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

told you so.” What she said instead was, “On some level, I knew it all along.” It was that “on some level” that I was grateful for. What I thought she meant, of course, was that she knew there had to be someone. She knew there had to be more to your leaving than just, “We want different things.” But it was worse than that. She knew all along that it was Esther.
    Funny how you lock something in your mind without knowing why, a single word spoken in a certain way, a mood, a facial expression. The shutter clicks, and there it is, forever. I remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday, a sweltering August weekend that Esther came for a visit. I’m not even sure what year it was, just that it was unbearably hot. She had just arrived, and was standing in the dining room. She had a book, something by Susan Sontag, and she was telling you about it—and it was clear that she was talking to you, as if I weren’t even in the room. I remember the look, an unmistakable look, lovely and exclusionary. It was a look of love.
    There was a shy, breathless air about Esther at that moment, no doubt because she had just arrived, and there you were, right in front of her, literally taking her breath away. I even remember the way she stood, her left knee bent, her foot lifting ever so slightly off the floor. She was tense, excited, her rotten little toes curling in her shoe.
    â€œSome of this is very difficult,” she said, opening the book and turning to the place she had in mind.
    It’s stunning, isn’t it, that a moment could so etch itself in your head and yet not register? But this is what I’ve been doing, all day, every day, highlighting the moments. They’re not what I thought at the time, those moments. They’re not what I thought, because while I was with you, every single day of the last two years, doing things that couples do, eating sandwiches and talking about remodeling the kitchen and cutting the grass and watching the kids orchestrate their social lives on Call Waiting, you were in love with Esther. It all looks different now, cast in a new and ugly light. I thought we’d had some good times, even in those last stressful months, and that nobody could take them away from me. But you managed to do it. You took all those memories—damn you!—and turned them into something I can never think of again without thinking of Esther. It’s like looking at a photograph, of your son’s graduation from high school, say, and seeing this shadowy figure lurking in the background. And you hold it a little closer, and you think, My God! There’s Esther. There’s my husband’s lover. What the hell is she doing there?

APRIL 13
    â€œHow can you blame someone for falling in love?” This is Nina’s feeling, anyway. It’s not exactly the cozy, commiserative comment I needed, but she’s always felt that way, even when she found out about Alec and Nicole. Everybody said, “Don’t you just hate Nicole?” No, she really didn’t. She didn’t hate anybody. She just wanted to die.
    Well, I don’t hate Esther, either, nor is Nina going to do me the favor of hating her for me. But I can’t be Esther’s friend. She did make a choice between you and me. The fact that Esther eventually worked things out with her husband doesn’t change that.
    There was one thing Nina said that made me feel better. “What I can’t understand,” she said, “is anybody’s having a choice between you and Nick and choosing Nick.”
    I don’t get it. I thought I was Esther’s friend. But friendship pales, apparently, in the presence of a man. That’s the great female malaise that makes a woman rush, headlong, every time, toward the man, the generic Man. Never mind that he’s taken, or that he happens to be married to a friend, or that she herself happens to be married, or whether he’s