To My Ex-Husband Read Free Page A

stuff like that. The first thing we’d both say was, wouldn’t you know ? How could you live with someone and not know a thing like that? Well, that’s what most of these stories were like. And the timing. God, do men ever have a knack!
    There was Rob. He didn’t say a word to Claire until the weekend of their twentieth-anniversary party, with dozens of old friends about to descend on them from out of town. For weeks, Claire had been going over menus with the caterer, fixing up the garage apartment for the man who had been Rob’s best man and his wife, potting new plants for the terrace, making sure everybody had a place to stay. The whole time, he’d been strangely removed, like a part-time employee waiting for instructions: “Where do you want this to go? What do you want to do with that?” She asked him a couple of times whether anything was wrong, but he said no, he was fine.
    The Friday night before everybody was due to arrive, Claire was running a bath and sitting naked on the edge of the tub, cleaning potting soil out from under her fingernails. Rob came into the bathroom and began flossing his teeth. She was exhausted, and feeling a little wistful, so she asked him whether it wouldn’t be nice if, after the party, they went away for a few days, just the two of them.
    He didn’t answer; he just tossed the floss into the toilet and went into the bedroom. Claire followed, staring at him, as if to say, “Well?” Finally, looking at her for the first time in months, he suddenly screwed up his face and started to cry. Then he told her about Charlotte, and Charlotte’s six-year-old. He would be moving in with them, four blocks away.
    Claire said she couldn’t decide which was the greater humiliation, that he was telling her the marriage was over and there was another woman, or that he was telling her the marriage was over and there was another woman while Claire was standing there without any clothes on. Listening to this, I couldn’t help thinking about one other galling thing. It’s the men who cry. Tears, a big show. See how difficult this is for me, see what immense pain I am in. Feel sorry for me, because I no longer love you .
    Then there was Isabel herself, who was out for a walk with Paul and trying to find out when, or if, they were ever going on vacation. They were supposed to have left for the Berkshires every week for the last five weeks, and he kept postponing it. Turns out he had a girlfriend, a former babysitter of theirs, who was about to take her final exams for her BA, and Paul thought it would be too hard on her at this time—Isabel dragged that part out, “at this time,” precisely in Paul’s pinchednostril, I’m-an-attorney way of speaking—for him to go off with his family. A postscript to this story was that it solved once and for all what Isabel calls “The Case of the Errant Undies,” a spare little number in flesh-colored lace that Isabel had found last spring under the sofa in the den. She knew they weren’t hers, but managed to convince herself that they belonged to one of the boys’ girlfriends, and let it go at that.
    I won’t go into all the rest. But I wish you could have seen how ridiculous all you men looked in the retelling. There is another side to those stories, we know that; but no matter whose side you listen to, one thing is clear: Women are either monumentally stupid or deliberately, desperately, blind. If something is wrong, they simply won’t see it. In this one way, I felt lucky. You and I were not like that. There was no other woman. There was no lie. What you said was sad, but I had to believe it. There just wasn’t any other explanation. We want different things. It’s no one’s fault .

OCTOBER 15
    I went with Nina and Stephen last night to see The River with Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson. We seem to go to movies early these days. The theater was full of