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his fault. Deirdre was the one who’d changed, not him.
    Max had met Deirdre in 1982 at a Jewish singles weekend at the Concord hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Back then, Deirdre was an upbeat, outgoing, friendly, big-chested girl from Huntington, Long Island. Max was living alone in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side, working as a twenty-four-thousand-dollar-a-year mainframe computer technician, and he decided that Deirdre was the best thing that had ever happened to him. After a few months of dating, he took her out for drinks at the bar at the Mansfield Hotel on Forty-fourth Street. It was a classy place, lots of books in the lounge, made Max feel well-read. Paula, the little blond barmaid, brought him his third screwdriver. He could see Paula understood he was a guy of wealth and fame, like the Stones song, what the hell was the title? Then Max, feeling nice and lit, thought, What the fuck? and popped the question to Deirdre. Six months later he was kissing her under the huppa at a synagogue in Huntington. They had a few happy years together — reasonably happy, anyway — living in a one-bedroom walk-up on West Seventy-seventh Street. Then Max left his job to start his own company. As his business started to take off, their relationship went downhill. They moved out of the walk-up, into a doorman building on the Upper East Side, and Deirdre slowly turned into the wife from hell.
    She was constantly critical, angry, and depressed, and spent his money faster than it came in. But it wasn’t the money that bothered Max so much as her personality. So, okay, it was the money too but, hey, that wasn’t the main thing. It got to the point where Max couldn’t stand spending more than a few minutes with her at a time. She was always starting arguments, telling Max that he was the cause of all her misery, that if she hadn’t married himshe would have been happy. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Then she started having mental problems. Manic-depressive, they called it, but Max had a simpler name — nasty bitch. Sometimes she was depressed, staying in bed all day, which Max actually didn’t mind so much. But other times she was hyper — on the phone all the time or out shopping with his credit cards or picking fights with him. Max paid thousands of dollars for her to see the best shrinks in the city. They put her on lithium, which helped, but sometimes she stopped taking her medication. Max was convinced that on some sick level Deirdre enjoyed the torture she was putting him through. She was actually happy when she made him feel like shit.
    Max tried to work things out peacefully. He went with Deirdre to a marriage counselor, but spending an entire hour cursing at each other didn’t exactly help.
    Finally, Max suggested divorce, but Deirdre said, “You know I’ll never divorce you. I’m religious.”
    Max nearly laughed out loud, thinking, Yeah, if religion means tormenting a good man for eternity — wasn’t that a Catholic thing? Deirdre was raised Orthodox Jewish, but she never went to temple or celebrated holidays — she didn’t even fast on Yom Kippur, for Christ’s sake. She was more atheist than Jewish and, besides, Orthodox Jews got divorces all the time. This was obviously just more bullshit Deirdre was using to try to prolong his agony.
    When things got so bad Max couldn’t stand living in the same house with Deirdre anymore, he considered moving out, separating. But he didn’t see why he had to be the one to go. It was his house, he’d busted his balls to pay for it. If anyone went it should be her.
    The situation seemed hopeless. Max knew that even if he could convince her to get a divorce, he’d be fucked. They had no pre-nup and Deirdre would take him to town in a settlement. She’d never worked a day in her lifeand they didn’t have kids; Max didn’t see why she deserved a cent of his money. But he knew a judge, especially a female judge, wouldn’t see it that way. Deirdre would get away with the