THE FORTY-SECOND PAGE

The first page makes it clear that this was a marriage that did not survive. It is no more complicated than that. When we slept together, it was a fine romance. When we appeared together in public, our differences were manifested: Beauty and the Beast unreconciled is not a pretty sight. Children were not for consideration. I had my books; she had her career. Cloning either of us would have been far more desirable than the pathetic procreative union of our unpredictable passive-aggressive tendencies, which when erupting at intervals could turn the lowliest dinner party into the cheesiest kind of made-for-television movie.

In the year or six months or however long we were married, we were apart more than we were together. She was making a lucrative segue from crowded rat trap dressing rooms in the city to the boring movie shoots with blue screens in the sunset.

The grounds for divorce were warranted, as far as I was concerned. The legal distinctions were incompatibility and cruelty, but these were bound to occur in a relationship in which the mate has not finished reading the author’s novel. She had gleaned the work’s quirky philosophy, but ignored the stirring narrative. She didn’t even realize that the boy and girl had walked hand in hand off into the sunset. Her note to me was a scam.