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Her mental energy was almost entirely spent on the boys and work, but there was a little bit left over for herself, and increasingly it went on fantasies, or speculation, at least: when, who, where.
She had wanted to stay married to him, because staying married to anyone is an accomplishment, but there were circumstances beyond one’s control, and here were several of them.
It was completely possible, of course, in the sense that very small ambitions can be achieved quite easily, if one can be bothered.
Joseph was watching American football on T.V. The boys were asleep, and all the washing-up had been done. She tried not to swoon. Perhaps the secret to a successful relationship was to pay someone ten pounds an hour, every hour.
And when she got to the party, she realized that she’d simply missed going out; there had been an awful lot of staying in.
Even if she went to the cinema on her own, which she did occasionally, she was sitting with people who liked the films she liked. Sometimes you needed that.
But how could one not be interested in one’s estranged husband’s girlfriend?
Maybe quiet thoughtful regret wasn’t a thing any more. And maybe they were all better off without it.
In Lucy’s experience, these were the two genders, boys and readers. She wished there was as much gender fluidity as people seemed to think.
Where did her confidence and optimism come from? She knew her life would not be over at fifty. She would still be ambitious, in her private and professional lives. She might be single, but she would still be working on the assumption that she was attractive to somebody, physically and otherwise. This assumption might prove to be utterly baseless, but it was going to be there.
Trump retweeted something with the Twitter handle ‘White Genocide Now.’ The Ku Klux Klan support him. You don’t know. Really.”
She thought about her own wedding, and her marriage, which had made her happy and then very unhappy, and it suddenly seemed absurd to her that she had spent so many years with someone who had brought her so low, all because of the vows that she had made at a different time, to a different person.
