22 June 2001

Just got off the phone. E*Trade insists they'll hire me by Labor Day. Which would be wonderful comeuppance. Crazy Bloomberg bastard. Snotty CNN cretins. I suppose I should be flattered that CNN thought I was evening anchor material. Slightly insane that they think I can lose 40 pounds in 6 weeks. Well, I mean, I could pull that off, I suppose. But they also want breast implants and facial liposuction-I called around, I can't even get an appointment in the next six months. Plus which, even if I had my fat little face vacuumed tomorrow, isn't six weeks a short recovery time?

I'm doing my meditation stuff but it still seems like the universe is making sure my ego keeps getting little rabbit punches along the way.

Like today. It started off like any normal kind of day. Get up, mop up greyhound urine off the kitchen floor, shower, get ready for the big Bloomberg interview.

It is with Bloomberg Radio, which is a step down from television. But if I can nail the job, then I can leave my annoying, overweight, flatulent, impotent husband.

I was told the interview was merely a formality-the current morning host specifically requested they hire me.

We do the formalities and then Ivan the Interviewer asks me, “Which is stronger, the dollar or the yen?”

What a silly question. Jeesh. I hide my annoyance and ask Ivan to clarify-stronger how-relative to each other or relative to the euro? Stronger over what time frame?

Ivan says he didn't expect me to be one of those detail-oriented journalists. He puts finger quotes around the word journalist. I do not like finger quoters, they are passive-aggressive. Besides, this is financial news, not Entertainment Tonight.

He then says that he's sorry, but my weight is an issue. I'm confused-I'm too fat for radio? Ivan says they will film the radio show-sort of the way Howard Stern films his show-and so, sorry, but the new trend in television is the heroin-chic look and I simply won't do.

I am loathe to mix personal with business … but I tell a small, teensy lie and say that my husband has been laid off and I need the job.

Ivan claims he sympathizes and offers me a position in the mailroom as a file clerk that pays 28,000 a year. Quite a far cry from my prior six-figure salary.

I'm dazed. I'm thinking “poor file clerk” “rich wife” “poor file clerk” “rich wife” and I really wish that there was a third choice and I sniff and say that I'm awful at filing and I appreciate the opportunity and there you go.

Thinking it isn't possible for my day to get worse-in fact, walking down Park Avenue, tulips a-bloom, sun shining, I say to myself, “Could this day get any worse?” It does.

I have dinner with husband Ken and his new boss Hans. Ken introduces me and Hans asks, “What do you do?” and before I could say “I'm in television” or “I'm the NASDAQ girl”, ohgodhelpme, Ken said “My wife? Why, she's a great little decorator.” I look alarmed and Ken clarifies. “Well, to be fair-she's a great decorator and an all-around fabulous homemaker.”

After a tortuously long dinner, I tear into Ken.

Decorator?! Homemaker?

Ken actually cries and admits that he has “wife envy”-that Hans's wife is an uber wife. She is an economist and a bond trader. She sleeps a mere three hours a night and has thrown herself into renovating their 150-year-old country cottage. She's such an astonishing specimen of a wife that when the cottage fireplace had smoke damage, uber-wife took a yearlong architectural history class to learn about mantles of the cottage's era and then went to masonry school and learned how to carve marble so she could then make a mantle from scratch.

Ken says when we married, he just assumed I should become that kind of uber-wife.

I get pissy, I don't care that he's crying, these are the first tears I've seen him shed in over a decade-but, honestly, for 15 years he has watched me struggle with microwaving frozen dinners but he has the gall to introduce me as a homemaker?

I'm on this tirade, this brilliant monologue and it just tumbles out. “I will not stay married to you. I will not stay married to you. I've put up with your gassy colon and your aversion to deodorant and your mother and your toenail fungus. You are a diary snooper and I will not be the wife of a smelly snooper. No. Not for eight more times I won't.”

I felt bitchy adding in that last bit, the eight more times thing, but he knew. Oh, he knew!

Two months ago, he had read my diary when I was visiting my mum. The entry he read-and then ripped out-was the part where I was trying to quantify our sex life.

We had made love twice in seven years. Our marital relations average, therefore, was once every one thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days.

We should stay married thirty more years. That would imply we would make love eight point six more times by my seventieth birthday.

Perhaps sexual deprivation leads to insanity. Feels like it. On the very day that Bloomberg doesn't work out, on the very day that I reject a job offer-a subpar one, no doubt-I shout to the man that pays the bills that I no longer want to be married.

Ken looks pale, his freckles fade, he's shocked. (Of course he's surprised, because uber-wives don't leave marriages. Though if I were truly an uber-wife, I would go to paper-making school to make my own divorce decree paper and then go to law school to file my own papers on the paper I milled by hand.)

He then weeps like a hungry child who lost his mommy at the mall food court. He's genuinely surprised. He finally pulls himself together and says he'll set me free while I still have a few good years left.

I ask what that means, the few good years left thing.

He goes right to how hard it is being married to a writer who always harps on word choice. It didn't come out right-what he meant to say was that at age thirty-seven, I'm not exactly a looker.

I ask what the hell that means, the looker thing.

He says I'm doing the word thing again, and that all he did mean was that he wouldn't oppose the divorce. As a quick added potshot, he quips that writers should be able to use more words than the “thing” thing that I use.

I am relieved and then he keeps talking, he says he's sorry we didn't have the sex life I wanted, he just wished I had told him, he had no crystal ball, he had no way of knowing that sex was that important to go at it more than once a year.

I get angrier, he's so clever to make it my fault, see how easily he did that?

He says I haven't exactly improved with age, the trend isn't good, so let's do a quick divorce so I stand a chance of nabbing someone before I fully morph into a hairy crone.

I tell him that men are drawn to me the same way he's drawn to a Philadelphia cheese steak, moth to flame, that when I'm eighty, my college-age pool boy will be desperate to get his mitts on me.

That all I've ever wanted was to be happy and I will be happy if it kills me.

And then he says he had no idea I was so full of myself, so vain, so conceited. And he also says he had no idea I was so obsessed with this being happy thing.

He put finger quotes around the word happy. I cannot stay married to someone who puts finger quotes around happy, like it is an abstract concept, a figment solely of my imagination.

I close my eyes and I envision my divorce court. It will look like it does on Ally McBeal, dark mahogany paneling, tall bench for the judge, green leather swively chairs. And the judge will be nice and jolly and kind, like John Lithgow.

And when Judge Lithgow asks me for the reason for the divorce, I'm going with that. I'm not going to be dull and say, “the marriage is irretrievably broken.”

Oh no, I'm going to look the judge in the eye and I will say, “Your honor, the reason for this divorce is finger quotes around the word happy.”


23 June 2001

By morning, we were too tired to be mad.

We mapped out a plan. There are some things I cannot fix. I told Ken that I'd work on my own self-esteem situation and he should pick on one of his issues to work on. Between the anger at his mother, the fact that his family hates me, the fact that he's adopted, or the fact that he's sad about being diabetic-just pick one and stare at it and try to find a way to work on it. He wants me to “assign” him a topic. No thanks, I'm not a marble-carver nor am I a topic-picker. I tell him to select one issue and just go nutso on it. Not fix it, but stare into the belly of the beast.

Join an adoption support group, find a nutritionist, read a book on diabetes, journal about his childhood-anything that will make him feel better. He says he'll pick his own topic and it'll be a surprise.

I'm not sure he'll really do anything. Actually, I am secretly hoping he'll do nothing. I feel so good announcing that I want o-u-t. I don't want to take it back. I feel like I can breathe again.

I could not have survived this without wise-yoda-counselor friend Tom. Tom rallied Dennis (husband of Barbara) and the two of them took me out drinking-naturally, Ken had to work. Saturday night, and he has to work. Tom and Dennis and I throw darts and drink cider and I can't remember where the really good dart bar is located and we are driving in circles and I get out my cell phone to call Ken and Dennis snatches it from me and says “You need to cut the ties. Don't let him know you need him.” And I felt like I was me again, Tom and Dennis made me remember who I used to be, I felt like I had awakened from the GoodWifeComa.

Forty-eight hours after the Great I Want Out Proclamation, I got stung badly by a giant thumb-sized bumblebee. I got swollen and weird feeling and Ken came to the rescue and I thought, as he applied paste to the sting area, I can't leave this. (Though he kept rubbing the paste in a circle around the sting-not straight on top of the sting-and we had an odd did-not/did-too argument about paste application. Swear to god, one day, I'll drag that man to an eye doctor. He's never been. Says it is all a sham, everyone that ever goes comes home with glasses, so if you don't need glasses, then don't go to an eye doctor.)

So we are semi-arguing about bee paste application and I feel dizzy and I'm glad he's there. Maybe my mum is right, this is a rough patch, we'll find our way back to each other.