Leaving Sophie Dean

“Well, basically he still thinks you’re the bee’s knees, and he still feels guilty about lying to his wife—probably still feels at this point that cheating on her is worse than leaving her. Deep down he agrees that he has to choose between you, so it’s good you hit him with this while he still has a conscience to torment him.”

That spring, some four months earlier, Adam and Valerie had had the incredible good luck to be sent together on business to Paris. It was just at the time when it was becoming clear that their sleeping together was not an aberration but rather the beginning of a love affair.

he’s a shit, let’s face it. First he cheats on her, lies to her for months, and reneges on his marriage vows, and now he craps out on his parental duties as well and leaves her flat with two young kids.

Each time Adam stepped into Valerie’s apartment, he felt himself a different man, and a man he vastly preferred: sophisticated, sexy, clever, and keen. With Valerie, Adam felt like a winner, eager to tackle new work, capable of great achievement.

Whereas at home… Oh, God, with Sophie, Adam felt harassed and inadequate.

Poor old Sophie in her T-shirts and jeans, skirts and sweaters. Pretty, of course. Adam sighed and poured himself another drink. Pretty and practical. “Well scrubbed.” Whereas Valerie… chic, confident, conquering. And sexy as she was, she was also refreshingly masculine, in her aggression, her ambition, her willingness to take risks, to make spur-of-the-moment decisions and shoulder the consequences.

Looking down at her defiant but frightened face, he felt a sudden great surge of love for her—and huge relief that he did. Having just broken up his home for this woman, he needed to feel something fierce and fiery for her that had been evading him all evening until that moment.

“Sophie, this is ridiculous. Wait! Goddamn it, what am I going to tell the children? This is serious—we’ve got to work it out together!” “It’s your problem, Adam. You broke up the home, you pick up the pieces.” And she was gone.

“Spare me the sanctimony, please. Those kids bore you, and we both know it.”

How was it that he, Adam Dean, found himself, eleven days after his supposed departure in his one great bid for freedom and happiness, a prisoner in suburbia, shackled to his children, on his knees, dusting with a soft cloth?

A nice, quiet weekend at home—oh, the bliss of having the boys gone; he could almost whimper with gratitude.

“You have been kicked,” he said, “and shit upon. Your husband has kicked you and shit upon you.” Startled, she lifted a hand to protest, but he carried on. “He’s done everything in his power to make you feel bad, and so you do. But you won’t feel bad forever. Something will happen to give you the switch.”

“Swimming.” “Oh, no…” “It’s the perfect place to cry. Think of it. You can fill the pool with tears, and the more you cry, the saltier the water becomes. The saltier the water is, the better you float, so in the end your own sadness buoys you up. Come on. We’re going swimming.”

You know it’s only called a ‘nuclear family’ because it blows up.

“What’s the guy’s name? At least I can send him killer thought waves.” “Adam.” “You’re joking. The first man. The original asshole.”

“What I’m trying to say, Adam, is that if it weren’t for the cowardly, dishonest way you did it, I suppose I could thank you for ending our marriage. Because now, instead of being a bored but brave little housewife with a cheating husband, I’m using my brain again, learning to do fulfilling new work, living in a place I love, and sharing my time with a man who cares about me. A man who speaks! A man I can talk to and laugh with, who views the world in refreshing ways and broadens my vision with his, as I broaden his with mine.”

“What do you want me to tell her? ‘Valerie’s gone. You can come back now’? Or how about ‘I didn’t get the partnership, my job’s hanging by a thread, so why not come back and support us all’? I can’t do it, James. And anyway, she’s… she’s involved with… someone.”

if Adam left me for the love of his life, that’s one thing. But if he left me for a casual relationship that was going to end a few months later, that’s even more humiliating.”

“He may very well miss me now, James. I can believe that. But he would never have missed me if he had been allowed to leave the children with me and start a new life with Valerie. That’s the truth.”

But what I’ve lost completely is trust in you. I don’t mean that I don’t trust you with the children—I do. But I don’t trust you with me. And I don’t think trust can be mended once it’s broken. It isn’t something like metal that you can weld together smoothly so the break is invisible.

Man has midlife crisis, man leaves wife, man sorts out his priorities, snaps his fingers, and wife runs back. As though she’s been on hold all this time, suspended in… in aspic while not in use. You don’t seem to understand that I’ve moved on since I left your house. I have a new life, new friends, a new profession, and a new lover, as I think I recall telling you, and I am very, very happy.

Do you seriously think I would drop everything and run back to you, simply because you’ve come to terms with your own mediocrity? You are monstrously self-centered, egotistical, and self-referential beyond belief, and yet, as I can see by the hurt expression on your face and the self-pitying things you’ve been saying here, you actually consider yourself a bit of a victim in all this. And a rather attractive one!”

I wish that damned Valerie had never moved out. First she screws up my life by taking Adam, then she screws it up all over again by dumping him. Do you realize that my entire life is dictated by my husband’s lover, a woman I don’t even know? How surreal is that?”

Sophie compares loss of trust in a partner caused by infidelity to a crack in a plate, which will still show, even if mended, and still harbor germs.