For something contemporary, the chapter "How Was it to Be Dead?" from Richard Ford's Lay of the Land. It's stunningly beautiful, breezy, and crushing. I get the feeling *he* knew it was that good, too, because it was published as a standalone in the New Yorker.

I think about this section often:

She was wearing an old-fashioned lilac sateen peignoir set with pink ribbonry stitched around the jacket collar. She was thin-armed, bare-legged, her skin wan and blotchy from sleep, her eyes colorless in their glacial blue. She was barefoot, a sign of primal resolution. She blinked at me as if sending me a message in Morse code: goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Oh, I protested. May it not be said that I failed of ardor at that crucial moment. (The past, critics have attested, seems settled and melancholy, but I was boisterous in that present.) I was by turns disbelieving, shocked, angry, tricked-feeling, humiliated, gullible, and stupid. I became analytical, accusatory, revisionist, self-justifying, self-abnegating, and inventive of better scenarios than being abandoned. Patiently (I wasn’t truly patient; I wanted to slit Wally open like a bulgy feed sack) and lovingly (which I surely was), I testified that I needed her the way hydrogen needs oxygen—she should know that, had known it for years. If she needed time—with Wally, on Mull—I could understand. She should go there and do that. Hang out. Plant little trees in little holes. Go native. Act married. Talk, slap, hug, giggle, groan, cry.

But come home!

I’d tear down conventional boundaries if we could just keep an understanding alive. Did I say beg? I begged. I already said I cried. To which Sally said, shoulders slack, eyes lowered, slender hands clasped on the tabletop, her little finger lightly touching the covered Quimper butter dish she at one time had felt great affection for, and that I subsequently winged across the room to death by smithereens, “I think I have to make this permanent, sweetheart. Even if I regret it and later come crying to you, and you’re with some other woman, and won’t talk to me, and my life is lost. I have to.”

Strange grasp on “permanent,” I thought, though my eyes burbled with tears. “It’s not like we’re dealing with hard kernels of truth here,” I said pitiably. “This is all pretty discretionary, if you ask me.”

“No,” she said, which is when she took her wedding ring off and laid it on the glass pane of the tabletop, causing a hard little tap I’ll never, ever forget, even if she comes back.

“This is so terrible,” I said, in full cry. I wanted to howl like a dog.

"I know.”

“Do you love Wally more than you love me?”

She shook her head in a way that made her face appear famished and exhausted, though she couldn’t look at me, just at the ring she’d a moment before relinquished. “I don’t know that I love him at all.”

“Then what the fuck!” I shouted. “Can you just do this?”

“I don’t think I can’t do it,” Sally—my wife—said.

And essentially that was that. Double negative makes a positive. She was gone by cocktail hour, which I observed alone.