a skating affair

I heard a whisper: This is how it ends.

Our son told us no more skating lessons. But Mark had liked taking him to the track, so he signed up for an adult beginning class. He soon bought a cheap pair of skates. The rink is less than a mile from our house, so he started taking a few hours for lunch on the ice.

I saw it clearly: my husband’s delusion with ice skating would be our downfall.

A childhood overshadowed by my parents’ divorce didn’t stop me from believing in love and finding it, but it put me on guard, reminding me that things can go unpredictably wrong.

What went wrong for my parents was that my father forged a connection with my mother’s best friend and ended up marrying her. I was 11 years old. The relationship began when they discovered a common interest and decided to build a sailboat from a kit. Their spouses and children watched as the helmet slowly took shape. Within a year, the newlyweds set sail on a hand-carved ship.

Mark switched from class to private lessons.

In our 15 years together, he hadn’t had a hobby or sport. Seeing him so committed to something new was a bit surprising. After nearly a decade focused on our two children, we found we had a little more time to ourselves. Mark was learning to skate backwards, and I went out occasionally to see plays. To show our support, we let go of each other.

He soon started mentioning someone who worked at the track.

“Ricky told me that I should invest in a better pair of skates,” Mark said while browsing online.

“Ricky has a side business selling high-end dog food,” he told me the following week. “We could investigate it. Maybe Zinnia should be eating wild boar.”

I heard another whisper: This is how it ends. Mark leaves you for Ricky, who ice skates and sells dog food.

We kept Zinnia on chicken nuggets, but a box of new skates soon arrived.

A few years earlier, when I was visiting my mother on the opposite coast, she asked me to go through the old belongings in my childhood bedroom closet. I sat for hours on the floor, reading passing grades in high school classrooms and flipping through yearbooks filled with messages written by people whose faces I could no longer conjure up.

My mom appeared at the door, holding her and my father’s wedding album. I knew it well As a child I looked at the page that froze his post-nuptial kiss for eternity.

“Take this home with you, or I’ll get rid of it,” he said in a tone that told me to take it off.

Looking at his album this time, it wasn’t the kiss that caught my attention so much as a photo on the next page in which the bride and groom are standing with their arms tightly interlocked. They are facing their guests, ready to come down from the altar. But their faces are turned inward, smiling not at the camera but at each other and at the shared life they had just begun. Those two people couldn’t know what was coming.

By the time Mark and I passed the 10-year mark, the couples around us had started divorcing. An apartment building not far from our house was where newly separated parents seemed to go when they moved.

When our close neighbors separated, I felt a deep sadness as I passed their house and remembered the day my father walked through our house with a yellow notepad, making a list of what he took with him.

One night, Mark said that he had stalled. The smooth skating visions of him were fading. I felt sympathy but also relief, waiting for this to be over and for him to come back to me.

Instead, he signed up for another round of lessons. Ricky showed her how to attach his phone to the track wall and take videos to test her technique.

He showed me one. He opened to a black screen, his fleece jacket close, until the camera revealed him as a dark figure receding further and further away.

“Ricky gave me his card today,” Mark said, setting it down on the kitchen counter. “Interesting guy. He is also a make-up artist.

I took the card and looked at it. It was well done, with sepia-toned makeup brushes below the text. At the back was a single brush wrapped in a cloud of dust that looked like smoke to me. A large letter announced: Ricardo.

This is how it ends. Mark leaves you for Ricky, who ice skates and sells dog food and can accentuate cheekbones.

Mark started suggesting that I come over and watch him skate. I managed not to do it for a long time. I didn’t want to meet Ricky. Then there came a day when Mark knew that he would be driving down the track when he would be there. I said okay.

Upon entering the building, I caught a distinctive odor of ice, metal, and rubber. I recognized the smell of skating as a kid, when I never felt stable. I wanted to turn around and leave. But there was Mark, moving easily across the ice, waving and smiling.

Ricky is here? I asked. I thought he should face my demon.

I haven’t seen it. Stand here and I’ll show you what I’ve been working on.”

Mark pushed away from the wall. He moved confidently towards the center of the court. It was a weekday and the lessons were over, so he was alone on the ice.

He skidded in circles and began to slide backwards. She did another turn, but something went wrong. She slipped and landed on her back, with such force that she slid across the ice, head first, right at me.

I knelt next to my stunned husband.

“Are you OK?”

“I don’t know what happened,” he said quietly.

“Don’t worry, you’ll show me more.”

I heard a whisper: “I wanted to impress you.”

It was Mark.

Within a few months, he was done skating. She now she has been cycling for about seven years. He rides for miles, through all the terrain, and then comes home.

A couple of years ago we passed a milestone: We had now been married longer than my parents. I thought of a friend who lost his father when he was young to a heart attack, and it wasn’t until he was past the same age that he felt his own heart might be right.

No whisper tells me that Mark will be leaving with someone from his cycling group. Now I’m just worried about it flying over the handlebars.

Jessica Stolzberg is a freelance writer and editor.