Serial Monogamy Read Free Page A

wasn’t really my thing. That was Al’s subject area. He was the big man in comp lit, the expert on Dickens’ reading of
The Thousand and One Nights
, the prof whose devastating combination of an olive complexion, a Persian surname and a slight English accent—picked up when he changed planes at Heathrow en route from Tehran to Montreal aged thirteen, I guess—attracted a bevy of admiring undergraduates, girls with long tresses who had thought they might like to do a master’s thesis on Jane Austen until they met him. But people often assume you share your spouse’s interests.
    The Dickens serial was first proposed to me at a Christmas party. In retrospect, I wondered if the whole thing had been a set-up, the party organized so the publisher could suggest his project in circumstances where it would be difficult for me to refuse. At the time, however, I just thought Frank Randle was trying to be kind.He is the book editor at
The Telegram
, and I write reviews for him from time to time.
    I gave up academia and all pretense of a serious interest in Dickens a decade ago; I wrote my first novel, a silly little thing about a girl obsessed with Jane Austen, and when a publisher took it on, I quickly abandoned scholarship. Without anything else to do and a promising advance, I managed to produce a second one in two years. It was published straight to the international best-seller lists a few months before the twins were born. Public taste is always something of a mystery to me—perhaps readers liked the happy ending and the fact I kept it short—but the sight of me on the daytime talk shows, eight months pregnant and promoting yet another hit, certainly contributed to the notion women can have it all. I was able to hire a nanny and returned to writing before the girls were three months old. I was soon making more money than a comp lit prof, much to Al’s annoyance, I suspect, although he always said he was proud of me. His colleagues at the university, on the other hand, found it difficult to hide their contempt. My books aren’t romances per se; they don’t even necessarily feature happy endings any more, they just conclude with hopeful moments that allow the reader to decide whether widows have the strength to go on or divorced dads find love for a second time.
    Frank, meanwhile, assigns me impenetrable literary experiments about which I dutifully rave or sexuallyexplicit novels penned by writers covered in tattoos that I defend against anticipated slights. I get to prove my intellectual credentials and he gets to parade my name through his pages. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.
    That was not, however, why he had invited me to a drinks party in the cramped Victorian he shares with two cats and thousands of books. It was a rare bit of entertaining on his part and I assumed I was there because he felt sorry for me. That had made me all the more determined to go, determined that I was going to feel well enough on the night, that I could do something perfectly normal, maybe even enjoy myself. Al was convinced that it would only be unnecessarily exhausting, but when he failed to dissuade me, he decided he had better come along too, chauffeur me there and lend support. That was fine; I’d put a brave face on the whole situation, show everybody I didn’t need their pity on any score. My hair was just growing back; I had a little buzz cut that Al said looked sexy, which was just him trying to be nice. Every woman in the room knew I was too old for anything so radical and guessed the reason behind it if she did not already know the gossip. I was the woman whose husband came home only because she had breast cancer.
    —
    So there I was, parked in the living room with some other authors whom I didn’t recognize, trying to remember to nurse the soda water I had been reduced to, only so thatI didn’t need to run off to the bathroom, and pretending I had read some article in
The New Yorker
although Al had let our