Ulysses:A Cautionary Tale!

Happy Hour at Ulysses, originally uploaded by t_a_i_s.

Down on Wall Street there's this fun little bar called Ulysses. If you work down there you've probably been there for happy hour. It's pretty standard frat boy fare, but after a long day at work sometimes an Amstel and Dave Matthew's tunes are exactly what one needs.

A bunch of my friends like to go there every few weeks, although due to my schedule I've missed most of the antics. A few weeks ago a friend of a friend, we'll call her Rachel, met a handsome banker who we'll call Sven, even though he is from an Eastern bloc country.

Rachel is 24 and fresh to NYC from The South. She works in PR. Sven was 34, recently promoted at JP Morgan and all around seems like a nice guy. He worked long hours and had a beach house in Long Island with some office friends. They began seeing each other, having dinners, dating like a regular professional couple for about two months.

One evening Rachel was Googling Sven and stumbled across his profile on Reunion.com. What to her wondering eyes should appear but his profile, which stated that not only was he married, but he had a daughter as well. Egads! Oh, and he was 44, not 34. No shock there.

Rachel knew that if she confronted Sven about this he would claim to be separated. So she did what any smart girl would do: she called the home telephone number listed on Reunion.com and told the wife that she was from their bank, and needed to speak to her husband about a recent deposit. Sure enough, the wife gave her Sven's work number.

Armed with all this intel, Rachel organized a dinner with Sven where she planned to confront him once and for all, not to mention dump him. My other friend Patricia was privvy to all of it, since she was sitting at the bar watching and acting as moral support for the inevitable fall out.

Sven and Rachel sat down for dinner and Rachel laid it all out. Sven, admitted to it all, especially since Rachel had spoken to the wife.

But wait...there's more!

As if being married with kid wasn't bad enough, Sven said that his weekend beach house was in Rhode Island, not Long Island, and he used it to see another woman he was sleeping with.

Even worse: Rachel is the second young woman I've known who, unbeknownst to her, met a married guy at Ulysses.

Moral of the story: Maybe Ulysses isn't the best choice for after work drinks. And ladies, if your man says he's going there, maybe you should be suspicious. I have to wonder how much Sven's wife actually knew about her husband's behavior.