THERE WAS NEVER GOING TObe a good time to tell Paul I wanted a divorce, but what I finally decided was that I needed to deal with my marriage before I could do anything else.
So, on a Thursday evening in early August, I made salmon fillets, which I served on fregole, and suggested we take our plates out into the garden, where I poured us each a glass of wine. I was so nervous I could barely eat, but after Paul had cleaned his plate, I told him we had to talk.
He had been about to take a sip of wine, but he set down the glass. The way he looked at me, sort of expectantly, I’d have sworn he knew what I was going to say.
“I’m not going to New London with you,” I whispered.
He took this in, then said, “You’re not?”
“I’m not.”
I studied my wineglass, afraid to look at him and glad that I had chosen to give him this news on our patio, where, if he became irate, Allegra might poke her head out the door and ask if everything was okay.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry for what?”
“All of it, I guess.”
Paul was so calm, it surprised me. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
My strategy, to the extent that I had one, was to focus on us. If I had to tell him about Teo, I would. But for Paul’s sake as much as my own, I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, and certainly not right away.
“I don’t think this is what a marriage is meant to feel like,” I started.
“Is this about the thing last fall?” asked Paul. “Because I told you I was sorry about that.”
“I know you did,” I said.
“It was a mistake, and you’re meant to forgive people when they make mistakes.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I do. Try to. But I still think that, with us, there’s something missing.”
“That isn’t true,” he argued. “We’re good together.”
I bit my lip, trying to figure out what to say to that. “I think we were good together in the beginning. The very beginning. But things moved so fast.”
“I thought you liked that. It was romantic, remember?”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said. “It was.”
How to explain that I thought Paul’s orders had put undue pressure on us, that if we had been allowed to date for even another couple of months, we might not have gotten married at all?
“Do you ever worry we got married to solve a problem instead of getting married because we wanted to be married?”
“The problem being me going overseas?”
I nodded.
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
I tried another tack. “After Lenny died, I put my whole life on hold. And then you came along, and it was like I had permission to start living again. Italy was going to be this big adventure, and I was overdue for one of those.”
“So you’re saying you married me to go to Italy?”
“Absolutely not,” I insisted. “But do you really think we would have gotten married if Italy hadn’t been in the mix?”
He acknowledged that we might have waited, but not that we wouldn’t have gotten married at all.
