I’m thinking about re-marrying my ex-wife. But first I would have to find her, track her down, and that might be what I believe can be confidently described as a stumbling block.
Another block over which to stumble might be that she may have changed her name. She was always changing her name, even when we were married. I’d go to bed at night with Gloria and wake up next to Samantha. Then another day I’d wave Cathy bye-bye as I went to work, and when I came home Margaret would be there, not having got around to cooking my dinner and on her way out to have drinks with the girls.
Also, I don’t even know if she’s still alive. Not only may she have quite naturally died of more or less natural causes, or been run over by a careless driver or stepped thoughtlessly into the path of, for example, an onrushing bus, but one dark and dismal Saturday night when I was feeling very much at odds with the world in general and with members of the female gender in general and with her in particular I took out a contract on her, and though I paid the hit-man half the money upfront, he never got back to me for the other half, and I never heard from him again, and I don’t know if he actually did the job or not, and I’m buggered if I could find him. His phone number stopped working, and the shady people who put me on to him had disappeared into the shadows from whence they came, and since by that time she and I lived in different towns many miles apart it wasn’t easy for me to check up on her. I scoured newspapers and whatnot but couldn’t find any reports that might suggest she’d been done away with as per my request to said assassin, and it’s not like you can go around asking if someone has or hasn’t been done away with. I thought about advertising in newspapers and magazines, but she was never much of a reader, and asking around on social media as to whether or not anyone knew the whereabouts of so-and-so . . . Well, social media these days is a hell-hole, and people can get suspicious and combative over the least little thing, or so I’ve found, and I decided against it. And you can’t just ask around to see if anyone had heard if so-and-so had met an untimely and gruesome end. That really gets people pricking their ears up.
But, putting all of that to one side, of course if I did find her there’d be every chance she wouldn’t want to re-marry me. I’ve always found it difficult to understand, but the world has turned out to be choc-a-bloc with ladies who haven’t wanted to marry me. It’s likely I’d have to use all my best and finest powers of persuasion and charm to convince her that remarriage is an excellent idea and a win-win for everyone concerned. But what if she’s remarried? I hear you ask, or if she’s happily settled in another relationship? And what if, in spite of all my best endeavours, she were to remain unconvinced, and told me to go and take a hike and never come back? Well, in that case, I suppose I’d just have to stay with the current Mrs until I can figure something out.
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Conrad Titmuss
Painting: Cezanne’s Mysterious Wife
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