To My Ex-Husband (3 page)

With the women I know, talk takes on an almost sexual intensity; maybe it
is
sex. For me, anyway, talking has replaced sex. It's a more intimate act, in many ways. I wonder if you remember watching, years ago, a drama on PBS called “Double Solitaire.” A woman is talking to her husband, a publisher, who has evidently disappointed her. She tells him that she would sometimes see him having lunch with one of his “clients.” They would be deeply engrossed in conversation, and she would think,
I wish he would sleep with her and talk to me
.

All this verbal intercourse with Dr. Bloom has necessitated the careful selection of my Tuesday-morning attire. I'm like Meryl Streep in
Falling in Love
, pulling things out of my closet, debating whether to wear jeans or a long, flowing skirt that buttons up to the waist, a lavender shirt, or something more sophisticated, in black. I ponder: Would a low-cut cocktail dress with spaghetti straps be too obvious?

Last week I wore a snug-fitting white crocheted sweater, and when I lifted my arm to rest it along the top of the couch, I believe that he had looked over, ever so quickly, to see if he could see my nipple through one of the holes. A pathetic patient's fantasy, no doubt. Or, as Nina put it, “You wish.” But just because it's a fantasy doesn't mean it isn't true, or that I can't have a little fun with it.

I also like having this sealed-off piece of myself that I keep private, the knowledge that I'm undressing him in my mind as we're talking. Maybe he knows; patients often credit psychiatrists with a perspicacity that they don't really possess. But it's I who literally wants to see through him, through his clothes, anyway. It's no wonder I want to peel them off. The man wears the most outrageous combinations. It's as if he stood in front of his closet every morning and said to himself, “Oh, what the hell, I'm just going to talk to a lot of crazy people.”

Anyhow, all this fun and fantasy end when the bill comes, that small slap in the face with the figures written on it, a tawdry reminder that my most important confidant, the man to whom I have entrusted everything that I am, the man with whom, even if pathologically, temporarily, I am falling in love, is a purchase.

OCTOBER 21

It's miserable living in the same town as the man I used to do errands with every Saturday for so many years. This morning I did a U-turn in front of an oncoming trolley because I thought I saw your car going into a parking lot. Imagine my disappointment when, having made a complete spectacle of myself, I race up to this silver-bullet-colored Toyota I know so well, plant my hand on the door, and peer directly into the startled face of a woman I've never seen before.

That wasn't the first time it has happened. More than once I've found myself hurrying up the street after a familiar set of shoulders in a red-and-black checked shirt, my pulse racing, only to see that it isn't you. Each time, I'm reminded of that passage in
Justine
, after she's left Alexandria and Darley is disconsolate. “Whenever his memory of her turned a familiar corner, she recreated herself … Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him … She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal, and he would overtake her with beating heart—to find it was someone else.”

There's much more to the passage than that, but the last line is the one that haunts: “… he carried the consciousness of her going heavily about with him—like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.”

“I haven't left,” you'll say. “I'm here.” But to me, you're lost. I have no access.

OCTOBER 23

Yesterday, I decided it was time I acknowledged that I was no longer married, at least for the time being, and so I went to the bank to deposit my rings in the safe-deposit box. It was a small, very private burial service. I sat in this tiny room with a long, steel box and the rings I had worn for two decades, and cried as quietly as I could into the sleeve of my coat. Naturally, I thought about the night you presented me with the engagement ring, the fractional but perfect stone, and dropped it as you took it out of the box; I thought about the two of us scrambling frantically around looking for it on the restaurant floor. For weeks afterward, I wished I could write, eat, adjust my hair, do everything with my left hand so that the ring would show more; how I picked my clothes out each morning according to what would set it off best; how, at work, I practiced laying my hand casually across the top of my paper while trying out writing my new name; I watched my hand in the mirror while gesticulating in animated, imaginary conversation. I was consumed with the notion of change, that in just a few weeks I was going to go from being a girl who shared an apartment with other girls—girls who wore Villager shirtwaists and ate powdered doughnuts and canned mandarin oranges for breakfast—to being a married woman, somebody like my mother, who wore stockings and sensible shoes and sat in a wing-backed chair with her legs crossed reading the current Book-of-the-Month.

We had all the answers then; nobody else—our parents, most especially—knew anything. The odd thing is, I still think we were right. I did not marry the wrong person. That's what makes this so painful. I don't have any regrets. I can't even get angry.

In that little bank cubicle, I got lost in time. In effect, two decades had gone by since I had gone in. Finally I shut the box and opened the door. Remarkably, everything on the other side was much as I'd left it. A few bank officers working at their desks; two or three lines at the tellers', moving quietly along; the usual friendly chatter among the depositors. On my way out, I walked naked among them, without my rings. Drained. Despondent. Like any woman leaving a funeral.

OCTOBER 21

I hate to open with bad news, but here it is: The dishwasher has been operating exclusively on a forced hot-air system lately, spewing hard little granules of Cascade all over the dishes without benefit of water. I may be the only person to apply the sandblasting principle to her dishes. Generally, I wouldn't take small inconveniences personally. But add to this the demise of the vacuum cleaner,
our own
Eureka Princess, and I am distraught.

If you recall, the Princess hasn't been entirely well for some time. It's had electrical problems; it's had motor problems; it's had hardware problems. For the last six weeks it wouldn't close its lid, and it had to be carried around, like a great yawning baby, on my hip. But these have always been minor wrinkles in the Princess's otherwise long and happy life; like those in the marriage of its owners, they could always be ironed out.

Finally the Princess told me something: It had gasped its last breath. The suction had gone out of it. Somewhere, stuck in the length of the hose, was a mass. I'd shaken it, slammed it against the side of the house, but nothing came out. So this morning I took the last resort. I scrubbed up and performed a tracheotomy.

The operation itself, performed with an L. L. Bean knife, a clean incision of about eleven inches, was a success. I found the mass, not the usual Baggie twist-ties and dog hair, but wads of yellow tissues and cotton balls. Annie had cleaned her room. A helluva way to empty a wastepaper basket.

I sutured the wound firmly with tape, but something went wrong. The hose collapsed and flattened, like a tapeworm. When I plugged it in, the sound the Princess gave off was faint, unfamiliar, and heartbreaking. It came from the grave.

So there's been a death in the family, a metaphor for broken dreams. I feel, somehow, as if I've cracked the last dish of the good china. I look around my kitchen floor at the scattered remains of an era, and know that I'll have to reconcile myself to the fact that some things just can't be fixed.

In the meantime, I need help with at least some of these things, like the dishwasher. They are still ours. And if we wind up putting the house on the market, there have to be working appliances.

You say you're not going to pull the ball out from under me (whatever that means—who stands on a ball?). But as I understand it, you've agreed to pay the real estate taxes and utilities, even though you “don't have to do this.” Getting out my slide rule, I find that that comes to a grand total of $3,000 a year. It doesn't seem that much of a hardship for a tenured professor/painter—a whopping 4 percent. Well, Dickens and I put our heads together this morning and came to the conclusion that if we cut out all nonessentials, like car insurance and Milkbones, by February we'd be like Dustin Hoffman as Ratzo Rizzo, sick and hungry and poor, living in a filthy, cold room and dreaming of Florida.

Yes. You said I'd have to manage like “any other single woman.” Fair enough. I just wish I'd had a touch of clairvoyance twenty years ago, when we talked about how important it was for mothers to work around their children. So much for “second incomes.” So much for writing a column about family life for a women's magazine. instead I should be writing one called “Creative Financing Among the Disenfranchised.” It's an honor to be a contributing editor of a major magazine, and it looks good on a résumé. But I'm still earning less than anyone I know, including the woman who comes to clean the house. I've always known that something was awry. She calls me “Emily” and I call her “Mrs. Washington.” Having abandoned all pretense of solvency, I've had to cut her back to every other week. Even then, I felt more like her employee than her employer. “Don't you worry yourself now,” she said, flashing me a big, brave smile. “You'll be doin' better before long.” Stephen was telling me recently that it was bad enough when his first wife left him and the marriage was over; but when the friendship went, that was the worst thing.

I felt that she was in my corner, so to speak, the way I used to feel about you. That's the hardest part for me, knowing I've lost my cheering section. You were my friend, my partner. But you make it so hard for me to get back on my feet. What is it, Nick? Do you want me to fail, so that you'll feel justified in leaving?
Look at her; she can't even manage like any other single woman
.

Whenever I mention to Nina that I miss your friendship, she manages to let me know that what I thought was friendly didn't look so friendly, particularly in the last year or so. I keep writing that off; she didn't,
doesn't
, know you. Signs are clearer, though, when read from a distance. I knew you too well, or so I thought, to read carefully. I skipped some words, filled in the blanks with background information. I made assumptions.

I did feel, always, that you were on my team. That's been my image of you and I never questioned it. I never turned to find the person alongside me running in the other direction. Whatever it is that others seemed to have noticed, I missed.

You were supportive, affectionate, sensitive, and considerate—I can't have imagined all that. You were the man who burst into my apartment with flowers and cold remedies when I was sick. I blew my nose and listened, rapt, as you read from slim volumes of romantic musings by obscure poets. My roommates were jealous. I'd found someone I could talk to. You weren't self-absorbed or precious, like the men they'd met. You weren't even like the men they
liked
. You were a nurturer. And—the ultimate, as I heard it years later in women's support groups—you never left dirty underpants lying on the floor for somebody else to pick up. In so many ways, you were different. Far from being threatened by my accomplishments, you were proud of them. You took me seriously. You supported my work, you talked to me, encouraged me. How could I not have loved you, done anything for you? I got
so much
back. I'm incredulous now to see that when I wasn't paying attention, you became somebody else.

OCTOBER 31

Last year, on Halloween, I went as a dog. There are some, including you, who might have said I went as a dog every year, but never mind. On that occasion I took special pains. I had the benefit, too, of a model, our own real dog, who sat cooperatively and watched as I applied the corresponding markings to my face—a freckle here, a freckle there—until there were two identical black-and-white dogs, one 100 percent fur, the other 100 percent felt. Exclusive of ornamentation, that is.

“Ornamentation,” if you recall, had included a thick, viscous layer of “Theatrical White,” with which I had colored in my blaze and my muzzle, and an inky black that covered the rest of my face. Some liberties had to be taken, of course, with the mouth and nose, which given certain anatomical differences were difficult to duplicate. On close inspection, something distinctly undoglike could have been detected about the eyes. Otherwise, I was perfect.

Well, that was last year. This year, I'm not sure I want to go as a dog. It's not just as a matter of principle, that I wouldn't go as the same thing two years in a row. It's that this year, behind the scenes, something's changed. I'm no longer a married woman.

It was one thing, as a married woman, to paste my hair down under a black watch cap from whose sides dangled a pair of great, long floppy ears, and smear my face—including the insides of my nostrils—with clown goo. It's something else entirely, it seems to me, to do it as a single woman. I no longer have that firm and affectionate I-love-you-in-your-flannel-nightgown-and-kneesocks base of support. While last year I might have been perfect as a dog, this year I would be less than perfect as, say, a potential dancing partner.

Granted, costume parties are costume parties, and being pretty isn't the point. Nor, as you know, have I ever been one of those party poopers who comes as she is and pretends that she's just come from a business function. Still, if there's anything I've learned in my short time as a single woman, it's that there's such a thing as being too good a sport.

I remember, as perhaps you do, too, that Halloween night a few years ago when, long after most of the crowd had sifted in, the doorbell rang. I answered it to find a gruesome-looking little witch with blackened teeth, a long, bubbly nose, and a high, squeaky voice.