It’s a 15-minute drive along two-lane roads in the woods to get to the office. At some point today I’ll have to call Katherine to arrange picking up the kids, but I know I’ll forget, like last time. She was pissed off. I could call her now, in the morning, but she’d be pissed off about that, too.

What the hell. To exist is to piss her off.

“Hello?”

“Hey.”

“Are you crazy?” she says, half asleep. “It’s five-thirty in the morning.”

“What time you want me to pick them up tomorrow?”

“This couldn’t wait until later?”

“No.”

“You’re being passive-aggressive.”

“Have you ever known me to be passive-aggressive?”

“It’s too early for this.”

“Last time I didn’t call, and you didn’t like that. Now I’m calling.”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Fine.”

She hangs up.

I allow myself to feel smug.

* * * *

The other fantasy I’ve had, aside from New Mexico can-plinking and Trump Tower load-dropping is to move out to L.A. and be an execution trader for a shop out there. There are some hedge funds in L.A. What a life that would be. I need to work on my image. This khakis and blue collared shirt thing isn’t working for me anymore. I need to be cool. I’ve been wearing this stupid hedge fund uniform for decades, now. Last night, Tod suggested to me that I wax my chest. That would be a start.

I’ve felt this way before, when Katharine and I first got together—I was her tenth, not her first, and I tortured myself with the idea that someone else had plucked her before I met her. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, and I spent a year, raw, angry, running just to run, running both away and towards the idea that someone else, no, many other people, had penetrated my girlfriend. To this day, I’m not entirely sure why I was so preoccupied with it—people have plenty of partners before marriage, nobody gets married a virgin anymore, and people have just gotten comfortable with the idea that there is not a small amount of sexual experimentation that goes on. Still, again, it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up, and the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep. I carried the thought around with me constantly, muscles tensed, not needing food, torturing myself. Now, years later, it was back, with the thought that I might never see my children again, victimized by unfair divorce laws that didn’t care whose fault it was.

Worst of all, and unbelievably, it was starting to look like I was not going to have enough money. We had a couple of million in the bank, but Katharine had consumed most of what I made over the years, and what wasn’t in the bank was either tied up in my stake in the partnership or in the house, which I was going to have to liquidate in order to give Katharine cash. Or, as my attorney was telling me, borrow money from her, which I was going to have to pay off in a balloon payment at the end of five years. This was all exclusive of any alimony and child support, which was going to add up to high five figures per month, to support her in the manner to which she had become accustomed.