Cultured women, comfortable circumstances, they broke like knickknacks in the hands of their straying men. [....] I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, forgetfulness. Or maybe not. [....] Pay attention, though, reorder the facts. Already in the course of the night something inside me had Yielded and broken. Reason and memory had flaked off, sorrow that lasts too long is capable of this. I had believed I was going to bed and yet I had not. Or I had and then had got up. Disobedient body. It wrote in my notebooks, wrote pages and pages.
A woman close to forty finds herself entirely unmoored after her husband, with whom she's been 15 years and with whom she's had two children, abandons her for a younger woman he's been involved with on the sly for years. Soon enough though, she learns that she doesn't need him after all and that she doesn't love him anymore. Wiser, she enters into another relationship, no longer the naïve young thing she once was.