To My Ex-Husband Read online

  I don’t think that Annie and Peter really care what I do so long as I don’t embarrass them, or worse, involve them. They’ve been disappointed, disgusted. What are these supposed grown-ups doing, they must wonder. They’d like not to be involved. But they can’t help observing—and absorbing—while resisting. It’s as though they’re watching a horror movie with their hand over their eyes and are helplessly compelled, peeking through their fingers.

  This isn’t me, I want to say. Only it is me, it’s just not the me they know. And why should they, why should they want to? It’s important for them to see the whole, not just the mother. But how painful and annoying that other part of mother must be when it serves merely to remind them of how their lives are changed, and, worse, that they’re innocent and unwilling participants in that change.

  It would help, as Nina reminds me, if you and I were to wind up in permanent, happier places. But we’re free-floating, without any obvious direction.

  JULY 2

  Forgive me, Nick, if I’m missing something. But this sudden backpedaling seems adolescent to me. The more interest I show in Edward, the more interest you show in me. Is this really a sense of loss, as you put it, or is it competition, possession? I’m not being facetious, or glib. I really want to know. Because I do not, cannot, trust this feeling in you.

  AUGUST 31

  What do you mean, “How could you?” As though I’d committed murder. Of course, it was a rhetorical question; you didn’t expect an answer. But because I think it raises important differences between us, I’m going to give you one anyway.

  I won’t dismiss it by saying it wasn’t easy. Just to take a vacation with another man and place my feet next to him in the sand was something of an issue for me. But I had to decide, early on, what was going to be off-limits. Was I never going to the island again in my life? And if I was, where exactly? On what street would I agree to rent a house? How close to the village? In which market would I shop, on which beaches would I dare to step? So I drew in my first breath on getting off the boat, and said, “There.” I’d done it. One bogeyman down.

  I could not go so far as to stay in the same house that we went to with Annie and Peter for most of their childhoods. It was much too big and rambling, for one thing; but those summers in that house were sacrosanct. The rooms would have been full of ghosts, the children’s noises, footsteps, even the way the water looked in the moonlight from the upstairs windows—so much I would not have had the energy to overcome.

  You’re forgetting, though, that not all our summers there were idyllic. I’m speaking particularly of the last one, in the cottage, when we were talking about the possibility of separating. “Where did it all go?” you asked me one night, holding your palms up to the ceiling.

  I hate metaphysical ponderables like that. I guess I’m less heady than you are, too down-to-earth, and what I wanted to know was, simply, why you didn’t love me anymore. You couldn’t make love to me, couldn’t pretend, even, couldn’t get close enough for tenderness, for consolation. I was as lonely then as a woman could be, there with my non-husband, my non-lover.

  Mostly what I remember about that time was lying in bed at night, trying to stifle the crying so that you wouldn’t hear me in the next room. I’d emerge in the morning with bulging eyes and the thick upper lids of a frog. Yet no one who didn’t know us would have guessed, as we walked along the road with Dickens, our arms wound tightly around each other, that we were a couple in the process of breaking up. No one would have guessed that the man who was leaning close to the woman at his side, pressing his head against hers, was asking as gently as he knew how whether there was anything he could do to make this easier for her.

  One afternoon, being slow to wean myself of wifely duties, I cut your hair on the porch steps. I was cutting around your ear, and saw in your glasses the reflection of the daisies in the meadow behind me, across the road. And while I snipped, I considered that small framed bit of wildness that so typified what had been our paradise, and knew that a time would come when we would look back on this, on all we had, and wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.

  I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to pass away during the night, to magically stop breathing, so that I wouldn’t have to wake up with that sickness rising in the pit of my stomach, remembering, as the early-morning light sifted into the room, that it was over.

  I wanted to go home, I wanted to stay, I wanted to do anything to ease that pain, but I didn’t have any idea what. So now you ask, how could I?

  I could because I had a bitter taste about the place that had tainted my memories. But it wasn’t the place that was wrong; it was you. You and me. So now I’ve done something about the place; I’ve given it a more positive slant. I couldn’t, after all, do anything about you.

  I said there were differences between us. I don’t happen to share your impulse to remove everything from sight that could serve as a reminder of you, or of us. If I did, nearly everything around me would have to go. Then, when I’d gotten rid of all the things, I’d have to do something about the smells, the light at certain seasons of the year, certain cloud formations, music. Imagine the music I could no longer listen to! You’re in my blood, Nick. Don’t you see? To protect myself from reminders, I’d have to close off my ears and my eyes, my every sense. I’d have to die.

  I chose instead to live with it all, and thus live not only with it, but through it. I’m just starting to come out whole to the other side. This experience, this story, every detail of it, is part of me. I roll along, gathering myself toward completion. It’s a growing process I don’t ever expect to finish; but having survived each day, I wouldn’t dream of lopping any of it off. I don’t want to surround myself with a lot of unhappy memories any more than you do. But if I don’t look them squarely in the face, if I don’t accept them and take them in, who am I? I’m somebody who spends her life looking the other way.

  I have to say that there were preoccupations with this vacation other than those presented by the past. More than being haunted by you and Annie and Peter, I was concerned about how to handle being with someone I didn’t actually know that well on a twenty-four-hour basis. Edward and I had spent only one whole night together. Yes, we had made love several times, but only after three or four months of seeing each other. Even then, we were being chaperoned by Nina and Stephen at their house on Long Beach Island.

  Nina was in her bedroom that Sunday morning—the morning after—and I ran in and leapt gleefully onto the bed like a kid who’s high on cake. I thought I might be in love, and that if I were very careful not to say so out loud, it wouldn’t go away. But I was so disgustingly radiant that I didn’t have to say anything. She laughed and gave me the biggest hug, and I remember thinking how lucky I was to have a friend who could be so happy for me.

  But until then it had been a rather cautious, old-fashioned sort of courtship. Edward and I would lie in bed together for hours and hours, making out and talking. It was like the ’50s, except in those days we didn’t say much. We just ground our bodies together until the guys complained of “seminal backup” and we girls whined about whisker-burn.

  At first I wondered whether Edward was attracted to me, he was so unpushy. But then I got this picture of a man who’d been divorced for several years, and who had plenty of opportunity to recover. (He did a lot of “recovering,” I gather.) I also realized without discussing it that he felt, as I did, that there was something to be said for being friends first. And yet I was intensely curious about him. I wanted to know what he would be like, the way he would breathe, the expression on his face, the force of his body against mine.

  By the beginning of August, we had worked ourselves into such a pitch that we’d slip out of our houses on two or three hours’ sleep and meet in the woods. Sometimes I’d bring a book that I wanted him to know about. I felt that to understand me he’d have to have read certain essays. So we’d walk, and I’d be reading aloud to him from Private Lives in the Imperial City. As the twi
gs snapped under our feet and Dickens sloshed through the creek, I’d rush through all the best essays, desperate to fill his mind with the same words, the same frames of reference, as mine. I never thought of it as foreplay, but that’s what it was. It couldn’t simply have been that I wanted to change my image of dentists as people who never read anything other than the copies of People that lie splashed across the coffee tables in their waiting rooms.

  I adored the frenzy of that time. We were out of control, like two adolescents. And then, not long after, there we were, on vacation, having a sleep-over.

  My first thought was that I wouldn’t be able to go to the bathroom for two weeks. I’d be like those guys you told me about in basic training who couldn’t “go” in a foxhole and were sent home, on the verge of being poisoned by their own waste. I would be carried by helicopter to the mainland, whisked along on a gurney, with this great distended belly, through the throngs of travelers in Logan Airport, to the waiting ambulance.

  Fortunately, Edward was very discreet. Or else he reset his body clock for 3 A.M. In any case, our paths never crossed at crucial moments.

  Thus the small hurdles of getting acquainted were overcome early on. The first night when we got into bed, Edward peeled off my nightgown and reached down to caress me. Just as I was getting aroused, he stopped suddenly, as if he had discovered that I’d shaved all my pubic hair off or something. Then he brought his hand out from under the sheet.

  “What’s this?” he asked, holding up the remains of a Monistat suppository that had failed to melt. It was the third night of a three-part treatment; treatments that are like second nature to me at this point. I had inserted it earlier, without thinking, and then forgotten about it.

  “Well?” he said. I had taken one glance at the slender white worm that had become but a sliver of its former self and dived under the sheet. Edward was beside himself, gleefully insisting that I had, in a spasm of unadulterated pleasure, ejected it like a bullet.

  Thus was the ice broken. By the next night, I was even able to brush my teeth beneath the critical eye of the professional. My flossing habits are less than systematic, but then Edward himself is nothing if not systematic in all things. He’s the sort of person who always has his pencils sharpened, and a completed shopping list that he follows to the letter. He’s not like me, someone who writes “trash bags” on her list, only to come home with a large roasting chicken. So there you are. The givens are understood. We’re operating from different sides of the brain.

  It might interest you to know that I am being schooled in opera—not that I’m a good student. I’ve told you that Edward adores opera; it’s part of his genes, like the way he knows olive oil. He’ll be in a restaurant, eating tuna carpaccio and suddenly, woefully, he’ll shake his head. I don’t ask anymore; I know what’s wrong. It’s the olive oil.

  Even I, despite my reckless acceptance of almost any kind of food, have absorbed some of the finer points of olive oil. I’ve been less successful in the operatic milieu. Edward loves to test me; I, in turn, love to thwart him. Take La Traviata, for instance.

  It’s important to Edward that I understand not only the background of the story—that it’s based on Dumas’s play, La Dame aux Caméllias, et cetera—but the story itself, and which pieces of music go with which parts. I’ve always been content just to enjoy the music, while paying very little attention to what these people are actually saying. We’ll be listening to the second act, and Edward will ask, “What’s happening now?”

  “Alfredo’s father has just come to visit Violetta,” I’ll begin, promisingly. A small smile will appear on Edward’s lips. I’ll continue: “This is just after Alfredo has been singing about the idyllic happiness of his life with Violetta, rejoicing that she has so eagerly given up the excitement of Paris, where she had been such a social butterfly, to be with him in the seclusion of the country.” So far so good. Edward is radiant. I have satisfied the true pedagogue in him.

  “But,” I go on, “Alfredo’s father has come to say that she cannot remain with Alfredo because it is he who loves her, not his son. And anyway, Alfredo doesn’t really love her; he loves Annina, Violetta’s maid, and that, as a matter of fact, Annina is going to have Alfredo’s baby.” Edward has to laugh. But he wishes I would take my studies more seriously.

  SEPTEMBER 17

  I guess you’re angry. Having your estranged husband arrive at your front door and throw an overdue gas bill in your face is not a nice way to start the day. If Edward is in the habit of staying here when his children are with their mother, that’s between him and me and has nothing to do with who should pay the gas bill. It always comes back to money, doesn’t it? Like the roads that lead to Rome, everything boils down to what I owe you. Nothing’s changed.

  Do you remember having this exchange two years ago? I asked you not to come in the house anymore when you came to pick up Annie because I felt awkward, as if I were on display. You know what you said? “Then you pay the utilities.”

  Years ago, when separations were things that happened to other people, I remember some men being in a rage because the women they left were having people over to dinner—on the money that these men earned.

  I never realized that the price of survival was so great. This vindictive, self-righteous stance is not like you, but then I’m sure that there are aspects of me, too, that strike you as startling. I’m more of a survivor than you thought, and more pragmatic. You might choose other words. “Hard,” for instance. It’s a choice of words men use when the women in their lives stop being accommodating and start doing something for themselves.

  SEPTEMBER 26

  Yesterday I saw Claire Edmonds coming out of Corelli’s Market looking absolutely ashen. I was about to drive away, but she came over to the car and leaned in the window. “I just passed my ex-husband’s pregnant wife on her way into the store,” she said. Claire’s such a private person, and we’re not close. I’ve rarely seen her, except from a distance, since that night a couple of years ago, when all we suddenly single women had dinner at Isabel’s. It was a measure of Claire’s distress that she said anything to me.

  She started to say something else, but dropped her head down onto her arm, which was resting in the window. Her shoulders were moving up and down, and I assumed she’d started crying. It must have been a full minute before I realized she was vomiting all down the side of the car.

  What a strange experience, lifted out of the ordinariness of a day like that. I felt disoriented. In retrospect, my reaction struck me as strange, too, mechanical, almost as if I were not in the picture, but watching it. I got out of the car and went around to help, but I watched myself performing these motions—getting her a paper towel from Corelli’s, wiping her face, noting, by the car door, that she seemed to have eaten a soft pretzel recently, all that—with total detachment.

  Maybe Claire’s position is too threatening for anything but detachment. I try to imagine what that would be like, to have to perform all the daily rituals of my life in the random presence of your second wife, radiant with child. In a few weeks, Claire will come face to face with the infant itself, a tiny blend of her former husband and her successor. Why does that fact, that there is a baby, make what happened between Claire and Rob so much more concrete, so much more real and awful? It’s simple, I suppose. It’s living, highly visible proof of a second union that, unlike the one before it, is fulfilling.

  OCTOBER 9

  It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve agreed to this, especially considering that I feel, without giving it a name, that I’ve moved into some other phase of life. As I said, I’m distrustful of couples-counseling in the first place. And what am I supposed to say to Edward? He’ll understand the reason for it, the need. And I believe he’ll respect it. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to like it.

  I’m not reneging on my promise. But this is more of a struggle for me than you seem to realize. Edward is not a diversion for me; it’s far more substantial than that. You�
�re asking me to hold all that in abeyance, now, and do this thing, this process, with you and Dr. Block.

  I’m agreeing because I don’t want to be someone who wouldn’t. I don’t want to be someone who would leave just because leaving is easier than dissecting a marriage and putting it back together. I don’t want to look back someday and see myself as someone who discarded twenty years without trying to do otherwise. So, really, I’m doing this for me.

  Still, I wonder: What’s the game plan? What would we be working toward? Is this to find out why we’re apart, or is it to see if there is any reason why we should be together?

  You were unhappy, remember? That’s why you left. Is it your plan to parade me in front of your doctor so that he can see what exactly is wrong with me and then help me/us fix it so that I’ll be more acceptable to you?

  But I’m already in the process of reconstruction, so that I can cohabit happily with myself. How do I reconcile what I’m doing for myself with what you’d like me to be doing with you and Dr. Block? Do I now walk into Dr. Bloom’s office, and say, “Hold everything. We’re going to make some adjustments in the blueprint. I thought I saw myself as a Victorian house with small, cozy parlors and a fireplace in every room, but scratch that. Nick needs me to be more of a loft”?

  One other thing: In the last few months, you’ve seen quite a lot of Dr. Block. You’ve seen him twice a week, once in group therapy and once in individual therapy, and you say you’ve seen him for occasional “emergencies.” In the last couple of months, you’ve seen more of Dr. Block than you saw of me during the last two years of our marriage. I feel that I’m at something of a disadvantage here. From where I sit, you two are thick as thieves. Dr. Block is your guy.