“Where’s my blue shirt?”

“Which blue shirt?”

“The striped one, the one I always wear when I present a paper.”

“I have no idea.”

That was how one of our worst arguments began, inconsequentially, over an unlaundered shirt, although I suppose it was about bigger things. The girls were small, three or so, and we still had a nanny in those days; we kept her until the girls started kindergarten. As I recall she usually took the bag of Al’s shirts to the cleaner’s after he or I asked her to, but that was not how Al understood the matter.

“Sharon. I have to leave early tomorrow. Where the fuck’s the shirt?”

I stared at him, uncomprehendingly. Did he really think this was my problem?

“Maybe it’s in the laundry bag still,” I said, taking the bag off the closet door. It was large and stuffed. Apparently, the shirts had not walked themselves to the cleaner’s. I opened it up, rummaged around and found the one in question. “I guess…”

“Can’t you keep things organized around here? I mean, you have help…”

“I don’t quite understand why this is my fault.”

“Well, whose fault is it?”

“It’s your shirt.”

“I don’t believe you. You know how hard I have to work; you’re at home all day.”

“I work at home.”

“Okay, sure. But the book’s finished. I mean, if you don’t have time to run the shirts to the laundry, the least you could do is warn me…”

“Why are you obsessed with this one shirt? Wear a different one already.”

And so it went on like this, this ridiculous argument over who should take responsibility for his laundry; he was at his worst, haughty and dismissive, and I wouldn’t back down because I thought he was in the wrong and I’m stubborn. He eventually accused me of failing to support him in his career, which I pointed out was completely untrue, and we wound up lying in bed in the dark in a sulky silence unable to apologize until exhaustion finally overtook us and we fell into an uneasy sleep. And the next day, in the manner of many married couples, we just moved on and forgot about our fight, without ever clarifying whose job it was to take the shirts to the cleaner’s, let alone figuring out what that was really about.

You always think, when you hear about some woman running off with another man or somebody’s heartbreaking separation, that the marriage must have been a disaster, the couple must have known they were headed for the rocks; they were battling ferociously or barely on speaking terms or something. You think you’d get some warning, if such a thing were ever going to happen to you. I swear I had no warning, no warning at all. I thought the bond between us was steely strong, forged with passion and burnished by children. I thought if we occasionally disagreed about trivial things, it was merely trivial. A fight about a shirt was just an irritation, a diversion. Everybody has bad days; those times when you snap at your spouse only because she’s the nearest person at hand. Al did not really expect me to wash his clothes. But I guess if I look back, if I have to pick a time where I had some inkling that we might be in trouble, or saw for an instant, quickly to be discarded, that there was a real problem here, it was the night before the fight over the shirt.

It was at a party, a party to launch my third book; we had taken over a restaurant not far from the house. Waiters passed around glasses of wine and trays full of cute little appetizers; I had bought a sleek new dress for the occasion; my publisher made a pretty and flattering speech. I stood up to thank her and everybody else. I pulled out a bit of paper because I can’t be trusted not to ramble at these things and needed to stick to a script. As I was straightening out my sheet of paper, I looked out at my audience, readying myself to speak, and I saw a man who wasn’t looking at me; instead, he was staring off to one side. In a fraction of a second, there were three things I noticed about him. The first was that he was so handsome, heart-stoppingly good looking; the second was that he looked annoyed, put out somehow by the proceedings, as though he wanted to be somewhere else. And the third thing I noticed was that this man was Al.

Perhaps to put it in that order is overstating what happened; perhaps I should just say that Al looked unhappy, like an awkward outsider at this party, and that there was this millisecond before I recognized him, probably because he was standing in the shadows. At any rate, I had this tiny moment where he felt like a total stranger to me, a man I had never seen before in my life. Occasionally I have had hazy flashbacks to that night, fleeting moments when I look at Al and see someone else and then have a feeling of déjà vu, that I have known him as a stranger before. I think back to the first time I saw him at the front of a classroom, lecturing on Dickens, the sense of excitement that swirled around this unknown man, but then I realize that’s not it. And I think of the shock when he told me he was leaving, my image of him standing at the front door, ready to go, and I know that’s not it either, that was a time too full of my anger and sorrow over his behaviour for him to feel unfamiliar. And then I remember the night of the party.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating here. Everybody experiences those occasions when you look at the man who you have slept beside for a decade and wonder what the hell he’s thinking.

—

This Saturday, he’s looking puzzled, or maybe it’s disgruntled. He’s sitting at the breakfast table with the weekend paper spread out before him. With much fanfare The Telegram has announced a literary event and begun publishing a serial novel by the distinguished (their word, not mine) novelist Sharon Soleymani to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The first four weekly instalments have been received with a deafening silence, except for a few emails from Dickens enthusiasts and cranks, making suggestions about future instalments, soliciting advice on their own projects or sharing stories about the first time they chortled their way through The Pickwick Papers or wept at Bleak House. God bless them for their interest because Jonathan Torres has had nothing to say about the publication of this fabulous project that he so loved until I run out of patience and send him an email asking how he feels it has been received. He takes three days to answer with two words, “Good response,” the terseness of which makes me suspect the opposite is true. There is no word from Stanek either. Typically, dear Frank fires me off a congratulatory missive the first Saturday morning, but I am feeling decidedly unloved at The Telegram.

But that’s not what hurts. We still have the paper delivered but Al shuns it and always reads the news on his tablet. The Telegram, however, has decided to run the serial only in print—this may be an exceedingly clever bit of marketing, or not, we will find out soon enough. I showed Al the first instalment—“Oh, Staplehurst. Very smart,” he said—and I assume he has read the next two. I pick the paper up off the porch every day, weekdays and weekends, and leave it on the kitchen table when I’m finished reading. But so far he has said nothing more. It’s mid-February, and I’m growing increasingly nervous. I want him to like it; I know he thinks I should be husbanding my strength, babying myself, but I need to work and want him to see that, to see the old me, the clever one who could match him at his own game.

And now finally, as the fourth instalment appears, he is visibly reading. Ostentatiously reading, sitting in the middle of the kitchen with a cold cup of coffee, frowning at the paper and rustling it occasionally as he does so.

“I always thought that story was greatly overplayed.”

“Overplayed? There was practically a conspiracy to keep the affair secret until the 1930s. Don’t sully the name…”

“Yes, but recently it’s been so overdone. So he had a mistress. Lots of men did.”

“And still do,” I say, before remembering I’m not supposed to do that.

“Hey, we agreed…”

The phone rings, interrupting our conversation. Marriage, in my experience, is full of conversations you never manage to finish. It is the lovely Jonathan on the line. He sounds panicked.

“Is this just going to be about this Nelly person?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Did you get my email?”

“I haven’t got to my desk yet.”

“Don’t you have a BlackBerry?” He sounds as contemptuous as my daughters, continually petitioning for a smartphone.

“I’m thinking about going Samsung,” I lie.

“Anyway, I sent you an email. I thought the serial was supposed to be about Dickens. Is this Nelly person his mistress or something?”

“Yes, his mistress. I did tell you Dickens was not the chief protagonist.”

“Yes, but I told the publisher it was going to be about Dickens and he isn’t sure about this direction. We hoped after all that stuff about the train crash you would move on to another topic. Follow the people he rescued or something. He thinks what you are doing is unfair…”

“Unfair to Dickens?”

“Yeah. Like you’re slandering the man when he can’t fight back.”

“I think the legacy of anybody who wrote A Christmas Carol can look after itself.”

“But you’re making out like he’s some pedophile or something.”

“He was forty-five. She was eighteen. That’s a fact.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to emphasize it.”

“You read it and edited it. Why didn’t you raise these concerns earlier this week?”

“Well…” He clears his throat and attempts a decisive note. “You are going to need to tone it down for next week. We’ll have to talk about a new direction. You’ll need to come into the office.”

“The direction will be what I decide it to be. Flip me Stanek’s email address and I’ll deal with him.”

“I don’t know. I’m the editor on the project…” He is getting whiny now.

“But he’s the one with the problem. Send me his email and I’ll respond to his complaints. Politely.”

“Okay.” He sounds relieved.

I am just composing my polite email to Stanek, saying I heard he had some concerns about the fourth instalment and would be happy to talk to him that afternoon after my daughters’ ballet class was over, when the phone rang again.

“Sharon. Bob Stanek. Is this just going to be about Ellen Ternan?”

“No. Not exactly…”