PART 1: A New Hope
***
Pen in hand, I sat down again. I wanted to keep moving. My cheeks itched just a bit where the tears had dried. The rumpled napkin was still sitting on the table just where I'd left it.
"That's all right. Happens to everyone. Just two more. Right here, and right here."
Quickly, I scribbled where the man told me. Then with a sigh, I set the pen down and sat back in my chair.
"Congratulations." The words sounded anything but congratulatory. "You are now officially divorced."
I shook his hand, and then watched him leave. The door slammed with an air of finality. I leaned back in the chair, another heavy sigh escaping my lips. I'd been sighing a lot recently. Twenty-four years old and already divorced. Chalk me up to another American statistic.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. The lawyer would come to my office to do the paperwork. It saved me the hassle of meeting him somewhere else. But now, as the huge walls of the conference room closed in around me, I dreaded even more having to get up and face my co-workers in this current state.
The divorce is what we both wanted. But right now I felt like shit.
I managed to make it to the men's room without anyone seeing me. Quickly, I washed my face and then stared into the mirror. Half muttering to myself, I forced a cool, calm look into my eyes, prepping myself to go out into the world again.
I passed by the cubicles, barely noticed by anyone. Bradley looked up and waved a file at me. I held up a hand to get him to wait a bit longer and kept marching towards my office. Tiffany stepped into my path, walking across an intersection in the aisles and heading off towards my right. She flashed a big smile at me, a thick set of folders crossed over her curvy chest. Just like every other day, I tried not to notice, and kept moving forward once she'd passed.
A few seconds later I was in the sanctity of my office, the door closed. Alone once again. I stared at my monitor. Fifteen emails had popped up in the last hour.
I put my copy of the divorce papers into a file. I ignored the fifteen emails (excuse me, now sixteen emails). Instead, I was staring at the gold/platinum band around my left ring finger.
With a sudden burst of anger, I moved to rip the thing off, but it was wedged onto me pretty tightly. My fingers must've been getting fatter or something. And so with a little pain, and some brute force, I pulled it off. I found an empty envelope and slipped the wedding band inside. The skin was noticeably lighter, if a little pink right now. Even though I'd taken the ring away, I still had an obviously untanned ring of skin around my finger.
I looked away, to my computer screen. Seventeen emails.
Sigh...
***
I'd had it all. I was living the American Dream. The high-paying job with the MBA. Nice car. Three bedroom starter home. Big screen plasma TV. And above all, a gorgeous and loving wife. We'd met during freshman orientation at college and started dating. When Kristin got onstage to pick up her college diploma, I was waiting at the end of the ramp, still in my own graduation gown, down on one knee and holding a big shiny diamond.
We'd gotten jobs close together. A year later we had a beautiful spring wedding. A year after that we picked out a brand-new house in an upscale community. I got promoted, traded up for the new Euro-Sport Sedan, we started talking about baby names, and life was just taking off from there.
Then Richard happened. He was a cute sales guy at some trade show. Kristin had one too many drinks at the bar. She confessed to me the moment she got home. I believed that I could forgive her. Oddly enough, it wasn't the sex that bothered me. It was that she did it behind my back. She was so sorry, and promised it would never happen again. For a while, everything was going to be okay.
But as the weeks passed by, little cracks started to show up in our marriage. I'd get nervous when a guy friend would innocently flirt with her. She was getting paranoid that I didn't trust her anymore. Both our tempers got a little big shorter. The fights lasted longer and came more frequently.
Then I came home one night to find my wife in bed... with Richard.
She wanted out. I agreed. She said we got married too young, too fast. She wanted space. We couldn't keep living together like that anymore. But it still broke my heart.
She moved out immediately and moved in with a friend. I stayed until the house sold and we could split the profits. The divorce was final only three months later.
Kristin was the love of my life. And now my life after love begins. It's a depressing life. Friday nights, alone in an empty condo. But I still had the nice car, the plasma TV, and Cinemax. Life could have been worse, I suppose.
The biggest problem with being married at such a young age is that you lose touch with a lot of your friends. You stop going out to bars or clubs. The people you do see are friends of "the couple". To be honest, a lot of them were Kristin's friends to begin with, which left me mostly alone.
It's hard being out of the game for a few years. You forget how to flirt. You forget how to date. I had no skills anymore for meeting new women. While married, you feel nostalgic for the old days, but you're happy that you found what everyone else is looking for. I had it, but I lost it. To borrow a phrase from my little brother, life sucks big donkey balls.
So with this mantra in my mind, I run myself ragged at work every day. It's all I've really got left. One of my staff told me I had to see this Topher Grace/Dennis Quaid movie. But then he immediately started laughing like a dumb hyena, so I'm not about to take his advice right now.
Tiffany was flirting more than usual with me. The news had spread throughout the office (only hours after I told the first "trusted friend") that I was getting divorced. I guess now the young, rich executive was fair game. I remembered an art piece by some weird guy in LA: "Gold Diggers: like hookers, only smarter."
Tiffany's tits looked so round and delectable. But my brain warned that the last thing I needed was getting taken advantage of by a social climber.
It was a Friday afternoon. I made my own hours. And the walls were starting to close in on me. Time to get the hell out of there.
***
I leaned back into a plush, overstuffed lounge chair, trying to crawl into the shadow of a fake plant. Bright, natural light was pouring through the open windows. The sun wouldn't be setting for an hour at least. For an ordinary day, it was way too early to be getting drunk. But this wasn't an ordinary day.
Happy Hour was just getting started at Maretto's, an upscale restaurant frequented by the preppy and youthful rich. I'd only been there ten minutes but I drained my second glass of some toxic mixture, then tilted my head back and let the thickness in my brain take over.
My pretty waitress came over. "Can I get you anything else?"
I held up my empty tumbler. "Two more of these." For a moment I wanted to flash my most charming smile, test my seduction skills, but I decided against it.
