Trouble by Kate Christensen

had possibly been my biggest mistake with him.
    Now, I stood at the kitchen counter looking at his well-shaped head, watching him eat spaghetti that hadn’t been cooked enough, remembering how much I had adored him. I felt like crying, but I couldn’t cry. On his face was an expression of deep engagement in whatever he was reading.
    He had squandered my love. That was what it came down to. I had no more to give him, and therefore it was over.
    “Anthony,” I said.
    “My sweet,” he said, turning a page.
    “Hello,” I said.
    “Hello,” he repeated. His voice held a certain amount of warmth, but he did not look up from his book. His reading glasses had slid halfway down his nose. His hairline had receded high up on his scalp; his graying hair spiraled down his neck in discrete, handsome curls. Under his V-necked blue sweater, his stomach had gone a bit soft. He wore black trousers and sneakers. He was beginning to look like Benjamin Franklin, with that firm, well-shaped mouth, those weary, intelligent eyes with pouches underneath, those incipient jowls. He was fifty-three years old, and he looked it, but he still had whatever quality it was that had originally attracted me to him. I could easily imagine, without a single pang of regret, some other woman scooping him up as soon as I had extricated myself from him. She was welcome to him; I had outgrown him. It was her turn now, whoever she was.
    I looked at him, jangling with wakefulness and nerves. “Where’s Wendy?” I asked, my leg jittering up and down. I took a gulp of wine.
    “She stayed for dinner at her friend’s house.”
    “What are you reading?”
    “A book about post-Communist capitalism in Eastern Europe.” He held his book up briefly to show me the dark, scholarly-looking cover; then he found his place in it again. “He’s a Marxist,” said Anthony as he continued to read, “who can’t accept the fact that Communism failed because of its inherent flaws, not because of history. He actually skewers certain of his fellow Marxist sociologists for failing to demonstrate the proper optimism.” Anthony said the word optimism with ironic emphasis. It was a quality he had little patience for.
    “How did your radio interview go this morning? I had clients; I missed it.”
    “All the NPR announcers are doped up on Xanax. Cozy little world we live in, cozy little people.”
    “What are they supposed to do, scream with horror? They’re just reporting the news.” He had no response to this. “Sounds like it went well, actually,” I said.
    “All I was doing,” he said, his eyes in his book, “was preaching to the choir. The Prius-driving, recycling, low-carbon-footprint choir.”
    Anthony could talk and read at the same time. But his eyes trumped his ears: He usually remembered what he’d read while talking, but he never remembered conversations he’d had while reading. He was like a sleepwalker who grocery-shopped and paid bills in his sleep and forgot it all the next morning. Most of our conversations were now conducted with a book between us— his book, of course. When I read, I shushed him ferociously, for all the good it did me; he had never accepted the fact that other people didn’t possess his unique facility for ingesting words with his eyes while spewing them from his mouth.
    He turned a page, scratched his forehead. He had barely looked at me since I had entered the kitchen. Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed, but now that I had been awakened to the fact that this marriage was dead, I took it as confirmation. I sat across from him with my plate of spaghetti. I began to eat, because I was hungry, but I had to force the food in, chew the undercooked strands hard and swallow hard to get them past the tight constriction in my throat. The wine tasted like life’s blood to me; I took another acidic, thick red gulp. The wine and spaghetti roiled in my stomach. I forced more of everything down.
    I didn’t know how to say it. I couldn’t