To My Ex-Husband (24 page)

A few minutes later, we were walking up your street, trying to stay within the shadows of the trees. Edward was completely cool, as though we spied on our former spouses every evening, but I was both giddy and terrified. I thought that I might wet my pants.

We sped up the front walk, and then around to the side of the house and into the sticker bushes. (You might be gratified to know that we were both wearing shorts.) I'd had no idea how high the dining-room windows were. Even standing on our toes and gripping the window ledge by our fingertips, we could barely see into the room. The big problem, though, was that you were sitting with your back to the window, and it was almost impossible to see Linda, except for a corner of her hair.

Occasionally you would reach for something, and I could see some of her face. She seemed nervous. And Harvey was right. Linda was cute.

“What do you think they're eating?” Edward whispered. “It looks like some kind of chops.” The food—of course. The real reason for his mission. Just then you got up from the table and moved toward the front door.

“He's coming!” Edward said, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the bushes. We ran toward the gate to the backyard, but we couldn't get it open. There was absolutely nowhere to go. I started giggling uncontrollably, so Edward pressed his hand over my mouth, which made me laugh all the more.

You never did come outside, as far as we know. We waited until we thought the coast was clear, then made our way back to the car. Edward walked; I ran. As we drove away, he said, “Didn't anyone ever tell you not to run from the scene of a crime?”

The scars of my indiscretion are still with me. My legs look as if I'd been attacked by a raccoon. Edward's probably do, too, but his shame is concealed by a manly carpet of hair.

I'm glad you didn't catch us; it would have been awfully embarrassing. Much more fun, too, to tell the story myself, as one who'd escaped, than to think that anyone would hear about it from your perspective, as the captor: “I found my ex-wife and her fiancé peering through my dining-room window the other night … how
perfectly
appalling. God knows what Linda must have thought …”

God knows what Annie would think; but then, I've never impressed Annie as a model of decorum. I'm a woman, remember, who is known to have climbed over a construction barrier and sink into eighteen inches of freshly poured concrete because she was too lazy to walk around the block. Children form an early opinion of their mother when construction workers whistle, and people in traffic jams yell out the windows of their cars, “Whatdja think it was, lady, a Chinese restaurant?”

Annie's always been so much more of a grown-up than I. Do you recall what she said that time I had my hair cut by that sadist who called himself an artist? “Oh, Mommy, why do you do these things?”

A sensible person might ask. But I expect I'll go on doing them until I die.

JULY 14

Nina and I have been having nuptial talks. It was she who got me into this, so I'm holding her responsible for easing my every anxiety. She started working on me a year ago, when she was doing a review of Jake's. I had just ordered the grilled chicken sandwich—she was having the tuna steak and a side dish of string sweet potato fries—when she said, “Emily, you just have to marry this man, that's all there is to it.”

These were disquieting words to the waiter, who had just returned with our iced tea and thought she was talking about him; but one of us is always saying something disquieting. Just the week before, in a crowded outdoor cafe, Nina had asked me what my hairdresser charged for a haircut. “Forty dollars for a cut,” I said, “and five dollars extra for a blow job. Uh,
dry
,” I added quickly, but it was too late. Nina was on her way under the table.

Anyway, I don't often argue with Nina; you know that. I tend to go along with her because she usually manages to convince me that hers is the only reasonable view. Almost invariably, she turns out to be right, a notable exception being the time she encouraged me to get a boarder and Valerie came to live with me.

So that day at Jake's she was telling me I had to get married. I loved the vintage, old-timey quality of the phrase, calling forth the hasty selection of crystal and silver patterns. But she was thinking, actually, of health insurance. As someone who spends thousands of dollars a year on yeast treatments and other related ailments, I got her point. I had nothing against a good insurance plan, but my relationship with Edward had been a romance. Romance and marriage, as so many of us had learned, were two quite different things.

When you're in love, you overlook annoyances. When you're in love, the way his teeth clink on the spoon each time he takes a mouthful of soup isn't something you really notice. But get married, and that noise will punctuate your sentences. It will be the conversational equivalent of water torture.

You and I had been married for twenty years—not forever, I grant you. But two decades is nothing to write off. Would I want to be married to Edward in twenty years? In twenty years he will be sixty-eight, an old man. Would I want to marry someone who's going to be an old man?

And what about me? What went through Edward's mind as, each morning, I stirred a hefty teaspoon of Fiberall into a glass of orange juice? More and more of what went into my mouth each year was for medicinal purposes. I was waiting for the all-fiber fettucine, and then I'd be set.

Otherwise, I wanted everything to stay as it was. There were days, it was true, when I hoped Melissa would leave for school in the morning and run away and get married in the afternoon. I was too old for the habits of adolescents, too old for sulking and door-slamming. But Edward was the indispensable part of the package. No matter what was going on, even when we were arguing about Melissa, which was often, even if I was having menstrual cramps and was bloated, even if he was paying entirely too much attention to those fish, I craved him with a passion I had not thought possible in me. The relationship was not about children, though we had them and loved them and took care of them when they were here; the relationship was about us. We were not starting a family; we had none of the plans that younger couples do. There were no peripherals. We were not asking ourselves, What will the future hold, what will we be? We already knew.

The point was to be together, to revel in what we had to offer each other. I just didn't see how being married was going to add anything. On the contrary, I thought marriage would subtract.

Nor had it escaped me that the success rate for second marriages was none too encouraging. One had a better chance of staying married the first time. Maybe that was because once you learn that you can get divorced and the sky won't fall, you can do it again. The first divorce is like the first murder; you've already got blood on your hands.

But I didn't want to get divorced again, not ever. And if I didn't get married again, I wouldn't have to worry about it. That was my guarantee.

Each day Edward lived here with me was by choice. He could leave at any time. At any time, I could ask him to leave. We were not stuck by contract. All the same, a time came when I started to change. Without realizing what was happening, I lowered my resistance. I started wondering if what I thought was choice, what I called not being stuck, was more like having one foot out the door. What had sounded like an option had all the earmarks of an escape hatch. So here I was, at lunch with Nina and having a nuptial talk. Maybe she had scared me about the insurance, I didn't know. But I was getting excited. I felt different. “Commitment” seems like such a simple, overused word. But if that was it, if that was the thing that was making it different, then I was suddenly, wholeheartedly, all for it.

The only thing I hadn't squared with myself was the extent to which I was going to bring my first husband into my second marriage. We were at Odeon, and Nina was concentrating on the pork medallions in some kind of thick, dark, brown sauce. I had the premarital jitters and could have been eating anything. I mean that literally—anything and everything. Other people who have premarital jitters eat nothing. My appetite was affected only to the extent that I was indiscriminate.

I took a forkful of something that may have been a breast of duck and said I would always think of Edward as my lover, not my husband. She nodded and said something that sounded like “piquant.” Hand it to Nina, the consummate professional.

I don't know how she does it, week after week. This may sound incredible coming from me, but I don't know if I could earn my living by eating. Once it became work, I don't think I could do it anymore. Nina, on the other hand, is always sharp, always concentrating. She never takes anything for granted. I've known restaurant reviewers in this city who chain-smoked or drank or both. They made or broke the reputations of restaurants on their impressions of food they could not possibly taste. I admired Nina tremendously, but I could hardly get her attention.

“You know,” I said, “if Edward and Nick were each about to drop off the edge of the world, and I could only save one of them, I would save Nick.” She looked up from her plate.

“You,” she said, “are retarded.”

I smiled, though she wasn't kidding. She means everything she says. I thought of Stephen, sweet, gentle Stephen, with his fatherly good nature and his innate sense of right; he can be funny, but, unlike Nina, never acerbic. “Oh, Nina, you don't mean that,” he'll say.

“But I do mean it,” she'll reply. He never believes her, of course.

I told Nina that I didn't really feel that way anymore, but that until very recently I had. I loved Edward; but I needed you in the world with me. I couldn't be the only one who would remember the children when they were newborns, their first words, the way they sounded when they talked. It was too huge a responsibility. Even now I look at a picture of Annie at two, and I hear you imitating her froggy little voice.

I didn't go into all this with Nina. I didn't bother explaining, because Nina wouldn't have understood how confusing those feelings had been. I had them at a time when I was looking for perfect clarity. What changed was not my vision so much, but my willingness to live with ambivalence.

JULY 26

So once again Harvey has done the unbelievable. Or maybe Meg has; I'm not up on the gene stuff. Anyway, I don't believe it.
Twins
. A boy and a girl, according to the amniocentesis. There is a reason, after all, why I see Harvey's life as a Shakespearean comedy. I asked him if he was going to name them Sebastian and Viola, as in
Twelfth Night
. He wasn't amused. “I thought I was having this second little family,” he said. “Instead, I'm having a farce.”

Fate has again fallen right into Harvey's hands and given him great material. He'll pretend to be miserable, and we will all love to hear about it. But while we're laughing, we will know that secretly he's thrilled.

AUGUST 8

My mother is too much. This morning, a UPS truck pulled up with a big box from Florida. It was a silk negligee and a matching robe. And there was this subtle aspect—it was ivory rather than white. My mother has put her semi-seal of approval on my sins. She sure has mellowed! But, unfortunately, my marriage plans have made her somewhat self-conscious. When I called to thank her, she asked if it bothered me that she was not planning to get married.

“Emily,” she said cautiously, “this way Fred and I have a little more money.”

Hard to believe that this was my mother talking, hard to believe that she and Fred actually sat down and said, “Oh, let's not get married; let's just collect these two social security checks.”

Everybody calls her Mrs. Graham, anyway. Just as everybody will no doubt call me Mrs. Ventura, though I'm not taking Edward's name. My students are so disappointed. They love change. It's romantic. One of the girls said, “But Mrs. Moore, why get married if you're not going to change your name?”

My God. What do you say to that?

But I can't be changing my name at this age. Nor, if it's of any interest to you, will Dickens. He is, and has always been, Dickens Moore, though he will enjoy a new and interesting status officially as Edward's stepdog.

When you and I were divorced, I'd have given up Moore and taken my maiden name back, but for two reasons. First, it's hard enough to get recognition as a writer without changing your name. And I'm not going to graft a new name onto an old name with the help of a hyphen. People are madly, joyously, hyphenating—until, in disillusion, they unhyphenate. Say Pearl Rudenke, the loan officer in your bank, gets married and becomes Pearl Rudenke-Betterbed. Then she gets divorced, and remarried. She calls herself Pearl Betterbed-Thames. Next thing, you know, she's refusing to lend you money as plain old Pearl Betterbed. So fickle. You begin to think that maybe it was a marriage in hyphen only.

The second reason I'm not snatching back my maiden name is one you already know. I hated Massengill. I always felt so fortunate to marry someone whose name was simple and pure and without pharmaceutical overtones. “There's no connection,” my mother felt compelled to explain time and again. Of course, not everyone is so hygienically inclined as to have made the connection, so they had to ask.

“Well, those douche things,” she would say, trying to sound offhand. As a teenager, this infuriated me. Why couldn't she just shut up? Douches went into vaginas. Vaginas had to do with sex. Why did my mother have to be talking about sex?

By and by, I saw that my mother was exercising her naughty side. Rebellion was so much more tasteful once upon a time, wasn't it?

Now here she is, sending her daughter a decidedly tasteful but nevertheless overtly sensual gift on the occasion of her second marriage. I'm incredibly touched at how supportive my mother has been. I don't know if she blamed me for what happened to us. I thought so at first. Her impulse has always been to assume that I'm at fault. And mine, in turn, has been to believe that she was right. She wasn't one who took a philosophical view, as my father did. She never considered that things had a way of working out for the best, especially if I had anything to do with them.