All Gone by Stephen Dixon

wife fights the divorce and wins. At the courtroom she’s so soft-spoken and sweet. Tells the judge I drink and beat her up every few months, etcetera. “But I still love him, don’t ask me why after all he’s put me through, and want him back.”
    I get a legal separation and file for divorce the long way and even then it might not be granted if she doesn’t stop challenging it. “If you do get it despite her fighting it,” my lawyer says, “you’ll have to give her everything you own and more alimony a year than you now earn and which you’ll have to continue giving even if she remarries.”
    I get my own apartment and go back to work. Melanie calls three to four times a week. She pleads with me to come back. I always hang up. Sometimes she follows me on the street, waits outside my office building and apartment house for me. I always get in a cab or duck into a subway and escape. She writes me ardent letters saying how she misses me, cries every night for me, wants me to make love to her, wants me to give her a child, letters like that. I rip them all up and eventually don’t even open them.
    I try and think of a way to get her to take one last unprovoked swing at me in front of witnesses. Then I could charge her with assault and maybe win this time and also get a quick divorce because of her physical cruelty and a legal writ preventing her from seeing and speaking to me again. But why bother, because the judge would probably say her hitting me again was caused by all the past times I’d provoked her. I’m also afraid that the next time she hits me she might batter my brains or eyes so much that I’d become blind or knocked into insensibility for good.
    About six months after our courtroom battle and a few weeks after she stopped calling and sending letters, I get a phone call.
    â€œIt’s me, don’t hang up,” she says. “I want to give you a quick uncontested divorce.”
    â€œWhat’s the trick now?”
    â€œNo trick, darling, it’s love. I met a beautiful man and we want to get married.”
    â€œI hope he’s a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than you.”
    â€œHe happens to be even thinner and shorter than you, but don’t be mean.”
    â€œI can see why you want to marry him. So you can beat him up even worse than you did me.”
    â€œNot true.”
    â€œDon’t tell me.”
    â€œAnd don’t argue with me either. You want the divorce or not? Don’t grant me it and you’ll never see the end of me for a lifetime.”
    â€œI want it.”
    We agree to file for divorce on the grounds of mutual mental cruelty. We get the divorce in a month, and a week later she marries. I saw the man at the divorce court. He’s a little guy all right, older and weaker-looking than me too. I wanted to warn him about her but then told myself to stay out of it. It’s his business. And if I say anything he might not marry her and then she’ll be on my back for life. Besides, if she does beat him up and he presses charges, the court and most of my old friends will know I wasn’t crazy after all. Two men pressing assault charges against the same woman—that’s no coincidence.
    A year later she and her husband are in the newspaper. He’s in a very bad coma. His sister, the article says, got a call from her brother saying Melanie was trying to break down their bedroom door to attack him. When the sister got to the apartment she found her brother on the floor and Melanie kicking him repeatedly in the head. The sister tore into her, knocked her out with a pan and then called the hospital and police.
    Melanie’s arrested. Her husband’s still in a coma. A newsman calls me and says “Mrs. Delray’s your ex-wife. So what do you think of the charges against her now—husband battering, attempted murder? Where it might end up a homicide, as he’s got no