just moved on and forgot about our fight, without everclarifying whose job it was to take the shirts to the cleaner’s, let alone figuring out what that was really about.
You always think, when you hear about some woman running off with another man or somebody’s heartbreaking separation, that the marriage must have been a disaster, the couple must have known they were headed for the rocks; they were battling ferociously or barely on speaking terms or something. You think you’d get some warning, if such a thing were ever going to happen to you. I swear I had no warning, no warning at all. I thought the bond between us was steely strong, forged with passion and burnished by children. I thought if we occasionally disagreed about trivial things, it was merely trivial. A fight about a shirt was just an irritation, a diversion. Everybody has bad days; those times when you snap at your spouse only because she’s the nearest person at hand. Al did not really expect me to wash his clothes. But I guess if I look back, if I have to pick a time where I had some inkling that we might be in trouble, or saw for an instant, quickly to be discarded, that there was a real problem here, it was the night before the fight over the shirt.
It was at a party, a party to launch my third book; we had taken over a restaurant not far from the house. Waiters passed around glasses of wine and trays full of cute little appetizers; I had bought a sleek new dress for the occasion; my publisher made a pretty and flattering speech. I stood up to thank her and everybody else. I pulled out a bit of paper because I can’t be trusted notto ramble at these things and needed to stick to a script. As I was straightening out my sheet of paper, I looked out at my audience, readying myself to speak, and I saw a man who wasn’t looking at me; instead, he was staring off to one side. In a fraction of a second, there were three things I noticed about him. The first was that he was so handsome, heart-stoppingly good looking; the second was that he looked annoyed, put out somehow by the proceedings, as though he wanted to be somewhere else. And the third thing I noticed was that this man was Al.
Perhaps to put it in that order is overstating what happened; perhaps I should just say that Al looked unhappy, like an awkward outsider at this party, and that there was this millisecond before I recognized him, probably because he was standing in the shadows. At any rate, I had this tiny moment where he felt like a total stranger to me, a man I had never seen before in my life. Occasionally I have had hazy flashbacks to that night, fleeting moments when I look at Al and see someone else and then have a feeling of déjà vu, that I have known him as a stranger before. I think back to the first time I saw him at the front of a classroom, lecturing on Dickens, the sense of excitement that swirled around this unknown man, but then I realize that’s not it. And I think of the shock when he told me he was leaving, my image of him standing at the front door, ready to go, and I know that’s not it either, that was a time too full of my anger and sorrow over his behaviour for him to feel unfamiliar. And then I remember the night of the party.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating here. Everybody experiences those occasions when you look at the man who you have slept beside for a decade and wonder what the hell he’s thinking.
—
This Saturday, he’s looking puzzled, or maybe it’s disgruntled. He’s sitting at the breakfast table with the weekend paper spread out before him. With much fanfare
The Telegram
has announced a literary event and begun publishing a serial novel by the distinguished (their word, not mine) novelist Sharon Soleymani to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The first four weekly instalments have been received with a deafening silence, except for a few emails from Dickens enthusiasts and cranks, making suggestions about future instalments,
You always think, when you hear about some woman running off with another man or somebody’s heartbreaking separation, that the marriage must have been a disaster, the couple must have known they were headed for the rocks; they were battling ferociously or barely on speaking terms or something. You think you’d get some warning, if such a thing were ever going to happen to you. I swear I had no warning, no warning at all. I thought the bond between us was steely strong, forged with passion and burnished by children. I thought if we occasionally disagreed about trivial things, it was merely trivial. A fight about a shirt was just an irritation, a diversion. Everybody has bad days; those times when you snap at your spouse only because she’s the nearest person at hand. Al did not really expect me to wash his clothes. But I guess if I look back, if I have to pick a time where I had some inkling that we might be in trouble, or saw for an instant, quickly to be discarded, that there was a real problem here, it was the night before the fight over the shirt.
It was at a party, a party to launch my third book; we had taken over a restaurant not far from the house. Waiters passed around glasses of wine and trays full of cute little appetizers; I had bought a sleek new dress for the occasion; my publisher made a pretty and flattering speech. I stood up to thank her and everybody else. I pulled out a bit of paper because I can’t be trusted notto ramble at these things and needed to stick to a script. As I was straightening out my sheet of paper, I looked out at my audience, readying myself to speak, and I saw a man who wasn’t looking at me; instead, he was staring off to one side. In a fraction of a second, there were three things I noticed about him. The first was that he was so handsome, heart-stoppingly good looking; the second was that he looked annoyed, put out somehow by the proceedings, as though he wanted to be somewhere else. And the third thing I noticed was that this man was Al.
Perhaps to put it in that order is overstating what happened; perhaps I should just say that Al looked unhappy, like an awkward outsider at this party, and that there was this millisecond before I recognized him, probably because he was standing in the shadows. At any rate, I had this tiny moment where he felt like a total stranger to me, a man I had never seen before in my life. Occasionally I have had hazy flashbacks to that night, fleeting moments when I look at Al and see someone else and then have a feeling of déjà vu, that I have known him as a stranger before. I think back to the first time I saw him at the front of a classroom, lecturing on Dickens, the sense of excitement that swirled around this unknown man, but then I realize that’s not it. And I think of the shock when he told me he was leaving, my image of him standing at the front door, ready to go, and I know that’s not it either, that was a time too full of my anger and sorrow over his behaviour for him to feel unfamiliar. And then I remember the night of the party.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating here. Everybody experiences those occasions when you look at the man who you have slept beside for a decade and wonder what the hell he’s thinking.
—
This Saturday, he’s looking puzzled, or maybe it’s disgruntled. He’s sitting at the breakfast table with the weekend paper spread out before him. With much fanfare
The Telegram
has announced a literary event and begun publishing a serial novel by the distinguished (their word, not mine) novelist Sharon Soleymani to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The first four weekly instalments have been received with a deafening silence, except for a few emails from Dickens enthusiasts and cranks, making suggestions about future instalments,
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