Read Online To My Ex-Husband by Susan Dundon - Free Book Online Page A

an enticement that I couldn’t identify, some sparkling pool of untested water collecting on the horizon, like a diamond in time. A day might come when I would grab it and run.
    And now this pain, searing and endless. There’s nothing else like it. I keep thinking, It could be worse . Peter or Annie could have died.
    My reality has been turned upside down. How could I have been so out of it? The lecture tours, the stopovers in Denver. What about the times Esther visited us? How did you stand my presence—by praying that I would fall backward down the cellar stairs?
    I picture you two tearing across the room, flying into each other’s arms every time I went off to the bathroom or to turn the chicken. Ninety seconds here, two and a half minutes there. The image is almost comical. Scramble, scramble, kiss, kiss and then, quick! Here she comes!
    How does the busiest man in America have time to leave his studio? Or did you walk out on your students? Why wasn’t it some stringy-haired postgraduate groupie, or a model from a life drawing class, some faceless female I couldn’t appreciate your interest in? It’s a bit ironic, all those times we played the Who-would-you-marry-if-I-died? game. Somehow, there’s very little satisfaction in knowing that I always had it exactly right.
    Where did you go when she was here, whose apartment? A hotel? One of those tasteful places with gold faucets and a hundred-and-fifty percent occupancy? If you weren’t the busiest man in America, you were the poorest. See how you’ve managed to overcome the two revolving reasons why we could never do anything. Emily, please . I have to work. Emily, please . We don’t have any money. Isn’t it amazing, the obstacles you can overcome, obstacles as insurmountable as time and money, when you’re in love?
    When I’m not thinking about this, I’m thinking about how stupid I feel. Or maybe it’s naiveté. Whatever it is, I seem to have raised it to an art form. I always was that way. Even as late as college, when other girls were saying things like, “He only wants her for one thing,” I thought, what? What’s the one thing? People tried to explain it to me, and I still didn’t get it. “Why,” I said, “would anyone want to do that with someone he didn’t like?”
    This morning I saw Dr. Bloom on what you could call an emergency basis. He just looked at me and, in that voice that’s so soft, so smooth, it’s as if he’s swallowed 3-in-One oil, said, “Nick’s behavior makes a lot more sense to me now.”
    I love that voice, am hypnotized by it. But without even realizing it, I’ve come to associate it with bombs falling. The smoother the voice, the more terrible the discovery. My body prepares; it knows. My chest heaves, moisture oozes through my skin. My hands fly up in front of my face to break the fall. Please. I don’t want to know .
    I recall that voice speaking to me last June, when I told him that you’d gone to bed one steamy night with your jockstrap on. It didn’t matter that I wanted you to take it off. “You’re going to sleep with that on?”
    I got the same weary response that I always got when I wanted something. Emily, I’m tired. Emily, I just want to go to sleep .
    Sleep , with these poor, pink little buttocks bound in a veritable highway system of thick, sweaty gray elastic. “It has to be,” I told Dr. Bloom, “one of the ugliest articles of clothing known to man.”
    He laughed. He’s not above letting me have fun with a story. Then he looked at me solemnly and said, in his 3-in-One voice, “I think that something is bothering Nick.”
    I keep thinking about that night at Isabel’s. I wish I’d known it at the time. I wish I’d known that of all those women, I had the best story of all.

APRIL 9
    Nina has spared me. She refrained from saying, “I