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In any tortured relationship there are more than a few last straws. Most of them are Springer-worthy acts of stalking, lying, and crockery hurling (and in that department, CB and I certainly did our part to contribute to the tradition). But what I think of as the real end—the thing from which we could never recover, even if we wanted to—occurred a few weeks before we separated. Kiki and I were going to the movies, to see Pollack.

"What's Pollack?" he asked.

Somehow, I knew he would ask that. I stared at him.

I had to see if what I suspected was true. I'd always worked to downplay what I thought of as my brainy enthusiasms, but realized at that moment that my knowledge wasn't freakishly erudite. It was basic information known to any educated person.

"I can't believe you've never heard of Jackson Pollack," I said with the most disdain I could muster.

CB grabbed the newspaper from me and studied the movie ad for a long minute. "Oh, I get it," he snorted. "He's a tortured artist, just like you."

"Was," I said. "He’s dead."

Marriages can survive more catastrophes than we could ever imagine. But they cannot survive contempt. It didn't end there, of course. I didn't throw my bag over my shoulder, march out to the theater to meet my friend, and return home to find he'd packed a bag and left a note. But the damage was done.

We fought some more. I moved out, even though we were living in a house I owned. He was unhappy with this arrangement. He said he was going to try; part of his effort was subscribing to the New York Times.

I lived at Kiki's house all summer. Once, when I returned to pick up something in the basement, I passed the newspaper recycling pile. It was a towering, several foot-high pile of unread Times, still captive in their blue plastic bags. Once I was gone, CB didn't have the interest or aptitude to slog through a daily newspaper.

I realized then that I could neither change my soon-to-be ex-husband into the sort of person who would be interested in the day's news, nor co-exist with someone who wasn't. To this day, the thought of that stupendous pile still makes me sad.

My current boyfriend and I have been together for six years. He's not a greaser-poet with working-class roots, but the nerdy son of an attorney who taught himself Latin in high school, just for fun. He is from Southern California though, and surfed at Malibu as a boy. I don't know if he owned a Sting-Ray bike. But he has read War and Peace, and favors Prince Andrei. I’m a Pierre person, myself, but as my friend Kiki says, I've always been shamelessly tolerant where my boyfriends are concerned.