Free To My Ex-Husband by Susan Dundon Page B

embarrassed to go to school.
    When, Nick, would you have told me about any of this? Ever? It dawns on me with horror that if Nancy hadn’t said something about Esther, I still wouldn’t know.
    When am I going to stop bumping into information as though I were living in a blackout? Is there more?
    I feel as though I’m this dinosaur, dragging my way through a crowded village, and people keep stepping on my tail. “Watch out!” they’re trying to say. But the message is traveling too slowly to my brain. By the time it gets there, the damage is done. I can’t stop it. All I can do is stand there and let it hit me in the face.
    The fact that you’ve chosen Isabel is not without its amusing aspects. She reminds me of the woman who used to do the Underwood deviled ham commercial, the tall, skinny, bookish woman with the huge black glasses who makes a move on the new tenant across the hall with her deviled-ham sandwich. She used to turn you on, maybe because of that dichotomy between the book and the bed, between the learned and the sexy, entities seemingly at odds. Dorothy Parker was wrong. It isn’t true that “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.” Glasses are like any barrier, such fun to remove. You want to claw your way to the real stuff underneath.
    But the Underwood lady was years ago. Years ago. It’s strange to think that may have been the genesis of your discontent, that our marriage disintegrated because of a deviled ham commercial, the woman you’ve wanted all this time, but never knew. I love thinking of Esther, my husband’s now former lover, Esther the historian, who’s even more bookish to my mind than Isabel, as a surrogate. And Isabel herself, the lady with hair the color of dust, and skin the pallor of an index card. I can see her sitting at her desk by the window, the June breeze wafting through the main floor of the library, luffing the long strands of fallen hair at the nape of her neck as she checks a stack of books in, flipping the covers—open, close; open, close; sliding the cards into their tight little envelopes. Is Isabel herself a tight little envelope? Is she thinking about you? Is our daughter sitting on the far side of the room, and scrutinizing her miserably over the top of her Greek civilization book?
    Well, okay. Okay . So you’re not coming back. You’re not even thinking of coming back. And you were the Man Who Would Be Monk. Self-contained, isolated, abstract, the thinker. I never thought you were really that interested in sex. Not that you didn’t like it now and then, only that there was no sense of urgency; there was no need. But there was a need, as it turns out. There just wasn’t any need for me.

JUNE 21
    Nina never leaves any room for doubt. “Nick’s gone,” she said. It was ten in the morning, and I was eating a Milky Way. Things usually feel a little bit better if I’m eating chocolate, but this was harsh.
    â€œHe and Isabel are probably doing all this great stuff.” All this great stuff , I thought wistfully. I tried to wrap my mind around the expansiveness of the remark. I had been childish, limited, ordinary in my lovemaking. I had held you back, and now I was paying for it with my imagination. You had replaced me in your sexual life, and there seemed no limit to what, with so little effort, I could put in the space I had vacated.
    But I knew what Nina meant. It was time to close the door that I’ve kept open. That’s what they always tell you to do: Keep the door open .
    I didn’t really need her to tell me that, or Dr. Bloom, who’s been waiting for me to get angry. Whenever I wax sentimental, he shifts impatiently in his chair, crossing one leg, not just over the knee, but high up, over the other, as if he needs to go to the bathroom, as if he literally cannot contain his eagerness to have me understand. I know that I pay him to be on my side, to be