To My Ex-Husband (2 page)

This was Annie's world, her mother and father, her big brother, her friends, and her dog. It was our world, too, a perfectly wonderful world. But sometime in the last couple of years, between
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
and
Heartburn
, something started going bad at the core. There are no photographs of that disparity, no hint of when it was that the imperceptible evolution first began, and one of us wound up wanting something different.

I couldn't leave Annie's room for the longest time. I was wallowing in the past, wondering: How did we get from there to here? How could we possibly have gone from that magical, snowy night in Boston when Peter was born to this day, and the next day, and the next, when you won't be coming home for dinner?

OCTOBER 13

With respect to the question everybody asks everybody but me—“Did he leave her, or did she leave him?”—I'm thinking of getting a bumper sticker. On the other hand, I might be putting myself at a disadvantage. “He left me” is the badge of the undesirable. No one wants a woman who's been dumped. But a man? The word is barely out before lines form with the thousands of women who want to kiss it all better.

You think I exaggerate, but I can quote you actual statistics. If one thinks of life as a game of musical chairs, there are roughly eight million women who don't have a place to sit down when the music stops.

Meantime, I've been to a party! (Having found myself suddenly in such social demand, I had to beg off on a second invitation, to attend a candida support group sponsored by the health-food store.)

So this was my first, albeit rather exclusive, party. I say “exclusive” because it was hosted by none other than Isabel Lyons, who is, as you know, another local rejectee, as were all of the other guests. A stellar group. Had I left you, I would never have been invited. So there was that one prerequisite, the perception being that we were all abandoned, emotionally devastated, sexually deprived, middle-aged women suffering from terminal loneliness who were desperate for something to do.

“The important thing,” Isabel had said when she called, “is to keep busy.”

As it happened, I had been quite busy, busy at not being any of those things. Frankly, I didn't want to be linked with the Victims. That wasn't the way I saw myself, as somebody to feel sorry for. They were all running out and buying
The Road Less Traveled
, whereas I got more out of Miss Manners's “Advice to the Rejectee.” “… A broken heart is a miserably unpleasant thing,” she writes, “making one feel ugly and unattractive, an enormous disadvantage when courting others.”

That was the next step, wasn't it? Courting? One day, I might be ready. In the meantime, if I felt ugly and unattractive, it was only in your presence. When you said you were leaving, that was when my modesty returned. I was suddenly shy getting dressed. My body cast me in shame, as it had when I was thirteen and nothing seemed to be growing according to the normal plan. The horrors of the girls' locker room returned, and, once again, I became deft at sliding one garment out from under another. The nightgown was over my head before the shirt slipped off my shoulders.

There were the three months before you actually left, three months in which I never let my body out from under cover, never let you see all that had turned unlovable. I was still your wife. But I was diminished by being naked in a room with a man who no longer wanted me.

Now you insist on coming to pick Annie up every day. You walk in the house, play with Dickens, pick up your mail. You're all shaved, showered, and dressed for work, smelling like Gilette. I'm in the kitchen, cooking French toast, wearing a flannel bathrobe, my hair pressed to my skull as though I'd been sleeping in a sock. I look like a George Booth cartoon. Every morning I think, This man must be looking at me and saying to himself, “Boy, did I ever do the right thing.”

What I want is a chance to be seen through new eyes, to regain my equilibrium and confidence. To see
myself
through new eyes. I like what Betsy said when her marriage broke up: “It's as if Ted was green and I was blue, and then we got all mixed up for twenty-six years. Now I want my blue back.”

And there we have it, the real common denominator at Isabel's. We were all searching for our blue, that pure, undiluted strain of the people we used to be.

Picture it: Six women on the verge of estrogen drain, whose husbands had all departed for greener pastures, getting together for dinner on a Saturday night. The first thing I thought of when I walked in was that line of Lily Tomlin's: “We're all in this alone.”

Isabel seemed a little nervous in the beginning, a hostess accustomed to functioning in concert with a host. She lit a fire—her first. She was admittedly shy about this, apologetic for having maintained such stereotypical roles throughout her marriage—during the Women's Movement, yet. Most of us were chopping wood just to make a point. But who was I to comment? I was already worried about Thanksgiving, when, in front of the children and my mother, I would have to carve the turkey.

Still, there was an air of conviviality at Isabel's, as if we'd gotten through the worst, and now each of us could sit back and appreciate the situation for what it was—a great story. A few bottles of Folonari, a touch of drama, and we were off.

I should preface this by saying that it had been an interesting few weeks. It seemed that everyone we knew whose first child had just gone off to college was getting separated. I'd be in the market, buying the “small family” loaf, when suddenly someone would seize my upper arm with a white-knuckled grip and say, “Get this. Reed comes home from the hardware store on Saturday and announces to Libby that he's leaving. He's in love with someone else. In twenty minutes he's gone. Can you imagine?”

No, I really couldn't imagine, and I know you couldn't, either. We were always incredulous hearing stuff like that. The first thing we'd both say was, wouldn't you
know
? How could you live with someone and not know a thing like that? Well, that's what most of these stories were like. And the timing. God, do men ever have a knack!

There was Rob. He didn't say a word to Claire until the weekend of their twentieth-anniversary party, with dozens of old friends about to descend on them from out of town. For weeks, Claire had been going over menus with the caterer, fixing up the garage apartment for the man who had been Rob's best man and his wife, potting new plants for the terrace, making sure everybody had a place to stay. The whole time, he'd been strangely removed, like a part-time employee waiting for instructions: “Where do you want this to go? What do you want to do with that?” She asked him a couple of times whether anything was wrong, but he said no, he was fine.

The Friday night before everybody was due to arrive, Claire was running a bath and sitting naked on the edge of the tub, cleaning potting soil out from under her fingernails. Rob came into the bathroom and began flossing his teeth. She was exhausted, and feeling a little wistful, so she asked him whether it wouldn't be nice if, after the party, they went away for a few days, just the two of them.

He didn't answer; he just tossed the floss into the toilet and went into the bedroom. Claire followed, staring at him, as if to say, “Well?” Finally, looking at her for the first time in months, he suddenly screwed up his face and started to cry. Then he told her about Charlotte, and Charlotte's six-year-old. He would be moving in with them, four blocks away.

Claire said she couldn't decide which was the greater humiliation, that he was telling her the marriage was over and there was another woman, or that he was telling her the marriage was over and there was another woman while Claire was standing there without any clothes on. Listening to this, I couldn't help thinking about one other galling thing. It's the men who cry. Tears, a big show.
See how difficult this is for me, see what immense pain I am in. Feel sorry for me, because I no longer love you
.

Then there was Isabel herself, who was out for a walk with Paul and trying to find out when, or if, they were ever going on vacation. They were supposed to have left for the Berkshires every week for the last five weeks, and he kept postponing it. Turns out he had a girlfriend, a former babysitter of theirs, who was about to take her final exams for her BA, and Paul thought it would be too hard on her at this time—Isabel dragged that part out, “at this time,” precisely in Paul's pinchednostril, I'm-an-attorney way of speaking—for him to go off with his family. A postscript to this story was that it solved once and for all what Isabel calls “The Case of the Errant Undies,” a spare little number in flesh-colored lace that Isabel had found last spring under the sofa in the den. She knew they weren't hers, but managed to convince herself that they belonged to one of the boys' girlfriends, and let it go at that.

I won't go into all the rest. But I wish you could have seen how ridiculous all you men looked in the retelling. There is another side to those stories, we know that; but no matter whose side you listen to, one thing is clear: Women are either monumentally stupid or deliberately, desperately, blind. If something is wrong, they simply won't see it. In this one way, I felt lucky. You and I were not like that. There was no other woman. There was no lie. What you said was sad, but I had to believe it. There just wasn't any other explanation.
We want different things. It's no one's fault
.

OCTOBER 15

I went with Nina and Stephen last night to see
The River
with Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson. We seem to go to movies early these days. The theater was full of blue-rinse ladies and a few surviving men badly in need of nose-hair clippers. It's an awful movie, all rushing, angry water and screaming, hopeless voices drowning in the wind. I got sick of looking at Sissy Spacek standing on the river bank, the strands of her long, drenched hair stuck to her face, and those round, red, frightened eyes. My attention wandered, and I happened to see Stephen reach over and take Nina's hand. It was the first time since we've been apart that I've felt the sting, not of loneliness, but of being alone. I got this little ache in my throat, and wondered if I'd ever have someone to hold my hand again.

I've been so intent on not being the great walking wounded that moments like those take me by surprise. I try to be optimistic, to use this time to learn something about me and about us, rather than dwell on the failure. Sometimes I'm successful. At other times, a simple gesture, like a hand reaching out to take another, triggers all of my worst fears. For me, such a thing now seems so remote and improbable that I have to concentrate to remember the texture of your skin, the weight of your arms around my shoulders, the comfort of your presence.

I used to think of my mother, alone in her bed, the bed in which my father gave her back rubs on Sunday mornings, the bed in which they sat among their pillows and drank coffee and read the newspapers. How did she ever manage to absorb the loss of those small intimacies that comprise the larger, more encompassing aspects of love?

Nina has reminded me, in her usual glib fashion, that this is the best thing that's happened to me in twenty years. I don't like hearing that from a friend,
our
friend, supposedly. It seems mean, to say nothing of being awkward if we ever
did
get back together. Nina wants me to move on. It's as if she's taking my face and pressing it against the windowpane so that I can see beyond. What I see is an abstraction, an idea of something better for me. But that something doesn't take shape. I keep it at bay because it will have to wait.

I don't even know how to play this role yet. It
is
a role, the abandoned wife, just like being a wife is a role. You haven't played it before, so you have to play it as you've seen it played. I did what my mother did. I changed the sheets once a week, wore skirts-and-sweater sets, and used Minute Rice.

But here's where I stop copying my mother, and not just because of the Minute Rice. I want to interrupt the programming, make it turn out differently. As I said, I don't know how to play it yet. But while I'm figuring it out, I don't want to try anything fancy. I just want to be with my friends. Right now, there's nothing like Nina's voice on the other end of the telephone nearly every morning, checking in before she goes to work.

Of course, it's hard for me to believe that anyone who reviews restaurants for a living is actually working. Imagine going around worrying that you're getting behind in your eating. There must be days when she's bored and can't wait to hang up, but she goes on listening and listening. In some ways, it's merely the continuation of a conversation that's been going on ever since I met Nina. Love. Men. Women. Women and men. The limitations of men. Why men do what they do. Why women do what they do. What's wrong with what we do and with what they do. Dependency. Resentment. Guilt. Children. Hair. Dogs. Clothes. The bathing-suit problem. The body problem. Yeast.
Life
.

So this is our unexpurgated dialogue on the events as we perceive them. Nancy and I had another version of it when all the kids were little. They grew up around our conversations, literally evolved from one stage to another while we were talking. They outgrew their overalls, and then one day, when we were making tuna fish sandwiches and talking about the G-Spot, we noticed that their voices had changed.

To some extent, Esther and I had this same kind of dialogue until she moved, although Esther was always very guarded about her thoughts. She was emotionally stingy, more like a dealer than a friend when it came to feelings. I had to show her mine first, but maybe that was the only way she could afford to give anything of herself. But it's that giving-over of self that I find so specifically germane to women. I used to think that most men didn't have, or take, the time, that historically they had other priorities.