The Wrong Side of Smart

I haven't written anything in a while, sorry about that (although that's kind of an arrogant thing to say, as if you guys are waiting with bated breath for Jezzaz to bestow upon you his wonderful writing! Yeah, right:)) Real life has been all consuming recently. Hopefully, you guys will accept this in the meantime, until I can finish some of the other stuff I have going.

This story is slow; there is no explicit sex but plenty of references. Since it is so slow, I decided to drop it all as one entry rather than chapters, as I normally do. It is a slow burn, so be aware that it's not my normal fare. If you are one of those people who talks about how wordy my stories are, you might want to give this one a miss, fair warning.

We never really do hear about what happens to the woman who leaves for whatever reason, do we? Most of the time we hear about it from the point of view of the person left behind, never hers. I thought it might be interesting to hear from her perspective...

I will get back to finishing Ingrams, and also making sure Ryan gets what is coming to him soon...

I hope this resonates with some out there.

Edited by the incomparable Blackrandi1958 and also input from GirlInTheMoon, both of whom are terrific writers and also awesome humans for spending their time making this better.

The Wrong Side of Smart.

Jeff clattered his plate onto the table, and I winced, but when he drank his water, slurping it, and burped at the end of it, I just lost it. Finally, irrevocably, and totally, I lost it.

I was so far at the end of my rope, I couldn't see the start of it. My nerves were so frayed you could plat them. I'd had enough, and I just screamed, "I goddamn well want a divorce!"

There was a stunned silence. Me, because I couldn't believe I'd finally given voice to the all-consuming thought I'd had for the past six months, and him, well, because he couldn't believe anything was amiss in The Life of Jeff. He just stared at me, the glass of water on the way to the table.

"Whh... What?" he said, with that stupid wobble in his voice he always had when he was surprised.

What the hell. I'd said it now. It was finally out there. Go for broke, girl. Let it all out.

"Yeah, I do. Jesus, Jeff, you can't possibly have not noticed how pissed off I've been over the past six months? I mean, even in your poor-ass deluded state you've got to have an inkling that I'm ready to walk? Surely?"

"Well, yeah, I just thought..."

His voice trailed away. Oh, this I had to hear.

"Thought what?"

"Well..." he squirmed, obviously uncomfortable. "I thought... well, you are hitting your late... forties. I thought... Menopause?" The last word was almost whispered.

I sat there, speechless. He actually thought I was going through menopause? This fucking clueless moron. I started feeling better about my outburst. He deserved it.

"I'm forty-six, you mother-fucker," I hissed through clenched teeth.

"I can still have kids for years. Unlike you, you fucking waste of space. When was the last time you got it up without a blue pill??" I sneered at him. It was all coming out now.

He was taken aback. "I thought... when we used those, it was..."

"It was what? Great? An all-nighter? Fuck. You waste most of those anyway, cos you just roll over when you are done and start snoring. What the fuck? You think you're some great lover? Casanova?"

I wasn't being quite fair here, there were times when he still had to peel me off the ceiling, but I wasn't about to let him know that. They were few and far between and in the last year, rarer than finding rocking-horse shit. And to totally honest, it's not like I instigated it much, or even really participated that much beyond being physically present. I mean, there's only so many half-hearted attempts to get yourself off you can take, right?

He did snore though, and that was another brick in the wall of Let's Get Jan Divorced. When we were done and he rolled over, instead of actually, you know, cuddling or something, he just started the snorting and snoring. It's enough to drive anyone to drink. In fact, that's exactly what I do. I get up and have a glass of wine, get my breath back, watch an episode of Sex in the City and wonder if any of those bitches ever had to deal with a snoring husband for seventeen years. I'm willing to bet not. That's not a script with a nice half hour resolution, however real it might be.

Frankly, what I really wanted was a joint. We used to have those back in the day, but since the kids came along? NooOOOooo. Not in the house, decreed Saint Jeff. The moment they came along, all fun ceased. Well, it sure felt like it. No more Saturday nights out, blasted to the gills. No more weed tasting parties. Those were the best! What I remember of them, anyway.

The fact is, I hated my life. I hated the man I'd married, who had singularly failed to make anything of himself. Oh sure, the kids loved him, but then what kids wouldn't? He had a job making toys, for god's sake. Toys! He went to college for that. I mean, seriously, he did. He has a master's degree in child psychology, for whatever that was worth. You have any idea how you explain that to your girlfriends? You don't just blithely drop that little tidbit in, when everyone is comparing husband's dick size, let me tell you. I usually tell them, airily, "Oh, he's got a degree in psychology and spends his days putting that to good use," and then move on hurriedly. It has the dual effect of making him sound more mysterious, thank Christ, and also meaning I don't have to go into details, because while I hate liars, I'd lie my fucking head off if I was really pressed about shit like that. I mean, wouldn't you? He makes toys for fucking toddlers, for shit's sake.

I mean, sure, I knew that going in. Obviously, but I figured he'd be doing shit like coming up with national curriculums to make kids learn faster or stuff like that, not advising TV shows like Little Einsteins. I mean, seriously? How do I spin that as a worthy job for my husband?

Melissa— she's my bestie, over at Moccha Realty, where I work— her husband was a NASCAR Mechanic. Now that's worth bragging about. Cyndi? Her husband designs earthquake resistant buildings. Joanie, she's married to a judge. Okay, traffic court, but still, he's a judge.

I don't want you to get the impression that I'm all just surface view, though. I know the value of doing what you love, reflected happiness and all the rest of it. I get it. God knows, selling and leasing commercial real estate wasn't quite where I expected to be at this point in my life either. I don't honestly know where I expected to be, really, but this frustrated, this fed up with my husband and my marriage, yeah, not there, not at all.

The thing is, I could bore you with a litany of issues I have with my husband; there's no one big thing that's wrong. He doesn't beat me or ignore me, or ignore the kids or abuse them. It's more like death by a thousand cuts. He snores, he burps, he farts. I know, he has a gastrointestinal tract imbalance. I hear that every time he farts in public, but you know what? That only goes so far. I know it's not 'his fault', but there comes a point where he farts at the crucial moment of a movie and all your friends who are over for a dinner party start laughing that you just can't deal any more.

His driving scares the bejesus out of me, and I'm genuinely terrified for the kids in that car of his. He drives a Mustang, and apparently he's had warp drives fitted to it. Half the time he gets to where he is going before he actually left, with the speeding tickets to prove it.

He hates coffee. I mean, who hates coffee? What did I do in a past life to deserve a husband who hates coffee? He drinks weird beer and turns his nose up at the Pabst Blue Ribbon or Budweiser that I drink, if beer is on the menu.

He's constantly picking wax out of his ears. He can burp the alphabet, something the kids find enormously funny. He insists on singing along with the latest teeny bopper sensation. Even the kids look at him funny when he does that, particularly when he's doing the drop-off at school.

Maisy - who is sixteen - is mortified by this. I know how to do it; you drop her off at the first available parking spot, you don't say a word as she gets out, and the moment she is out, you take off. You are a parent, and therefore meant to be invisible. I get it. It's how I was at that age; it's the natural order of things. Him? Oh no, he has to get out of the car and hug her and embarrass the hell out of her, cheerily waving at all her friends, whose names he doesn't remember. For FUCKS sake.

And the bike racing he does on the weekend with Drew, our son, who is fourteen; I mean, how dirty can you actually get? I swear he just goes out to the desert and digs up as much mud as the pair of them can carry, and then just climbs back in the car, to bring it into MY house.

He uses my eyebrow tweezers to pick hairs out of his nose. He NEVER puts the toilet seat down, and when he's had to go, it looks like an explosion in a shit factory in there. And smells like it, too.

He wants sex at inopportune moments, 'when the mood takes us' he puts it. It never damn well takes us when I want to. It's always just before we are due to go out, the few times we have been out recently. Right when I'm just done with the makeup, he comes up and starts groping me and making suggestions and kissing my neck and I'm like "For Fucks Sake Jeff, we'll be late!"

He never does any washing, and when he loads the dishwasher, it's all haphazard and nothing gets cleaned properly. As for paying bills on time, forget it. I used to leave that to him, but after the third time the electricity got cut off because he just forgot, I took over.

I'm telling you all this so you get an idea of what my life is like. I sell and lease commercial real estate for a job; it's pretty lucrative and I out-earn Jeff two to one, something he doesn't seem to have any respect for, either.

I'm smart. Well, I think I am. God knows I'm smarter than a lot of the bozos I seem to be selling to. My mom and dad are dead and gone and frankly, good riddance. Mom never warmed to me. I'd do something, something that mattered, something clever or whatever, usually involving one of my friends; I was really good about being able to diagnose their relationship ailments, but did they listen? Did they hell, and tell her about it, and she'd just sigh and mutter, "The wrong side of smart." It used to really piss me off. I mean, your own mother calling you stupid. What kid can deal with that? My big sis, Tina, she'd just give me the smug smile and then go back to whatever she was doing. Tina was the only person approaching my intellectual level— having to explain Dallas sub-plots to your parents is demeaning—did they really not understand it?

Tina, though, she was every big sister you hate. Everything she touched was great. "Why can't you be more like your big sister?" I'd get, all the time, with her smirking behind Mom as she said it. Fucking Tina. Smarter than me. She ended up a political science major and was a part of several senators' election teams. Want to be elected? Call Tina. Something you need spun? Call Tina. Want to be made to feel a complete fucking idiot? Call Tina. Well, that last one was more about me than anyone else, but still. Tina was someone I loved from afar and got extremely frustrated with in person, because she just cut to the core of everything using a fucking diamond scalpel with "For use on January" written on the side...

We'd not seen each other in years; she'd moved to Washington, married some socialite dude or something, and was currently 'taking a couple of years out', sailing the world on their sixty-foot yacht. She'd written some textbooks on politics, and lectured at some Ivy League schools and married money, and now she was living the life of Riley. Getting hold of her was hard a lot of the time because she was 'at sea'. I kept waiting for her to invite us to come visit, but it wasn't happening and there was no way I was going to ask, so Tina was just not there at the time.

We lived in a suburb of Seattle, and let me tell you, business was booming. Recently, our company got selected to sell this entire new building in downtown Seattle, and it had been a hell of a job. Companies like Amazon and Google were vying to get office space, and we had to be available to show it at all hours.

Melissa, my friend I mentioned, she was recently divorced herself. She was miserable for the first six months, but after that, she got in her groove. We were all thrilled to hear her stories on Monday of her weekend. She seemed to jet off to Vegas regularly, and then came in starting her stories like, "So there I was, he was covered in baby oil, and he had a saddle and some jumper cables over one shoulder..." Yeah, I know it's a Jeff Foxworthy quote, but when she said it, it was dripping with sauce, and you knew it would be followed up with salacious details.

She seemed happy, you know? God knew I wasn't. I just needed a break. I needed to find myself, because I didn't seem to remember who I was anymore. Not with this man-child I married, and then two other children on top of him. It's just not what I signed up for.

I know I'm not perfect, either, obviously. I have my foibles. I can't seem to stand Prius drivers, for example. I mean, I get the point of the car, but around here, it's like a badge people use to exclaim to everyone else, "Look! I'm so much more concerned with the environment than you are!" There's this thing called 'conspicuous conservatism', which is basically making a big deal about what a tree hugger you are, and boy, do people around here have it in spades. I see a fucking Prius— which can't be anything else but an electric car, and massive nerd statement at the same time— and I just want to scream. And I get a lot of opportunities around here, let me tell you.

So yeah, I have my issues, but I'm damn sure I'm more grounded in reality than Jeff is.

The thing is, frustrated as I was, I have to believe that Jeff was, too? It's not like he hadn't tried to reach out to me. I could tell; the trouble was, he was doing it using psychology for toddlers. He was using techniques and approaches that are designed to get a ten-year-old to talk to you, not a mature woman who's probably smarter than he was. When he tried, it both made me angry that he was trying in such a stupid way, and sad that this was where we were. He saw the divide and was trying, but in such a way as to make the chasm even greater than it was in the first place.

Back to the moment. The words were out there. I couldn't take them back.

He looked back at me, I could see the hurt on his face. Good. Now he knew how I felt, every second I had to look at him.

I. Just. Wanted. Out. This wasn't how I planned to go about it, but when the moment came, I wasn't going to be found wanting. If it had to be this way, then so be it. My life was only going to get better by taking drastic steps, and I was pretty sure this was going to be a mercy for him, too, since I'm sure he wasn't any happier than I was. Who could be?

Right then though, I took a deep breath. I was angry; he was hurt, and I had to try to de-escalate the situation.

"Look," I said, in a calmer and steadier voice, "I'm not happy. God knows, I'm not happy. I'm pretty sure you aren't either. This isn't working. This is not what I signed up for. I just can't deal anymore, right? I just can't. I need out."

I almost sobbed the last, and immediately, Jeff got up to come over to me, missing the entire point of what I was trying to say. He was coming over to hug me, missing the fact that it was him who I was tired of.

"No!" I said, holding up my hand to ward him off. "No, just... sit."

Jeff looked confused and like a sad puppy. I had insulted him, sneered at his bedroom performance, and still the man just wanted to 'hug it out'. What kind of man is this?

"Jeff, I'm serious," I said, steadily, looking him in the eye as he sat down. "I want a divorce. I need my own life back."

"I see," he said, wobbly. "Well, I can't stop you, and I wouldn't want to. We all have to make our own path through life."

That's just the kind of wishy-washy shit he says, though. I mean, listen to it. I'd had eighteen years of that shit and I just couldn't take another second of it. Fighting down a surge of irritation, I was about to say something when he said, "I had rather hoped that our paths might be the on the same road, though. Obviously not."

"See, I just can't take another platitude like that, Jeff. I just can't. 'Make our own path through life'," I made air quotes, then put my finger in mouth, like I was going to be sick. "Can you hear yourself? Jesus."

He looked at me, and I could see his stone face come down. He does that when he's cut himself out emotionally from whatever is going on. I'd seen it probably five or six times in our marriage. When his mother died, when his best friend was killed, when we lost the first baby through a miscarriage, when I was in a car accident, through my own fault, and I lied about it, and once when the kids were involved in a beating of a Jewish kid from their school. They weren't involved in terms of doing it, but they were there when it happened, and they didn't do anything to stop it, and Jeff was pissed at them for days afterwards. When the cop showed up at the house, I thought he was going to go off like a rocket, but the stone face came down and stayed down for days.

He had this point where he just emotionally dis-engaged. I don't know if it was to stop himself feeling any more, or whether he was deliberately dampening to avoid blowing his top. Either way, it was there then. I should have expected it.

"How do you propose this plays out, January?"

Not 'Jan' any more. January now. The full name treatment, and he knows how much I detest that stupid name. Well, I guess I'd earned that.

"I don't know." I really didn't. I had planned that a divorce was coming, while I'd blown my top this evening, and it was all rolling along now, I'd known how unhappy I was and how I needed to get out, and I'd entertained several plans. I could move out, or he could. We bought the house together when we were first married, and we were well over half way to paying it off. I liked it, but then so did he.

I was conflicted about how it should go. I was aware that whoever got the house would more than likely get major custody of the kids, and that's where the conflict was. I loved my kids, I lived for them, but part of the whole point of this was to get some of my life back. I was drowning in the life I had, and so I wanted some semblance of my old one back. Shared custody would be fine with me; whatever failures Jeff had as a husband, he was a good father, and I was pretty sure he'd say I was a good mother. Shared custody would give us both time off for good behavior; it was as much a gift for Jeff as it was for me.

The thing was, the house was great, but it also came with memories I don't need, so I'd been looking off and on. I was a commercial real estate agent, but you hear things; I'd seen several developments with apartments attached. There was a really nice three-bedroom executive suite apartment with roof rights, in a new development in downtown Bellevue I'd been keeping an eye on. It would suit me down to the ground -- or the roof, in this case -, and I could afford to lease it for a couple of years, with intent to buy.

In lots of ways, it was better that way. I had more resources to draw on than Jeff did, and while I was pissed off with him, turfing him out and keeping the house, well, that would just mean large amounts of alimony, and I didn't want that, either. And I wasn't that much of a bitch.