Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

pool. I think she won.
    Our hair still damp, we lay on a blanket atop the mesa—stars pulsating all around us. Our shoulders touched. And as she laughed about the ledge being named for Dinty Moore—the beef stew cowboy—I kissed her neck that shone like bone. She rolled on top of me. Vanilla-scented lotion, cool skin, warm mouth. Waves and waves of heat. I brushed the back of my hand between her legs, and when she moaned, my fears of homosexuality melted away in a frothy lava rush.

    Wes picked me up from the airport. Though we could see each other’s faces, the distance remained. My brain remained on Grace. I relished long car drives when Wes read in the passenger seat and I could relive the feel and scent of her. The Internet brought me closer to my affair, until Wes discovered my notebook of printed infidelity. Before he confronted me, he plastered our apartment’s cinderblock walls with pieces of computer paper, each one proclaiming something about me he loved. Wes convinced me that I was in love with Grace’s writing accomplishments, not Grace. I tossed the notebook into the rusted Dumpster and pronounced all contact with Grace over. I believed that I could throw that part of me away.
    He stopped crying. Sat at a desk in our cramped apartment and made a giant eye out of construction paper. The only other art project I had seen him undertake was when we painted bright, intricate designs on our plastic, thrift store headboard. We ditched that headboard when we moved to Georgia and bought a grownup bed. The eye, he told me, was to watch over us. The iris was green, and the lashes were thick, black, and rectangular. The pupil, dilated. He used double-sided tape to stick the eye to the wall above our cherry headboard. It wasn’t long before the tape dried out and the eye fell behind our bed. Within three months, our marriage dried out. Again.

    But we traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, together. He had his master’s in accounting, and we both had the quixotic notion that a new setting would put the adhesion back on the eyeball of our commitment. I craved the mountains. Having grown up on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, I believe the elevation is good for the spirit. The Georgian humidity had worn me down into its red soil.
    So I convinced two schools in Asheville that they wanted me to teach their students: one was a day school and the other was a boarding school. Wes had no trouble landing an accounting job, and he had definite ideas about which job I should accept. Though I wanted to teach at the day school, he insisted I take the job at the boarding school, as room and board would be free. Wes is the man, after all, who convinced me to sleep in our car on long trips rather than paying for a hotel room. The same man who stuck dated labels beneath light fixtures to prove that I had foolishly squandered money on light bulbs marketed to be longer-lasting. So we moved our mismatched furniture into the girls’ dormitory where I would have countless duties. I taught ninth-grade English and coached cross-country and track.
    My first morning at the school, I ran the cross-country course and lost myself near the horse stables. I ran into a clearing and faced a huge, wooden throne. A man in blue jeans and a striped button-down shirt sat on it. He was completely still. He did not budge as I walked toward him to ask him for directions back to the school buildings. Blood soaked the wood behind his mangled head.
    The newspaper article said he was found at a clearing on Asheville School campus; a clearing that Camp Hollymont uses in the summer. He had shot himself in the head the day before he was found. There was no mention of me, and the headmaster told me I was not to discuss the unfortunate man with any other faculty members, and certainly not with the students who would be arriving in a couple of weeks.
    I learned the campus and neighboring trails well, thanks to other teachers who were distance runners. Four of us