Free The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund by Jill Kargman Page B

probably be a messy divorce, a kid, and the clichéd anger of a woman scorned. I opened my e-mail account and looked back to find Natasha’s e-mail detailing her meltdown. A choice excerpt:
    â€œIt’s like they say, Holly: Infidelity isn’t the cause of a split, it’s a symptom something is wrong.”
    Of course all I could think of was When Harry Met Sally and Billy Crystal’s response to the same line: “Yeah, well, that symptom is fucking my wife.” I had no idea what was wrong with our marriage. We had occasional sexual dry spells compared to how we used to be, sure, but nothing was “wrong.” I read on.
    â€œI guess subconsciously I knew divorce was coming. . . . I could smell it in the marriage. Cliff started plotting and planning, I could just sense it. And you’re living and sleeping with your enemy. It is like a bad movie-of-the-week on Lifetime. You check his wallet for receipts belonging to a secret credit card. You watch his fingers as he checks his cell voice mail to figure out his password. . . . You check his voice mail with the password and hear girls calling. . . . I wanted to catch him cheating, so I had a girlfriend of mine call him and ask him out. Cassie called him and pretended she was a one-night hookup who was calling for more action. He bit. I flipped.”
    But the strange thing was, I never felt like I was sleeping with the enemy. I had confessed a few months back to my father that I sometimes felt a growing void between Tim and me, but it had since passed.
    â€œYou and Mom had good moments and bad moments, right?”
    â€œI’m not going to lie to you,” my dad had said. “Not really. It was always wonderful. The whole marriage. That’s not to say there weren’t times we were tired or maybe had disagreements here and there, sure. But it was never work with Mom. I hear people say marriage is work, but Mom never made it feel that way.”
    I heard his voice drift off. Even though it had been seven years since she’d passed away, I knew his voice could crack at any moment. My father was such a sensitive, kind, and gentle man that I knew when he lost her that in some ways, he’d never recover. I know people can deify those they’ve buried and that my dad was still and always would be in love with her, but after thirty years, I had assumed that, like all marriages, theirs had had peaks and valleys.
    And while I knew some of our valleys were definitely deeper within the last year as what I thought was Tim’s work had intensified, I never, ever clued in about the plotting—the CDs, the affairs, the fake phone calls, bogus business trips, and lame alibis. I was the dumbest, most clueless woman on the planet, or Tim deserved an Academy effing Award. Either way, I had been duped. As someone who always thought she was so damn smart, that realization made me cry the most that night.

11
    â€œI think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage.
They’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.”
    â€”Rita Rudner
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    T he next day, I awoke dreading the confrontation. In anticipation of Tim’s arrival home, I got my hair done and looked like a million bucks. Okay, maybe a thousand. Pesos. But in my fractured and weary state, it was the best I could do, and I needed to feel put together to face off with the man who I thought was my partner but was in fact a complete and total stranger.
    I had been distracted all day, running errands in zoned-out autopilot mode, grocery shopping and making dinner with Miles, and after tuck-in and bedtime, I waited. He was probably jamming in one more shag pre-return home. Via the Brooklyn Bridge, not LaGuardia. As I sat there, flipping through the daily pile of catalogs, I felt newly distant from the shiny smiling families who wore matching pajamas, each page marked at the bottom with a 1-800 number you could call to order up their synchronized