Seeing my ex-husband on Saturday was a lot of fun for awhile, and very upsetting afterwards. Throughout our marriage I kept trying to straighten him out, and then I just was waiting and hoping he would straighten himself out, and of course he never did. He still really hasn’t. But he is also still cute, funny, smart, and able to make my knees weak when he sings. He still makes me feel soft and fuzzy in the chest and he still gives fantastic big hugs. There’s a sense in which I will always love him… but my disappointment in him as a husband was so profound that I can’t bring myself to ever trust him again. So I just keep walking away. I keep letting him go. It’s not always hard. Going back to EH again would be just short of suicidal. But Saturday was hard.

EH and I are both singing as part of a quartet in our galpal’s wedding ceremony, which is in a few weeks. Gal is not only close friends with both of us, but she sang in our wedding 5 years ago. How could we not do this? We certainly have no reason not to. EH and I are having the most amicable seperation and divorce I have ever heard of. We get along great and, occasionally, not often, enjoy spending some time together. We are friends. I have moved on, and I'm sure he has too.

I have been SO excited, thinking about doing this wedding. Gal is a professional musical theatre actress. It’s an honor to be asked to sing in her wedding when she could have had anyone she wanted. Add in the fact that the wedding is on Block Island in early June. I’ll be spending two nights there in a B&B singing with awesome vocalists for one of my best friends, eating well and dancing with my boyfriend, who will be accompanying me. Yep, I got a date and all. I’m SO looking forward to this.

So, last Saturday I rehearsed with EH and 2 others at his Wall Street apartment. We’re singing two beautiful madrigals. We sound so great together, the four of us. We had fun learning the music and working on it. It’s going to be a blast. We must have worked on it for 2 hours.

Reminder: EH was friends with Zenchick’s friend Amy, which is how Zenchick and I met. So. Since Zenchick was in town for the blogfest, I hung around EH’s place for a few minutes after rehearsal, eating pistachio nuts and waiting for Zenchick to stop by. The plan was she and EH get to visit a bit, and then she and I head up to the Village to meet the bloggers for lunch.

So Zenny arrives. Hug hug, how’s it going, catching up, blah blah blah. At some point during the conversation, EH’s phone rang. ZC and I babbled while he dealt with it. I heard him say “No, now’s a great time. Some people are here, come on over.” I thought nothing of it. Until he hung up the phone and said “That was LM.”

LM is a gal who did a show with EH back when he and I were newly engaged. She was very young at the time (under 20) and EH was about 31. She had a crush on him and flirted baaaad. In the show, there was choreography that had her straddling him in a chair and placing his hands all over her, which she clearly relished. We thought it was amusing at the time. She was cute. That was 6 years ago.

Now, EH and I are of course separated, I’m dating, he’s available. She’s still around. They have kept in touch all this time.

What was I supposed to think?

I was still sitting at his table eating those damn yummy pistachio nuts. I made a crack to Zenchick that LM was after David for awhile, and how cute she was. EH said, “No, I was after her for awhile.” Oh really? I kept munching and talking. “The last time I saw her, Zenny, they were doing a show together, and he had his hands on her ass.” (Flip and funny, right?) “Tits,” EH corrected me. “Oh yeah,” I said, scratching my head. “Maybe it was both.”

Somehow we left. Somehow I lost the feeling in my gut. Like my stomach was hollow. I remember wondering how many pistachios I had eaten. I shook. “Are you alright?” Zenchick asked on the elevator down. “No,” I said. EH lives on Wall street and it’s a nice elevator. Still, I found myself sobbing. But I was fine. Elevator was lovely. Zenchick gave me a hug. I sobbed.

We got on the 2 train to head to the Village and Rafaella’s. I started babbling. “All of our wedding stuff and things we bought during the marriage is in his apartment. All that stuff - that was our household. It’s everywhere. He’s using it all. Did you notice?”

The dishes, the towels, the knick-knacks. The candlesticks Zenchick had given us as a wedding present. The furniture. The Disney figurines that he started buying because I liked them, and then never gave them to me, deciding instead to start a collection of his own. This Disney thing is a huge gaping wound between us. I won’t go into the details here. But seeing the Fantasia Sprite on his shelf prominently displayed was a knife in my gut.

And then LM. “I’ll bet they’re having sex right now,” I chattered. “If he was after her he could get her. She’s been ready to lift her skirt for him for years. All these years! I’ll bet they’re fucking right now.”

Why the hell did I give a damn? I enjoy fantastic sex with my boyfriend all the time. David and I were never all that hot together anyway. What was I really jealous of? Or was this even really jealousy at all? It felt more like… mourning.

Then I said “I hope they are having sex. That would be so great for him. I think he needs that.”

The thing is, I really meant it.

Zenchick just stood there on the train, listening patiently. “We’re wrong for each other,” I said. “But it’s hard for me to stop seeing the man I fell in love with.”

“Maybe he feels the same way about you,” She said.

At that point, we realized we had mistakenly boarded the south-bound train and were now speeding into Brooklyn. We got off at Clark street and switched to the uptown. “I think you’d better take responsibility for getting us to Rafaella’s, Zenny,” I laughed. “I’m in a bit of a place here I think.”

“That’s ok,” Said Zenchick, in her quintessentially Zen way.

Later, at Rafaella’s, I was laughing at Mark and Zenny scrapping, eating an eggplant panini and discovering that Crash and I may have been separated at birth, as evidenced by our mutual blonde fetishes and penchants for foreign film. We all marveled that the Accidental New Yorker had been the first to post a funny story about the previous evenings GB:NY party. MAK nursed a hangover and everyone watched pretty boys walking past the windows. Zenchick camcordered the whole thing. Life was back to normal.