To My Ex-Husband Page 7

  So those words—Stay married; there isn’t anything out here—did not apply. Today, on the other hand, they are a constant clanging in my ears, a bell buoy in a storm. With each successive wave, the truth crashes over me like an angry sea. Sid Pomerantz seems more divine every day.

  “Up and down” is what a woman in my position says when you ask her how she is. I expected that. I expected to have trouble keeping up with my moods. What I wasn’t so prepared for was the essentially solid plane of the day-to-day, like the Future that yawns before you after someone has died and the people who came to mourn have gone home.

  In painting a bleak landscape, I should say that it is at least punctuated with some interesting, if infrequent, experiences. I’m not sure “interesting” quite describes the despair I feel for the woman—and I am one—who has the misfortune to believe, against a considerable body of evidence, that a man in one’s life, while not essential, is a nice addition.

  So in walks Walter Abbott, a slightly truncated version of Prince Charles, eminently presentable, eminently polite, eminently genteel—on first inspection. I, by contrast, was recovering from a summer cold, and was feeling unsavory in every respect. But he had tickets to the orchestra, and the program included two Vivaldi concertos that, as you know, would be hard for me to pass up—to say nothing of dinner at Dilullo Centro. A truly elegant evening, but for the fact that my nose looked as if I’d been washing dishes with it.

  So we’re having a brandy after the concert, and it comes to him, as he looks deeply, significantly, into my eyes, that there’s an important phone call that he must make, and he must make it from his apartment. It seems the phone number and some of the information he needs are there. Reluctantly, I leave the restaurant with him, thinking, well, I can wait in the car.

  I don’t know what I expected from a criminal defense lawyer, but Walter has a tidily prepared case as to why it would be utter nonsense for me to wait in the car. My obvious caution offends him. Suddenly, I’m a six-year-old, a small moron, regurgitating my mother’s advice, Don’t take rides from strangers, don’t open the door to a meter reader without looking at his I.D.…

  All right. So I go up into the apartment with him, where I stand nervously in the foyer, taking in the environment, my eyes flashing from side to side like a cornered mouse. Walter’s apartment reflects his personal appearance, clean almost to the point of being sterile, studied, and without warmth. Two quite lovely Vermeer prints hang on the wall above the couch; on the coffee table is a stack of Smithsonian magazines placed in an ordered, self-conscious way; the dining area contains a couple of dark, heavy, ancestral pieces that Walter’s ex-wife might reasonably have considered adequate settlement just to be rid of.

  Walter, meanwhile, has glided smoothly off across a polished parquet floor, as if on roller skates, to the telephone.

  In a couple of minutes, he returns to find me perched on the edge of his chilly leather couch. He comes over and lifts me by the elbows, and then, pressing his hand into the small of my back, pulls me to him and plants a small, tender, premeditated kiss on my lips. In all honesty, I did not mind.

  But a kiss, as the song says, is just a kiss. At least to me. To Walter, it was a permission slip. Suddenly the blouse is getting pulled out of my skirt, the buttons are coming undone. I’m busy retucking and rebuttoning. It’s always the same tired scenario that turns what could be a really nice evening into a tawdry episode that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Walter had bought me a concert and a dinner. And now, turning nasty like someone who’d been cheated, he wanted to be paid back. In retrospect, every sentence spoken, every gesture, smile, and laugh, all that I thought might develop into an easy affinity, was just an item in the final tab.

  Ever the gentleman, he was willing to take me home, shoving me into my coat while telling me that I was a baby, that I’d led him on, that I was stupid and naive. What had I thought, anyway, that he just wanted my company? But I didn’t want to give him that. I wanted instead to deprive him of doing the honorable thing. I stepped out onto 18th Street and walked over to Walnut, where I got a cab. Maybe I was a baby, I didn’t know. I just wanted to go home and get in bed. Maybe next time I would remember something else my mother had said, rather recently: “Be sure to pay your own way.”

  AUGUST 14

  Dr. Bloom has a spot on his carpet. Yes, I know. I’ve got to be the only woman ever to write to her estranged husband to say that there is a stain on her psychiatrist’s office floor. But hear me out.

  It’s not an ink-blot sort of stain, the kind that looks like either a bat or a boned chicken breast. I don’t interpret it. I just stare at it when I say certain things that can’t be said face-to-face, like, “I don’t see myself masturbating my way through middle age.”

  This was yesterday morning. I had been talking and staring at this thing that I had silently focused on for more than a year when I glanced sharply up at Dr. Bloom, and said, “Aren’t you ever going to take care of that stain?”

  He smiled and said—and this is what I love about him, that he would just answer the question, straight, as though I were a perfectly normal person—he didn’t know what it was, that it wouldn’t come out. But it occurred to me, now that I mentioned it, that there were other things in his office that could use some attention, like a vase of pussy willows that were turning to a pile of brown powder. To make a rather minor point, a baby step, as it were, I was moving away from my stain, my beloved home base, and onto other things. I had talked about masturbation and rejected it as a permanent lifestyle, though other women I knew had managed, through creativity, to find it satisfactory. (A friend once told me she used her left hand because it was a little clumsy and therefore terribly exciting, as if she were with someone new.)

  But I was saying, whether I knew it at that moment or not, that I was ready to move on. And then I told him about my weekend.

  On Saturday night, I had one of those trite, it’s-a-small-world experiences. I was at a housewarming party given by a woman I met, years ago, at a women’s support group. She’s single now, as has often been the destiny of women who attend support groups. I had gone to see an early showing of The Killing Fields, which should tell you what kind of mood I was in. I was in the mood for lying on my bed and slipping quietly into a coma. I thought, though, that if I forced myself to go, there was a good chance I’d develop a better frame of mind in spite of myself. I also had to obey my own rule of thumb, which is that the party you least want to go to is the one you should go to. Maybe it’s just a matter of having negative expectations; but somehow, those are the ones I’m glad I went to. And who, I ask you, would expect to have a great time at a party for which the hostess has hired a magician?

  For the first hour, we sat through the forced applause of people who are all wondering the same thing, on the order of, What do I have to do to get out of this class? Between tricks, I’d cast an eye around the room, looking for an unobtrusive way to get to the bar. Finally, I escaped upstairs to the bathroom and found this man sitting in the hallway, reading a book. It was a thin book—but still, not a good sign if you’re a hostess.

  But the bathroom was occupied, so I sat down next to him, and glanced at the cover of the little volume, which turned out to be Small Pig, a diversion he’d gratefully found on the stairs. I told him it had been one of my daughter’s favorites. “Really?” he said, and started to read.

  “… But most of all, Small Pig likes to sit down and sink down in good, soft mud.” He was getting to the part where the farmer’s wife goes on an out-of-control cleaning spree and cleans the house, and then the barnyard, and the stable, and the chicken coop, and the pigpen, until poor Small Pig has no mud to sink down in. I started to laugh.

  “You like this part,” he said, turning to me, smiling. I always did like that part, the ultimate case against vacuum cleaners. Now what made me laugh was the idea of these two grown-ups, who didn’t even know each other’s names, sitting on the floor and reading a children’s book ou
tside someone’s upstairs bathroom at a party where the main attraction is a magician. I felt light-headed and silly. Before long, we’d be looking for the Playdough. But, actually, it was more than childish, the feeling I had. It was truly like going home again, like returning not only to childhood, but to this person, this man himself. I knew him from somewhere, his mouth, the formation of his teeth, the jumpy nervousness of his laugh. It all fit in some ancient context that I couldn’t place.

  His name is David Patterson. Thirty-six years ago, he was my boyfriend. I doubt that I’d ever have recognized him without the benefit of the name, and of course “Moore” was no help to him at all. He looked like Sluggo then, not unlike a lot of little boys. His sandy hair has faded into an anemic bottom-of-the-moat beige. His nose is longer, too, sharper and more functional now, a feature to be used, rather than the two damp, pink little windows I used to avoid looking into. David always had a cold.

  But he was sexy even then, always asking me if I knew how grown-ups “did it,” because he did, even if I didn’t, and would I like to try it? He was a street-smart, savvy kid whom nothing phased, least of all the Facts of Life, possibly as a result of growing up around animals. He and his mother lived in an apartment over the garage on Carter’s farm. The place smelled of hamsters, which were always getting loose, and old newspapers. David had the biggest comic-book collection the world has ever known, which is probably why I picked Sluggo as his lookalike.

  We finished Small Pig, and went back downstairs and took possession of a bottle of Beaujolais. We had three and a half decades to catch up on. By the time we got to the last decade, we had had a change of venue, as it were, and, taking advantage of the kids’ absence, found ourselves at my house. (I still have trouble saying that to you, my house.)

  By about 2 A.M., all those years had evaporated, and I felt as if we were back on Carter’s farm, doing “the dirty stuff,” as we used to call it, in the hayloft. This is how it used to work: I got five strokes, and then he got five, and then I got ten, and then he got ten. I hasten to point out that I always thought, running my finger up and down this little stick that reminded me of asparagus, that girls got the better deal here. Boys had something to show, and that something took several different forms, and could do different things. The best thing was that it could go to the bathroom in the woods without making a mess or having to get undressed. That’s real penis envy, in my book. When you’re on a highway, forty-six miles from a service area, and you see a guy pulled off to the side of the road, standing with his back to the traffic and his head bowed in an attentive, almost reverent manner, you can just feel the relief flowing out with the arc of his water. Those fifteen strokes, in 1950, was as far as that went. Not because it was 1950, but because we wanted to move on to the main event, which was to see who could make the broadest jump down out of the hayloft.

  Last Saturday we played by our old rules at first. I may have been more game at eight, less eager to please than to be pleased. Yet you’d have thought I did this sort of thing every day. I was uncharacteristically in the moment, not holding a mirror up to my performance, much too intrigued to worry about how gross I must look in this position, or that position. Nor did any of my usual compulsions come to haunt me. I don’t even know—this may surprise you—if the door was closed or not. None of it was what I imagined making love to another man would be like after all this. I expected to be filled with anxiety, even of shame. But it was gentle, friendly, and safe. Once you were the one I felt safe with, the one who loved me unconditionally, with all my apparent and inapparent imperfections, the one whose love was long-term and transcended the petty, narrow grievances of ordinary people. And now we’ve come to this, that the very notion of going to bed with you makes me tremble with uncertainty, like baring myself in front of a masked bandit.

  AUGUST 5

  I’m not sure I like having our children bear witness to my second adolescence. Annie tells her friends on the phone, “My mom’s dating someone,” with a sarcastic emphasis on the word “dating.” Annie tends to have a sarcastic emphasis on so many of her words lately, you’d think it would be hard to distinguish. For those special words reserved for upper-case sarcasm, however, she actually lightens the volume, and gives a singsong cadence to the word or phrase. For instance, she’s not accustomed to seeing me wear makeup. So, instead of asking me why I don’t wear a little makeup, she elevates the heinousness of the crime by saying, in a slightly higher than normal, oh so superior voice, “Hmm, I see we’re wearing just a little makeup.”

  She makes me feel ridiculous. But not ridiculous enough. I refrain from scrubbing my face to its formerly squeaky-clean, hormonally repressed condition on the grounds that I’ve improved upon the essential inadequacy of the basic product.

  Annie was at home the night that David and I had our first official date. I wasn’t ready, which (unfairly) left Annie to answer the door, Dickens at her side, like an armed guard. As a matter of fact, I have to give Annie a lot of credit. She hates this whole business, and yet finds it in her heart to feed me a few crumbs of support. While I was finishing drying my hair, she bounced into the bathroom to say, “He’s kind of cute, Mom.”

  Peter is less generous. On the few occasions that David has been to the house since then, Peter is hospitable to the extent that he has been willing to look at him, not directly, but sideways, sliding his eyes into the furthermost reaches of their sockets, without moving his head. As far as speaking is concerned, he is brief but conclusive. “Not really” and “Yup” are the collected, unabridged comments made by Peter thus far.

  To accept David, or any man that his mother dates, is to betray you. So he feels guilty, and then he’s resentful because he’s been put in the position of being guilty. As I’ve said, it would have been easier if you’d died.

  But since you’re still alive, David and I are careful not to be caught lingering within a radius of one and a half feet of each other. Conversations are stilted, to say the least. In our determination to be innocent, we’re all sounding like a bad episode of “Father Knows Best.” Better not to appear to know each other too well. I try to remember in Peter’s presence, for instance, to ask David whether he takes anything in his coffee. He, in turn, pretends he doesn’t remember where I keep the sugar.

  I have a problem, I see, being perceived as a sexual person in the eyes of my children. Mothers don’t have sex organs; they have birth canals, and these are sewn up and hermetically sealed after the babies are born. Only in emergencies, and with a special note from one’s doctor, can the seal be broken.

  Just because kids know deep down inside that their parents have sex doesn’t make it any less revolting. And then to think that their mother’s or father’s middle-aged flesh may commingle voluntarily, perhaps even hungrily, with that of some other father or mother is just too much to bear.

  Nothing is happening in this house that isn’t happening all over America. Why that doesn’t make it any easier, I don’t know. We haven’t even got a good working vocabulary. Peter had his own date the other night. He brought her home after a concert. David was just leaving, so we convened in front of the house.

  “Julie, this is my mother,” says Peter. “And this is my mother’s boyfriend.”

  No further identification was called for as far as Peter was concerned. Like a name. But the relationship of this man to his mother had to be categorized at once. Must we trot out the nomenclature for any person who happens by? Peter has indicated that he’s not particularly interested in this young woman, who is a terribly tall, somewhat vacuous version of Jessica Lang. I doubt he’ll see her again. I don’t know her last name, or where she lives or goes to school or how she comes to know our son. But she has met a man who has been definitively identified as Peter’s mother’s boyfriend. And with all—or as little—as that word, boyfriend, implies, she has folded that information into her head and taken it home with her.

  AUGUST 16

  I have just bought all new underwear. Ahem. Lin
gerie. Nothing like a little romance to boost morale, don’t you agree? Every woman I know has a horror of being struck by a car and carted off to the hospital, her underwear to be spread out on a gurney and inspected under the antiseptic glow of a five-million-watt bulb. And yet that horror isn’t somehow quite enough to send her scurrying off to Saks Fifth Avenue in search of something more palatable than her own graying cotton assortment with the stretched elastic and the little holes opening up along the seams. So much more pleasant to picture the occasional pubic hair poking through a silky layer of ecru lace. Still: One doesn’t quite make it to the store. Love and only love pushes a woman toward the ultimate purchase.

  “I wouldn’t buy it for myself,” is what a woman says. But when it’s for him—that’s something else. Men say it, too, in their way. I now recall some purchases of your own, back in ’83 and ’84. They were slipped, without comment, into your drawer, spanking new briefs, bikini briefs, in navy and turquoise and black. This from the Prince of Deprivation, the man who was philosophically opposed to throwing away a T-shirt until its neck was literally severed from the rest of it. My blindness at the time continues to astound. But if time has done nothing to lessen my humiliation, I have at least developed an appreciation for the skill with which one can self-protect. I would say my powers of denial were nothing short of deft. On some magical level, I knew I was not up to the truth. Indeed, the truth has served me far better after the fact.

  AUGUST 28

  For more than four days I have been absolutely alone. The house is quiet, with a deadly, almost profound, stillness. I used to laugh about the rabbi who said that life begins when the children go off to college and the dog dies. Now I’m less amused.