To My Ex-Husband Read online

  Only a short while ago, I know, I was complaining. Make up your mind, you say. You can’t have it both ways.

  I don’t think of myself as a woman who’s dependent on her family for an identity, but it was useful having an ironclad reason to get up in the morning. Cold or headache or sleepless night, there was no excuse. I was needed. Deadlines could be missed; the world could wait for my words. But my daughter could not go off to school without breakfast, or without lunch in her book bag, and a kiss; without knowing that her mother was up and shuffling about, doing her most important job. Even on their worst days, kids do something vitally important for their parents. They give them structure, a place to belong.

  They say that people who live alone “get funny.” I’m afraid of getting funny, of being a fringe person, like a character (how ironic) in one of Esther’s favorite novels. One day, I’ll be one of those people I see walking down the street in a too-small sweater and non-matching socks, muttering to herself. I’ll have what the kids call “bed head” and an eleven-year-old bottle of ketchup in an otherwise empty refrigerator.

  Of course, in my so-called “Twilight Years” I’ll have Nina. We have a standing agreement that when the men in our lives have died off, we’re going to get adjoining rooms at Wrinklewood, where, as the most notorious eccentrics among our aged fellow retirees, we will stroll around holding hands and wearing the matching sundresses that we bought one year by sheer coincidence.

  Nina’s greatest fear is that Stephen will be dead, I’ll be remarried to someone who eats only bean curd and rice and who will therefore live forever, and she’ll have to go to Wrinklewood by herself.

  SEPTEMBER 20

  I should know better than to complain to Nina about anything. She always tells me the truth. Now I ask you, what kind of a friend is that?

  I had been whining once too often about money, about trying to keep this house together, pay the mortgage, come up with the six-month premium on my car insurance, all while writing my November column, about “Our Money” as the great marital illusion. As you know, I never thought there was any such thing as our money. There was only our money when I wanted to buy something with my money. Otherwise, our money was your money.

  But Nina’s reached her saturation point on the subject. “Why don’t you just face facts and rent out part of your house? You don’t need all those rooms, and taking in even one boarder would make your life so much easier.”

  Nina can’t stand anyone who lets herself be victimized. Never have I ever heard Nina say, “I don’t know what to do.” More to the point, I’ve never heard her say, “I don’t know what you should do.” She knows exactly what I should do and when I should do it. She can be wrong, mind you. She can make big mistakes, usually by moving too quickly. Like a lot of small, wiry people, Nina’s incapable of doing anything in a leisurely way, so why should it be any different when it comes to opening her mouth? She’s been known to offend several of her closest friends in a single afternoon. But she speaks her mind, and the solution is immediately clear to her.

  I, on the other hand, am more of a plodder. I think about things, chew them around in my head for a while. I’m a ruminant, basically, grazing over the landscape, taking in a little of this and a little of that. What I find is that there’s a bit of the inedible in every patch.

  I always hear myself saying, “yes, but,” when I talk to Nina. Yes, but what do I do when Annie and Peter come home from college? Yes, but I want privacy; yes, but I don’t want a complete stranger bumping into me in the hallway at night; yes, but I don’t want someone else’s groceries in my refrigerator.

  “Yes, but you don’t have enough money,” she says.

  Yes, but—I just want to complain. It’s true I can rent a couple of rooms. It’s true I can get more money. What I can’t do is alter the fact that life at this stage, according to that rabbi, is not the way my life appears to be headed. Life begins when the kids go off to college and the dog dies and you take in a boarder. I don’t think so.

  OCTOBER 7

  The leaves are curling on the horse chestnut; the cicadas are dropping from the trees; dark closes in on my late-afternoon walks with Dickens. It all spells fall, and you leaving. Up the street, someone lights a fire. The smell of it wafts across my consciousness like a broken promise, and there you are. God, but associations are slow to die.

  It’s been just over a year since you left to sleep on a futon. I knew then that I had lost my husband. It had been my husband who had gone; and one day, perhaps, it would be my husband who would return. But the man I did not count on losing, did not think about then, was my best friend. I mourned for my marriage, but I forgot to mourn for my friend. He’s the one I miss the most.

  The man who was my husband dates another woman; I date another man. We come and go, each of us, to movies, and to dinner, and to bed. It’s nice. I’m okay. You don’t need to feel guilty anymore. But where, I wonder, even in the middle of a great sunny Sunday morning, when the maple tree outside my window is an explosion of yellow and David is on his way over to see me, where is that friend I used to have, the one with the dark, soulful eyes and the kinky hair who used to spin out his insane ideas over a second cup of coffee? Where is he who listened attentively to my endless, groundless, neurotic fears and wound up actually convincing me that they were functions of creativity? When was the moment that he ceased to think of me not only as his lover, but also as his friend?

  All those past joys and certainties have been negated, erased. The intimacies that wove us together have come unraveled like an old blanket that somebody left on a park bench. And there is nothing, nothing in this life that can replace them. How does one unlearn one’s past?

  So it wasn’t the marriage I took for granted all these years; it was, I have been slow to see, the friendship I could not imagine being without. It’s our imagination that has failed us, so much we did not, could not, picture. You said once on the telephone, “If either of us gets married again—” And stopped yourself, asking, “I can’t imagine that, can you?”

  “No,” I said. “But then there are a lot of things I couldn’t imagine.”

  OCTOBER 26

  Trust me when I tell you, she almost got the lamb chops. What a sweet scene, Isabel skipping down the aisles of Corelli’s, looking positively radiant from the nip in the air and the excitement of preparing a special dinner for you while I, the knowing ex-wife-elect, peer into her shopping basket, nodding approval.

  I smiled. She smiled. I could see us in a comic strip, balloons of words forming over our heads. Hmm, sausage, lamb chops, looks like a mixed grill; why, of course, it’s his birthday, and she’s cooking his favorite dinner. She sees me looking, knows I know. I wonder if she’ll select an alternative menu. A new lover hardly wants to trail along in the path of her predecessor.

  Isabel, meanwhile: She knows it’s his birthday, it’s probably the same damn dinner she’s given him since he was twenty-five. I wonder if he’d really mind that much if I got something else … When I saw her again at the checkout counter, the lamb chops had been replaced by Cornish hens. Separations would be so dull, wouldn’t they, without these unexpected encounters? It was like looking into a room that had been vacated after I’d gone. It was your next life. I’d label it, After Emily.

  NOVEMBER 5

  Three days ago, a man told me that my body was a work of art. I liked that: A work of art. The man was David, but what I’m still trying to absorb is that an actual man, someone with reasonably good eyesight, feels that way about me. There was a time when such an idea would have seemed hilarious. In college I went out with someone whose mother pulled him aside one parents’ weekend after she had met me, and said, “Someday, John, you and your brother are going to realize that there’s more to life than a blond body.” What a bizarre way to describe a woman whose body was only slightly less seductive than that of an eleven-year-old boy. Even my boyfriend got a lot of mileage out of that, addressing me in front of his fraternity brothers as, �
��Inga from the Land of the Big Knockers and The Midnight Sun.”

  I seem to have come a long way, baby, as they say, at least as far as the body is concerned. But I’m still at the stage when everything David says or does comes across in a historical context, thrown into relief against the background of the past. He can’t open his mouth without my thinking, Would Nick have said that? In this instance, I think I can safely assume that the answer is no. I’m leaving my wife. She has a body like a work of art. It doesn’t quite fit, does it?

  We took so much for granted, Nick. Maybe that was our biggest mistake. I think of how disdainful I was of my mother when, at the end of the day, she would brush her teeth and powder her nose and put on more lipstick before my father came home. It didn’t matter what she had been doing, whether she herself had only just come home from work, or whether she’d been pulling crabgrass. My father’s imminent arrival would make its way into her consciousness, and she would pop in front of the mirror to set about preparing herself for him.

  This effort my mother made to make herself attractive to my father at all times infuriated me. I saw it as deferential, demeaning; I thought she lacked the confidence just to be. Did she think he wouldn’t love her with a single hair out of place, or with dirt under her fingernails? And if he didn’t, what of it? What did that make him? Surely, I thought, if she went about her business, if she didn’t cater to him, he might love her more; he might love her more than she knew.

  So what am I saying? Maybe that I might have tried harder to let you know that I cared whether I was attractive to you. I might have made an effort to convey to you how lucky I was to have you come home at the end of the day. Who knows all I might have done, if I could have done anything at all.

  We could spend the rest of our lives thinking of all the what if’s. It’s certainly my kind of preoccupation. In the meantime, I’m reveling in being regarded as a work of art. It’s like having someone pull me out of the back of a closet and dust me off to discover that—wow!—I’m an original, a museum piece. I wouldn’t want to call in any experts on this. No second opinions, please! I’m not asking any questions, not thinking about where this will lead. I’m just going to lie in my bed in the morning, stretch with the sunrise, and feel the blood return. I’m going to savor the sensation of having my body come back to life, hungry inch by hungry inch.

  NOVEMBER 11

  You must have heard that Harvey and June are getting separated. I’m upset; you don’t know how much I’ve counted on them. They’ve taught me how to laugh even when it isn’t funny—mainly when it isn’t funny. I’ve always adored that about the Littles. When they’re at their most impoverished, with creditors knocking on the door and making threatening phone calls, that’s when you’ll find them doubled over laughing because they’d just received an invitation to open up a charge account at Saks Fifth Avenue.

  We’ve been each other’s best audience, though I hope I won’t have any more of Harvey’s telephone solicitations for the home for unwed mothers. He’s always so convincing, affecting that soft, angelic voice with the slight speech impediment. If you could justh contribute a thmall amount, anything at all, it would be thoo much apprethiated.

  And then, when I’ve made my excuses, Well, Jesuth Critht, if you can’t give anything for God …

  How can a couple who has separated three times not be together? I suppose it would shock a lot of people to know that Harvey and June didn’t have the ideal marriage. They have that surface dazzle, like two people who’ve just stepped out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. She laughs at all his funny routines as though hearing them for the first time; he goes all moist in the eyes when she steps into a room, as if he’s thinking, This is my wife; this remarkable specimen is my wife. Who would guess that in real life, after the guests go home, they’re Alice and Ralph Kramden?

  But, to you and me, that mercurial aspect is precisely what gives them their solidarity. What can they possibly discover about this process that they don’t already know? After all, it was they who begged us, Don’t do it. It’s expensive, and it doesn’t solve anything. I can’t bear to watch. It’s like going through it again, like looking in a mirror and watching it break into small pieces.

  NOVEMBER 17

  Another season of leaves has fallen in our backyard. It has not escaped me that when we talk property division, this is our house, our five eighths of an acre, our trees—and my leaves. Right about now, I’d like to put some fine-tuning into our joint custody agreements.

  I feel like the neighborhood pariah, rustling around knee-deep in reminders of my slovenliness. A lot of the pressure comes, not from the neighbors, who don’t know quite what to make of me, but from Dickens, who has trouble keeping track of his toys. He goes galloping through the drifts, his nose to the ground, trying to ferret out his frog, among other things. When he isn’t involved in a project, he seems depressed, a dog in need of something to do. He’s not eating. This morning, he was asleep with his ear in his water bowl. It was a dead, unproductive sleep, with little rapid eye movement and squirrel chasing. I don’t think he likes this life. It’s pointless and disorienting. Dickens reminds me of the Littles’ cat, who went on a hunger strike when June changed her job and started commuting to New York, adding four hours to her workday. Remember the vet’s report after two weeks of observation? Will eat lobster if fed by hand.

  I expected, by now, to be headed in some definitive direction—either we’d be getting divorced, or we’d be trying to reconcile. Maybe I’m being arbitrary, but I think that after a year’s time, we should have a game plan. I’m not good at holding my life in abeyance. We don’t seem to be taking another look at this marriage; nor are we making a commitment to the new people in our lives. How can we? A “trial separation,” we called it. What it is is a long, open-ended recess and, for my part, I’ve tried to make the most of it. But we’ve been out on the playground too long. What’s happened is that it has become easier to stay out here than it is to face going back inside, where there’s work to be done.

  Several months ago, I sat on your futon, listening to you tick off the reasons why you began your affair with Esther. It all added up to my fault. I’ll take my share of the blame. But I’m tired of being told that I wasn’t a grown-up, that I was the child and you were the adult. Because it seems to me, while you’re being so grown up, that you might take some responsibility for what you’ve done. I wasn’t so childish way back in the early seventies, when we were busy sitting in circles, passing around these soggy joints and having an “open marriage” in our bell-bottoms, that I didn’t realize I needed to do something for myself, and for us, by going into therapy. It would not have occurred to me to list all the reasons why what I was doing was your fault.

  If you’re paying me back, if that’s what this is all about, I’d like to remind you that the statute of limitations has run out on those particular offenses. They have been behind us for nearly fifteen years. We can’t change any of that. The point is who we are today, and what we want to do about it.

  NOVEMBER 30

  Now I can give thanks—that it’s over. Even for traditional families, Thanksgiving can be hell. My parents always played hosts to warring great-aunts who, sometime before dinner and after the second manhattan, would square off in front of the stove and rekindle some family feud that had been going on for thirty years.

  My mother’s mother, meanwhile, would be sitting by the fire in the living room, trying to deflect the tension by giving anyone within hearing distance a tour of her charm bracelet. Between points of interest, we were aware of the muffled growls of dispute that inevitably erupted between my aunt and uncle, who managed never to take the same train home. But with all that, a generous spirit survived. We fell into bed exhausted and amused. When we awoke in the morning, all was well.

  For twenty years, you and I carried on this tradition, with all of its attendant generational and culinary conflicts, i.e., the annual canned-versus-homemade cranberry-sauce controversy, over
which certain people threatened not to make an appearance at dinner. The house echoes with all those creaky, cranky voices we’d have loved to silence with the wave of a wooden spoon. Today, I’d bring them back in a flash.

  Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness. It wasn’t meant for people who don’t know what to do with their marriages. It wasn’t meant for people who have boyfriends over forty, and whose children say things like, “I suppose your boyfriend’s coming for dinner.” I don’t know about you, but while we’re keeping our options open, I occasionally glance at my plate to see that there’s nothing on it. I think it’s time we served up a little decision.

  As it happens, my “boyfriend” did not come for dinner. David and Audrey, his soon-to-be ex-wife, are still keeping up the pretense of unity for their youngest son, who is only eight. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Barney. If not, it’s probably because, like David himself, I can’t quite believe that there’s someone that young in my life. David didn’t think it necessary to talk about Barney until I walked into his apartment for the first time and saw the bunk beds. “Who gets the top?” I asked, a sudden, awful realization seeping into my brain.

  “The guest gets to pick,” he said. “Those are the house rules.”

  “How old is he?” I asked, hearing my voice break. “The host, I mean.”

  His face grew serious. “I was afraid to tell you, and then I couldn’t tell you, because I hadn’t told you.”

  Barney’s a terrific kid, but I don’t know what to say to an eight-year-old anymore, to say nothing of an eight-year-old who’s a genius and likes to build telescopes in his spare time and who says he doesn’t like school because it doesn’t give him time to think.