OPINION: When the mistress has an edge over the wife!
Every woman has this dream of when she meets the “other woman” in her husband’s life. She sees this “other woman” as plain dull and with an interesting background – a woman who would be pathetically grateful for any male attention. A woman she, the wife, would look down on with pity, convinced that her husband would be insane to leave her for cheap thrills like this one.
She’s kidding herself, of course! The other woman is often ravishingly attractive and eager to give the wife at home a stiff competition. Ifi said she never really met her husband’s women until recently. All she’d come to rely on whenever he was having affairs were the tell-tale signs – His reluctance to make love, his going to cocktails and dinners without her and his distant look whenever she discussed anything important with him.
Ifi would be the first to tell you that Levi, her husband, did not get to the top today by being
‘straight’. He’d always bragged that he knew a great deal about human nature and had found out early in life how easy it was to arouse greed. It’s amazing the number of palm-greasing he’d been able to get away with – the fat commissions he’d pulled over the years showed just how successful he’d exploit the greed in his contacts.
A very ruthless businessman, he’s always stopped any opposition in its track. Ifi and Levi live in one of the reserved areas in Ikeja, but Levi has a consultancy office on Victoria Island. Ifi was in Lagos early this year to do some shopping for one of the kids’ forthcoming birthday, and since she didn’t bring her car, she thought she would cage a lift from her husband. The shopping centre she visited was a few minutes walk from his office.
“Levi shares the same floor with his younger brother who is also a partner in his firm”, Ifi told me. “Onome, his brother, is really Levi’s right hand man and I thought I would say hello to him first. The top of the door to his office is glass, and what I saw in that room made me dizzy with shock. At the desk sat this lovely lady, vaguely, I remembered Levi telling me about a year ago that they’d just employed a brilliant company secretary. And there she sat, a beautiful lady in her thirties. She had class, I would say that for her. Levi was with her – sitting in Onome’s chair. Where was Onome? I discretely disappeared to give the love-birds the privacy they needed. The intimacy between this woman and my husband was obvious. As I hesitated, his fingers played teasingly on the front of her blouse. I drew back swiftly and rushed down the corridor to the ladies.
“My first reaction was to go home in a taxi but why should I? Levi, was afterall, my husband. With head held high, I marched back to Levi’s office and waited for him there. His secretary had this funny look on her face as she hurried to go call my husband. Levi carried off his surprise very well when he saw me. I explained why I was there and he told me he’d gone to discuss the forthcoming official party with the new company secretary…
To be continued...
