To My Ex-Husband Read online

  Part of my agenda with Nina yesterday at lunch was to go over some of the ground rules, a sort of friends-as-property agreement. We were supposed to meet at 1:15, which is in itself an imposition for someone like me, who’s hungry by 10:30. She wanted to review a new Thai restaurant on Second Street. It was such a gorgeous day that I stood outside waiting. One always waits for Nina—and you thought I had no sense of time. At 1:35, I saw her hopping down the street. To her credit, she looked as though she were in a hurry, as though she did understand that she was late and that someone was waiting. But then she spotted some interesting items in a sidewalk display in front of a crafts store, and went in. I couldn’t believe it. Nina is never too late to do a little shopping.

  I ran down the street and practically dragged her out of the store by her hair. She wasn’t even contrite. It was her way of exacting the price I would pay for seeing you. Nina does not want to hear about twenty-year investments, about the short term and long term. She doesn’t want to hear about the Big Picture, at least not our Big Picture.

  I sat across from her, with the steam from the Tom Yum Goong soup curling up into my nostrils, running out of adjectives. I said that if she didn’t play fair, I would give away her identity; I would start some conspicuous note-taking. (Nina had ordered the Thai Inter Duck for herself, which made me a little cranky because that meant I would get a taste of that, while she would get a taste of the soup. What I wanted, since I outweigh Nina by about thirty pounds, and since it was hours past my lunch hour, was a taste of the soup and all but a bite of the duck. But there is, in this business, such a thing as a free lunch, and these were the rules.)

  All the same, on a fuller stomach I might have more confidence in what you and I are doing, and more sensible resistance to Nina, who has her own agenda. Get rid of Nick; marry Edward. Period.

  She’s always said how much easier it is to leave a marriage and start over than it is to fix one. So many of our conversations revolve around whether people can really change. She’s more doubtful than I.

  MAY 10

  I wanted to call you all day yesterday, but I didn’t know what to say. Or maybe the problem was that I didn’t know what to say first. I never went to sleep Saturday night, and I was pretty sure you hadn’t, either. It was an awful night. Everything I said and did struck me as wrong and offensive. Everything you said and did struck me as vague and confusing.

  There aren’t many books on how to date one’s estranged husband. Neither of us has been able to find the right note on how to behave.

  First, the flowers. Opening the door and seeing you with the roses reminded me of that first anniversary after you left. You’d sent me a plant. I remember bursting into tears and being so undone that the delivery boy had to sign for me.

  A single word didn’t exist for what I felt at that moment; but the full reality of our positions came crashing down on me. I was touched that you had wanted to acknowledge the day in some way. At the same time, it was a sad reminder that on a day we once celebrated we were now living apart. Then, too, it was a public—by that I mean visible—gesture that should really have been private. Annie was naturally curious about where it had come from, and highly protective of you.

  “Did you send him anything? No, of course not,” she snapped before I could answer, and stormed out of the room. She had been seething in those days, but rarely had I been so aware of it as just then.

  Anyway, it all came back on Saturday when I opened the door and saw you there with these roses and the sweetest smile. I wanted to be appreciative, but the flowers made me nervous. They seemed so bold, so red, so full of implication and expectation. There was even pressure in their perfume. Had I made a promise I couldn’t keep? Worse, had I made one I couldn’t remember? It was one statement to bring them, another to accept them. I was uncertain of both statements, uncertain and frightened.

  And then dinner. The small talk of strangers tainted with the combined overtones of current enemies and former lovers. I didn’t even know what I was eating, which has to be a first for me. I could only think one thing: This isn’t going to work. Whatever happened, there would be that truth, and I didn’t know if I could be the one to say it.

  Later, when we were lying side by side in our old bed and letting the tears roll into our hairlines, I understood that the hard part had yet to come, and that was that we were going to have to let go at the same time. As long as one hangs on, it doesn’t end. As long as one hangs on, there’s guilt for the one who doesn’t, which allows hope for the one who does.

  I know you think I planned this. How often you’ve said, “I left, but you wanted me to leave.” That isn’t true, Nick. What’s happened is that we’ve changed. It was you who said we wanted different things. I didn’t see it clearly at the time. Especially since what you wanted at the time was Esther.

  But, more and more, you like your life ordered. You make lists that you follow to the letter. They’re little maps that take you through your day, your life. I notice how hard it is to fit me in, even for a discussion on what we’re going to do for Peter’s or Annie’s birthday.

  That walk we took a couple of weeks ago keeps running through my mind, over and over. I wanted to talk about us, anything that pertained to how we are, as people, suitable or unsuitable. I wanted to know how you felt about me. I wanted to know if you had loved Esther.

  “Well, what’s love?” you said.

  Why is it that, up close, I never saw how elusive you could be? I didn’t get answers, and so I must have made them up. You didn’t speak for yourself. I spoke for you.

  One thing you’ve said, and said consistently—that you didn’t leave me for Esther, that you would have left me anyway. And yet you want to get back together. You say you’ve “murdered your family” and want it back. But I’m not the whole family; I’m part of it. The rest of the family is growing up. If we’ve done our job right, they’ll stand poised on the edge of the nest, spread out their wings, and fly away.

  When that happens, there will just be me, the one you were going to leave anyway. The one with whom you had dozens of long-standing grievances, the one who wasn’t supportive or understanding, the one who made you feel inadequate, the one who left the financial realities to you while spending money we didn’t have. What makes you think I’ve kicked the Lord and Taylor habit? Don’t you even want to check my credit rating first?

  Lots of people reconcile to ease the pain. The problem is that they don’t resolve anything. You said it yourself the other night. You said it so quietly and so quickly that the words almost evaporated before they brushed my ear. I’m afraid that if we got back together, the same thing would happen all over again.

  And that’s why we were crying, because we know that it would. I can’t speak for you; but I’ve seen our marriage from a different perspective now. And that statement says it all. You keep telling me how much you love me, how much you want to be reconciled, and then almost as soon as I begin to move in your direction, you’re filled with second thoughts. You are afraid. You’re really not clear; you’re riddled with doubt and ambivalence. You have little confidence in yourself and little confidence in us.

  I might feel differently if you had more faith, if you had said, “We won’t let the same thing happen again.”

  Like you, when I look at the span of our twenty years together, I tend to give it a romantic spin. That’s why it’s so tempting to step back in. I think of us working together in the garden, the way we used to; having long, intimate talks over coffee on Sunday mornings, the way we used to; exchanging casual caresses as we passed each other throughout the day, the way we used to.

  I forget about moving to parallel positions, the way we used to, doing things side by side rather than together. I forget about the periods of feeling lonely, and the lack of passion. I forget about all the things we took for granted. I forget thinking that maybe we really weren’t happy, the way we used to be.

  So, I am not going to let the same thing happen all over
again. This was easier when it was your decision. Now I’m bearing some of the burden. You broke my heart once, but you gave me an opportunity. And I’m sorry, Nick, but I am going to take it.

  JUNE 3

  Thanks for dropping off the material on divorce mediation, although “dropping off” doesn’t exactly describe the way you flung it across the kitchen table, sending it crashing into the breakfast dishes. It’s almost funny, a ready-made domestic cartoon. I think we can handle this calmly, and in a civilized fashion, he said, throwing her down the elevator shaft. Mediation just may not be for us.

  Perhaps we could make a new sugar dish part of the property agreement. I understand that you’re furious. You’ve been abandoned and all that; feelings I’ve never had, you understand. But can’t we just get through this the best way we can?

  JUNE 24

  Well, you won’t be hearing from a Mr. Mitchell Schein, in whose connection “nice divorce lawyer” may be a contradiction in terms. If people aren’t out to screw each other when they start this process, the lawyers make sure that they are by the time they finish it. I see just how it must have been now for the Sands. They got remarried because they hated their lawyers so much. It was a hate that created a new and unbreakable bond.

  Mr. Schein sat fingering a large, square diamond pinky ring while, speaking as quickly as I possibly could—you’d be surprised how quick, at $100/hr.—I told him what kind of person I thought you were, that initially you wanted the separation, but now I was the one who would be filing for divorce, that we were good friends, that we did not hate each other, that it was important to me to find a settlement that was fair. This was not just for my benefit, or for yours, but for Peter and Annie, whom I did not want involved in an ugly mess, watching their parents behave like vultures; that we had no money and very little property, only a house; that you were a painter and a teacher, and that I wanted to be sensitive to the limitations of your income while being realistic about mine.

  He listened carefully, appreciatively, taking it all in. He had seemed a nice man, a family man. On the desk were pictures of him and his wife and children. One, taken of them all standing beside a swimming pool, included a big, yellow dog, like a golden retriever; another was of the three kids, two girls and a boy, on a sailboat.

  When I had given Mr. Schein all the pertinent information, he let go of his ring and smiled. As he leaned over his desk, I couldn’t help thinking that his face had a distorted, elongated look, as if reflected in a silver bowl. “He probably had some chippy, your husband,” he said. That last bit, your husband, was spoken with a definitive nod, a punctuation mark that meant, “Come on, now. You can’t be that naive. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  I hadn’t mentioned Esther. I didn’t think he needed fodder. Furthermore, even I, in my admittedly biased opinion, do not harbor feelings of Esther as a “chippy”—especially since I think her parents named her after the heroine of the Book of Esther. In any case, your relationship with her should only have been that simple.

  I have some other recommendations. One of them is a guy named Robert Seltzer. Isn’t he the one who left his wife several years ago and married one of his clients, who was one of Peter’s friend’s mother? And then, after they bought this huge summer house on Long Beach Island, she sued him for divorce because she found out that he was having an affair with another client. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think that’s the one. I don’t think he’d take me on, though. I don’t have enough assets.

  JULY 7

  My mother and her beau, who flew up for the weekend, were here for a grilled butterfly leg of lamb on the fourth. (I didn’t want to compete with the sirloins of yore.) It was a little hard to get used to calling him “Fred.” He was always Mr. Graham to me and my sister. I wish you could see him and my mother together; they’re so cute. She’s her usual quiet and unassuming self, but more relaxed than I’ve ever known her to be. And he, miraculously, wonderfully, is the same.

  This is easy to say, in retrospect, but I always adored him, and if there were any other person I would have loved to have as my father, it would have been Fred. I loved his looseness, his gentle, teasing manner, his thick white hair, which must have turned light very prematurely. I can’t remember it ever being any other color.

  I never cared nearly as much for his wife She seemed cold and cynical, particularly in contrast to Fred’s warm gregariousness, and I wondered why he had married her, although there was never any evidence that they didn’t get along.

  I hadn’t seen Fred since our wedding. I mean it when I say he’s the same, except that the hugeness and the strength in the hug that enveloped me when I was a kid is diminished. It’s odd that I didn’t feel my father’s absence at all. That whole part of their lives and all that went with it—my father, Lillian, the parties in pine-paneled recreation rooms, boating on Long Island Sound, the canasta games—all had been peacefully packed away. They were playing a different game now. The music stopped, you ran for a chair, and did the best you could.

  This time around, my mother got a chair. I hope she keeps it for a while.

  JULY 30

  I was bleaching my mustache when the doorbell rang. A crust of white creme was hardening on my upper lip. I’d just applied it, of course, and had six minutes to go. I’m accustomed to being caught in the midst of dealing with unwanted facial hair by untimely visits from meter readers and tireless idealists who make regular rounds on behalf of Greenpeace, and by the UPS driver, most recently a cheerful young woman who virtually hops from truck to door and back, having been liberated, I gather, from such female oppression as I was allowing myself to experience in midlife. But it was Edward’s car that had pulled up in front of the house. He’d broken his resolve.

  What a waste, I thought, running warm water into a washcloth. I had to wipe the stuff off. Edward would have been shocked, never having suspected me, I’m sure, of such deceitful practices. He might ask his daughter why, since she had such pretty cranberry hair, she dyed her roots brown. But daughters did those things. They tried blue hair, black hair, orange hair, spiked hair, uncombed, dirty, awful hair. They punctured their ears with a dozen holes. They dyed all their clothes black, or they pinned the legs of their jeans into a tight tube. It all depended. Daughters did that. They experimented.

  But grown, emotionally secure women didn’t fuss with themselves anymore. They were what they were; they worked with the givens. Edward did not like enhancements; I knew that. He was disappointed to learn, when we went away last summer, that I shaved under my arms. “I just want whatever it is that is you,” he had said. “I want you that way.”

  There was such a thing, I decided, as being too literal. So here I was, touching up the shadows. But now they would have to wait. I would have to answer the door with a slightly pink, overly scrubbed face.

  I hadn’t spoken with Edward in weeks, not since before Nina mentioned to me that she’d seen him having dinner with Phyllis. I’d wanted to call him many times, fought calling him, but I was concerned about thinking in either/or terms. Just because it hadn’t worked out with you didn’t mean, necessarily, that it would work out with Edward. Maybe neither of you was appropriate for me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to be married to you; I didn’t want to be married. I didn’t know if I could be married, as accustomed as I am now to having things my way. I didn’t know if I could make room for another person, another will. I’d lost my live-withability. For the present, I was like Candy in The Cider House Rules. I was waiting and seeing.

  But the second I opened the door and let Edward in, it dawned on me that I probably wouldn’t have to wait that long before I would see.

  AUGUST 14

  It would happen that in the week I’m supposed to be writing at a feverish pace about the “Key to Lasting Love,” I have actually spent most of my time casting about for a lawyer to negotiate the terms of our divorce. I wanted someone that I could a) afford, and b) trust. What I found was someone who is part of a two-man office that loo
ks like something out of an old private-eye movie, right down to the rippled glass door. There is a secretary, but she wasn’t there, so Leon Fine was answering his own phone, which endeared him to me. I answer my own phone, too, so we were on an equal footing. He would be sensitive to my position without being what is known in the trade as a scumbag.

  AUGUST 20

  Life is good. I eat a lot of fresh vegetables, make love as often as I can, go to the theater at least once a week, and never use a vacuum cleaner. This in a note from our old friend Laney. Not a bad recipe for happiness for a single woman—for any woman. Especially the part about the vacuum cleaner.

  I suppose it isn’t accurate to think of myself as a single woman, since I’ve started doing so many things with Edward again. But I enjoy being able to choose whether I want to be alone or not. My Candy routine of waiting and seeing isn’t exactly Edward’s style, but he’s okay about it. I suggested that his cooperation might have something to do with wanting to keep Phyllis the Physician in the wings, but he insisted that she was satisfactory only on a strictly emergency basis.

  It’s interesting that someone who was as riveted to the future as I was no longer has the need to know. I was practically born with that compulsion. Maybe that’s why I threw away all my diaries before they had any value as history. It embarrassed me, even a week after any given entry, and in the privacy of my own room, to see how completely immersed I was in what was going to happen next. Every page began with a question, based more or less on a social issue. Of paramount importance, for instance, was whether Gordon Singer was going to ask me to the prom.