The man frames his separation in terms of his wife\u2019s inability to adapt. \u201cShe has many good qualities,\u201d he begins to the lawyer\u2014and then, reconsidering: \u201cA few good qualities, anyway.\u201d But she did not change her habits, he explains, when his business went under following the arrest and personal bankruptcy of his long-time friend and partner, and did not temper them during the months he was unemployed or after he finally found a job in corporate confinement, where the hours are interminable and he earns less than half what his real estate business had taken in during the boom.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe still buys $500 shoes,\u201d he says, smiling quizzically. \u201cChlo\u00e9 boots. Manolo Blahnik.\u201d He loosens his tie and the top button of a starched white shirt that sheaths his rotund torso before popping a couple pills from an Rx container. \u201cFor the pain,\u201d he says, chewing hard. He\u2019s beginning to sweat.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you mind if I smoke?\u201d he asks a minute later, indicating the cigarette he\u2019s already lit. \u201cTen years without until earlier this week.\u201d He chuckles as the lawyer looks around for a makeshift ashtray.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe bought a convertible Lexus, did I mention? Mint green. Yeah, yuck. Never said a word. I get home one night at ten, there it is in the driveway.\u201d He leans his chair back on two legs and balances himself by propping his feet up on the desk. He never stops grinning.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet this. In February she flew to The Iditarod with five friends. The Iditarod. After that it was Derby. Very big on sporting events this girl. A real fan.\u201d He flicks his ashes on the floor. <\/em><\/p>\n \u0004\u201cThe savings went dry in June. Pfft! Gone. You have any idea what pedicures cost? Take a guess.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawyer notices an unpleasant smell, perhaps it\u2019s the man\u2019s body odor. He locates a coffee cup and sets it beside the man\u2019s feet.<\/p>\n \u201cSpending money, she says, was her way of maintaining her identity<\/em> when our world spun out of control,\u201d the man says, mockingly. \u201cWell, I am sorry. I am sorry things did not turn out like we planned. Human beings embezzle. Bubbles burst. I am not the celestial force who makes that happen. Life takes! Sometimes all in a row: bang bang bang bang bang bang bang. You adapt! The day I was served with the divorce petition, do you know where she was? Take a wild guess.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe World Series?\u201d the lawyer guesses, then adds, nodding at the cup, \u201cIt\u2019s for the ashes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBangalore!\u201d the man yelps, leaning forward. \u201cA two-week yoga retreat in Bangalore!\u201d<\/p>\n The rest of the interview consists of a litany of like charges, examples of his wife\u2019s refusal to moderate her profligacy in the face of reduced means. Credit cards run up for day spas and designer handbags. Four-hundred dollar hairstyles. A gift of original art shipped to a sister on Long Island.<\/p>\n The man lights another cigarette and sets it over the edge of the desk. He begins to play with the aglet on the end of one shoelace and then removes the lace from his shoe while he continues his narrative. A long ash forms as he stretches and twirls the shoelace around his index fingers like a garrote.<\/p>\n \u201cShe met a man there, a tennis player,\u201d he resumes. \u201cHeir to a French cosmetics fortune. I have the evidence: phone bills, texts, debits from private accounts. It isn\u2019t hard to figure out your wife\u2019s passwords when you never sleep<\/em>!\u201d<\/p>\n He fails to notice when the burnt out cigarette falls to the floor. Annoyed, the lawyer steps around the desk, picks up the butt and mashes it perceptibly into the coffee cup.<\/p>\n \u201cIt sounds like your wife adapted after all,\u201d he says, with deliberate candor.<\/p>\n The man looks in the lawyer\u2019s eyes for the first time, and for the first time stops smiling. He flicks his lighter\u2019s thumbwheel in what the lawyer will later transform in a dream into the timer switch on a homemade bomb.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, in a fashion,\u201d the lawyer adds, remembering the man is a potential new client.<\/p>\n The man is not listening. The lawyer returns to his chair in front of a wall of windows, and the man notices a plane emerge from a cloud behind him, angling downward as if into the lawyer\u2019s neck, like a syringe. For a moment, the man thinks the plane is going to crash. When he remembers the small airport nearby, he is unrelieved. He slings the shoelace over his shoulder, slaps both thighs before rising and walks wordlessly to the door, where he turns and rubs his chin as if puzzling over an engineering problem that could either save the world or destroy it.<\/p>\n \u201cIs it Thursday?\u201d he asks. When the lawyer tells him no, it\u2019s Tuesday, the man nods appreciatively and walks out.<\/p>\n So it was that the lawyer lost a prospective client he would read about in the newspaper three days later. A violent act was widely witnessed at an airport baggage claim. An unnamed man with a copper pipe struck a stylish woman with beautiful hair and hands across the face after a brief altercation. The woman was knocked cold, her jaw broken. Another woman screamed. An older woman fainted. A man dropped his bag and darted in the direction of airport security. Amid the chaos, the perpetrator walked away unmolested into a private club within the terminal. About an hour later he was pointed out to police as the guy watching television alone at the unmanned bar, where an abandoned food basket and two half-consumed beers might have seemed, in conjunction with the three unconscious bodies on the floor, like evidence of an act of spontaneous adaptation. His first comment to the policemen who came at him, guns drawn, from both sides was that he was waiting to see himself on the TV news, for the news of who he was now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cShe bought a convertible Lexus, did I mention? I get home one night at ten, there it is in the driveway<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[901,902],"class_list":["post-12142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-adaptation","tag-mania","writer-corey-mertes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12142"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12418,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12142\/revisions\/12418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}