When the lockdown began in March 2020, my husband and I decided to retreat with our youngest two, then aged 12 and 15, to our home in Martha’s Vineyard. [une petite île du Massachusetts]. We landed on March 15 and unpacked our big sweaters, boots, notebooks and cellos, ready to stay there for quite a while.
My husband set up a desk on a folding table in the living room, and every morning, from 4 am, he paced the room worrying about the state of the markets. He cut wood, of three different species, to light superb fires, and prepared me sour whiskeys that I sipped facing the setting sun (we were convinced that whiskey helped eliminate the virus, as some claimed). Our eldest learned to cook homemade gnocchi, and her little sister to play Fortnite. We were delighted to enjoy the house out of season, and to discover the island for the first time in the last rays of winter.
A week after our arrival, on March 22, at 6 am, my husband announced to me that he wanted a divorce. He packed a bag, got into his Jeep, and headed for the ferry. We had been married for almost twenty-one years.
fall from the clouds
Once back in New York, he justified himself: he thought he wanted this life but was wrong, he thought he was happy but lied to himself. Something had shifted inside him. He didn’t want to keep the house or the apartment, and wouldn’t ask for custody of the children.
I fell from the clouds. My husband was the kind of man who goes to bed at 9 p.m. and monitors his sleep cycles through an app. He was always the first to leave parties. He would go to the office, play tennis, then come home and watch tennis on TV. He wasn’t particularly tender or demonstrative, but I never doubted his love. He never flirted with other women in front of me. We weren’t bickering, he seemed happy and invested in our daily lives. The year before he left, he had built an extension to the garage and planted blueberry trees in the garden.
But as often in these cases, there was another woman in the landscape. Her husband called me on the evening of March 21, while I was mopping the floor in the kitchen after dinner, and left a message on my answering machine: “I’m sorry to report that your husband is having an affair with my wife.”
That evening, my husband apologized, full of remorse. He assured me that he loved me, and that this story didn’t matter. But at dawn, when he announced his departure to me, he looked different. Resolved. An icy glow illuminated his green eyes.
An earthquake at the worst of times
The rest of the story is just a succession of additional shots. He left me the year I was 5
2023-07-23 03:00:19
#York #Times #column #Modern #Love #married #twenty #years #complete #stranger
