That’s ridiculous also and never happened. Why not say what really did happen and be done with it? It was all very simple and fast. We were eating dinner when she said she was leaving me for a man named Mike. We had no child, we’d been married for eight years. I said I wouldn’t try to stop her. I could see it’d be useless and I did only want her to be happy. If she couldn’t be happy with me, I was glad she was with someone she could be happy with. She said she was thankful I was taking it so well and in such a decent civilized way. I asked about him. She said he worked in a law office on the same floor as hers. They’d been carrying on for six months. He was divorced, had two children. That night Arlene and I slept in separate rooms for the first time in our marriage, or for the first time when one of us wasn’t very angry at the other or wasn’t so ill that he or she needed to sleep alone. We just thought it best to sleep separately till she moved out. They rented a new apartment together the following month. I helped her pack and bring her belongings to the van she rented and drove. I told her I wouldn’t mind if Mike came and helped, since she had several vanfuls of stuff to move. She said she felt I shouldn’t meet him till much later on: when they were married, perhaps; maybe a year into their marriage when I could come by with my new woman who she said she knew I’d have by then. “You’ll be as much in love with someone else in a few months as I am now with Mike.” I said “I hope you’re right. It’ll certainly be what I want.” So she was gone. I thought I was taking it well but I wasn’t. I couldn’t take it, in fact. Every night I’d get drunk thinking about her. I read her old adoring notes and letters to me and looked at her photos and would slam the wall or table with my fists and shout and cry. I couldn’t stand thinking of her being with another man, kissing him, whispering to him, making love with him, doing all those private things with him, confiding to him, telling him what happened to her at the store that day, asking him if he’d like to see such and such movie or play that week, meeting him for lunch, going away with him some weekend, visiting friends, maybe even planning to have a child. It also distressed me that they were in the same profession. I knew that’d make them even closer, all those professional matters they could discuss and look up and share. A month after she left me I showed up in front of their office building at around the time I knew they’d be finished for the day. They walked out of the building fifteen minutes later, holding hands, chatting animatedly. I had a wrench with me. I pulled it out of my jacket, ran up to him and screamed “Meet Jules, her husband, you bastard,” and hit him in the hand he threw up to protect his head from the wrench. He grabbed that hand, turned to run and I hit him in the back of the head with the wrench. He went down. I kept yelling “I’ll never let her be with anyone else, you bastard, never. I love her too much. I’ll love her forever,” and swung the wrench over his face but didn’t hit him again. The police came. I didn’t try to get away. I don’t know what Arlene was doing at the time. I was arrested. Mike was taken away in an ambulance. Later he pressed charges against me. I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years. That means I’ll serve around three and a half years if I don’t cause any trouble in prison. Arlene visits me every day she’s allowed to and stays the maximum time. It’s six hours by bus for her round trip but she says she doesn’t mind. Twice in my first half year here we were allowed to walk around the prison garden for an hour. She broke off with Mike and he’s already moved in with another woman. “So much for his professed eternal devotion,” Arlene said, “not that I would want it now.” She’s said several times that she’ll never again be with another man but me. She hated my hitting Mike with the wrench, but sees now it was probably the only way I could ever get through to her how much I loved her and wanted to get her back. “In some oddball way,” she said, “it made me fall for you all over again. Maybe also because what I did and the way I did it forced you to lose control and try to kill him and I’m trying to make up for that too. But it’ll all be different from now on. I can’t wait to be back home with you, my arms around you, in bed with you, I can’t wait.” At certain designated spots in the garden we’re allowed to hug and kiss for a half-minute, which we always did past the time limit till one of the guards ordered us to stop.