***Yah, Don’t Advertise Your Man

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Ruth Ryan and Robin Hunt were best friends from way back when. Way back went with a few intervals in between. They had gone through the George Washington Elementary School in San Francisco together, and then Robin had moved with her family down to San Jose when the computer boom hit in the early 80s and her father got into that bonanza early. Then the Hunts, as the computer industry spread northward, had moved back up to Frisco in Robin’s sophomore year of high school and the pair had reconnected at Galileo High. After graduation both young women went to UCLA together and were roommates all through college. And as fate would have it they both got jobs in San Jose in the flourishing computer industry there where they were still roommates sharing a condo rental together as the heart of their story unfolds.

Now that information above tells us a lot about how their fates have been intertwined but does not speak to things like boyfriends or not, how they related to each other or not, and where they both think they are heading or not. The first part of the question, and only the first part of the question, is what is of interest to us here. Ruth, a sassy brown- haired, brown-eyed, tallish, well-built woman goes for the intellectual-types and has run through a few men who have Berkeley or Stanford on their resumes. And as such intellectual types run she usually picks them about her height, thin and kind of well, if you ask Robin, nerdy, dwebs, whatever you call the misfits of this wicked old world. Robin, on the other hand tends to, uh, athletic types, well-built, with some brains but mainly a good bedmate. Right now Ruth is man-less having unceremoniously dumped a guy she met at a protest march who had some weird mother-fixation problems that he wanted her to solve. Please. Robin is now in a semi-serious (always semi-serious it seems to her) with Harry, a gym work-out nut who also happens to be a second level exec for a computer software firm. They met, well, they met in the gym, Mike Gold’s, over some training bicycle exhibit and they kind of hit it off (okay, semi-hit it off).

The reason this build-up is important is that while Robin and Ruth have, as friends, close friends will, had many a tussle over one issue or another, you know who was supposed to clean this or what didn’t take out the rubbish that they have never had a fight over men. Different tastes. They both claimed that is part of why they remained friends for so long. So neither one when coupled up thought anything of, as friends will, talking about their issues with their respective love interest, including, of course, sex, and the various ways that issue got, or did get played out.

So for the past few months Robin had been filling Ruth in on the details of her and Harry’s sex life. No big deal. Or one would have thought no big deal. It seems that Harry was not just some Adonis reflecting himself in some mirror but a rather generous and thoughtful lover. And has shown Robin few things that, well, made her blush when she told Ruth some of the details. And then things changed a little between the two best friends. Ruth would avoid being around when Harry came by the condo. She would be kind of secretive about her whereabouts when she didn’t come home some nights. She was also less talkative about stuff in general for a while. Not a big unexplained freeze but a little frost turn their relationship. Robin thought for sure it was one of her off-beat romances and Ruth was ashamed to bring the guy out into the open. Then things exploded on night. She had been sent by her company to a conference up in Seattle that finished up early and so she flew home early. You know the rest. When she got to the condo there were Harry and Ruth is a very compromising position, a position that Robin had told Ruth about in detail one night. Yah, so take old blues singer Sippy Wallace’s advice-please, under no circumstances, advertise your man. Enough said.