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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWhen work doesn't suck, work blows. And people like Camille are the reason. Camille was a hack, plain and simple. She ruined everything she touched, insulted everyone she spoke to, and boasted loudly about a salary that no one else in the office could ever hope to make. Camille played tennis with the boss every Friday, downed blini and martinis with the boss every Wednesday, and hitched a ride home with the boss and his driver every day at ve thirty. The rest of us worked late into the night, every night\u2014sedentary, hungry, sober, subway-dependent, and full of loathing.When work doesn't suck, work blows. And people like Camille are the reason. Camille was a hack, plain and simple. She ruined everything she touched, insulted everyone she spoke to, and boasted loudly about a salary that no one else in the office could ever hope to make. Camille played tennis with the boss every Friday, downed blini and martinis with the boss every Wednesday, and hitched a ride home with the boss and his driver every day at ve thirty. The rest of us worked late into the night, every night\u2014sedentary, hungry, sober, subway-dependent, and full of loathing. \n\n In this office of haves and have-nots, at least I had my rst in a series of office wives, Amy (whose name I changed, like everyone else's in this piece). For the record, let's stipulate that the other women in a man's life are great. His wife is great, his girlfriend is great, and\u2014if he has one of each\u2014well, they're both great. They're everything he ever wanted, more than he ever hoped for, blah, blah, blah. But if he's going to spend all day and half the night at the office\u2014his prime postcoffee awake-and-alive hours, the ones in which he can think and speak and do\u2014what he needs is a condante, a fellow corporate soldier to share the smirks, the laughs, the deep, plaintive groans of incredulity, and the rare moments of self-awareness.\n\n Is the boss that clueless, that inept, that shallow or backward-thinking or dim or derelict? Has no one else noticed? But wait, someone else has noticed and\u2014even better\u2014has noticed you noticing. Out of nowhere, there she is: the work wife, the other woman your wife might just let you keep. It should go without saying that it helps considerably when the work wife is nonthreatening in age, looks, or ass size. Karen Hughes or Mary Beth Cahill will never be mistaken for Fawn Hall or Monica Lewinsky. Even t, trim, single Condoleezza Rice comes off like Marcie to George W.'s Peppermint Patty. (Evidently, instead of \"sir,'' she refers to him as \"my hus\u2014,'' as she did last spring in a room full of reporters.)\n\n In our own big, open, decidedly non\u2013Oval office, no one loathed the loathsome Camille more than Amy, who sat a few yards away from me. Whenever Camille picked up the phone to peck at her husband or squawk at her gynecologist, I noticed that Amy's eyes rolled when mine did, and I gazed with admiration at the cresting waves of hatred. When she looked up from her desk, she knew that I'd be looking, too. She loathed from the left, I loathed from the right, and we came to like each other in between.\n\n Amy was dating a guy with a wine cellar and a roaming eye. I had a anc\u00E9e and a wedding date. No man was good enough for Amy, including me. But in our own casual, platonic way, we became a couple: I didn't have to love, honor, or obey\u2014I merely vowed to hang out with her at re drills. We ate lunch together, mocked coworkers together, and shared the few genuine feelings that didn't get soaked with cynicism and sink to the bottom of our souls forever. She kept me from sending hotheaded e-mails I might later regret. \"Step away from the keyboard!'' she would tell me. I kept her entertained. For ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, Amy was my work wife. I was her day husband.\n\n Of course, a work wife, like any wife, must rst be courted. Amy was no different. I wrapped up pretty, shiny nuggets of information\u2014about a woman in Accounting, for instance, who greeted me in Klingon (\"Nook-neckh!'')\u2014and handed them over. She gave as good as she got, especially when she revealed that the hottest woman in the office had gone into the ladies' room, removed her bra, and asked coworkers as they sauntered in if one breast felt warmer than the other. Amy also made it her job to outwit the affably clueless man we all worked for. When the boss presented me with the traditional Tiffany decanter during a perfunctory prewedding company toast in the conference room, I unwrapped it, made the appropriate sounds, and tried to insert the stopper in the top. It was too big. \"Let's hope the wedding night isn't like this,'' he yodeled. As his loyal underlings tittered, Amy refused to let him have the last laugh. \"Gosh,'' she countered, \"let's hope it is.''\n\n After the courtship, we silently pronounced ourselves Day Husband and Work Wife and began unpacking months of mentally cataloged insights and outrages. The matchmaking moment that brought us together, the Rosetta stone of our relationship, involved Camille. As far as Amy and I could make out from the one-sided phone conversations we overheard, Camille's mother was ghting a painful, drawn-out battle with cancer, the outcome inevitable but never spoken aloud\u2014not on our end, anyhow. The mother, at the other end of the line, would clearly be recounting the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation in a weak, resigned voice we could only imagine. \"You think you've got problems?'' we heard Camille announce one day to the terminally ill woman who had raised her from birth. \"That's nothing.''\n\n Our sideways glances became full-blown stares.\n\n \"You think you've got problems?'' Camille repeated. \"I've got a babysitter who can't take phone messages.''\n\n The people we make fun of are the people we don't want to become. By telling a work spouse who we aren't, we're telling her who we are. For many men, this qualies as intimacy. Admittedly, the intimacy of a work marriage is often based on stuff that no one else would get. With your work spouse, it's all inside jokes and nely honed impersonations that can never be fully appreciated by an outsider. It is the very essence of You Had to Be There. Although a lot of work-spousal activity happens in public places\u2014at a conference table, in a meeting\u2014the mental place you go to in those moments is a zone that no one else, other than you and your work spouse, will ever enter. When someone you both hate does something profoundly annoying or stupid, you look at each other instinctively, move an eyelash or swallow a certain way, and everything is thoroughly grokked and agreed.\n\n Tak, for example, the Splenda-sweet coworker who sashays in and out of her cubicle in a skirt with a triple-size cat appliqu\u00E9d on the front, its whiskers in a very unfortunate place. All you have to do is mouth \"meow'' to your work wife and clarity is yours. Or there's always the evil overling who is writing the Ungreat American Novel on company time, foisting his real work on others. Whenever he speaks at a meeting, you pretend to take copious notes, creating a thorough faux transcript of his transparent, ass-covering nattering (\"I'm just wondering if we should ruminate on that idea, maybe big-picture it and focus-group it before we proceed''). When you ick your exhausted wrist with a subtle ourish, he has no idea what you're doing, but your work wife does.\n\n Telling your real wife that story, or explaining why so much annoyance is embedded in a tiny moment in a meeting, requires such a tremendous amount of backstory and preamble and small-beans exposition, it's futile. You could literally be telling the story from the moment you got home at night to the moment you spit out your toothpaste before bed\u2014that's how much you would have to explain to someone not in the work marriage. And to the real wife, it's the most boring shit she's ever heard. She is mindlessly uh-huh-ing you and clearly more enthralled with the Smith &amp;amp; Hawken catalog. \"Honey,'' she tells you after listening to hours of your scathing insights, \"I think I'd like to grow organic squash.'' And really, who can blame her? With the work wife, you can have the epiphany, get it out in the open, perform the skewering pantomime of Chumpy McFuckstain ponticating at the staff meeting, leave it at the office, and get your ass home on time. You wouldn't wear your muddy shoes into the house; why track in all the dirty dealings of the day?\n\n Ezra, a television writer in Los Angeles, has an office wife as well as a real wife, Louisa, who is thrilled to share him. \"There's no quicker way to put my wife to sleep than to hear me talk about an idea I have for a TV show,'' he says. But his office wife, Beth, is a captive audience. They BlackBerry each other during meetings, even when they are sitting side by side. When lunch arrives and Ezra hates what he ordered, Beth trades with him. When he's late, Beth leaves him a catch-up note (\"Paul is mad about the rst scene, thinks it needs to be more physical''). He does the same for Beth. At home, when Ezra wouldn't shut up about one coworker in particular, Louisa banned all discussion of the man. \"I had a hate-on for the guy,'' admits Ezra. \"He liked to discuss every line of every page of script as if it were the SALT treaty. If we moved at his pace, we'd never make it home for dinner, which was our number one goal each day.'' When the ban took effect, Ezra knew Beth would pick up the slack and listen to him for as long as necessary.\n\n Men, after all, like to say what they think when they think it. They're not so adept at taking mental notes for later. Craig, a teacher in New York City, has a work wife for just that reason. \"It's hard for my wife to really care that my ninth graders were nightmares,'' he says. \"Plus, I'd lose the need to vent about it. There's something very unsatisfying about trying to nd a minute to pick up the phone, wait on hold, and then complain to your wife, who has never met half the people you're talking about anyway.'' Craig's work wife, Mary, tells a similar story about her own home husband, who tried to show an interest in school stuff, \"but I would often forget the little things that seemed so important during the school day,'' she says. \"At the end of the day, all the crap Craig and I complained about seemed pretty silly if you weren't in the thick of it.''\n\n Though Kristin, Craig's real wife, considers Mary a close friend, she can't help but be somewhat jealous of their work-spouse relationship. \"Craig still tells me about his students at night,'' says Kristin, \"so I never feel like Mary hears stuff I don't get to hear. But sometimes he will quote her to me, something particularly insightful or empathetic she said, and I'll think, I wish I could be that good a listener.'' Craig once even admonished Kristin: \"Everyone, at some point or another, is a better listener than you are.'' Ouch.\n\n Every office-wife tale has certain patches of discord, but in general, if your wife is the girl you can bring home to Mom, your office wife is the woman you can bring home to your wife. Coworkers, of course, conjure up fantasies of some third-rate romance, some low-rent rendezvous\u2014an office wench instead of an office wife. But you know better. While the rest of the office imagines her tonguing you in a Swank magazine sort of way, your work wife only touches you in a got-your-back sort of way. But inevitably some office wives and day husbands end up using the rox machine for more than collation. There will always be people who have to go and ruin it for everyone else.\n\n Walter and Wendy, for example, the tallest \u00FCber-Aryans at their media company, were married to others when they became work spouses. Different genders, says Wendy, means a certain tension, even if it isn't physical at rst. (\"You're the only people around here with any sort of sexual energy,'' one prescient coworker told her.) Long hours meant they saw each other more than they saw their real spouses. They talked office politics, world politics, and books, and eventually Wendy counseled Walter on his failing marriage. Soon he was recounting dates with other women. \"It was a really good way to get to know someone,'' says Wendy, who supplied pickup lines as well as breakup strategies. She even went so far as to befriend and defuse a former girlfriend of Walter's who was stalking him. When Walter's young daughter visited the office, she sat on Wendy's lap and played computer games. Wendy and Walter are married now, to each other.\n\n After Amy and I stopped working together (that's one nice thing about work marriage\u2014there's no such thing as work divorce), I cut a wide swath through subsequent jobs. I've had only one wife, at home in Connecticut, but in my career, I've been like some Scripture-spouting, woolly-bearded Utahan, with at least a dozen work wives. They've been to my house, met my wife, held my kids. I've met their boyfriends, been to their weddings, babysat for their children.\n\n Work Wife Number Five, Marie, invited herself to dinner one Mother's Day, adding a dangerous layer of intrigue to her relationship with my wife. After years of practice, Marie thinks every woman should have an office husband, \"especially if you're single and they're married, because then there's no worry\u2014at least for this nice girl\u2014that things will cross the line.'' Marie has left a legion of heartsick work husbands behind her. \"They tell you about their kids and their home renovations and the suburbs,'' she says. \"You tell them all about your insane dates and how you need to freeze some eggs.''\n\n Whether at work or at home, marriage is a series of secrets and revelations\u2014oddly specic, occasionally insightful. My wife, for instance, does not know that my biggest fear about getting old is that I'll become one of those little antique men driving around in one of those little antique cars with the top down. She has no idea what I think about clove cigarettes, bad toupees, or black-and-white scarves depicting piano keys. But my work wife does. You had to be there. And she was.\n\n Tom Prince is an editor and writer who lives in Connecticut. This is his rst piece for GQ."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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