“What happened?” I asked, fighting a rising wave of panic over what he had just said. My husband “didn't think” he loved me. How did that fit into the scheme of things?

“I don't know,” Roger said, looking uncomfortable. “I just looked around and realized I don't belong here.” This was a lot worse than getting fired. It sounded like he was going to fire me. And he looked as though he meant it.

“You don't belong here? What are you talking about?” I asked, sliding still farther off the satin chair, suddenly feeling unbelievably ugly in my nightgown. Sometime in the last ten years, I should have found the time to buy new ones, I realized. “You live here. We love each other. We have two children, for chrissake. Roger … are you drunk? Are you on drugs?” Then suddenly I wondered, “Maybe you should be. Prozac. Zoloft. Midol. Something. Are you feeling sick?” I wasn't trying to discredit what he had said, I just didn't understand it. This was the craziest thing he'd come up with yet. More so even than saying he was going to write a book or a screenplay. In thirteen years of marriage, I had never even known him to write a letter.

“I'm fine.” He stared at me blankly, as though he no longer knew me, as though I had already become a stranger to him. I reached out to touch his hand, but he wouldn't let me.

“Steph, I mean it.”

“You can't mean it,” I said, tears leaping to my eyes, and suddenly running down my cheeks faster than I could stop them. Instinctively, I lifted the hem of the nightgown to my face, and saw that it came away black. The mascara I had worn the day before was now smeared all over my face, and my nightgown. A pretty picture. Most convincing. “We love each other, this is crazy….” I wanted to scream at him, “You can't do ‘this to me, you're my best friend.” But in the blink of an eye, he no longer was. In a matter of moments, he had become a stranger.

“No, it isn't crazy.” His eyes looked empty. He was already gone, and at that precise moment, I knew it. My heart felt as though it had been hit with a battering ram, which had not only shattered it to bits, but driven right through it.

“When did you decide this?”

“Last summer,” he said calmly. “On the Fourth of July,” he added with absolute precision. What had I done wrong on the Fourth of July? I wasn't sleeping with any of his friends, I hadn't lost any of the children so far. My trust fund hadn't run out, and shouldn't for both our lifetimes. What in hell was his problem? And without Umpa's trust fund and my good nature about the jobs he lost, how did he think he was going to eat?

“Why the Fourth of July?”

“I just knew when I looked at you that it was over,” he said coolly.

“Why? Is there someone else?” I could hardly get the words out and he looked wounded by what I said to him.

“Of course not.” Of course not. My husband of thirteen years tells me he no longer loves me and I'm not supposed to at least suspect a rival with enormous breasts who remembers to shave her legs more often than just at the change of the seasons. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not entirely disgusting, nor am I covered with fur, nor do I have a mustache. But I will admit to you now, as I look back at that painful time, I had grown a little careless. People did not retch as I walked past them on the street. Men at cocktail parties still found me attractive. But with Roger … perhaps … I had become a little less than attentive. I wasn't fat or anything, I just didn't dress up much at home, and my costumes in bed were a little odd. So sue me. He did.

“Are you leaving me?” I asked, sounding desperate. I couldn't believe this was happening to me. All my adult and married life I had been supercilious about women who lost their husbands, i.e., those whose husbands divorced them. That could never happen to me, nor would it. I was about to discover it could, and had, and was happening at that exact moment, as I slipped almost entirely off the goddam slippery satin chair in my own bedroom, with Roger watching me as though he were a stranger, and I were someone he hadn't been married to for thirteen years. He looked at me like an alien from another planet.

“I think so,” he said in answer to my question about whether he was leaving.

“But why?” I was beginning to sob then. I was convinced he had killed me, or was trying to. I have never been so frightened in my entire life. The status and the man who had been my identity, my security, my life, were about to disappear. And then who would I be? No one.

“I have to leave. I need to. I can't breathe here.” I had never noticed him having any trouble breathing. He breathed fine, from what I could see. In fact he snored like a Zamboni on an ice rink. I kind of liked it. To me, it sounded like a large cat purring. But then again I wasn't the one who was leaving, he was. “The kids drive me nuts,” he explained. “It's just too much pressure all the time, too much responsibility … too much noise … too much everything … and when I look at you, I see a stranger.”

“Me?” I asked, with a look of amazement. What stranger would parade around his house with uncombed hair, unshaven legs, and a torn flannel nightgown? Strangers wore micro miniskirts, stiletto heels, and tight sweaters over enormous silicone implants. Apparently, no one had told him.

“We're not strangers after knowing you for nineteen years, Roger, you're my best friend.” But not any longer. “When are you leaving?” I managed to choke out the words, while still smearing the watery black mascara all over my nightgown. It wasn't a very pretty picture. Pathetic barely began to touch it. Ugly would have done it better. Revolting would have said it all. I must have looked nothing short of disgusting, and to add to the romance of it all, my nose started running.

“I thought I'd stay through the holidays,” Roger said grandly. It was nice of him, I guess, but it also meant I had approximately one month to either adjust to it, or talk him out of leaving. Maybe a vacation in Mexico … Hawaii … Tahiti … the Galapagos would do it. Someplace warm and sexy. I'm sure at that moment he had absolutely no problem at all imagining me on a beach somewhere, in a T-shirt and a flannel nightgown. “I'm moving into the guest room.” He looked and sounded as though he meant it. It was my worst nightmare. The impossible had happened. My husband was leaving me, and had just told me he no longer loved me. I managed to throw my arms around his neck then and smear what was left of my mascara all over his immaculate shirt collar. My tears fell unseen on his blazer, and my nose ran on his tie, while ever so cautiously he held me, kind of like a bank teller afraid to get too near the bank robber with sticks of dynamite taped all over his body. The one thing that was obvious was that he didn't want to get near me.

In retrospect, I'm not sure I blame him. Looking back, I also realize how little contact we had had for a long time. We were making love in those days about once every two or three months, sometimes as much as every six months, after I'd complained enough about it, and he felt obliged to. Funny how you overlook things like that, or explain them to yourself. I just thought he was stressed about his job, or the lack of one, depending on his current situation. Or it was because one of the kids was asleep in our bed, or the dog, or something, anything. I guess that wasn't the problem. Maybe I just bored him. But sex was the last thing on my mind as I looked across at him that morning. My life was on a tightrope and teetering badly.

He finally managed to unwind my arms from around his neck, and I retreated to my bathroom, where I sobbed into a towel and then took a good look at myself, and saw not only the hairdo that eight hours on my pillow had achieved, but the remains of the blueberry muffin. Seeing myself just as he had, only made me cry harder. I had no idea what to do to get him back, or worse, if I even could. Looking back, I wonder if I had relied on the trust fund to keep him for me. Maybe I assumed that his natural ineptitude would make him dependent on me. But clearly, even that hadn't done the trick. I had thought that sparing him any responsibility, and being a good sport about everything, would make him love me more. Instead, I had the feeling he had come to hate me.

I cried all day, as I recall, and that night he moved into the guest room. He told the kids he had work to do, and like a truck with three flat tires, we lumbered awkwardly through Thanksgiving. My parents were there, and his, and Roger's sister Angela and her kids. Her husband had left her the previous year, for his secretary. I could suddenly see myself in her shoes in the not too distant future. And out of sheer embarrassment I told no one what had happened. Only Roger's sister said that I looked like I was coming down with something. Yeah, the same thing she had when Norman left her. Six months of intense depression. And the only thing that seemed to be saving her was the fact that she was now having an affair with her shrink.

Christmas was beyond belief that year, the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, and I cried every time no one was looking. Worse yet, I still couldn't believe it, and did everything I could to talk Roger out of leaving, except buy new nightgowns. More than ever, I needed my old standbys. I wore them with mismatched pairs of Roger's socks now. But Roger was in therapy by then, and more convinced than ever that he was doing the right thing by leaving me. He wasn't even in trouble at work this time, and had stopped talking about writing a novel.

We told the kids on New Year's Day. Sam was six then, and Charlotte was eleven. They cried so unbelievably that I thought I would die watching them. Someone I knew had described that as the worst day of her life, and I readily believed it. After we told them, I threw up and went to bed. Roger called his therapist, and went out to dinner with a friend. I was beginning to hate him. He seemed so healthy. And I felt dead inside. He had killed me, and everything I had once believed in. But the worst part was, instead of hating him, I hated me.