The Angry Wife And The Husband Who Doesn't Look Like John Lloyd Cruz

      Few weeks ago, I was sitting in front of the computer inside my room when I was startled by two loud, arguing voices outside. I looked out the window and saw a woman and a man (probably both in their late forties) standing and bickering directly below my window. Both looked lower class, the woman a bit fat and ordinary in her duster and the one really doing the tongue-lashing. And the man, he was potbellied, dark-skinned, he sort of resembled the late great character actor Max Alvarado and had black, crude tattoos on his right arm and was, as I listened to the woman, jobless, a drunkard and an ex-convict.

      I stayed by the window, looking at them, hoping that once they saw me hovering on them like a spy drone, they would move out and quarrel in a different location. They saw me, alright, but they stayed there and continued their heated argument—so I gave up and went back to my seat in front of the computer. The man’s an ex-con and would probably not relish my eavesdropping on them and might do something to me that I might not relish, too. But I could still hear them, and the gist of their argument? They were husband and wife, and the woman just caught the man, red-handed and in flagrante delicto, cheating on her with another woman (who was also married). And what was really enraging the poor woman was that it was the second time in a year that he caught him cheating on her.

      Married, an ex-convict, jobless, drunkard, unfaithful, these are the traits that women in their right mind would not really go gaga for—and still, this philandering man had two paramours in a year, and yet, some decent, loyal, quite attractive  men can’t even get one girlfriend in thirty years. Jeez, Rod was right when he said some guys just have all the luck.

      So, I sat there, listening to the furious wife harangue his jerk of a husband, silently cheering her. The last words I heard from the woman before they went away and everything turned silent and contemplative?

      “Buti sana kung kamukha mo si John Lloyd!”

      It was followed by a barrage of curses and expletives that would make even the derang--, er, I mean, our president, the King of Swear Words himself, Rodrigo Duterte, blush and wince.