Free Serial Monogamy by Kate Taylor

do. We’re too much alike to be together.”
    “I thought you said we weren’t compatible.”
    “Yes, because we are too much alike. We both have these egos that need…I don’t know…Air? Space?”
    “Fuel. Your ego just needs fuel…” My voice was rising. He never yelled; he could be hurtfully dismissive in an argument but he never lost his temper. These days, he would go very quiet and look sad, which made me feel all the more desperately certain I was losing.
    When I was furious, he always seemed a bit surprised, taken aback that things might possibly get ugly. It was as though he had not anticipated my anger, or at least did not have any particular plan, any idea about what happened after you tell your wife you’re sleeping with one of your students. I wondered if she was pressing him hard for a resolution, just as I was, and if his preference might not have been to never tell me at all, and to keep going in the old-fashioned way, with a wife at home and a mistress in an apartment, for as long as he possibly could. A strong, decisive figure who had always exuded self-confidence—we’ll be going here; we’ll be doing this—he now seemed at a loss, unable to take control of a situation he had created.
    It was an impossible, miserable time and we got a brief respite when I took the girls out to Nova Scotia to visit my mother for a week, but since I did not confide in her what was going on at home, the holiday had a surreal quality for me as I played at being the happy mother and dutiful daughter.
    Still, the break from immediate, daily anguish calmedme and I returned determined to have it out with Al, to fight to give our marriage a second chance and our girls the home they deserved. Of course, in retrospect, I can guess he probably spent the time in the arms of his grad student, strengthening his resolve to leave, but after weeks of obsessing about her obvious lack of character and manipulative wiles, I happened at that moment to have achieved a bit of distance on the subject of Al’s lover. She was just a symptom of some middle-aged malaise that Al and I could fix together. I went home almost hopeful.
    And at first things seemed better. Al greeted us cheerfully off a midday flight and I unpacked while he mucked about with the girls. Did the bedroom closet seem a little less stuffed than usual? I suppressed my rising panic and kept going with my chores. Dinner seemed normal, filled with the girls’ accounts of the seaside, but as soon as they were asleep, Al was waiting for me downstairs.
    “We need to talk,” he said. “This isn’t working.”
    “Of course, it isn’t working. How did you possibly expect it to work?”
    “I think I should leave.”
    “I think you should break off this nonsense so we can try to fix things.”
    “It’s too late. You know that; there’s nothing here.”
    “How can you say there is nothing here?” I ask, gesturing around the living room where the girls had scattered the new toys their grandmother had given them. “Our life is here, the girls’ life, my life.”
    “Okay, but life has got to be about more than houses and junk, and ours has become about nothing else. Whose turn it is to pick up the girls, whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher. We wind up arguing about trivia. Do you remember that day last winter when we had that fight in the appliance store about whether we needed a front-loading machine? I mean, I really don’t care what kind of washing machine we buy and there I was arguing about it. I don’t even remember why.”
    “We can work on these things,” I plead.
    “What, you want to work on how to have more constructive discussions about washing machines?”
    “We can work on making more room for things that aren’t trivial. I can put the new book on ice,” I offered. It wasn’t getting written anyway. “If you feel I’m not paying enough attention to you, let’s take a break, get away somewhere.”
    “That’s not going to solve