I laughed too.

But in private it stung, and more than that it puzzled me, because the woman saying these things in company was not the woman I married — or rather, I understand now, she was, and the woman I married had been the performance.

I did not understand, then, that the jokes had a purpose beyond cruelty.

I thought of them as a change in her affection — that the warmth of the early months had cooled into contempt, which was painful but ordinary; marriages cool.

What I could not see was that the jokes were construction.

Each one, delivered in front of witnesses and softened with a laugh, laid a brick in a wall she was building around my reputation. Mortimer forgets.