At first she was irritated. Then irked. She tried to modulate her negativity, but Monica grew waspish. Simon responded with anxiety and tripled his efforts to please her. He began guessing at what she desired and conforming his own choices to what he imagined were hers.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” she’d ask him after they both returned home from their jobs. They were free adults; they could dine out, cook at home, shop and picnic, whatever.

“I don’t know,” Simon would voice while looking into her face. “Ummm,” as his brows drew together. “Italian?” He inflected the end of his answer into a question. His demeanor declared that he was ready to change his response to whatever matched hers.

Monica knew it would be as crazy to complain about her handsome husband’s devotion as about her other privileges. Which made her even more irritable. Then her irritability triggered more guessing from Simon. “For you to be happy” was his invariable answer to her any question about what he wanted from life. And as Simon kept insisting, what they had seemed to be as good or better than other couples. “Look around,” he said to her. “What more do you want?”

After it was over, she concluded it shouldn’t have gone on as long as it had. Then she could see how they diverted their energies into real estate purchases, and building, instead of working on (or dismantling) their union. With hindsight it was clear to Monica that her on-and-off affair with their realtor Max was never going to go anywhere (he was great fun but they shared no values) and distracted her from evaluating what was happening at home. And Monica realized when she had to arrange her abortion, that she clearly didn’t want to have a baby with Simon, but it wasn’t till after they split up that she understood her aversion to having a baby with anyone. Monica loved her parents but had no desire to be one herself.

At her last lunch with Simon, after the divorce but soon enough that it was in the nature of a debriefing, he voiced his only complaint about her. His girlfriend Debra had him attending a Unitarian church. Debra was Jewish and characterized herself as “open;” she was comfortable in that environment. Monica had been raised in a mixed-culture home; her parents observed Chanukah for her dad and Christmas in keeping with her mother’s traditions. Monica always preferred Christmas even though she sided with her father about most things. She liked the drama, the abundance and the tree, but mostly she liked Christmas because it wasn’t the only rhyme for her name.

“I can’t believe you never told me,” Simon said to her over that restaurant table.

“Told you what?”

“It blows me away. We were together all that time, and you never told me the true story of Chanukah.”

Monica is older now. She has acquired perspective with experience. She has a fair understanding of the Simon years. But she still sputters when she recalls that complaint.