To My Ex-Husband Read online

  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.

  “Just a minute,” I said sweetly, stooping to the child’s level. “We just might have one more treat.” And then I caught it: A familiar expression on the witch’s countenance swept across my consciousness. This witch, I suddenly realized, was no child. She was none other than our friend June, married June, who was having an enormous amount of fun running around the neighborhood, fooling people like us.

  June had done time, as it were, as a single woman, and while doing so never once, by her own admission, would she have gone to a party as a witch. Or if she had, she would have gone as a good witch, a lovely, radiant Witch-of-the-North-type, with false eyelashes and golden hair. At least she would have gone with all of her teeth showing and a less horrendous nose. Things had been difficult enough.

  As you know perfectly well, I’ve always been impatient with this line of reasoning. But of course: I could afford to be impatient. I could afford to look at a single woman and say, “It’s a costume party, for heaven’s sake, not a beauty pageant.” I could afford to see the folly of a single woman’s missing a great movie because there was no one to see it with, or in storing up ten years’ worth of vacation time because there was no man in her life.

  Now, with every minute, I’m less impatient. Circumstances do have an impact. Whereas once I went comfortably to movies by myself and to parties by myself and took trips by myself, now I’ll go to movies by myself and to parties by myself and take trips by myself … a bit uncomfortably. I’ll do the same things with a different attitude, a different perspective. I’ve always felt independent. Now I’ll have to live that way.

  All the silly, crazy things that single women do, like shave their legs, even in winter—the sudden, cold reality is that I’m going to do them, too. I’ll wash my hair on Saturday mornings before I go out and do errands. I’ll pay more attention to fashion, more attention to me.

  So this Halloween, whether I go as a dog, or a witch, or Ronald Reagan, the underlying truth is this: Any way I look at it, I’m going as an unmarried woman.

  NOVEMBER 7

  I did not go as an unmarried woman on Halloween. I went as you. June and Harvey didn’t think it was funny when I showed up at their door in my Nick Moore suit. They were flatly unamused at what I regarded as a rather brilliant rendering of the man who had left me.

  Annie screamed when I appeared in the doorway of her room, but recognized it nevertheless as something of a historic event, and promptly called up all of her friends. Dr. Bloom merely shrugged when I told him.

  “There could be any number of reasons why you dressed up as your husband,” he said. “I have no idea why.”

  It was a bizarre impulse, I admit. And yet logical, in its way. Maybe it was simply that you were gone and that I was bringing you back. And don’t forget, it was Halloween. If what you want is a costume, estranged husbands are easier to put together than, say, an elephant. All I needed was a tweedy jacket, wire-rimmed glasses, which I fashioned out of a flimsy hanger, and a more masculine profile—that is to say, a bigger nose, easily accomplished with some putty.

  I can’t explain my motives any better than anyone else can. One day, maybe, they’ll be clear. But I was riding on some kind of creative high. I wanted to have fun, and who’s more fun than the Littles? But obviously, June and Harvey weren’t in the mood. I was so disappointed. They and Nina have been my life-support system. Never mind that the Littles have problems of their own; marital strife is far from a foreign notion. But they put it aside and take you in. I show up at nine o’clock at night for a glass of wine and maybe a little cry, and first thing I know, Harvey will be at the stove, fixing me something soothing to eat. Food always does it for me; I’m just not the pale, wan type, with that exotic, underfed quality.

  Now here was this frosty reception, as though I were selling burial plots.
Perhaps they were just stunned. I was stunning. Without saying anything, June went for her Polaroid; she always has had a sense of occasion. I felt that to her mind this picture already had a caption: The beginning of the breakdown.

  I’m not having any breakdown. Maybe there’s no single reason I did what I did; or maybe that reason remains to be seen. Maybe I just wanted to know what it was like to be in your skin. Maybe I’d know the real reason you left. Nina keeps saying there just has to be more to it than what you’ve said.

  I don’t know how I can worry about something as trivial as a failed marriage when, for the second time, we’ve elected a retired actor president. Harvey says that the most depressing thing of all is that after a while people will get used to it. They’ll say, “Oh, he’s not that bad.”

  In the meantime, Harvey still can’t get used to our being apart. It’s beginning to dawn on me why he and June seemed so aloof on Halloween. We were so close, the four of us, that they’re going through all the usual recriminations of the injured parties themselves. It’s as if we had broken up with the Littles. You could say, after all, that couples who have gone to movies together and to parties together and have taken vacations together have been going steady. And now we’ve torn the foursome asunder. But because we’re all civilized, we’re still dating—one person at a time.

  For the Littles, it’s like burning the candle at both ends. They have to be equally loyal, equally supportive, equally caring and loving to both of us. They have to, in addition, be equally critical of the one who wronged on behalf of the one who has been wronged—which means that they’ll get pretty adept at seeing both sides of an issue. They’ll see that while I’m completely neurotic, you, on the other hand, are completely neurotic.

  Ronald Reagan can be with us for only four more years. You and I and the Littles mght be doing this for the rest of our lives. And that’s what I can’t get used to.

  NOVEMBER 9

  Such indignities women suffer! I’m getting all of my vital parts checked out while I’m still looked upon favorably, if loosely, by your insurance carrier as “Spouse.” Unfortunately, one of the parts is a relic that must be inspected at close range and, as things have developed at my family practice, by a man young enough to be our son.

  In principle, I generally don’t speak to anyone under thirty; but a gynecologist that young, especially a male gynecologist, should by law not be permitted to examine anyone over thirty-five.

  Am I sexually active, he wants to know. No eye contact here. Or here: Do I still menstruate? He seems surprised at my fierce, affirmative nod. “Yes,” I snap, “and these are real teeth, too.”

  “Well, in a woman of your age …” he says.

  A woman of my age. What am I, a biological phenomenon? I’m forty-two. I’ve forgotten more than he’ll ever know about women of my age.

  Why, suddenly, does the world seem overrun with callow youths smelling of Clearasil and looking suspiciously like earnest students on a class trip? I don’t see how my mother can stand it. But when I complain—not of young women doctors, who at least have the appearance of being sympathetic and seem to know what you’re talking about, but of young men doctors, who don’t—she becomes impatient. She has no interest in going to a woman doctor. There are entirely too many women in her life, she says. At work. In her apartment building. At the hospital where she volunteers. On travel tours. So when young, handsome Doctor Brooks gave her an internal recently, she didn’t feel like I did. She said, “It was almost a pleasure, really!”

  This from my mother, a woman who doesn’t acknowledge that bodily functions exist. Do we ever know our mothers? A pleasure—how is such a thing possible? Believe me, this doctor was no pleasure. He was arrogant, unattractive, and short, with small abundantly hairy hands.

  Do I sound angry?

  Annie tells me you don’t like the color I painted the kitchen. Too bad. You’ve lost your voting privileges. Anyway, it’s a clean exorcism job, my version of washing that man right out of my hair. It’s not actually pink. I prefer to call it “Dusty Nipple,” and try not to dwell too much on the implications.

  NOVEMBER 14

  Thanksgiving—again. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! That sums up the holiday spirit when you ask a woman who is newly separated and whose youngest child is still living at home and wishes she weren’t because “it’s not home anymore,” and whose oldest child may or may not come home from college, and if he does, may or may not stay with her, and whose sister and brother-in-law may or may not come, and if they do, may or may not bring their own children, who want to see their friends and who, in any case, no longer have anything in common with the woman’s children, and her mother may or may not come to dinner because her house is always freezing. But if her mother does come, the woman wants her sister and brother-in-law to be there, too; otherwise it’s much too quiet. The air fills with the sound of swallowing. She stares into her mother’s eyes from across the table and sees recrimination, the inevitable, “What did you do to make this happen? No one could have been more devoted than Nick. You never learn.”

  The trouble is, just when you get used to not operating as a family, you have to think about operating as a family. Here are the possibilities: a) We can all get together here for a midday dinner, you, my mother and the kids and I. That’s if you think your presence here in this house can be explained. (No one knows whether it’s anticipated, and if it is, to what extent, or by whom.) Or, b) My mother and the kids and I can have a midday dinner here; then, Annie and Peter take two Fleet enemas each and go over to your apartment to have another Thanksgiving dinner with you. Or, c) Annie and Peter go to your place for Thanksgiving, period, and I and my mother, who doesn’t care much about food anymore, can share a Cornish hen.

  A brief postscript to Halloween: I mentioned to Dr. Bloom that I was still getting phone calls from people like your sister, who don’t seem to have been told that we’re separated. His eyes lit up. “That’s why you dressed up as Nick! He wasn’t talking. You were talking.” The unconscious works in mysterious ways. Like the Lord.

  DECEMBER 2

  I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. Forgive me if that sounds sarcastic. Any hint of insincerity isn’t directed at you, but at the situation. How long does a newly separated man have to know he’s free for Thanksgiving dinner before the phone rings? Six, maybe seven minutes? It must be the image a single man evokes, standing all by himself at the microwave, waiting for his Swanson’s chicken pot pie. He’ll eat it with one of the two forks he bought at Conran’s recently, along with two plates and two glasses, an apron, some dishcloths, a couple of wooden spoons, a mixing bowl, some bath towels, and a set of sheets, decidedly masculine, with gray stripes. I can see the saleswoman, too, very solicitous, very Oh, poor baby, leading the bewildered fellow around the store, saying, “Now let’s see,” as if speaking to a small child, “you’ll need one of these …”

  I have an extra set of measuring spoons, by the way, or should I send them to your hostess?

  I can’t wait until the holidays are over and we can get on with the business of being separated. The trouble is, being separated is a condition of suspension. It could go either way. Until which way is decided, it feels like an occupation. How are you? I’m separated. I’m so busy being separated, there isn’t room for living. I’d be happy just to have people stop telling me how wonderful I look. What they mean is wonderful, considering—as though I’d just had a gall bladder operation.

  Nina and I were talking this morning about how you know it’s the last time. You often don’t know it’s the last time for a lot of things. The last time you scare somebody to death with a rubber lizard. The last time you sneak a look at your Christmas presents before Christmas. The last time you make out in a parked car. The last time—am I putting too fine a point on this?—you make love to your husband.

  Nina says that, with Alec, she knew it was the last time. “He said, ‘Listen, honey, it’s the last time.’” She laughed. Of course, she wa
sn’t laughing at the time. She was twenty-seven, with two toddlers, and Alec was about to move in with Nicole.

  I wonder if what I remember is what you remember. Do we remember different things, or do we remember things differently? Where was it that we last made love, Nick? Maybe you think it was outside, under the clothesline at the house we rented last summer. You remember the way the legs of your khakis tickled your back as you rocked back and forth.

  It was not under the clothesline. It was in that funny bathtub on the first floor, the one that was made for midgets. You said, let’s try it, and so I wrapped my legs around you and you slid under me. But then we started moving and making waves. Bigger and bigger they were getting, until the water began sloshing over the side of the tub. I started laughing. I couldn’t stop. The more you moved, the more the water leapt out of the tub, and the harder I laughed. Tears ran down my cheeks. You got furious with me, and so it didn’t work. You grabbed your towel and stormed out of the bathroom, and I thought, it was funny. We could have at least had that together.

  DECEMBER 12

  I need to talk to you about money. One reason is that the gas company sent me a maintenance contract for the heater. Do I want a maintenance contract? I know that one of your longstanding grievances with me is that I never paid any attention to these things. It strikes me we had a pretty good balance there; you never paid any attention to cleaning the house or what we were having for dinner or who needed to get picked up at the orthodontist. It’s interesting, isn’t it? That while I’m over here learning more than I want to know about maintenance contracts, you’ve probably figured out that if dinner isn’t any good, there’s only one person you can turn to. Separations are great for that. If nothing else, they teach us how to be whole.