The Happy Marriage

My wife is like a house that was built without foundations.

My wife is sweet to everyone except her husband.

My wife thinks her parents are actually her children.

My wife calls every drama a tragedy.

My wife wants to cut me down to size so I’ll be at her mercy.

My wife doesn’t have a sense of justice, but she sees herself as a paladin of justice anyway.

My wife is fiercely jealous.

My wife has never thanked me.

My wife has never told me she loved me.

My wife is only tender toward her children, brothers, sisters, and parents.

My wife thinks other couples don’t have any problems.

My wife annoys me at least once a day.

My wife acts in bad faith with certainty and triumphalism.

My wife confuses “true” with “good” and “false” with “bad.”

My wife has never sought my advice before making a decision.

My wife pretends that she’s never had a lover. Which I very much doubt is true. But I pretend to believe her when we’re face to face. It’s a bad idea to offend a woman who’s cheated on you.

My wife thought that she loved me — and so did I. I don’t love her anymore and that’s fine by me …

A few days after finishing his list, he listened to the tape before heading out for his appointment at the psychiatrist’s. The painter felt he’d missed the big picture. So he hit “record” again and said: “I’m solely responsible for this failure. There were many more differences between us than simply our social standing or ages. No, the real difference between us was a lot worse than that. We’ve never shared a life throughout the entirety of our marriage and we never even realized it.”

XXIV. Casablanca, January 4, 2003

Dying is easy. Living’s the hard part.

— Mrs. Menoux to Julie

FRITZ LANG, Liliom

He’d never taken the initiative to leave a woman. His wife would be the first. His decision was final. He’d taken a long time to reach that decision, but the stroke had finally helped to sway him more convincingly than any of his friends or his psychiatrist. He’d waited for Christmas to pass, had prepared a speech, had completed the paintings he’d been working on, had rested, then had chosen a day when she’d seemed calmer than usual and had asked her to come see him in his studio late that afternoon.

When he’d announced his decision to leave her, and told her that he didn’t love her anymore, she pretended that she hadn’t heard him and instead asked him where he wanted to dine that evening. He didn’t answer her. A long silence ensued. All of a sudden, she went on the offensive: “But what will become of me? Everything you have you owe to me: your career, your success, your money. You’re nothing without me, just a wreck stuck in a wheelchair. It was thanks to me and my intelligence and the energy of my youth that you became famous and celebrated, and that your paintings are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. All of that will fall apart when I’m gone. Not to mention that I’ll make you pay dearly for this! You have no idea what I’m capable of. You wanted to have children with me, to start a family, and so you’ll have to assume your responsibilities. I won’t lift a finger to help you and one morning you’ll wake up and find yourself face to face with cruelty in the shape of a woman. I’m the one who made you, and I know how to destroy you!” On that note, she left, slamming the door behind her. The painter wasn’t shaken. He was going to hold steady.

When his wife realized a few days later that he wasn’t kidding, and that he wasn’t making idle threats and was serious about wanting to leave her, she took the initiative and handed him a letter written by a lawyer asking the painter for his opinion. The lawyer suggested an uncontested divorce. Knowing his wife and having heard all the threats she’d made, the painter was initially surprised. He read and reread the letter, then told himself: “After all, it’s better this way, this will make things easier and quicker.”

He grew disillusioned in the weeks that followed. His wife had absolutely no intention of agreeing to a compromise. She was going to be ruthless, sick or not, disabled or not, she’d made up her mind: that man would have to pay for the audacity of wanting to leave her. The painter couldn’t find any rest. War had been declared and nothing would be able to stop it. “Uncontested divorce!” The idiot who’d come up with that term — one of those formulaic sentences of which there were so many in the world — couldn’t have imagined that the word “uncontested” didn’t mean anything to his wife.