To My Ex-Husband Page 6

It’s stunning, isn’t it, that a moment could so etch itself in your head and yet not register? But this is what I’ve been doing, all day, every day, highlighting the moments. They’re not what I thought at the time, those moments. They’re not what I thought, because while I was with you, every single day of the last two years, doing things that couples do, eating sandwiches and talking about remodeling the kitchen and cutting the grass and watching the kids orchestrate their social lives on Call Waiting, you were in love with Esther. It all looks different now, cast in a new and ugly light. I thought we’d had some good times, even in those last stressful months, and that nobody could take them away from me. But you managed to do it. You took all those memories—damn you!—and turned them into something I can never think of again without thinking of Esther. It’s like looking at a photograph, of your son’s graduation from high school, say, and seeing this shadowy figure lurking in the background. And you hold it a little closer, and you think, My God! There’s Esther. There’s my husband’s lover. What the hell is she doing there?

  APRIL 13

  “How can you blame someone for falling in love?” This is Nina’s feeling, anyway. It’s not exactly the cozy, commiserative comment I needed, but she’s always felt that way, even when she found out about Alec and Nicole. Everybody said, “Don’t you just hate Nicole?” No, she really didn’t. She didn’t hate anybody. She just wanted to die.

  Well, I don’t hate Esther, either, nor is Nina going to do me the favor of hating her for me. But I can’t be Esther’s friend. She did make a choice between you and me. The fact that Esther eventually worked things out with her husband doesn’t change that.

  There was one thing Nina said that made me feel better. “What I can’t understand,” she said, “is anybody’s having a choice between you and Nick and choosing Nick.”

  I don’t get it. I thought I was Esther’s friend. But friendship pales, apparently, in the presence of a man. That’s the great female malaise that makes a woman rush, headlong, every time, toward the man, the generic Man. Never mind that he’s taken, or that he happens to be married to a friend, or that she herself happens to be married, or whether he’s inappropriate in a hundred other ways.

  In time, I may soften my line on Esther, as Nina has done with Nicole. Of course, it helps that Alec has now moved on to someone else, just as it helps me to know that it’s over with Esther, that it has been over. But it is fresh for me, as if you had been in bed with Esther yesterday and still loved her today. I have to remind myself that it’s been nine whole months since Esther left you in an August thunderstorm and flew home to tell Don what was going on. Their marriage may be better for it. I may even be generous enough someday to say I hope so. It would be good for the supermarket tabloids, too: HOW HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH MY FRIEND’S HUSBAND SAVED MY MARRIAGE!

  I read something in a Miss Manners column once on the subject of faithless husbands. She said it was an old and ugly trick of society to pit the women against one another and forgive the men. She’s right. It is an old and ugly trick, and I shouldn’t bother playing it on Esther who, after all, may not be worth my wrath. She isn’t the woman I thought she was. Nor you the man. Not because of the affair, but because of all the disguised weaknesses that were revealed. Telling me, for instance, as if I could be sympathetic, even so long after the fact, “Emily, I had two separations to go through.” If you had been watching a play, you’d have loathed the character. You’d have said, “That worm.” If being single has taught me anything, it’s that nothing, nothing, is what it seems.

  MAY 5

  Ah, yes. To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. I know there was a time when I went to bed at night and slept until morning. I can’t really imagine that now, can’t feel in my bones what it must be like. I’m beginning to look deranged, nervous and big-eyed, like a lemur. It dawns on me, finally, the full meaning of an acquired characteristic. Because, in point of fact, I am getting awfully good at seeing in the dark. By summer, I will have completed my metamorphosis into a nocturnal animal and you will be able to tell people, with some accuracy, that you were once married to a small monkey. Do I sound insane? I NEED TO SLEEP.

  And yet I don’t feel in the least tired. On the contrary, I’m oddly energized, racing toward my middle-of-the-night high, when I write letters, or roll around in my/your old bed and think delicious, murderous thoughts. Years ago, I remember, someone in our neighborhood created a scandal by suddenly leaving his wife and running off to Florida with their babysitter. The next day, that short, funny woman with the frosted hair and the foul mouth who lived down the street came over and said, “Honey, if that ever happened to me, it would be on the front page.” God, she made me laugh.

  But the thing was, the reason I laughed was that I knew it was true. It would have been on the front page. One didn’t mess with that woman. She was all heart underneath, but she meant business.

  Well, I wish I were more like her. I wish I were a front-page kind of woman. Even my “murderous” thoughts are mild, as if I could be jailed for dreaming. Fantasies can be pretty dull if you don’t know what you want. Do I want Esther dead, so that practically everybody I know can sit around and mourn? Death elevates. Imagine. My adversary, an angel. Angel Esther.

  No, I don’t want Esther dead. I merely want her miserable, in excruciating emotional pain, as I am. Death does not inflict pain in oneself, only in those one loves. So what are my dream options here? To take out a contract on Esther’s husband—and leave Esther, the young widow, free? Never!

  Would that I could appear like a devilish Puck beside Esther’s marital bed and anoint Don with special, potent anti-love potion so that he would fall instantly out of love with his wife upon waking. Would that I could will abandonment into Esther’s life, snatch away her confidence, her sexual juiciness, and leave her dry, parched, and utterly repellent. I want her all scratchy and prickly inside, like a stinging nettle.

  But then Esther was never exactly cozy. Besides which, as June said when I showed her Esther’s picture, “She’s no beauty.” But beauty was never the point, was it? You once told me that passion breeds passion. And Esther wanted you.

  I need to know: Was Esther earthy? Was she raw with desire, in a way that I have never been? Was she the kind of woman, for instance, who never worried about whether she was going to leak little glutinous pools of sperm onto the bedspread, or, if you were being particularly intimate, thought back to how many hours it had been since she’d had a shower? I could never be jealous of who Esther is, but I could be jealous of her abandon. That letting go, literally giving yourself over, is the secret to so many things that seem just beyond my grasp.

  JUNE 3

  It’s wonderful living in the dark. You should try it. Sometime, somewhere, when you least expect it, a light goes on, and you’re pulled out of the tunnel. Let me tell you about my latest “light.”

  I am not by nature a suspicious person—as has already been established. But when Annie starts making a habit of cutting her telephone conversations short as I enter the room, starts humming, or launches into what I know instinctively is a change of subject, I take it that there is something that I am not supposed to know. Okay. Parents are not supposed to know. They may have what the military calls the Need to Know, but when it comes to their children, need doesn’t enter into it. Now if she’s talking about sex, or boyfriends, or about what a flake her mother is, that’s not my business. But when I combine this with Annie’s moods lately (part-CIA agent, part-ocelot), I have to think that this is not your typical adolescent frame of mind, at least not Annie’s frame of mind.

  So I began pressing. And pressing. And what do you know? The monosyllabic wall of stony impenetrability came tumbling down.

  At that moment, she happened to be eating an after-school snack of peanut butter and Carr’s crackers. Her face got all red, her mouth opened and, almost noiselessly, she started to cry. Peanut-buttery strings of saliva stretched between her lips as I pulled her close to me and buried my fac
e in her hair.

  “It’s all over school,” she sobbed, “about Daddy and Isabel.”

  Isabel? And here I was, still preoccupied with Esther. Not that there’s anything wrong with Isabel; I like Isabel. She has a quiet dignity that has served her extremely well in these circumstances. But, for Annie’s sake, couldn’t you have chosen somebody she doesn’t see every day, somebody all of her friends don’t see every day, somebody other than the school librarian?

  At first, I thought Annie had to be wrong. You and Isabel were just friends, I said. But as the words were leaving my mouth, I heard the doubt in my voice; I was the one who was wrong. And, of course, there was no doubt at all in Annie’s mind.

  She came out with an Oh, Mom I hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t that whiny, teenagey, “Oh, Mo-om, you-can’t-be-serious, a cur-few?!” we’ve been hearing. It was grown-up and sympathetic—and yet impatient. It was “Poor Mom, you just don’t want to see it, do you?” Anyway, it had the ring of truth. I couldn’t have convinced her otherwise, so I didn’t try.

  Obviously, you can do as you like. We’re separated. But I wish you’d at least have had the decency to wait until school was out. What a way for Annie to finish her senior year. It just isn’t fair, when I think of what she’s had to contend with already. She’s done well, and should feel good about herself. Instead, she’s crying and eating peanut butter and crackers and is too embarrassed to go to school.

  When, Nick, would you have told me about any of this? Ever? It dawns on me with horror that if Nancy hadn’t said something about Esther, I still wouldn’t know.

  When am I going to stop bumping into information as though I were living in a blackout? Is there more?

  I feel as though I’m this dinosaur, dragging my way through a crowded village, and people keep stepping on my tail. “Watch out!” they’re trying to say. But the message is traveling too slowly to my brain. By the time it gets there, the damage is done. I can’t stop it. All I can do is stand there and let it hit me in the face.

  The fact that you’ve chosen Isabel is not without its amusing aspects. She reminds me of the woman who used to do the Underwood deviled ham commercial, the tall, skinny, bookish woman with the huge black glasses who makes a move on the new tenant across the hall with her deviled-ham sandwich. She used to turn you on, maybe because of that dichotomy between the book and the bed, between the learned and the sexy, entities seemingly at odds. Dorothy Parker was wrong. It isn’t true that “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.” Glasses are like any barrier, such fun to remove. You want to claw your way to the real stuff underneath.

  But the Underwood lady was years ago. Years ago. It’s strange to think that may have been the genesis of your discontent, that our marriage disintegrated because of a deviled ham commercial, the woman you’ve wanted all this time, but never knew. I love thinking of Esther, my husband’s now former lover, Esther the historian, who’s even more bookish to my mind than Isabel, as a surrogate. And Isabel herself, the lady with hair the color of dust, and skin the pallor of an index card. I can see her sitting at her desk by the window, the June breeze wafting through the main floor of the library, luffing the long strands of fallen hair at the nape of her neck as she checks a stack of books in, flipping the covers—open, close; open, close; sliding the cards into their tight little envelopes. Is Isabel herself a tight little envelope? Is she thinking about you? Is our daughter sitting on the far side of the room, and scrutinizing her miserably over the top of her Greek civilization book?

  Well, okay. Okay. So you’re not coming back. You’re not even thinking of coming back. And you were the Man Who Would Be Monk. Self-contained, isolated, abstract, the thinker. I never thought you were really that interested in sex. Not that you didn’t like it now and then, only that there was no sense of urgency; there was no need. But there was a need, as it turns out. There just wasn’t any need for me.

  JUNE 21

  Nina never leaves any room for doubt. “Nick’s gone,” she said. It was ten in the morning, and I was eating a Milky Way. Things usually feel a little bit better if I’m eating chocolate, but this was harsh.

  “He and Isabel are probably doing all this great stuff.” All this great stuff, I thought wistfully. I tried to wrap my mind around the expansiveness of the remark. I had been childish, limited, ordinary in my lovemaking. I had held you back, and now I was paying for it with my imagination. You had replaced me in your sexual life, and there seemed no limit to what, with so little effort, I could put in the space I had vacated.

  But I knew what Nina meant. It was time to close the door that I’ve kept open. That’s what they always tell you to do: Keep the door open.

  I didn’t really need her to tell me that, or Dr. Bloom, who’s been waiting for me to get angry. Whenever I wax sentimental, he shifts impatiently in his chair, crossing one leg, not just over the knee, but high up, over the other, as if he needs to go to the bathroom, as if he literally cannot contain his eagerness to have me understand. I know that I pay him to be on my side, to be for me. I’ve given him the information, the data, and I have to say, it doesn’t look good for you. On the basis of the facts alone, you look like something of a creep. However, there are times when I think that if he really knew you, the way my mother did, or the way Harvey does, or anyone who saw for himself the delight we took in each other, he’d understand my sadness, my reluctance to let go. I just can’t believe we’re actually doing this.

  “It is sad,” he told me once. “But there were lots of sad things about your marriage.”

  Yes, I should be angry, am angry. But it doesn’t last long. None of my moods lasts long. When I first started seeing Dr. Bloom, I told him I didn’t think I was a candidate for suicide. When he asked me why, I said, “Because I have the attention span of a one-year-old. I can’t even sustain my own depression.”

  JULY 3

  Did you see me on Wednesday night? I saw you, turning the corner on three wheels. A Wednesday night. The holiday weekend hadn’t even started yet, and you were rushing off, all spruced up, the after-shave probably still drying on your neck. I, anticipating my own glamorous evening, was on my way home from the 7-Eleven with a box of laundry detergent.

  It was such a quick glance, a split-second caught in the shutter of the mind’s eye. Your car coming toward me, fast; you at the steering wheel, hair slicked back, and then, as I rounded the corner, all was darkness in the rearview mirror. I thought, later, of you and Isabel sitting outside in her backyard, that delicious, summery scent of honeysuckle hanging in the air. It’s barely even started yet, and already I want summer to be over. Everything’s so fragrant and fertile, swollen with moisture. I feel my own barren hollowness. It’s as if every move I make has an echo.

  I suppose I’m jealous. But I don’t want you. I don’t want someone who doesn’t want me. And yet, I suppose I should thank you for the inspiration. That sight, swift as it was, of you speeding through the night was a gun to my head. Move on, it said. Or prepare to lie down and die.

  JULY 7

  Jesus Christ. Something is awry in a world in which middle-aged women find themselves living in college dormitories over the summer. Peter’s been at home for nearly eight weeks now, and it seems like eight months. When he first left for college last August, I was beside myself. We all were. Annie retreated to her room; Dickens sat under the kitchen table for three days with his bone and his ball and his frog all gathered around him. Poor dog. All the men in the family had taken off and left him to this little household of handmaidens.

  One morning early that fall, I was out in the garden when old Mr. Williams wandered over. He said he hadn’t seen “that nice boy of yours” for a while; hadn’t seen “the mister,” either.

  “Peter’s gone to college, Mr. Williams,” I said. “And my husband no longer lives here, he has an apartment. Next year,” I added matter-of-factly, “Annie will be gone, too, and I’ll be alone.”

  He was quiet for a moment, taking it all in. The
n he said, “Well, you got y’own self.” I don’t think Mr. Williams ever learned to read. But he turns out to be one of the wisest men I’ve ever met.

  I was trying very hard then to get used to Peter’s not being here, to get used to being a mother with only one child to take care of, to get used to not buying several pounds of cold cuts each time I went to the market, to get used to the verbal void, the sudden absence of those wry, soft-spoken comments that flowed effortlessly from his mouth. I missed him, missed not being able to find my Newsweeks, missed running out of orange juice, missed the tall, occasionally surly presence that never ceased to amaze me was my son. I wanted him near me. Having Peter here made life seem more normal. But somehow, I went from getting used to it to getting into it.

  Dickens, meanwhile, is thrilled. We have some of our testosterone back. Tennis balls bounce off the walls, rugs fly, deep, manly voices fill the house—usually starting at eleven o’clock, just as I’m dozing off to sleep. Suddenly, it’s all noise and boys, deafening, rhythmless music, and “Whaddya want to do, guys,” and “Who’s hungry,” and “Mom, can I borrow your car?” Where is it written that the “Custodial Parent” has to double as a Siamese twin? Couldn’t you take him once in a while, say, for the night shift? Or would that cut too deeply into your social life?

  JULY 30

  “You’d better stay married, because there’s nothing out here.” This is the advice, offered roughly thirteen years ago to Abby Berlin when she was debating whether to leave Bernie. I’m surprised I remember Abby’s telling me this, because a separation in the early seventies could not have been further from our minds. Peter was learning how to read; Annie had just started kindergarten. How could anything have been more compelling than the launching of these two small, fragile people stepping out into the world in their Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls? Dickens was a mere fuzzy black dot in God’s distant eye, but I have to think he was part of a grand plan.