the wife comes in, she sees her husband's feet sticking out from under the bed. So, she comes up with a plan. Gesturing toward her husband's feet, she tells her lover that she had gotten terrible news from the temple: her husband was to die in six months. She claims that the only way to save him is to have sex with another man, therefore passing the curse to him. They then proceed to become intimate. The foolish carpenter then comes out from under the bed and treats the two like heroes.

I decided to make the story a little more contemporary, and tell it after the fact. I thought that a marriage counselor's office would be a good place to get both sides of the story. I also wanted it a little more vague that the wife was really cheating, but not too vague. I also just wanted an excuse to use the line “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” I've always found it funny.


Bibliography: The Panchatantra by Krishna Dharma. Web source.