A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (17 page)

“Kids,” her father said, and then looked back at her mother, helplessly. She frowned and motioned that the children should sit on the couch. They stood stiffly at either end, tottering above them like two withered trees.

“Kids,” her father repeated, but didn’t say anything else.

“Kids,” her mother said. “This is what we need to tell you.
his is what we need to say: we want you to know something and that is that we love you both very much. Really, you’re the most important things in the world to us and always will be. Can you understand that? No matter what happens, I will always be your mommy and Daddy will always be your daddy.”

Her mother paused, staring at them. Victor squirmed under her gaze. Viola met her stare and, aware of the occasion’s gravity, assumed an attentive, adult expression. She asked, “Will Victor stay my brother?”

Her mother shot a queer, desperate look at her father, who was pinching the top of his nose between his fingers and looking at the floor.

“Yes, always,” her mother said. “That’s why it’s important to be nice to him and take care of him, all right?”

Viola insisted, “It wasn’t my fault!”

“Okay, okay, this isn’t about you and Vic,” her father said vehemently. “I mean, it
is
about you and Vic—this conversation, I mean—but Mommy and I have something to tell you.”

“
He
broke the vase.”

“Not on purpose!” Victor objected.

Her father said, “We don’t care about the vase, it was an ugly vase. I hate the vase. Stop talking about the vase. Listen, Viola. Listen, Vic. Nothing’s been settled yet, unfortunately. We’re still working out the details, but this is what we need to tell you…”

For several minutes then, she stopped understanding what was being said. Her parents were talking at the same time, rushing out the words and damming them up and then yelling again to contradict each other. Her mother spoke about a happier family. Her father several times mumbled the words “new arrangements.” They were told that in the new apartment they would have a second set of toys, but there would be no important changes in their lives. Her mother wept silently and did
nothing to cover her face. Her father said that they didn’t know when what would happen would happen. Her mother replied sharply that it could happen first thing tomorrow morning. The sound of their argument, as always, swirled around itself, entangling and accelerating. This went on for several minutes until she heard a single word that cut through the mists, a word she could comprehend immediately and completely. The word was this: divorce.

Forget Rachel and Maria. They had nothing to do with divorce. Elizabeth, Roxanne, and Keisha had to do with divorce. Viola knew what it meant: people talking about your parents being divorced; you were the kid with the divorced parents; divorce divorce divorce—as if you were a divorce yourself, which perhaps you were. She knew from Elizabeth, Roxanne, and Keisha what divorce was. They were watched by one parent at a time, never the complete set, and this made them incomplete too, either one half or the other, set adrift in the schoolyard.

But weren’t Victor and Viola set adrift now? Their parents took turns with them every weekend, just as Elizabeth, Roxanne, and Keisha’s parents did with them. Their parents never kissed each other like parents in normal families did on TV; never cuddled, never snuggled. And now they’d have two apartments. Their parents were getting divorced: wasn’t
everything
in her life about this? Dr. Nancy, Mr. Peter, her mother sleeping on the couch, her father quiet in his bedroom, the tears, the shouting, the slammed doors…How could she have been so stupid? This had been going on forever. They had been plotting it. The realization was as transforming as Victor’s transformation of the princess vase.

So she had been stupid. The evidence of the divorce had been around her all this time—lain there? hovered there? glittered there like a magic ring inside a coin machine?—waiting to be made sense of. The universe was an immense construction
that rose from facts, an infinitesimal fraction of which could be apprehended in a single glance. Evidence about everything was around her, if only she could see it. But she couldn’t even imagine what she was ignorant about. She was
still
stupid. What else was she missing?

M
ARSHALL PASSED THROUGH
the vaulted, gleaming halls of granite and crystal and ascended in a cosseted whoosh to his lawyer’s offices. The elevator emptied into a broad, lofty, wooded chamber, its carpentry sensuously turned, profoundly stained, and seamlessly joined—the last a rebuke to human couplings, Marshall thought. His shoes sank within the plush. His ears popped. The receptionist, posing dark and sultry behind a console, appraised him coolly. She was shrink-wrapped in a low-cut, bare-shouldered white shirt, and her high-boned face was a
salade composée
of that moment’s every glamorous ethnicity, Balkan, Latin, Eritrean. She fixed him with lustrous brown eyes and a smile precisely calibrated to be outrageously wanton without inviting familiarity. She asked him his name. Those teeth. Marshall felt sick. Who was paying for this? He was paying for this.

Thorpe, his lawyer, didn’t rise when Marshall entered his office. His eyes sparkling, the fat man preferred to watch Marshall’s entrance from behind his desk’s immense mahogany redoubt. The desk must have weighed as much as a car. Everything in this office was big: the furniture, the pen resting on the extra-large yellow legal pad, the de Kooning on the right wall. In the
immaculate wall-sized glass behind Thorpe the children of titans had arrayed the spires of other towers, every one of them different, each partitioned by windows, each window another office, each office another locus of powerful moneymaking. Thorpe glanced at his watch. Marshall had already seen the watch, which he presumed kept track of his billable hours. It was a Teslar chronograph. Marshall wondered what expectation of success, what desperate strategy, what optimism about his finances had led him to employ a lawyer who wore a Teslar chronograph.

Thorpe’s smile was ugly: mocking, cruel, and carnivorous. Or was that just Marshall’s imagination? As Marshall descended into an unsettlingly deep chair, the lawyer demanded: “My friend, how well do you think you know your wife?”

Marshall replied vacantly, “What do you mean?”

Thorpe chuckled, amused as always. Marshall was so easy to catch off guard, Thorpe probably confused him only to keep in practice. “You understand, of course, that we’re reaching the end of a very complicated, very delicate legal conflict. The moment of decision draws near. And this decision depends on your best answer to the following question: Will Joyce settle or press the case to the bitter end?”

“It’s bitter enough now. But I don’t know what she wants to do.”

“Please.” Thorpe scowled. “You’re not paying for idle conversation. Think. You lived with her how many years?”

“Nine. If you count this as living with her.”

“So you should have some knowledge of her character.” Thorpe tapped several sheets of fax paper before him. “She’s made an offer, and the question, which is not for me to answer, is how badly do you think she wants to settle? Will she come down? In a situation like this, how desperate is she? Is she tired, disgusted, still vengeful? How much is she thinking of the children’s welfare?”

“Mystery of mysteries.”

“I submit that’s why your marriage failed.” He said severely, “Every legal move she’s made for the past two years has been a surprise. How can we make strategy? You don’t know her. Where have you been? The two of you shared a home and started a family, but did you ever consider this woman as an individual, with her own motivations? It’s as if Joyce were no more than your reflection, to be judged by her responses to your maneuvers—not to mention your mistakes, neuroses, and ambitions. You don’t
comprehend
her. But she comprehends you. So she holds the advantage.”

This was absurd. From the beginning, when they met in college, Joyce had summoned the vast bulk of Marshall’s attention and contemplation. Who could say what he studied in his senior-year classes? He hadn’t cared to learn anything but the girl’s thought and substance. She had been a strange girl, immature, he thought, as fresh and fragile as a newly independent nation liberated from colonial misrule. She was still composing her constitution, finding allies, striking new emotional coinage, and rediscovering and rewriting her past. Marshall had been required to learn her obscure language. Over the years, with every new development in their lives, like career changes and children, he had needed to reassess her. And since the regime had turned militant, he had intensified his scrutiny. At times when he was away his vision was obscured by the memory of her face, and his hearing was deafened by the recollection of her words. How could he not know her? But Marshall told Thorpe, “You’re right,” and believed that perhaps Thorpe was.

The lawyer leaned over and rested his elbows on his desk. His cuff links were gold. He asked, “Why is she so angry?”

“I don’t know.” Marshall flung out his hands. “I mean, I
do
know, I can tell you all the little things that happened over the years and sort of piled up. She has grievances,
I
have griev
ances…and the fact that I have the temerity to entertain a grievance is one of her grievances! I’m not perfect, but some of her complaints are crazy or wildly overstated, or her reaction is disproportionate to the actual harm inflicted.” All the bitterness of the divorce suddenly returned to him, like something in the blood. “If you isolate each of our betrayals and self-indulgences, the mean things we’ve said to each other, the errors in judgment—on their own, they’re quite heinous. Yet neither of us did anything to the other that wasn’t in the context of something else. That’s the problem! That’s why I can’t say she’s entirely wrong. I
can
identify the causes of her anger, but once I do, even to myself, it’s almost like justifying them—and that makes me weak.” He sighed and asked, “Anyway, how bad is her proposal?”

Thorpe quickly grinned, pleased by the question, his countenance as bright as the day beyond the window. He caressed the faxes and announced, “You’re fucked. She gets residential custody, the apartment, support, education expenses…You’ll be broke. By the way, before I forget, your account’s past due.”

“That’s if I
settle
? What if we keep her in court?”

“There’s a difference between being fucked and being totally fucked.” He chuckled. “The settlement gives you room to maneuver on joint debts and liabilities. I’ve seen worse. The support level could be worse. The point is, you’re both taking a chance with the judge. Give Joyce a reasonable counteroffer, if you think she’s likely to come down—but not if you think she won’t. Lowball her if you think she’s forlorn, or if you want to bluff or scare her, if she’s scareable. We have options. What do you think? This is where I need you to tell me what she’s like,
really
.”

Marshall briefly looked at the ceiling, doubting that you could know another person without depending on her responses to your stimuli—it seemed unscientific. Who knew what the Arabs were like, really? Who the fuck cared? He wondered how
Thorpe’s office was illuminated: the windows were the only visible light sources, but the lawyer’s deeply tanned face seemed to radiate on its own. Marshall said, “I don’t know…She just wants this over like I do, probably. I don’t think she cares about the money. She was never very, you know, financially oriented. She hates me or thinks she hates me. It’s the dynamics of the divorce. She once loved me, too. I’m the father of her kids…” he said, trailing off pathetically.

Thorpe was not a handsome man, but his muscular, veined nose, his smacking, swollen lips, and the massive pendulousness of his jaw gave his gaze a compellingly raw effect. Now he turned the full contemptuous force of it on Marshall. Remaining at his desk, he leaned toward his client, his blunt, bald head like a missile.

He asked, “What is she like in bed? Sort of passive, I imagine. Distracted, distant—”

“No, no, not at all,” Marshall rushed to say. He could feel the heat pooling in his ears. “I mean, it’s been a long time since, you know, but she was very active, very inventive. Passionate.”

How passionate? Very passionate, he thought, defensively. When they were courting, he and Joyce had occupied entire weekends making love and even after they were married, before the children, there had been what seemed like hundreds of drag-you-down-on-the-floor, hot-and-dirty, sweaty, spermy, pungently sopping, let’s-try-
this
afternoons, if only he could recall them. Those days had been buried in the debris.

“How did she give head?” Thorpe demanded. “Was it vigorous, intense, full-mouthed, like she meant it? And how hard did she work out her pubococcygeus? When you had sex, did you get the impression she
wanted
it?”

“Yes, everything was normal. That wasn’t our problem.”

“Nice breasts, I bet. But she’s a bit heavy in the tush, no?”

“She’s had two kids!” Marshall protested. His face was in
flamed and he was disoriented by the interrogation. Thorpe’s questions were insulting, of course, but to each he found himself searching for an answer. “And she’s thirty-six, works in an office, I don’t expect—”

“How much would you pay to fuck her?”

“I don’t know. I mean the going rate these days is apparently rather high…But that’s not how I think of making love—”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Thorpe said, raising a hand and swatting at Marshall’s objections. “You’re a fool, Marshall, this proves it. You’re still in love! You’re seeing Joyce
romantically
! That’s why you can never figure what she’s going to do. Listen to me, Marshall, she wants to ruin your life. She wants to separate you from your kids. She wants to separate you from your
balls
. Your image of Joyce is false;
that
Joyce is not the person you’re dealing with today. That Joyce is finished. That Joyce is gone. If you want to get out of this divorce with any money or self-respect, you’re going to have to look for the first time at Joyce and see how she
is,
now.”

Marshall dropped his face into his hands. Unbidden, a memory rose to the surface like steam from a street vent. Years ago, before they were married, they had gone to Wales for a hiking holiday, making love as a matter of course or principle in each bed-and-breakfast along the way. On an old Roman road between one unpronounceably multisyllabic place and the next, they had stopped for lunch on a grassy rise at the top of a long clovered meadow. Sheep congregated by the woods at the meadow’s distant borders, their bells’ arrhythmic clangor lifting high into the morning air. Marshall couldn’t recall any of the week’s lovemaking, but he remembered the lunch perfectly: cheddar cheese sandwiches on crusty hard brown rolls, green Sicilian olives, one plum apiece, and a bar of bittersweet chocolate for dessert. He lay with his head in her lap afterward, seeing nothing but sky. They had talked in a happy, anticipatory way—about what he couldn’t say now, not for the life of him—
and Joyce had absentmindedly wrapped and unwrapped around her finger the long hairs at the side of his head.

“Okay, you’re right. She wants me dead. I don’t think she’s ready to come down. They’re trying to draw us out. So what’s our next move?”

Thorpe picked up the fax sheets from her lawyer and rolled them into a tight cylinder. He declared, “We say she can stick this up her ass and give it a twist. Let her think about that. We go back to court, judges are funny these days, she could get next to nothing. Her lawyer will tell her that. She’ll come back with a better offer, and then we’ll go to work on that.”

“Right,” Marshall said, pleased by the firmness in his own voice, as if he had been the one to plan the strategy. “Okay. Agreed.”

Rising from the chair with his battered attaché in hand, he wondered how long he had been here—about fifteen minutes, he guessed—and went wobbly in the knees thinking of the money he had just spent. But the billable hours were worth the expense. He was paying for more than a strategy to defeat Joyce: this education in rigorous self-interest was an investment in his postdivorce future. This was why you had a lawyer. Thorpe gave him a confidence he would be capable of deploying every day, in every other aspect of his life.

“By the way, that’s some attractive lady out there in the reception area,” Marshall added, his grin hearty.

Thorpe’s expression didn’t change and his minimal nod of acknowledgment required hardly more muscular effort than respiration. He remained in his seat watching Marshall with hard black eyes. Marshall’s giddy impulse to ask the lawyer if he was having sex with the receptionist was quickly suppressed. He had intended to use, ridiculously and uncharacteristically, the word
balling
. He let himself out of the office. He went through the reception area past her with his own eyes averted, except for a single reckless moment. In that mo
ment he knew with total certainty that the lawyer was having sex with her.

LATER THAT MORNING
his boss drummed his fingers softly on the carpeted wall by Marshall’s desk. Marshall didn’t hear him, entirely immersed in the data stream gushing from his computer monitor. Hudson had to say his name twice before he looked up.

“Sorry.”

“No, no, it’s okay, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Hudson said, his palms raised. “Do you have a minute?”

“Of course, sure I do. Pull up a chair.”

Hudson’s moon face was cratered by a small, shy smile. He stepped in and took the seat, careful first to hitch up his pants. He leaned forward. Holding back his tie, he met Marshall’s eyes and then looked away.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, Bill. And you?”

“How’s the kids?”

“Good. Viola has preschool graduation tomorrow. Caps and gowns. Now she wants an allowance.”

Hudson nodded, taking in the information as if to remember it forever. Perhaps he would. He didn’t ask about Joyce; everyone in the office knew now that Marshall was getting divorced, and despite Marshall’s restrained denials, they believed the action stemmed from 9/11. At his firm 9/11 was the alpha point from which history moved forward, the Big Bang, Genesis 1:1. The director of the New York office had been killed in the attack, along with all the others who had been at their desks that morning. As head of the midtown satellite office, Hudson had immediately thrown himself into the crisis. Though he himself didn’t return home for three days, he made sure that his staff did that evening, or he found shelter for those who couldn’t. He secured
the company’s records and documentation. He personally obtained and posted around town photos and descriptions of those whose fates were yet unknown, including, briefly, Marshall’s. Hudson had been the first to call the families. Little did he know, as he moved with decisiveness and sterling judgment, that this was to be his finest hour. In the following weeks he was chosen to lead the unified New York office, an uneasy amalgamation of surviving WTC people like Marshall, the former midtown staff, and some new hires who couldn’t shake the notion that ghosts roamed the hallways. Hudson had been given free rein by the company’s board to restore the office to normal—“whatever normal is now,” the CEO had whispered darkly.