Free To My Ex-Husband by Susan Dundon

inappropriate in a hundred other ways.
    In time, I may soften my line on Esther, as Nina has done with Nicole. Of course, it helps that Alec has now moved on to someone else, just as it helps me to know that it’s over with Esther, that it has been over. But it is fresh for me, as if you had been in bed with Esther yesterday and still loved her today. I have to remind myself that it’s been nine whole months since Esther left you in an August thunderstorm and flew home to tell Don what was going on. Their marriage may be better for it. I may even be generous enough someday to say I hope so. It would be good for the supermarket tabloids, too: HOW HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH MY FRIEND’S HUSBAND SAVED MY MARRIAGE !
    I read something in a Miss Manners column once on the subject of faithless husbands. She said it was an old and ugly trick of society to pit the women against one another and forgive the men. She’s right. It is an old and ugly trick, and I shouldn’t bother playing it on Esther who, after all, may not be worth my wrath. She isn’t the woman I thought she was. Nor you the man. Not because of the affair, but because of all the disguised weaknesses that were revealed. Telling me, for instance, as if I could be sympathetic, even so long after the fact, “Emily, I had two separations to go through.” If you had been watching a play, you’d have loathed the character. You’d have said, “That worm.” If being single has taught me anything, it’s that nothing, nothing , is what it seems.

MAY 5
    Ah, yes. To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. I know there was a time when I went to bed at night and slept until morning. I can’t really imagine that now, can’t feel in my bones what it must be like. I’m beginning to look deranged, nervous and big-eyed, like a lemur. It dawns on me, finally, the full meaning of an acquired characteristic. Because, in point of fact, I am getting awfully good at seeing in the dark. By summer, I will have completed my metamorphosis into a nocturnal animal and you will be able to tell people, with some accuracy, that you were once married to a small monkey. Do I sound insane? I NEED TO SLEEP.
    And yet I don’t feel in the least tired. On the contrary, I’m oddly energized, racing toward my middle-of-the-night high, when I write letters, or roll around in my/your old bed and think delicious, murderous thoughts. Years ago, I remember, someone in our neighborhood created a scandal by suddenly leaving his wife and running off to Florida with their babysitter. The next day, that short, funny woman with the frosted hair and the foul mouth who lived down the street came over and said, “Honey, if that ever happened to me, it would be on the front page.” God, she made me laugh.
    But the thing was, the reason I laughed was that I knew it was true. It would have been on the front page. One didn’t mess with that woman. She was all heart underneath, but she meant business.
    Well, I wish I were more like her. I wish I were a front-page kind of woman. Even my “murderous” thoughts are mild, as if I could be jailed for dreaming. Fantasies can be pretty dull if you don’t know what you want. Do I want Esther dead, so that practically everybody I know can sit around and mourn? Death elevates. Imagine. My adversary, an angel. Angel Esther.
    No, I don’t want Esther dead. I merely want her miserable, in excruciating emotional pain, as I am. Death does not inflict pain in oneself, only in those one loves. So what are my dream options here? To take out a contract on Esther’s husband—and leave Esther, the young widow, free? Never!
    Would that I could appear like a devilish Puck beside Esther’s marital bed and anoint Don with special, potent anti-love potion so that he would fall instantly out of love with his wife upon waking. Would that I could will abandonment into Esther’s life, snatch away her