Page 34 of Hard to Kill

Martin and I were married six months later. By then he’d opened a bistro in the West Village and both of our professional lives were taking off. I still thought we were happy.

That made one of us.

“No happily-ever-after, obviously,” Ben says.

“Unhappily, no.”

The marriage lasted three years. Really, it only went bad over the final six months. He eventually drifted into an affair with his sous chef at the new, bigger place he’d opened on the Upper West Side. But he had already moved out by then.

Moved out and moved on.

“I wanted to blame it on our careers, but even I knew that was a cliché. It wasn’t careers, plural. It was just one. Mine. He said being a lawyer was all I needed. I told him he was wrong. He said that maybe he knew me better than I knew myself. Before he walked out, I told him I could change if he’d give me a chance; I hated how needy and desperate I sounded, almost like another person. He told me that I was incapable of changing. And left. And nearly broke my goddamn heart in the process.”

I sip more wine. “You want to know why I don’t cook? Because it reminds me too much of him.”

Ben doesn’t say anything. He somehow seems to know that isn’t the end of the story.

It isn’t.

“He told me he still loved me and probably always would love me. But that I was incapable of living with anybody.”

“Anybody meaning him, the master chef.”

“Anybody meaning anybody,” I say.

I reach for my glass and realize it’s empty. I reach for his glass and take a sip.

“And none of that is the worst part,” I say. “The worst part is what he said to me on the day he moved out.”

No going back now.

Tell him all of it.

Now or never.

“He told me that losing the baby was probably the best thing for both of us.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

ONLY JIMMY AND BRIGID knew about the miscarriage, one month into my second trimester, in what also turned out to be the last trimester of my marriage to Martin.

Now Dr. Ben Kalinsky knew, too, and knew about how after the miscarriage I found out I could no longer have children.

It was going to be a boy.

Going to be the son my father never had, as badly as he’d wanted one.

I finally announce when we sit down for dinner that I’m through talking about Martin Elian for tonight and maybe until the end of time. The dinner, by the way, is a complete triumph in Ben’s estimation, not just the beef but the sides of potato-fennel gratin and the honey-glazed carrots.

“Please tell me this isn’t one of his recipes.”

“Ina Garten!” I say.

Before we change the subject, Ben says he’d like to make one final observation about Martin.

“Because of what he said about you having lost the baby, I fully intend to punch his teeth through the back of his head if I ever meet him.”

“And you a man of peace.”

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