Trouble by Kate Christensen Page B

are.” I lost control of my face then and had to struggle with my cheek muscles for a moment. “You would never go to therapy with me,” I added.
    Anthony closed his book. “You know why, Josie,” he said tightly. “I was this way when you met me. I haven’t changed. You’ve changed, and I accept that, although I would vastly prefer you didn’t leave me, and that’s an understatement. Of course you deserve a man who’s more compatible with you. I am so sorry I’ve failed you.” He said this last sentence as if it were a line in a school play he was mocking. I hated it when he did this, couched something that ought to have been genuine and touching in ironic glibness. It seemed cowardly; it was nothing but a sign of how limited he was.
    “I think I should move out as soon as possible,” I said. I gave a small vestigial hiccup, which annoyed me; it undercut my righteous anger at him. “We should tell Wendy tonight, when she gets home. You’ve made this very easy for me, Anthony. There doesn’t seem to be anything left to say.”
    “You’ll be back,” he said.
    “Not until you stop being condescending and impervious,” I told him, my anger suddenly gone, just like that—poof— replaced by something like giddy relief. I was leaving; I was free. I began to eat my spaghetti again. “You make the worst spaghetti,” I said, laughing.
    I noticed that he had not reopened his book. I had his full attention, it seemed. “All of us Italians know how to make spaghetti,” he said. “It’s in our blood.”
    “Well, yours is horrible,” I said. “Undercooked and glutinous.”
    “I follow the directions!”
    “The directions are fallible.”
    He shook his head. This was by no means the first time I had pointed this out to him. “I like it like this,” he said.
    “That’s very sad.”
    “Maybe I just have different taste in pasta doneness than you do.”
    “Maybe you’re totally out of touch with the sensory world.”
    “Maybe not entirely,” he said, looking fondly at me.
    Now it was my turn to feel the old, old pull of passion for him.
    “You know, if you would agree to just a few therapy sessions, I might be able to stay,” I said. “What’s the harm in just trying?”
    “If we can’t work it out on our own, we can’t work it out.”
    “That makes no sense whatsoever,” I said.
    “Nevertheless,” he said.
    “You think if you use a word like nevertheless , it makes your argument viable?”
    He rubbed his hands over his face and blinked a few times. “Listen,” he said. “I can’t say I’m totally surprised here. So you want to go? Go. I predict you’ll come back eventually. I feel like you need to do this. I am not going to fight you, but that’s only because I believe that you will come back in the end.”
    “You’re kicking me out?” I said.
    “Not exactly,” he replied.
    “You’re just being preemptive,” I said. “You macho guido.”
    We both laughed.
    “If I thought therapy would do a thing, I would go,” he said. “No offense to your profession.”
    He had always mocked my profession; I had never been the least bit offended. Now I wondered why the hell not.
    “If I were our marital therapist,” I said briskly, “I would force you to exercise regularly, cut down on the booze, and take vitamin B supplements.”
    “Right there, you’ve lost me,” said Anthony. His tone was predictably laconic.
    “And then,” I said, “I would send you and me on a weeklong vacation to somewhere like Glacier National Park to stay in the lodge and hike all day and canoe on the lake, then come in and take a hot shower, have cocktails, eat a big dinner, and go to bed early and have sex every night.”
    He watched me, half-smiling skeptically, waiting for me to go on. His book lay on the table, ignored.
    “And then we could start to talk about the reasons why we’ve both shut down over the past ten or so years. You know, clean up the marital ecosystem. Try to get everyone