The Ghost Read Free Page A

was willing to wait forever.
    You make it sound like you're leaving me. Charlie had cried just looking at her, and then he'd put his arms around her and they both cried. How could this happen to us? he asked her again and again. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, how could she do that? And yet she had, and something about the way she looked at him told him that she was not ready to let go of Simon. He tried to be reasonable about it, but he had to ask her to stop seeing him. He wanted to go to a marriage counselor with her. He wanted to do anything they had to do to fix it.
    Carole tried everything she could to make it work with him. She agreed to go to counseling and even stopped seeing Simon. For all of two weeks. But at the end of it, she was crazed, and she knew she couldn't give him up completely. Whatever had been wrong between Charlie and Carole seemed much worse suddenly, and they were both constantly angry at each other. The fights they'd never had before blossomed like trees in spring, and they fought every time they were together. Charlie was furious at what she'd done, he wanted to kill someone, preferably Simon. And she admitted to how unhappy she was to have been left alone so much, she felt as though they were nothing more than good friends and compatible roommates. Charlie didn't take care of her the way Simon did. She said he was immature, and accused him of being selfish. She complained that when he came home from a trip, he was too tired to even think about her, or talk sometimes, until they went to bed and he wanted to make love to her. But that was his way of establishing contact, he explained, it said more about his feelings than words ever could. But it actually said more about the difference between men and women. Their complaints were suddenly deep and ingrained, and Carole stunned him by telling their marriage counselor that she thought their whole marriage was centered on Charlie, and Simon was the first man she'd ever known who cared about her feelings. Charlie couldh't believe what he was hearing.
    She was sleeping with Simon again by then, but she was lying to Charlie about it, and within weeks it all became an impossible tangle of deceit and fights and recriminations. In March, when Charlie flew to Berlin for three days, she packed her things and moved in with Simon. She told Charlie on the phone, and he sat in his hotel room and cried. But she told him she wasn't willing to go on living this way. It was agony for all of them, and just too stressful.
    I don't want us to turn into this, she said when she called, crying at her end. I hate what I've become with you. I hate everything I am and do and say. And I'm starting to hate you ' Charlie ' we have to give it up. I just can't do it. Not to mention the fact that she couldn't practice law coherently while trying to juggle this insane situation.
    Why not? he had blazed back at her. Honest rage was beginning to take hold of him, and even she knew he had a right to be as angry as he was now. Other marriages survive when one partner has an affair, why can't we? It was a plea for mercy.
    There was a long, long silence at her end. Charlie, I don't want to do this anymore, she said finally, and he could hear that she meant it. And that was the end of them. For whatever reason, it was over for her. She had fallen in love with another man, and out of love with him. Maybe there was no reason after all, maybe there was no blame. They were only human after all, with unpredictable, erratic emotions. There was no saying why it had happened. It just had, and whether Charlie liked it or not, Carole had left him for Simon.
    In the ensuing months, he ricocheted between despair and rage. He could hardly keep his mind on his work. He stopped seeing his friends. He sat alone in his house sometimes, just thinking of her. He sat in the dark, hungry, tired, still unable to believe what had happened. He kept hoping that the affair with Simon would end, that she would tire