To My Ex-Husband (13 page)

The deal is that each of you orders enough food for four, plus every dessert on the menu. Then you sample each one. I'm sure these places must get suspicious. I always expect to find Nina slipping into the restaurant looking like Miss Piggy as the Underground Restaurant Critic, in a huge hat tipped down over one eye and sunglasses with lenses the size of a satellite dish.

By the time I got to the lush white-chocolate mousse set on a thin disk of dark chocolate awash in a pool of fresh raspberry sauce and covered with lacy threads of hardened caramel, I had almost,
almost
, forgotten the difficulties of the last weeks. It hadn't been fun. But perhaps I had paved the way for that to come.

MARCH 5

I gave in, finally, to the idea of having a boarder, and called a woman who had put an ad up on the bulletin board of the co-op. The time seemed right, and not only because I was in the position of choosing between my car insurance and groceries—not a tough choice, on the surface, given my attitude toward food. But not having a car represented such a loss of mobility that I was feeling claustrophobic.

The woman was here for two weeks. I liked Valerie, who was about sixty, because she reminded me of Ruth Gordon in
Rosemary's Baby
. She had that same lively and eccentric quality. Also, she was a flutist. I thought I might be lured into playing the piano again; at least, I might get the thing tuned. The music was a selling point, but she had neglected to mention the hot plate. She would come home late at night from an engagement and do stir-fry. I'd be awakened at all hours of the night, smelling soy sauce, soybeans, soysage (you know, tastes like sausage?). This mixed with ginger and bean curd.

My refrigerator looked like a health-food store. There were compressed pies of yet another form of soy that swelled and oozed out of their casings when you put them in the toaster oven. There were dietary supplements of all kinds, as well as maximum-stress capsules and a giant bottle of a miracle drink that contained, among other things, purified water, caramel color, glycerin, potassium citrate, ferric glycerophosphate, chamomile flower, sarsaparilla root, celery seed, alfalfa herb, dandelion root, horehound herb, licorice root, senega root, passion flower, thyme leaf, gentian root, saw palmetto berry, angelica root,
Cascara sagrada
bark, potassium hydroxide, and vanillin,
plus
artificial flavors. I was glad I wasn't pregnant. She might have forced me to eat the stuff and then send me off to the devil's disciple, Dr. Sapperstein.

I didn't really object to Valerie's using the hot plate, except for the hour that she chose to use it. But it meant that I myself couldn't do much cooking. All the dishes were upstairs, in her bathtub, not that she seemed inclined to wash them.

Then there was the cat, which she had also not mentioned. Charleston—so named because somebody had given him to her when she went down there for a music festival—was good about his litter box, and stayed in her room, where he set about shredding the furniture. Valerie had bought him an upholstered post to climb on, but he much preferred the chairs. All this might have been manageable eventually, but Dickens became obsessed. The minute Charleston moved in, Dickens launched into a twenty-four-hour surveillance program. Day and night you could hear him pacing back and forth, sniffing at the airspace under Valerie's door. I thought I might have to serve him his dinner up there, but after a couple of days he'd take a break, put in a quick appearance at his bowl, and head right back to work, still chewing his kibble on the way.

Valerie was giving me a check for another week when she asked if her boyfriend could rent the other room. I'd met him only once. He was the spitting image of Mr. Hooper on “Sesame Street,” which made him a great temptation. But I was getting in over my head, and was hugely relieved to be able to say that I needed the room for Annie. The next day, she and Charleston moved out. Dickens hopped alongside her on two legs as she carried Charleston in his cat-cage down the stairs and out to her car, setting what has to be a record for an ostensibly four-legged beast. I wish David Letterman had been here!

APRIL 5

Okay, Nick. I think we should get something straight. I'm a little sick of having it get back to me, especially through the children, that I'm ripping you off by living in luxury in a three-thousand-square-foot house while you're stuck in a one-bedroom apartment. Yes, I complain about the maintenance. I'd be complaining about it if you were here, only there would be two of us working to pay for it. This house is falling apart. The septic system is leaking, the windowsills are rotting, and every month yet another section of the roof has to be repaired. Meanwhile, I'm supposed to feel grateful to you for paying the utilities, something you seem to think makes you a good guy. Well, you need to be educated. If we took this to court, you'd be required to do that and more. But that isn't the biggest problem, as I see it. The biggest problem is that you have a talent for turning everything around so that it fits your image of yourself as an innocent bystander:
Poor Nick. He's so sweet. What did he do to deserve this?

Let me just remind you of a little something: You left. I'm doing everything I can to stay in this house, including teaching three sections of eighth-grade English while someone is on maternity leave. I do it not merely for the money, but for the unmitigated joy of hearing loudly whispered choruses of “Whack off, Whack off!” from the boys in the back row while I hold forth on the major themes of
The Old Man and the Sea
.

But Nick: The house is the only constancy Annie and Peter have. I'm not about to divvy it up, in any case, just so that you can feel better knowing that I, too, am living in what used to be referred to as “reduced circumstances.” I'm just plain not ready, and I'll tell you something else: Neither is Dickens. It's just no fun jumping up onto a futon.

What's the matter, anyway, that you have to start picking on me again? Aren't things going well with Isabel?

APRIL 22

If I were to write an autobiography, an apt title would be
I Should Have Known
. So. It hasn't worked out with Isabel. I wish I could say that I was sorry. I wish I could say more about what I wish for your happiness. I
do
wish for it. But it hurts me to be excluded from it.

Apart from that, I think that being involved with a woman whose six-year-old son sleeps with her does not portend well for the relationship. Isabel should pack him off now and then with his older brothers. They'll straighten him out. Whose is the greater need here, Isabel's or Andrew's? If it's Isabel's, I have to say that, for warmth and security, a dog is a much safer bet. Of course Dickens doesn't like to share me, but he deals with his feelings constructively, by shredding the edges of the rugs. Unlike Andrew, he doesn't take it out on the men in my life. I understand that he bit you. Now that's what I call feedback. There's no mystery as to where
you
stand.

p.s. I can't help noticing that you seem to surround yourself with women who have at least one child that is still young. Esther. Isabel. The women in your apartment building—friendly but unromantic attachments. Saturday-night casseroles. Movies. Museums. It's a nesting instinct come late in life. You were hardly at home when Peter and Annie were little. Now you seem to want to replicate the family you're missing. It makes me wonder: If you married a woman who'd never had children, would you have more children? It's a thought that fills me with fascination and horror all at the same time. So many men want to start over. They want to do it
right
this time, like my neighbor's ex-husband. He looks at the daughter he has, the one he wasn't there for. He sees his mistakes. Never mind that she's a perfectly wonderful girl; what he means is that she lacks his imprint. So he undoes his vasectomy and has another child. As this woman said to me, “You know—it's like you throw the first crepe away.”

MAY 10

Nina says she ran into you, and you'd heard that I was seeing somebody, “a proctologist, I think.”

A proctologist, I think not. He's a periodontist, though for dating purposes it may be a toss-up, one of life's hard choices.

I'd been seeing him (Dr. Ventura) long before I started dating him on a regular basis. “Bloody Wednesdays,” I called them. Do you remember my telling you that I was earning extra money teaching? This is one of the reasons. It is the nearly-two-thousand-dollar reason. But I knew I was in for trouble when my regular dentist stood by my chair, pressing a mini-ruler into my gums and calling out numbers to the hygienist:
eight, nine, ten
. These were otherwise perfectly innocent numbers with pleasant, if sometimes seasonal, associations, like maids-a-milking and ladies dancing. I heard nothing less than a seven, which in the world of dentistry meant I was getting dangerously long in the tooth, and could well have used some twos and threes, some turtle doves and French hens. The solution is to take the patient's mouth, divide it into quadrants, and cut away the loose tissue, thereby tightening the gums around those wobbling teeth.

I don't suppose a dentist normally wants to date his patient any more than a patient wants to date him. My experience has been that the very thought of a dentist makes my eyes water and shifts my salivary glands into overdrive, not for the usual reasons, but because of those sharp pieces of cardboard they stuff into your mouth when they're taking X rays. I wind up gagging, ejecting the thing like a dart, and we have to start all over with the child-sized one.

Yet, much as I dreaded it, it didn't seem like a normal situation from the beginning. I don't know—maybe he (Edward) thought I appeared pitiful. Certainly I wouldn't have made great copy for the personals:
Single, forty-ish female, with financial problems and bleeding gums, seeks curettage, and much, much more
. Anyway, he seemed to genuinely care about my swelling gingiva and their instant pink eruptions at the touch of a toothbrush, seemed to care about my well-being, my children in college, my work, and—this was indeed odd—
not
about my inability to pay. He might, he said, work out a fee adjustment. I could pay in installments. The work needed to be done.

If I wasn't attractive when I first walked into his office, I grew less so. How pretty can you be, walking around for a week at a time with your teeth encased in Peri-Pak, the periodontal equivalent of Silly Putty? To the casual observer, especially after lunch, it must have looked as though I had left the better part of a tuna-fish sandwich parked between my teeth.

At each appointment, the long needle of Novocaine penetrated my gums cleanly and swiftly. I never felt more than a pinprick and the pressure of his hand against my jaw. Things were moving along like clockwork. But one afternoon, he must have gone light on the anesthetic. I felt, suddenly, the sting of my flesh, hot and deep. My eyes squeezed shut; tears eked out of the corners. Dr. Ventura seemed flustered, disturbed. My evident discomfort made him nervous. Or else, he really shouldn't listen to
Carmen
while wielding a surgical instrument, at least not during the stirring refrain of the “Toreador Song.” Anyway, he sliced into my lip.

It hadn't occurred to me that having an Italian dentist would be life-threatening, but that was before I'd driven in a car with him. Edward's car is a mini-opera house, and Edward is the featured tenor, singing along at top volume, arms waving. He's a passionate driver, to say the least. People steer clear of him—more, I suspect, because of the singing than the driving. It's truly painful to listen. Edward's favorite quote, not surprisingly, is from
The Importance of Being Earnest
, when Algernon says, “Anyone can sing in tune; I sing with wonderful feeling.”

Trying to be cavalier, I asked him how many stitches he thought my lip would take.

“Oh, I don't know,” he said, going along with my little joke. “Ever hem a skirt?”

I knew it wasn't much of a cut; but he was upset. Possibly he saw litigation leaping out of the chair and running down to the lawyer's office. I don't know. But that night, after profuse apologies, he called me to see how I was doing. I heard something in the background, a loud hum. He said it was his aquarium. I had to smile. Now this was more like it, more normal for a dentist. So we talked about his tropical fish. I didn't think much about that conversation at the time. Dr. Ventura was a nice man, so genuinely nice, it seemed, that it was just barely possible that dentists had gotten a lot of bad press. I didn't mind finding out if it was justified.

Dickens, whose judgments I trust in these matters, regards Edward warmly, but with some remove. He sits directly in front of Edward, a few feet away—close enough to be cordial, but a hair too far away to be touched. As you can see, Dickens and I are taking developments a day at a time.

MAY 25

This is so confusing that I don't know where to start. It's taking me a while to get the full implications of all you said yesterday when you came by. Just the fact of your coming here was in itself surprising. Mostly—nearly all—of our conversations are strictly business, even when they concern Annie and Peter. Who's paying for air fare home, who's paying for books, etc.

It was unnerving to have you sitting next to me in the backyard, with the landscape of our marriage looking on, the same rooftops, the same trees, the same rhododendrons, bending their leaves like so many eager ears. I guess I was too stunned to respond. I'm sorry.

You say you're jealous about “this new thing” I'm having. What was different about David? I remember asking you then if you were at all jealous about that. Don't you remember what you said? I sure do. You said, “I would be jealous—if I felt about you the same way I felt about Esther.”

I suppose I asked for that. I thought, wrongly, that I was hardened against any further pain and humiliation, hardened against holding out any hope. That night, I was in a horrible, nasty mood. David and I went to see
The Purple Rose of Cairo
. I couldn't concentrate on anything except his hand moving automatically back and forth from his popcorn to his mouth, almost as if he were in a trance. He seemed suddenly, excruciatingly boring and boorish. When he was finished, he licked his fingers, and put his arm around me. And then, with a smack of the lips, he called me “hon.” I hated being called that. It's a generic term of endearment, something you get from the woman who washes your hair in a beauty salon. It's easy and lazy. And it's not even a whole term of endearment; it's a half–term of endearment.