Just the three of us: my wife, her lover, and me.
Three
weeks after my wife told me she was having an affair, I decided to buy a pair
of new pants. For a functional adult under normal circumstances, this wouldn't
be much of an event, but I'd never been able to buy much of anything for
myself—and all kinds of everyday actions had recently taken on layers of
meaning. The last time I could remember buying my own pants had been in an
emergency, when I discovered a rip in the seat of some raggedy khakis at work.
Before the affair, I'd often worn pants until the cuffs were stringy and the
lap was spotted with olive oil from eating salad at my desk; I had begun to
muffin out of some of them as well. Sometimes my wife just threw my pants out
and ordered new ones online—in black, so they would be harder to ruin.
I needed
new pants because I'd shrunk. Almost as soon as I began to understand that my
wife was having an affair and was imagining a whole new life for herself, I
started to lose weight. That first week, I was mostly too confused to think
about food. I started smoking again, which killed what was left of my appetite.
At the same time, I also began to set personal records for push-ups, sit-ups,
and distance running. The obsessive exercise was more a way to stay busy and
burn off sorrow and anger than a conscious attempt to get in shape, but I lost
15 pounds, and all of my pants now had enough room in the waist for me and a
box turtle. I had abdominal muscles for the first time since high school. My
neck was thinner. My whole face looked pleasantly more rugged, maybe from the
exercise of crying.
