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Perry took the aisle seat even though his theater ticket assigned him to the next seat over. He hoped the occupant of seat BB1 wouldn’t show.

"Paper says it’s good," said a man Perry knew only as Tom, who was seated in the same seat, one row behind him. A rotund man with salt and pepper hair who was about 10 years Perry’s junior, Tom had been sitting behind Perry for as long as he had the seats. Perry, using information overheard through the years, assumed Tom was a banker of some sort. Their interactions were limited to uttering perfunctory greetings before shows, brief praise or criticism during intermissions, and the obligatory "See you next time" after shows.

"The Sun liked it?" Perry asked, without turning around.

"As much as they like anything," Tom said.

"Guess we’ll see." Perry hoped to end the conversation. Tom’s response was a kick in Perry’s head, literally, as Tom adjusted his legs, which stretched over to the area of his female companion, an attractive wisp of the woman who Perry had noticed earlier was wearing a lime dress.

"Where’s Helene?" she asked. Perry assumed she was Tom’s wife, but given the inexact nature of his theater-seat relationship with Tom, he couldn’t be sure any more than the woman or Tom could be sure of Helene’s relationship to him.

Perry had several possible responses queued in his mind. But when the time came to hit the send button, he always faltered. He wasn’t embarrassed or upset about the fact that he and Helene had separated over the summer. Their parting after 30 years was the first stop on a much-anticipated trip toward divorce. Whenever he thought of the eventual divorce, he worried about people’s reaction to the change.

His concern drove him to notify the First Tier – his children, his sisters, his mother, and close friends – by telephone rather than waiting to mention it during his next meeting with each. He hated the informality of the pronouncement over the phone. But he preferred it to someone close to him finding out through the grapevine, which he knew flourished with these nuggets. Much to his amazement, members of his First Tier expressed no surprise; in several cases, it barely registered.

People in the Second Tier – coworkers, neighborhood friends, relatives, in town and out – heard about the breakup next. Perry had to call these people too, because of distance. The calls began with the usual pleasantries and pregnant pauses in a conversation that seemed forced to both parties until Perry could muster the will to explain the real reason for his call.

His cousin Alex, with whom he and Helene had gone on a weekend skiing trip about 10 years earlier, expressed the most shock. "Are you sure this is right? You seemed so together in Vermont," Alex said.

"That was a decade ago," Perry replied, popping open a can of Coke from the refrigerator in his apartment. Perry would have preferred to be sitting in his Lazy-Boy watching the Orioles play. But Helene got the house, the living room furniture and the big TV.

"Things change, people change," he told Alex.

How many times had he used that line since the breakup? The first time was the night of their separation, when Helene had asked Perry to explain his thoughts on the situation. Those four words immediately spilled out. They became his mantra, though he wasn’t sure if he was in love more with the idea that those words conveyed or the ease with which they flowed from his mouth. The peace those words conveyed failed to halt the lengthy string of half-hearted dinner and lunch invitations tinged with the suggestion that he was incapable of surviving without Helene. Perry knew better and questioned why the First Tier and maybe the Second Tier felt differently.

Tom was a member of the newly named Third Tier, a group of people Perry’s notification plan failed to identify for action. These were people whose relationships with Perry and Helene were too superficial for them to learn of the couple’s parting without noticing them apart from one another at a chance encounter.

Perry didn’t think the Third Tier was entitled to know about that one Saturday, about a month after he moved out, when he and Helene sat at the Plain Valley Inn dividing their assets. They handled stocks (she got $13 more, one share in some obscure tech start-up), retirement funds (they each kept their own and he gave her a third-quarter share in the mortgage-free house to make up for the additional value in his pension plan), dishes (he kept his grandmother’s, she took their everyday ones), furniture (he would take the casual stuff, and she would keep the formal seating and the bed), the books (she didn’t want the clutter), the computer (she wanted it), and the photos (she would keep the originals after she got copies of each, for which she would pay half of the expense).

On later reflection, Perry would recognize that The Plain Valley Inn meeting, as he had dubbed it, was one of the more pleasant times in their marriage. Until they each expressed interest in the season tickets to the Baltimore Theater Guild. Perry thought this odd, since he had introduced Helene to the theater shortly after they married. He had been going to the shows since he was in college, the tickets at first being a gift from his grandmother. Back then, he sat in the balcony, off to the right. Over the years, he had moved closer to what he considered the best seats: Mezzanine center, row BB, high enough that the railing didn’t obstruct the sight line but close enough to see and feel everything on stage. He’d had the seats long enough that he couldn’t recall sitting anywhere else.

As his marriage started to falter, Perry reduced their days together to mathematics. Where some might have counted the days, so to speak, Perry counted the activities. He wanted something concrete, a way to mark progress or failure, a way to wrap his mind around what had become of their marriage. He knew, having watched it happen to several friends, that the current of a failed marriage could so easily push you down the river toward death. Perry had always liked tracking the batting averages for his favorite baseball players. Over several months, he devised a similar way to track the status of his marriage.

Every activity that he and Helene did together went in one of three columns: His, Hers, or Both. If he joined her for the weekly trip to the grocery store, a rarity, then that time was logged as Hers. If she watched a portion of the baseball game with him, then the time was His.

Perry kept a running tally in his head. But his system had two problems. If, for instance, he took Helene’s car to the car wash, whose column did that fall into? It benefited Helene, but it wasn’t time together, and time together was what he was scoring. As Perry wrestled with how to handle these cases, he also recognized that practically no activities landed in the Both column. One morning, while shaving in preparation for a brunch with his cousin, he changed Both to Neither. Soon, he could score forced interactions and obligations like birthday parties, work events, retirements, each requiring them to put on their happy faces, as Neither events.

The theater had always gone in the His column. But now, if Helene was expressing interest in the tickets, he wondered if he should have assigned it to the Neither column, assuming Helene wasn’t bluffing interest.

Perry expected a few disputes as they tried to equally dispatch years of accumulated greed, excess and necessity. He even prepared to offer several items he would have liked as bargaining chips for bigger items he really wanted. However, Helene had conceded the Sony stereo and the Bose sound system, while he let her have the last family portrait and the roll-top desk they bought on their second anniversary. Perry just assumed the theater tickets were his.

"What will it take?" Perry asked. He sipped his coffee.

"Nothing. I want the tickets," Helene said.

Perry almost choked. "I’ve gone since college. You never went till I started taking you."

Helene looked puzzled.

"You don’t really care about the theater, Helene."

"I enjoy it. It’s a chance to dress up."

"You can find something else to dress up for. Can’t you?" Perry could hear his voice rising. He didn’t want her to bait him into an argument, a skill she mastered early in their marriage.

"No, Perry. I can’t." She took a long sip of her tea. "I’ve given you most of what you wanted. Check the list." She pointed to his column in the legal pad where he had been logging their dividing of materials into, oddly enough, His and Hers columns. "This is important to me. I can’t really say why. I know it must be upsetting to you, but I really want those tickets."

"But—"

"—Is that too much to ask, Perry?"

"Yes, I think it is."

For several minutes, they sat in silence. Perry sipped his coffee and picked at a piece of blueberry pie, while Helene fiddled with her paper napkin.

As had been the pattern in their marriage, Perry broke the silence. "Would you agree to alternating shows?"

"No." Helene’s quick reply showed she sensed victory and they both knew it.

"I guess for now we should each take one ticket." He saw Helene give a small nod. "Can I at least have the aisle?" Perry asked. At most shows, they switched off, with Helene sitting in the aisle seat for the first half.

"It’s hard for me to get out for people who want to pass if I am not on the aisle," Helene said. She caught the attention of the waitress and motioned to her teacup.

"Hope she brings more coffee," Perry said.

While waiting for the waitress, Perry pondered his options. He cast his eyes outside, over the parking lot, the shopping center across the street and the hundreds of homes that had popped up in the two miles between the home they used to share and this new restaurant. He noticed a low line of clouds, which would make for a beautiful sunset, if he were able to find a place, other than a booth at the Plain Valley Inn, to watch it.

Sunsets were his new solace. He never took in the falling sun during all his years of battling rush-hour traffic. Even though the sunset signaled an end of a day, Perry saw the infinite possibilities in the reds, oranges and blues as a symbol of this new phase in his life. He needed to see those possibilities and that meant putting an end to the debate over the tickets.

"You can have the aisle seat this year," Perry said. "But we’ll have to figure something else out for next year."

"Sure, Perry. Whatever you say." Perry knew those words meant she would find a way to get the tickets. But she couldn’t take his sunsets away.

A tap on Perry’s left shoulder interrupted his thoughts. "So where is she?" Tom asked.

Perry turned around, breaking the unwritten theater communication protocol. "We split up a little while ago," he said.

"I’m sorry," Tom said.

"You two seemed so devoted to each other when we saw you here," the woman next to Tom said.

"Do you think it’s permanent?" Tom asked.

Perry now realized that Third Tier people felt most free to ask probing questions about the failure of his marriage. The superficiality of his relationship to these people created an inverse need for depth of answers.

"Yes, I do."

"How many years together?" the woman asked.

"Thirty."

"That’s twice as long as Tom and me," the woman said. She placed a hand on Perry’s shoulder. "I can’t imagine what it’s like."

Perry felt self-conscious with the woman’s touch. He began to turn around, when Tom asked, "So what happened?"

The theater lights dimmed. "Things change," Perry said over his shoulder as he sat down.

"And people change," said Helene, nudging Perry toward the inside seat.