To My Ex-Husband (10 page)

Just because kids know deep down inside that their parents have sex doesn't make it any less revolting. And then to think that their mother's or father's middle-aged flesh may commingle voluntarily, perhaps even hungrily, with that of some other father or mother is just too much to bear.

Nothing is happening in this house that isn't happening all over America. Why that doesn't make it any easier, I don't know. We haven't even got a good working vocabulary. Peter had his own date the other night. He brought her home after a concert. David was just leaving, so we convened in front of the house.

“Julie, this is my mother,” says Peter. “And this is my mother's boyfriend.”

No further identification was called for as far as Peter was concerned. Like a name. But the relationship of this man to his mother had to be categorized at once. Must we trot out the nomenclature for any person who happens by? Peter has indicated that he's not particularly interested in this young woman, who is a terribly tall, somewhat vacuous version of Jessica Lang. I doubt he'll see her again. I don't know her last name, or where she lives or goes to school or how she comes to know our son. But she has met a man who has been definitively identified as Peter's mother's boyfriend. And with all—or as little—as that word,
boyfriend
, implies, she has folded that information into her head and taken it home with her.

AUGUST 16

I have just bought all new underwear. Ahem.
Lingerie
. Nothing like a little romance to boost morale, don't you agree? Every woman I know has a horror of being struck by a car and carted off to the hospital, her underwear to be spread out on a gurney and inspected under the antiseptic glow of a five-million-watt bulb. And yet that horror isn't somehow quite enough to send her scurrying off to Saks Fifth Avenue in search of something more palatable than her own graying cotton assortment with the stretched elastic and the little holes opening up along the seams. So much more pleasant to picture the occasional pubic hair poking through a silky layer of ecru lace. Still: One doesn't quite make it to the store. Love and only love pushes a woman toward the ultimate purchase.

“I wouldn't buy it for myself,” is what a woman says. But when it's for him—that's something else. Men say it, too, in their way. I now recall some purchases of your own, back in '83 and '84. They were slipped, without comment, into your drawer, spanking new briefs, bikini briefs, in navy and turquoise and black. This from the Prince of Deprivation, the man who was philosophically opposed to throwing away a T-shirt until its neck was literally severed from the rest of it. My blindness at the time continues to astound. But if time has done nothing to lessen my humiliation, I have at least developed an appreciation for the skill with which one can self-protect. I would say my powers of denial were nothing short of deft. On some magical level, I knew I was not up to the truth. Indeed, the truth has served me far better after the fact.

AUGUST 28

For more than four days I have been absolutely alone. The house is quiet, with a deadly, almost profound, stillness. I used to laugh about the rabbi who said that life begins when the children go off to college and the dog dies. Now I'm less amused.

Only a short while ago, I know, I was complaining.
Make up your mind
, you say.
You can't have it both ways
.

I don't think of myself as a woman who's dependent on her family for an identity, but it was useful having an ironclad reason to get up in the morning. Cold or headache or sleepless night, there was no excuse. I was needed. Deadlines could be missed; the world could wait for my words. But my daughter could not go off to school without breakfast, or without lunch in her book bag, and a kiss; without knowing that her mother was up and shuffling about, doing her most important job. Even on their worst days, kids do something vitally important for their parents. They give them structure, a place to belong.

They say that people who live alone “get funny.” I'm afraid of getting funny, of being a fringe person, like a character (how ironic) in one of Esther's favorite novels. One day, I'll be one of those people I see walking down the street in a too-small sweater and non-matching socks, muttering to herself. I'll have what the kids call “bed head” and an eleven-year-old bottle of ketchup in an otherwise empty refrigerator.

Of course, in my so-called “Twilight Years” I'll have Nina. We have a standing agreement that when the men in our lives have died off, we're going to get adjoining rooms at Wrinklewood, where, as the most notorious eccentrics among our aged fellow retirees, we will stroll around holding hands and wearing the matching sundresses that we bought one year by sheer coincidence.

Nina's greatest fear is that Stephen will be dead, I'll be remarried to someone who eats only bean curd and rice and who will therefore live forever, and she'll have to go to Wrinklewood by herself.

SEPTEMBER 20

I should know better than to complain to Nina about anything. She always tells me the truth. Now I ask you, what kind of a friend is that?

I had been whining once too often about money, about trying to keep this house together, pay the mortgage, come up with the six-month premium on my car insurance, all while writing my November column, about “Our Money” as the great marital illusion. As you know, I never thought there was any such thing as
our
money. There was only
our
money when I wanted to buy something with
my
money. Otherwise,
our
money was
your
money.

But Nina's reached her saturation point on the subject.
“Why
don't you just face facts and rent out part of your house? You don't need all those rooms, and taking in even one boarder would make your life so much easier.”

Nina can't stand anyone who lets herself be victimized. Never have I ever heard Nina say, “I don't know what to do.” More to the point, I've never heard her say, “I don't know what you should do.” She knows exactly what I should do and when I should do it. She can be wrong, mind you. She can make big mistakes, usually by moving too quickly. Like a lot of small, wiry people, Nina's incapable of doing anything in a leisurely way, so why should it be any different when it comes to opening her mouth? She's been known to offend several of her closest friends in a single afternoon. But she speaks her mind, and the solution is immediately clear to her.

I, on the other hand, am more of a plodder. I think about things, chew them around in my head for a while. I'm a ruminant, basically, grazing over the landscape, taking in a little of this and a little of that. What I find is that there's a bit of the inedible in every patch.

I always hear myself saying, “yes, but,” when I talk to Nina. Yes, but what do I do when Annie and Peter come home from college? Yes, but I want privacy; yes, but I don't want a complete stranger bumping into me in the hallway at night; yes, but I don't want someone else's groceries in my refrigerator.

“Yes, but you don't have enough money,” she says.

Yes, but—I just want to complain. It's true I can rent a couple of rooms. It's true I can get more money. What I can't do is alter the fact that life at this stage, according to that rabbi, is not the way my life appears to be headed.
Life begins when the kids go off to college and the dog dies and you take in a boarder
. I don't think so.

OCTOBER 7

The leaves are curling on the horse chestnut; the cicadas are dropping from the trees; dark closes in on my late-afternoon walks with Dickens. It all spells fall, and you leaving. Up the street, someone lights a fire. The smell of it wafts across my consciousness like a broken promise, and there you are. God, but associations are slow to die.

It's been just over a year since you left to sleep on a futon. I knew then that I had lost my husband. It had been my husband who had gone; and one day, perhaps, it would be my husband who would return. But the man I did not count on losing, did not think about then, was my best friend. I mourned for my marriage, but I forgot to mourn for my friend. He's the one I miss the most.

The man who was my husband dates another woman; I date another man. We come and go, each of us, to movies, and to dinner, and to bed. It's nice. I'm okay. You don't need to feel guilty anymore. But where, I wonder, even in the middle of a great sunny Sunday morning, when the maple tree outside my window is an explosion of yellow and David is on his way over to see me, where is that friend I used to have, the one with the dark, soulful eyes and the kinky hair who used to spin out his insane ideas over a second cup of coffee? Where is he who listened attentively to my endless, groundless, neurotic fears and wound up actually convincing me that they were functions of creativity? When was the moment that he ceased to think of me not only as his lover, but also as his friend?

All those past joys and certainties have been negated, erased. The intimacies that wove us together have come unraveled like an old blanket that somebody left on a park bench. And there is nothing, nothing in this life that can replace them. How does one unlearn one's past?

So it wasn't the marriage I took for granted all these years; it was, I have been slow to see, the friendship I could not imagine being without. It's our imagination that has failed us, so much we did not, could not, picture. You said once on the telephone, “If either of us gets married again—” And stopped yourself, asking, “I can't imagine that, can you?”

“No,” I said. “But then there are a lot of things I couldn't imagine.”

OCTOBER 26

Trust me when I tell you, she almost got the lamb chops. What a sweet scene, Isabel skipping down the aisles of Corelli's, looking positively radiant from the nip in the air and the excitement of preparing a special dinner for you while I, the knowing ex-wife-elect, peer into her shopping basket, nodding approval.

I smiled. She smiled. I could see us in a comic strip, balloons of words forming over our heads.
Hmm
,
sausage, lamb chops, looks like a mixed grill; why, of course, it's his birthday, and she's cooking his favorite dinner. She sees me looking, knows I know. I wonder if she'll select an alternative menu. A new lover hardly wants to trail along in the path of her predecessor
.

Isabel, meanwhile:
She knows it's his birthday, it's probably the same damn dinner she's given him since he was twenty-five. I wonder if he'd really mind that much if I got something else …
When I saw her again at the checkout counter, the lamb chops had been replaced by Cornish hens. Separations would be so dull, wouldn't they, without these unexpected encounters? It was like looking into a room that had been vacated after I'd gone. It was your next life. I'd label it,
After Emily
.

NOVEMBER 5

Three days ago, a man told me that my body was a work of art. I liked that:
A work of art
. The man was David, but what I'm still trying to absorb is that an actual man, someone with reasonably good eyesight, feels that way about me. There was a time when such an idea would have seemed hilarious. In college I went out with someone whose mother pulled him aside one parents' weekend after she had met me, and said, “Someday, John, you and your brother are going to realize that there's more to life than a blond body.” What a bizarre way to describe a woman whose body was only slightly less seductive than that of an eleven-year-old boy. Even my boyfriend got a lot of mileage out of that, addressing me in front of his fraternity brothers as, “Inga from the Land of the Big Knockers and The Midnight Sun.”

I seem to have come a long way, baby, as they say, at least as far as the body is concerned. But I'm still at the stage when everything David says or does comes across in a historical context, thrown into relief against the background of the past. He can't open his mouth without my thinking,
Would Nick have said that?
In this instance, I think I can safely assume that the answer is no.
I'm leaving my wife. She has a body like a work of art
. It doesn't quite fit, does it?

We took so much for granted, Nick. Maybe that was our biggest mistake. I think of how disdainful I was of my mother when, at the end of the day, she would brush her teeth and powder her nose and put on more lipstick before my father came home. It didn't matter what she had been doing, whether she herself had only just come home from work, or whether she'd been pulling crabgrass. My father's imminent arrival would make its way into her consciousness, and she would pop in front of the mirror to set about preparing herself for him.

This effort my mother made to make herself attractive to my father at all times infuriated me. I saw it as deferential, demeaning; I thought she lacked the confidence just to
be
. Did she think he wouldn't love her with a single hair out of place, or with dirt under her fingernails? And if he didn't, what of it? What did that make him? Surely, I thought, if she went about her business, if she didn't cater to him, he might love her more; he might love her more than she knew.

So what am I saying? Maybe that I might have tried harder to let you know that I cared whether I was attractive to you. I might have made an effort to convey to you how lucky I was to have you come home at the end of the day. Who knows all I might have done, if I could have done anything at all.

We could spend the rest of our lives thinking of all the what if's. It's certainly my kind of preoccupation. In the meantime, I'm reveling in being regarded as a work of art. It's like having someone pull me out of the back of a closet and dust me off to discover that—wow!—I'm an original, a museum piece. I wouldn't want to call in any experts on this. No second opinions, please! I'm not asking any questions, not thinking about where this will lead. I'm just going to lie in my bed in the morning, stretch with the sunrise, and feel the blood return. I'm going to savor the sensation of having my body come back to life, hungry inch by hungry inch.