Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,62
and how my gray moods must have taken a toll on poor Renn who deserved a strong woman, even if he wasn’t ever home to spend time with her or to talk to her for more than five minutes every few days when he was out of town.
5. He tried to keep his kids from me after he filed for divorce. It was sad for Billy, Anna, and me because we liked each other, for real, and the fact that Renn didn’t want me seeing them anymore, let alone talking to them on the phone, was probably more hurtful than when I had to deal with the two tramps gloating over how he’d fucked them.
6. He often laughed at me when I mispronounced a word or if I didn’t know things like Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal or that Bora Bora is an island in French Polynesia, not a city in Malaysia. But how many people do know these facts? I graduated cum laude from USC with a degree in communications. I’m not stupid, but there are so many things to know about the world, and God forbid I didn’t know all of the exact same things that Renn knew. Does he know how to make beurre blanc? Does he know that cheesecloth is an important tool when you’re making fruit preserves or Greek yogurt? I’m sure he doesn’t. He was so condescending so many times that it’s a wonder I didn’t dump him before he had a chance to dump me.
7. He left me for another woman. Poetic justice, some will say, considering how he and I got together. Sure, I understand. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t suffer. He didn’t marry her though, probably because she moved to Prague to pursue a career as a sculptor, which seemed pretentious and ridiculous to me at the time, and still does, frankly. She had the money to do it though and not get anxious if her work was awful and didn’t sell, because her father owned a rifle factory in Virginia. Renn met her when he was making a film about the Civil War in the same town where her father’s factory is. After he divorced me, it was only a few months before she moved to Europe and told him that she was going to dump him if he didn’t buy a place in Prague and spend at least a few months of the year there with her. I have to say that I kind of admire her guts, or maybe it was just an air of entitlement. She was only twenty-four at the time and almost model-beautiful and probably had lots of men after her, though I doubt any of them were both famous and rich the way Renn was.
Other questions people (therapists, mainly) have asked:
What one thing did Renn do that made you happier than anything else?
That’s a hard question too. I guess you could say it’s that he noticed me, when there were so many other women (and men) who wanted him to notice them too. He also made it possible for me to quit my job, which I liked well enough while I was doing it, but if you don’t have to work, it’s pretty tempting not to. I started to drink more than I should have though, having so much free time on my hands and no kids to take care of, other than my stepchildren once in a while. But they didn’t need me to take care of them, both of them independent and bright enough to keep themselves busy. I once blamed Renn for my excesses with alcohol, and this got around in an embarrassingly public way, but I don’t drink anymore and haven’t in about a year and a half.
What did you learn about yourself while you were married to him?
One thing I learned is that I don’t do well with uncertainty. This is something my current therapist helped me to figure out. I realize now that most people don’t do very well with uncertainty because the biggest events in our lives, namely, our births and deaths, are out of our control, so in between these two points, we try as hard as we can, almost to the point of insanity (and beyond, in some cases), to control what we can. I’m not a fatalist, but I do think that there are quite a few things that we can’t control, like what time the mail will be delivered or how