To My Ex-Husband Read online

  Still, there was an air of conviviality at Isabel’s, as if we’d gotten through the worst, and now each of us could sit back and appreciate the situation for what it was—a great story. A few bottles of Folonari, a touch of drama, and we were off.

  I should preface this by saying that it had been an interesting few weeks. It seemed that everyone we knew whose first child had just gone off to college was getting separated. I’d be in the market, buying the “small family” loaf, when suddenly someone would seize my upper arm with a white-knuckled grip and say, “Get this. Reed comes home from the hardware store on Saturday and announces to Libby that he’s leaving. He’s in love with someone else. In twenty minutes he’s gone. Can you imagine?”

  No, I really couldn’t imagine, and I know you couldn’t, either. We were always incredulous hearing stuff like that. The first thing we’d both say was, wouldn’t you know? How could you live with someone and not know a thing like that? Well, that’s what most of these stories were like. And the timing. God, do men ever have a knack!

  There was Rob. He didn’t say a word to Claire until the weekend of their twentieth-anniversary party, with dozens of old friends about to descend on them from out of town. For weeks, Claire had been going over menus with the caterer, fixing up the garage apartment for the man who had been Rob’s best man and his wife, potting new plants for the terrace, making sure everybody had a place to stay. The whole time, he’d been strangely removed, like a part-time employee waiting for instructions: “Where do you want this to go? What do you want to do with that?” She asked him a couple of times whether anything was wrong, but he said no, he was fine.

  The Friday night before everybody was due to arrive, Claire was running a bath and sitting naked on the edge of the tub, cleaning potting soil out from under her fingernails. Rob came into the bathroom and began flossing his teeth. She was exhausted, and feeling a little wistful, so she asked him whether it wouldn’t be nice if, after the party, they went away for a few days, just the two of them.

  He didn’t answer; he just tossed the floss into the toilet and went into the bedroom. Claire followed, staring at him, as if to say, “Well?” Finally, looking at her for the first time in months, he suddenly screwed up his face and started to cry. Then he told her about Charlotte, and Charlotte’s six-year-old. He would be moving in with them, four blocks away.

  Claire said she couldn’t decide which was the greater humiliation, that he was telling her the marriage was over and there was another woman, or that he was telling her the marriage was over and there was another woman while Claire was standing there without any clothes on. Listening to this, I couldn’t help thinking about one other galling thing. It’s the men who cry. Tears, a big show. See how difficult this is for me, see what immense pain I am in. Feel sorry for me, because I no longer love you.

  Then there was Isabel herself, who was out for a walk with Paul and trying to find out when, or if, they were ever going on vacation. They were supposed to have left for the Berkshires every week for the last five weeks, and he kept postponing it. Turns out he had a girlfriend, a former babysitter of theirs, who was about to take her final exams for her BA, and Paul thought it would be too hard on her at this time—Isabel dragged that part out, “at this time,” precisely in Paul’s pinchednostril, I’m-an-attorney way of speaking—for him to go off with his family. A postscript to this story was that it solved once and for all what Isabel calls “The Case of the Errant Undies,” a spare little number in flesh-colored lace that Isabel had found last spring under the sofa in the den. She knew they weren’t hers, but managed to convince herself that they belonged to one of the boys’ girlfriends, and let it go at that.

  I won’t go into all the rest. But I wish you could have seen how ridiculous all you men looked in the retelling. There is another side to those stories, we know that; but no matter whose side you listen to, one thing is clear: Women are either monumentally stupid or deliberately, desperately, blind. If something is wrong, they simply won’t see it. In this one way, I felt lucky. You and I were not like that. There was no other woman. There was no lie. What you said was sad, but I had to believe it. There just wasn’t any other explanation. We want different things. It’s no one’s fault.

  OCTOBER 15

  I went with Nina and Stephen last night to see The River with Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson. We seem to go to movies early these days. The theater was full of blue-rinse ladies and a few surviving men badly in need of nose-hair clippers. It’s an awful movie, all rushing, angry water and screaming, hopeless voices drowning in the wind. I got sick of looking at Sissy Spacek standing on the river bank, the strands of her long, drenched hair stuck to her face, and those round, red, frightened eyes. My attention wandered, and I happened to see Stephen reach over and take Nina’s hand. It was the first time since we’ve been apart that I’ve felt the sting, not of loneliness, but of being alone. I got this little ache in my throat, and wondered if I’d ever have someone to hold my hand again.

  I’ve been so intent on not being the great walking wounded that moments like those take me by surprise. I try to be optimistic, to use this time to learn something about me and about us, rather than dwell on the failure. Sometimes I’m successful. At other times, a simple gesture, like a hand reaching out to take another, triggers all of my worst fears. For me, such a thing now seems so remote and improbable that I have to concentrate to remember the texture of your skin, the weight of your arms around my shoulders, the comfort of your presence.

  I used to think of my mother, alone in her bed, the bed in which my father gave her back rubs on Sunday mornings, the bed in which they sat among their pillows and drank coffee and read the newspapers. How did she ever manage to absorb the loss of those small intimacies that comprise the larger, more encompassing aspects of love?

  Nina has reminded me, in her usual glib fashion, that this is the best thing that’s happened to me in twenty years. I don’t like hearing that from a friend, our friend, supposedly. It seems mean, to say nothing of being awkward if we ever did get back together. Nina wants me to move on. It’s as if she’s taking my face and pressing it against the windowpane so that I can see beyond. What I see is an abstraction, an idea of something better for me. But that something doesn’t take shape. I keep it at bay because it will have to wait.

  I don’t even know how to play this role yet. It is a role, the abandoned wife, just like being a wife is a role. You haven’t played it before, so you have to play it as you’ve seen it played. I did what my mother did. I changed the sheets once a week, wore skirts-and-sweater sets, and used Minute Rice.

  But here’s where I stop copying my mother, and not just because of the Minute Rice. I want to interrupt the programming, make it turn out differently. As I said, I don’t know how to play it yet. But while I’m figuring it out, I don’t want to try anything fancy. I just want to be with my friends. Right now, there’s nothing like Nina’s voice on the other end of the telephone nearly every morning, checking in before she goes to work.

  Of course, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone who reviews restaurants for a living is actually working. Imagine going around worrying that you’re getting behind in your eating. There must be days when she’s bored and can’t wait to hang up, but she goes on listening and listening. In some ways, it’s merely the continuation of a conversation that’s been going on ever since I met Nina. Love. Men. Women. Women and men. The limitations of men. Why men do what they do. Why women do what they do. What’s wrong with what we do and with what they do. Dependency. Resentment. Guilt. Children. Hair. Dogs. Clothes. The bathing-suit problem. The body problem. Yeast. Life.

  So this is our unexpurgated dialogue on the events as we perceive them. Nancy and I had another version of it when all the kids were little. They grew up around our conversations, literally evolved from one stage to another while we were talking. They outgrew their overalls, and then one day, when we were making tuna fish sandwiches and talking about the G-Spot, we noticed
that their voices had changed.

  To some extent, Esther and I had this same kind of dialogue until she moved, although Esther was always very guarded about her thoughts. She was emotionally stingy, more like a dealer than a friend when it came to feelings. I had to show her mine first, but maybe that was the only way she could afford to give anything of herself. But it’s that giving-over of self that I find so specifically germane to women. I used to think that most men didn’t have, or take, the time, that historically they had other priorities.

  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.