I Am Having So Much Fun Without You Read Free

from work with a shopping bag full of carefully chosen things, everything comes flooding back and it makes me fucking ache because I can no longer connect these memories that feel so warm when I think about them to what we’re currently living. Somewhere down the line, it got hard to just be kind, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know when, and when I see all of the reasons to be back in love with her again, I want more than anything to be swept up in the tide of before. Somewhere in the losing of my love for Anne, I lost a little bit of my love for everything else. And I don’t know what I’m waiting for to get those feelings back. Nor how long I—we—can wait.

2
    NEAR THE end of September, Julien called to tell me that he had mail for me, and news. After walking Camille to school as I did each morning, I bought an elephant ear at a neighboring bakery and ate it standing behind a news kiosk, biding my time for whatever awaited me in a scented envelope.
    When Lisa said she was leaving me, she asked if she could write. The paradox of her request always makes me think of the Serge Gainsbourg song “I Love You, Me Neither.” Lisa Bishop even looks like Jane Birkin, the little minx. In any case, because I’m an idiot slash glutton for punishment, I said yes. I said write me at the gallery. I said never at my home.
    When I tried to imagine what these letters would be like, I had visions of me clue-searching for evidence that Lisa missed me, that she felt she’d made a mistake. I expected that when she finally did get married and was thus exposed to the libido-numbing administrations of conjugal life, that the letters might increase in volume and in temperature, that they’d be lurid, sexy things. In my fantasy world, I wrote her back, keeping a message-in-a-bottle thing going at the gallery, keeping my (nowonly intellectual) dalliances far away from home. I miss you back. I’m empty. But you’re right, it had to end.
    In reality, however, Lisa’s letters have been so disheartening, I haven’t responded. I’ve thought about writing her to ask her to stop writing, but there’s something so terribly childish about that, so very “sticks and stones,” I haven’t done that either. Besides, sticks and stones have broken my bones, and words have also hurt me.
    I don’t mean to be churlish about it, but you spend seven years on top-notch behavior only to finally give in, falter, seriously fuck things up, the least your accomplice can do is have the decency to love you back.
    I always assumed that Lisa wanted me to leave my wife. I spent a lot of time wondering why else would she be with me, and not enough time asking her why she actually was. And why was she? For the sex, she finally said. The novelty. The fun . And this from an American, a journalist , a woman endowed with neither the prudishness of her countrywomen nor the ethics of her trade. This isn’t how things are supposed to work when you’re a cheater. Lisa was supposed to go all fatal attraction for me. She was supposed to want to meet my kid and dream about being a fab stepmum who was a taller, brighter, wilder version of Anne. What she wasn’t supposed to do was casually drop over a light lunch of nigiri sushi that she was leaving me for a cutlery designer from London, a prissy toff named Dave.
    â€œGood Lord, he doesn’t go by ‘David’?” I remember asking with a cough.
    â€œNo.” She stuck her chopsticks into the center of the wasabi, two stakes through the heart. “He’s very nice.”
    â€œOh, I’m sure he is, with a name like that.”
    â€œPlease,” she said. “You’re not winning any originality awards with ‘Richard.’” She sighed and pushed away her sushi. “Are you seriously going to say that you’re surprised?”
    My jaw dropped, answering her question. “When did you even meet