To My Ex-Husband Read online

  Not that I stopped asking such questions after I had the good sense to throw the thing away. I spared myself embarrassment of the written word by making my inquiries of a Magic 8 Ball. “Will I pass my algebra exam?” I asked, closing my eyes, all the better to concentrate on the powers that be. A cardboard triangle would float into view. Printed on its surface were the words, “Outlook Not So Good.” Not being one to give up on reading the future, as opposed to studying, I then took the best-of-three approach. Two that said “Outlook Hopeful” would stack the deck, and I could go to bed. When other girls my age were wishing that they were prettier, or had bigger breasts, or that they would make the cheerleading squad, I was wishing for all that, too, but my biggest wish would have been that I were clairvoyant, that I could be my own crystal ball.

  Of course, to see the future would be terrifying; but what amazes me is that uncertainty is no longer frightening. I remember asking you before we were married whether you were going to protect me. I asked it in a half-mocking, coquettish sort of way, and you answered in the same way, but the words were right to the point. “There’ll be good things that will happen to you, and bad things, and I’m not going to be able to do anything about them.”

  Those good things and bad things have happened, and what I have learned from them, without even realizing it, is that I’ll be okay.

  I just remembered something else you said around that time. “A good relationship is one in which nobody loses.” I was trying to bludgeon you into going along with all my plans for the wedding without regard to the things that were important to you. I compromised for the wedding; you may have compromised too much in the marriage.

  You told me one day, after we’d seen Dr. Block, that you made two mistakes. You said yes to Esther, and you left. Wrong.

  You made only one mistake. You never conveyed to me how unhappy you were. You never conveyed to me the extent to which you thought you were losing.

  SEPTEMBER 9

  I’m always relieved when the kids are back at school, out of the line of fire. Every overheard word between you and me, each long, white envelope from Leon Fine’s office that comes shooting through the mail slot is another step toward our divorce, another stone hurled in their direction, straight at the heart. But something happened when Edward and I were on Nantucket, and I was reminded that no one is ever safe.

  The phone rang late at night. We’d gone into a deep sleep, after a big dinner and too much wine. It must have rung several times before Edward finally stumbled out of bed to answer it.

  He managed a throaty, “Hello,” and then he said nothing for the longest time. Whoever was calling had some serious talking to do. And then came these questions: “Who was drinking?… The police?… Which pillar?… You called Rescue?…”

  I sat up in bed and hugged my knees. I had gathered by now that this was one of Edward’s children, probably his son, Tony. I couldn’t make out the rest of the conversation, which was muffled, but I could discern that it was conducted in the deep, stern, fatherly tones reserved for serious occasions.

  When Edward came back to bed, he looked as if he’d plugged himself into an electric outlet. He’d been frantically running his fingers through his hair, a high-anxiety habit that I’d come to associate almost exclusively with his children.

  “Here’s the story,” he said. “Tony had a party. Some kids were drinking beer, and standing around on the front porch. The music got pretty loud, and the police were summoned. In the meantime, one of the porch pillars fell down and hit a girl in the head. She seemed to be bleeding quite a lot, so Tony called Rescue. They took her to the emergency room, where she had a few stitches taken. But she’s okay,” he said, trying to calm himself. “She’s okay; she’s going to be okay.”

  Edward was not okay. And if he were within an arm’s reach of Tony, Tony wouldn’t be okay, either.

  We didn’t know what the police would do about the beer; the kids were all underage. We also didn’t know what the girl’s parents would do. “Okay” may not exactly sum up their impression of the evening.

  Edward tried to get back to sleep, but it was hopeless. Every time he closed his eyes, the scene, and all its ramifications, grew larger and more terrifying.

  The girl really was all right, and Edward hasn’t heard from her parents. But there’s no end to the horror that goes on in your mind, the things that might have happened that didn’t—not this time. This time, we all escaped. But trouble is just around the corner, and kids do not understand that. Their complete lack of understanding, their almost willful ignorance of consequences, leaves them, and us, so vulnerable. We loathe them for their stupidity, while living in abject fear that they are going to do themselves in. They get older and they go away to school, and they get a little better at coping with reality. In time, they cease to be children. But we go on being their parents, wherever we are, and at any hour of the day or night, we can be struck down by that burden and by the limitlessness of its love.

  Peter and Annie are ours forever. I used to think that as long as we were together, we could protect them, that we could keep them safe—a notion that is as absurd as it was once necessary to believe. The line of fire goes beyond us; it is infinite and eternal.

  SEPTEMBER 19

  Your lawyer is Sharon Glass? I can’t believe it! You have chosen a “heavy-duty” divorce lawyer, by all accounts, a woman who happens to be married, not incidentally, to a man whose specialty is fixing noses. Marvin “Makeover” Glass, they call him. What a team. She wins her clients unconscionably large settlements, and he gets them all dolled up for recirculation in the meat market.

  While I’m sitting in Leon Fine’s office, explaining what a sweet, sensitive man you were—an artist, a man who could cry long before it was fashionable to do so—you’re talking to Sharon Glass.

  So much for sensitivity.

  I’m as stunned by this as I would be to hear that you’d dropped your pants in public or pissed in the fountain at Logan Circle. It’s as if you’d had a brain transplant and had become like that rich guy we used to know—I forget his name—who took a perverse pride in never reading a book and was in the habit of mooning in restaurants. He was thoroughly obnoxious and crass. More than that, he was dumb. We were all dumb then, but he was king of the dumbs. Nick, what’s happened to you?

  It wasn’t making any sense to me. Here was a man I’d loved very much, and all he wanted was a second chance. Going through these motions, asking for things to which I’d been assured I was entitled, bargaining on behalf of the rightness of my position—I just wasn’t sure. I was acting on intuition, or worse, impulse. Would I regret what I was doing? Shouldn’t it take more thought, more logic? Couldn’t we just forget all this, I thought, and start over?

  And then Leon Fine gets a letter from Sharon Glass. If I ever needed confirmation, that was it.

  NOVEMBER 17

  I wonder if kids have a pact. Listen, if they ever break up, we don’t talk to either of them about it, agreed?

  Annie called last night to tell me she thought she might have a ride home for Thanksgiving. Somehow, she got around to asking if we were going to sell the house. “I hope not,” I said, “but it depends on what your father and I—”

  Buzzwords: your father and I. “Never mind, Mom,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  When my parents were getting divorced, it was they who didn’t want to talk to us. “That’s between your mother and me,” my father would say. “It doesn’t concern you.”

  I should have been so lucky that it didn’t concern me. Where I would be living, and with whom, where I’d be going to school. I was given to understand that it was self-centered to be curious about such things, so I learned not to ask; but I did offer an opinion once.

  My parents had had an argument, a fight, really, the kind of fight in which suitcases start coming out of closets, drawers open, stockings and nightgowns are suddenly airborne across the room and into an American Tourister.

 
; My mother was shrieking; my father put his arms around me, and I said, “The sooner you separate, the sooner you can get back together.”

  What was I talking about, I wonder—a fresh start? A virus that must be allowed to run its course? I don’t know what I meant by it. In any case, my father agreed. “If only your mother could understand that,” he said. But, of course, they never got back together.

  What surprises me is that Annie and Peter don’t even appear to be talking to each other about this. My sister and I talked plenty, although she had an it’s-all-him philosophy that I never shared. I’ve always been more of the it-takes-two school of thought—until now, naturally, when I can see how the it’s-all-him theory makes a certain amount of sense.

  That’s a joke, Nick. But I’m not going to help you out by noting, in writing, how I contributed to this situation.

  DECEMBER 29

  This seemed an empty week. The last-minute hysteria of Christmas is over, but there was something else: Dr. Bloom is no longer part of my calendar. I’ve terminated treatment, as they say. Only he never said that. He isn’t one of them.

  Psychiatrists are such a funny and varied lot—like the rest of the populace, of course, but more funny and more varied. Dr. Bloom seemed unusual in this regard. Normal, almost—just a regular guy, trained at a different job from the rest of us. Which is probably why I trusted him.

  He wasn’t going to be crass and vulgar just to get a reaction, like that marriage counselor we saw in the seventies. He wasn’t going to be like the psychiatrist in my college town, who left his practice and his wife and children, to run off with a student and open a coffeehouse. He didn’t have any bizarre nervous tics. Nor would he commit suicide, as Harvey’s doctor had done years ago. Harvey’s still angry about that. A doctor took all the riddles of his life to the grave with him, leaving Harvey to start all over again, which is probably why he hasn’t gotten much done since then. He toys with his therapists now, charms them, as though he were at a cocktail party, collecting a few phone numbers, some more enhancements for his Rolodex. And why not?

  I’d flirt with the mental-health establishment, too, if I thought the person I was paying two-fifty a minute to help me make sense of my life was going to close the door and shoot himself. Harvey jokes that he was the one who threw this man over the edge, that it was through Harvey that he recognized his own lack of insight. “I was too deep for him,” he tells me. “I am, after all, a man of immense complexity.”

  We laugh, but Harvey may indeed be a man who can’t be cured. That he doesn’t want to be is another story. He doesn’t want to give up his neuroses, he just wants to be more efficient with the ones he has. Anyway, I’m awfully glad he’s my friend and not my patient.

  No one, incidentally, has pronounced me cured. I can’t remember how I came to be having my last session. Money was certainly an issue. But I also felt that were it not for the money, I would go on and on and on. I’d never run out of things to talk about, although the crisis that took me there had long passed. The things that upset me had less and less to do with me, and more to do with global events. Oil spills, politics. Sometimes we talked about movies. Dr. Bloom’s slant, no matter what the subject, was always provocative and relevant. But then so was Nina’s. She’d call me at eight-thirty in the morning, and say, “Did you read that article? Women should not be having babies after menopause. That’s antisocial; it’s rude!”

  I had fallen out of love with Dr. Bloom, which was a good sign. How sad for psychiatrists, that their patients’ ardor is just a phase in the treatment. I knew, in any case, that it was over when I started withholding things, editing my sessions, thinking, “Why, this is none of his business!” Of course, I still like him. I knew, though, that if we were to meet for lunch, say, even years from now, it would not be very interesting. It would be my turn to ask questions. I’d ask him about his wife and his children, and where he ever got that sport coat with the built-in belt. I’d ask him all the things that people ask of a stranger sitting next to them on a train, provided I were a chatty sort of traveler, which I’m not. Remove the intimacy of therapy and you’re left with friendship. But there was no friendship.

  Well, it didn’t matter. We’d never have lunch. Dr. Bloom knew better than that. When I stood up at the end of my forty-five minutes, he shook my hand, and said something gracious about what a pleasure it had been to work with me. I noticed that he was wearing a nice suit; he’d improved his taste in clothes since I first started seeing him. And on my way to the parking lot, I wondered two things. First, whether he said that to all his patients, that they had been a pleasure to work with. And secondly, that suit—of a rich, deep-navy wool so soft it looked as if it had been woven around his body—had it been chosen that morning just for me?

  1988

  JANUARY 11

  I thought, at first, that it was the beard. But really, it was what you said that got to me. I’m never going to be that boy again.

  I don’t know if I can fully explain what made me burst into tears. But I was shocked to open the door and see you, not reminiscent of the way you looked twenty-four years ago, but exactly the way you looked. You’d shaved it off so long ago that I’d forgotten. The face, the way we had loved each other when you had that face—it just didn’t go with the anger. The anger is all you seem to have left for me. Think how you’d feel, Nick, if I showed up at your apartment, my hair in a shoulder-length flip, wearing an A-line skirt with that floral blouse from Peck & Peck, the one with the McMullen collar that I wore the night we met. These were the costumes of our courtship, the A-line skirt and the beard.

  I was glad you had to get Peter off to the airport. I had to pull myself together, do all the ritualistic, motherly things a woman does when she says good-bye to her child, the hugs, the have-a-good-last-term. But I could hardly take my eyes off you. Watching you help Peter put his bags in the car, then lean down and pat Dickens—each gesture I took in as though absorbed in an old and cherished movie.

  After you’d gone, I rolled it over and over: I’m never going to be that boy again. You say I don’t acknowledge the changes you’ve made. Maybe that’s true. It’s true, too, that I liked the boy more than I liked the man. The boy had been so alive, so game. But the years went by and he became disillusioned. He didn’t get the recognition he deserved. He “worked his balls off,” as he put it, to maintain a standard of living that was insufficient. His family—his wife, particularly—was parasitic on his energies; demanding, needy. He got depressed. He lost the song he had. I need new dreams, he told his wife.

  Yes, he made changes. But one critical change he does not seem to have made is in believing that his wife is the keeper of his dreams.

  FEBRUARY 4

  Settlement seems to be the topic of the day here in our town. Edward and I went for a bite to eat at Noodles and ran into Claire. She and her companion, a man I didn’t recognize, were getting ready to leave. As she was buttoning up her coat, Claire came over to me and said, sotto voce, “Did you get the house? I got the house.”

  Rob was obviously feeling a little guiltier than you are.

  I felt like a traitor to my sex, battling over percentages, in not asking for the whole pie. I am a traitor. I haven’t learned to feel entitled. Entitlement is a male gene, whereas a woman seems to emerge undeserving from the womb and struggles her whole life to think otherwise. All I have to do is think of Annie, at two, sitting on the toilet. If Peter needed to pee, too, she simply moved back farther on the seat, to give him room. If he’d been sitting there, he’d have told her to wait. The whole toilet. The whole pie. Is there any difference? Entire books are written for people like me who don’t know how to protect their interests. If I were someone who knew how to protect her interests, I wouldn’t have married an artist in the first place. I wouldn’t have been a writer. I’d have gone to law school and become one of those people who writes letters to me, “Re: Moore v. Moore.” I would use phrases like “Affidavit of consent,” and “stipulated va
lue.” I would promise to “effectuate the issuance” of my clients’ divorce papers. But right now I am sitting in what has been referred to numerous times on stationery with engraved letter headings as “the marital home,” and thinking that even one hundred percent of it for either of us would be the shabbiest victory.

  MARCH 22

  Slowly, the background is changing; a curtain is coming down on the old set. The props are small, though; it’s not a major production. To begin with, I’ve changed my laundry detergent. No more Tide. My pillowcases smell like Solo, and by association, like Edward. Solo is Edward’s soap. Solo in the laundry; Dove in the shower. Illicit scents brought into my house, scents of a man who is not my husband.

  Habits get branded into your skin. Recently, I realized how infrequently I listened to music because so much of what I liked was linked to history. I hadn’t avoided it; I just hadn’t gone out of my way to sit down and pay attention to it. But yesterday, in the car, I tuned into public radio and heard an exquisite piece of music that I was sure I’d never heard before. When I got home, I called the station and was told that it was Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss’s Vier Letze Lieder (“Four Last Songs”). I went right out and bought the tape. You would love it. But now, of course, I’ve put my signature on it. Even if it’s become a recent favorite, you will no longer let it in. “Four Last Songs” will not be for you.

  Someone said to me not long ago, “Emily, you have a whole new life.” But I do not have a new life. What I have is an eclectic, often uncomfortable, mixture of past and present. I have kept a lot of the old by choice. I thought it said something nice about me that I kept so much of my former life intact; it said I wasn’t a person who threw things away. I wasn’t a squanderer. I was sentimental; I had attachments. Some of that image, I see now, was an image I created for you. It made me more like you, and if I were like you, I’d be hard to reject. This for the same reason I took up yoga a few years ago. It was Eastern, intriguing, exotic. People who practiced yoga were intellectual.