After the husband moves out, the wife spends the summer crying hard and being baffled about why someone ends a good marriage and whether or not the marriage was actually good even though she had always thought it was good and more or less is only trying to get through the day on the off chance that at some point there will be less crying and then someday maybe no crying, about this topic. (There will never be no crying. There will always be crying now. Crying’s where it’s at, a friend says one day, and the wife appreciates the great truth of this.) The wife can no longer bear to see the husband for any reason, coming to get stuff from the house, take the dog out, whatever, she can’t see the husband without bursting into tears. Sometimes she hides when he comes by, sometimes she doesn’t, sometimes she can avoid starting a conversation, sometimes she cannot help starting a conversation. They have a few conversations that are emotional on both ends and which indicate a certain willingness to try to understand what really happened that she hasn’t yet seen from the husband. Somehow this ends up with them going back to couples counseling, with a new couples counselor. Not to reconcile. We won’t say they’re trying to consciously uncouple, but they aren’t not. The wife wants to understand what happened, and the husband has come to understand, or to seem to understand, that he had been abrupt in ending the marriage, though he doesn’t seem to regret it. He is still exploring with the client. He hasn’t gained a willingness to work on the marriage, but he’s gained a willingness to talk about the marriage. There is some concern on the part of the wife that the husband is motivated by his exploration with the other person in some way and not his genuine willingness to do some of the work he didn’t do in round one. He has hinted that things are not perfect, that he’s far from setting up house over at this other woman’s mansion. The wife doesn’t want details but says And what’s the common denominator there, ya think?
I know, he says.
She is trying to take his words at face value, though they are both known to leave words out.
It emerges that he now takes the client to the restaurant she considered their special-occasion place, that farm-to-table place on an actual farm, chalkboards and drip coffee, fresh baked goods and picnic tables by a stream, string lights and posies in saltshakers, little kids in tiny handmade cardigans and tiny wellies on tiny bridges feeding ducks. How does someone do that? How does someone go to a place that was their place with someone else? Their place with tiny cardigans? Go find your own place. Does the client even know it was their place? This is the woman I love. This is what he says when she tries to point out that it’s not nice to seduce other people’s husbands. You don’t get to say shit about the woman I love.
Sure I do, she says.
So the couple goes to a second shitty couples counselor and they talk more about it and they both cry, a lot, and sometimes it feels like progress is being made, that useful information is emerging, other times, it feels like her teeth are being pulled out one by one with a pair of pliers, and that if the second shitty couples therapist praises the husband one more time for showing up to couples therapy after they’ve already split up, there will be screaming, and if there is screaming, there will be no end to screaming, there will only be screaming forever and ever after.