Page 9 of The Frog Prince
“Something wrong?”
God damn it,yes.
You once said you loved me. And you married me. In front of God and my family and everybody.
I see us at my family’s old-fashioned church in Visalia with the marvelous stained-glass windows, the same church I attended every single Sunday from birth until I went away to college. I see us in St. Tropez in lounge chairs on the pier, sunlight glinting madly off the perfect turquoise water, me obsessed with Jean-Marc’s indifference while Jean-Marc is obsessed with Rimbaud’s poetry. I see us stiff and silent, signing the divorce papers at the ugly Fresno courthouse, the building more suitable for a prison than for an office building.
“No.” But I’m going to cry; I’m going to break open fast. Jesus. How can it be so easy for him? How can it—we—have been nothing at all? “What happened?” I ask, and I know I’m a fool, know that this is ground that’s been covered a thousand times without any insight gleaned, but I still need answers, something definitive, something to save me. Make me human again. The truth is, I have to understand how his feelings changed. I need to know what makes love fade, or if it was something I did.
“Oh, Holly.” He sighs. “Are you having a bad day?”
Stupid tears sting my eyes.No, Jean-Marc, I want to scream, nota bad day, just a bad life. I thought you were my Prince Charming, and instead you were a toad. I sniff unattractively, and somehow, thinking of him as a toad, a really awful warty, stinky toad, makes me feel marginally better. “Are you having a party?”
“Just a few friends over.”
I say nothing. What can I say? I was the one who filed for divorce. I was the one who played bad cop to Jean-Marc’s good cop. I was the one who moved. He got to stay behind. He got to keep the friends. Even better, he got the great Waterford glasses—a complete set, minus the eight white wine I have, which he doesn’t miss since he has twelve red—so he ought to be having parties.
“It takes time to settle into a new place,” he says, his accent suddenly becoming thicker, more Gallic. The guy knows when to play his French-foreign-hero card. “You have to be patient. Give it time.”
“Yeah.”
“Starting over is never easy.”
I nod, not that he can see, and scrub my face dry.
“It was the same for me,” he adds. “When I left Paris, came here, everything was so different. I felt like a fish out of water.”
Oh, shut up.
Jean-Marc’s a professor of French literature at Fresno State, the local university. When we met at the Daily Planet in Fresno’s Tower district, I fell for him hard and fast. I loved everything about him: his Frenchness, his style, his incredible accent. He was so different from anyone I’d ever met, so interesting, so romantic. Our dates were like something out of a romance novel—champagne (Frenchchampagne, not Napa Valley sparkling wine), intimate little restaurants (Continental cuisine, of course), expert seduction with real French-kissing.
“What went wrong?” I repeat, growing angry all over again.Why did you stop loving me?
He sighs, a heavy Gallic sigh. “I don’t know, Holly. These things happen.”
Do they? Why?How?
I used to phone him more often, a call every two or three weeks under the auspices of checking in, and every call is like this. We have conversations of nothing. I ask hopeless questions, and he has no answer; he gives me no help. I’m desperate. And he’s a stranger.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. I’m still shocked. Mortified. I was always the good girl. I was the one who worked so hard not to make mistakes. I was the one who made sure everyone else was happy first. But here I am in a drafty apartment in a city that feels strange, trying not to fall apart.
No one told me this part. No one talked about what happens after the happily-ever-after. Fairy tales usually conclude with “The End,” but in my case, there was another page that said, “The Beginning Again, PartII.”
PartII.
How awful.
I know Olivia says I must get out, meet people, start dating, but dating again scares me to death. What do I tell people? What do I tell them about myself?
A Cancer, born in the year of the rat, I like sushi, Italian food, movies, travel, and hiking. Oh, and I’m divorced. Yeah. We lasted just under a year. But hey, that’s life; it’s cool.
No.
You can’t tell people that. You can’t just spill stuff like that. I know. I’ve tried. And people freak. First they say, “You’re so young!” and when I don’t elaborate (how can I?), they get that frosty look, all frozen and cold, and I feel more alone than before.
So now I don’t say anything about the divorce to anyone, and I just smile. Even though on the inside my eyes are stinging and my jaw aches because, honest to God, I don’t want my own apartment. I had a house—ahome—with Jean-Marc. I had a squashy down-filled sofa and bookcases filled with books, yellow climbing roses on the trellis, flagstone pavers from the patio to the pool, and a perfect little gated side yard with lush green grass that would have been perfect for a child’s swing set.
I thought I had a future, a husband, a life. I wasn’t prepared to be starting over. Wasn’t prepared at all.