I’m in touch with seven exes, so it was no surprise when my second husband called and suggested we meet for drinks. What surprised me was the reason: He wanted my advice. His long-term live-in girlfriend had just told him that she had been seeing someone else for over a year, and she was going to move in with the new guy.
“So,” I said with a laugh, “does this mean that you liked how I handled things when I found out you were sleeping with that fashion model?”
He laughed, too.
We parted ways 11 years ago, after 11 years together. The fashion model situation arose during year 10. I was slow to find out — to be cheated on is to feel not only unattractive, but stupid.
When I got the news, I raged, cried and made him sleep on the floor — the usual. Also, I plucked his expensive lambskin hat off his head as we stood on a busy street corner and hurled it onto the sidewalk.
I make him sound like a cad, but he’s not. Early on, when I fell seriously ill, he cared for me devotedly. He’s witty, sweet, a great cook and easy on the eyes. He introduced me to Beethoven’s late quartets and the films of Tarkovsky. He taught me to recognize a good wine, to hold the glass by the stem and to remove the green stalk from the center of the garlic clove so it doesn’t burn on the way down.
I can appreciate all this now because the drama, the anguish and the years I wouldn’t take his calls are long past. Nine years my junior, he’s now more wayward baby brother than ex-husband.
People ask why we’re in touch, and how I could forgive. Soon after we split, he stepped out of the hotel room where he and the model were holed up and left me a tearful message saying he was miserable and would never love anyone as much as he had loved me. Late one night, after their thing had run its course, the model also left me a weepy voice mail, saying, “I was nothing to him. When he was with me, he was always thinking about you.”
These things made it easier to forgive; living well is the best remedy, bar none.
Forgiving, like weight lifting, grows easier the more reps you do. But apart from developing your forgiveness muscles, there are other reasons to stay in touch.
I loved my exes then, and I love them now, only differently. They still have the qualities I loved from the beginning. Most of them think I’m beautiful, and all of them laugh at my jokes. When I was newly separated, still very ill, and in no shape to start up with anyone new, they surrounded me with an affection tinged with romance, but without the complications of an actual relationship.
I’m grateful to them all. Why would I toss them away? If it’s true that you cannot make new old friends, finding new old lovers is harder still.
Along the way, I have developed a few rules. When you’re seeing someone, it is only polite to hit pause on these ex-ships, or at least dial them back. Don’t discuss sex with an ex, especially any sex you’ve had since you split, and certainly not the sex you had with each other.
Years after the marital turmoil ended, the model and I got together. She was four times divorced. (“I know men,” she said. “I’ve had over a hundred partners.”) Four divorces are twice as many as I have had, yet while I’m embarrassed at flunking out of marriage repeatedly, she was proud that so many men had chosen to marry her.
“I talk to all of my husbands,” she said, “except the third one, who tried to kill me.” This validated my decision to stay in touch with my menschy men of yesteryear, none of whom has ever made anything resembling an attempt on my life.
About those other exes: I talk weekly with the one from college. Another I see on a monthly Zoom cocktail gathering. The guy I dated chastely in high school and the one who broke my heart when I was in my 30s live in the same city, and I see them and their wives when I’m there visiting family.
There’s another one I can still bring to the brink of ecstasy when he comes to my place. I do it now by reading out snippets of Tolstoy, Chekhov or Babel in the original. I’m a Russian translator, and on our first date, we bonded over our love of Russian literature. Next, I provide an off-the-cuff rendition in English, and then we look at several other translations and compare.
“I’ll never be able to do this with anyone else,” he said tearfully when he broke up with me, gesturing to my shelves of Russian books. It seems that he was right about that, because when the dust settled, we revived our little reading club.
My most recent love and I are still finding our platonic sea legs. A professional vocalist, he sang torch songs to me on FaceTime for months after we broke up, and I listened with tears coursing down my face.
My formerly philandering, newly cuckolded second ex-husband and I met at his favorite watering hole, Café Luxembourg, on the Upper West Side. I supported him for 11 years while he was in graduate school for philosophy, and I have since made it clear that I am never, ever, ever picking up another check for him, not even for a cheap cup of coffee.
Café Lux is pricey, and while he swapped out Plato and Heidegger a while back for a career in real estate, he has had few sales lately. He frequents expensive places nonetheless, trawling, he says, for wealthy clients.
At the bar, he asked to sample some wines, and a row of bottles appeared. As he sniffed, swirled, sipped and selected, I recalled how, during our marriage, he used to make the case for ordering by the bottle rather than by the glass.
“It’s just five glasses, and much less expensive than ordering one by one,” he would say in an urgent tone, as if experiencing a case of sudden-onset frugality.
This line of discussion always brought me face to face with a dilemma: If he got a bottle and I drank some, that would cut into his consumption, which was a positive. On the other hand, becoming his drinking buddy might, in the long run, be worse.
Now the wine-bottle conundrum was no longer mine to puzzle over. The relief this brought me was all the intoxication I needed. I ordered cranberry juice with lime.
He filled me in on the girlfriend situation. She had met the guy on a cruise she had taken with friends, and they had been texting and FaceTiming for a year.
Our talk ran over into the dinner hour. A few times he almost asked if I was hungry, then caught himself, remembering that he was paying. Finally, he requested the menu. I glanced at the offerings: duck confit, moules frites, steak tartare, white veal Bolognese — and then ordered lentil soup. Why be greedy?
In the end, he didn’t ask for advice about his love troubles. Maybe he just needed to confide in someone he trusted. Or was this some strange new way of apologizing — which he had done already, numerous times — for his long-ago transgression?
If only his girlfriend had cheated years earlier, it might have been balm to my wounds, but eons had passed, and the wounds had healed on their own. I felt no desire to gloat, and that was disappointing.
Nonetheless, the evening was a reminder of why it’s worthwhile to keep up with your exes. In doing so, you see that not only does fate, God or destiny (or whatever you call it) have an unparalleled sense of humor, it is also a master artisan, meticulously designing intricate patterns of chiaroscuro that take years to become visible.
In this case, the pleasing symmetry came with a modest repast, one that was delicious, and — best of all — overpriced. There is no earthly sommelier who can match the ingenious pairings of fate.
He walked me to the subway. At the entrance, he hugged me for a long time. If I had been the one who initiated the hug, enfolding him in my arms so tightly that he couldn’t pull away, I wouldn’t have held on as long as he did. But I didn’t mind. And he still smelled good.
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