A cheating wife drives a man to extremes

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I tried to protest but she held up her hand. “Please don’t,” she said. “There’s nothing you can say to make me change my mind. I’m just going to pack a bag and then I’m leaving,” she went on.

I was still in a state of disbelief. “Leaving? Where are you going? Can’t we talk about this?”

She shook her head sadly. “I’m going to stay with a friend until we can get everything finalized here. Please just accept it. Neither one of us wants to say anything that will make this harder than it already is.”

With that she disappeared into our bedroom, and as I stood there in shock, she reappeared in a remarkably brief time, rolling her suitcase behind her. It was as if she already had it packed and waiting.

“Please, Glenda, what about counseling? Can’t we find somebody . . .”

She brushed by me and opened the door. “I’m sorry, Alex, there’s nothing to talk about. It has to be this way.” With that she rolled the bag over the threshold and pulled the door shut behind her, leaving me standing there in stunned silence.

I slowly walked back to the sofa and collapsed on it. In the kind of novels I edit, the main character goes into a towering rage, or heads off to the nearest bar to get drunk, or leaves to try to get laid. I did none of those things. Instead I sat there in the growing darkness and tried to find answers to the questions swirling through my head. I simply could not comprehend what had happened, much less why.

My relationship with Glenda had not been remarkable. We’d gone to the same college and had been part of a group that hung out with each other all four years we’d been there. Most of the time none of us actually dated each other; it had been easier to do things as a group rather than pairing off. But during our senior year, Glenda began going with a guy who wasn’t part of our group, so we didn’t see her as much as in the past. I think she was hoping he’d pop the question, but he opted for grad school in California and they broke up at graduation.

I’d been an English major and, like so many others, wanted to get into the publishing business after graduation. Therefore, like so many others, I moved to New York City and started job hunting. Five hundred resumes and forty interviews later, I was working as a waiter and living with five other friends in a two-bedroom apartment in a bad section of Brooklyn.

Then I caught a break. It turned out my grandfather actually knew someone in the publishing industry, and when he found out about my dreams he called in a favor. The upshot was that I managed to land an internship at a real publishing company. The bad news was that the internship paid only the minimum wage, so I still had to wait tables at night after I got off from my day job. The good news was that I was now actually working in the industry to which I aspired and had the chance to learn what publishing was all about from the inside.

I was now working two full jobs and earning one meager salary (including tips), but the wonderful thing about youth is that you have both the energy and the naivety to put up with such conditions for longer than anyone not in actual slavery.

It was on a Tuesday night when I wasn’t scheduled to work at the restaurant that my roommates and I decided to head to a midtown Manhattan bar and waste some of our precious earnings on overpriced alcohol. As we were talking boisterously, I glanced up to see none other than Glenda Preston walk into the bar with two girlfriends.

He stopped his narrative suddenly. “Can you leave her name out of this?” he asked.

“Why?” I asked curiously.

He looked at me a bit sheepishly. “I guess I’m still trying to work my way through all this. Somehow, starting open warfare with her doesn’t seem like it would help.”

I was surprised; it seemed my nut case had more depth than I’d suspected.

“Actually, that will make it easier on me,” I told him. “That way I won’t have to track her down and get her side of the story. More to the point, this is supposed to be about Superman, not his ex-wife.”

“Okay, good,” he said, and resumed his story.

When I spotted her, I almost knocked my roommate’s beer bottle out of his hand as I rushed over to greet her. But as I neared her little covey, I pulled up short, suddenly hesitant. Would she be as eager to see me as I was to reconnect with her? But at that instant she glanced up, and when she spotted me she squealed, “Alex!” and rushed to embrace me. We hugged, then she drew back, looked at me carefully and kissed me on the mouth. I wasn’t sure where that was coming from, but it felt wonderful so I really didn’t care.

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