To My Ex-Husband (15 page)

“But,” I go on, “Alfredo's father has come to say that she cannot remain with Alfredo because it is he who loves her, not his son. And anyway, Alfredo doesn't really love her; he loves Annina, Violetta's maid, and that, as a matter of fact, Annina is going to have Alfredo's baby.” Edward has to laugh. But he wishes I would take my studies more seriously.

SEPTEMBER 17

I guess you're angry. Having your estranged husband arrive at your front door and throw an overdue gas bill in your face is not a nice way to start the day. If Edward is in the habit of staying here when his children are with their mother, that's between him and me and has nothing to do with who should pay the gas bill. It always comes back to money, doesn't it? Like the roads that lead to Rome, everything boils down to what I owe you. Nothing's changed.

Do you remember having this exchange two years ago? I asked you not to come in the house anymore when you came to pick up Annie because I felt awkward, as if I were on display. You know what you said? “Then you pay the utilities.”

Years ago, when separations were things that happened to other people, I remember some men being in a rage because the women they left were having people over to dinner—on the money that these men earned.

I never realized that the price of survival was so great. This vindictive, self-righteous stance is not like you, but then I'm sure that there are aspects of me, too, that strike you as startling. I'm more of a survivor than you thought, and more pragmatic. You might choose other words. “Hard,” for instance. It's a choice of words men use when the women in their lives stop being accommodating and start doing something for themselves.

SEPTEMBER 26

Yesterday I saw Claire Edmonds coming out of Corelli's Market looking absolutely ashen. I was about to drive away, but she came over to the car and leaned in the window. “I just passed my ex-husband's pregnant wife on her way into the store,” she said. Claire's such a private person, and we're not close. I've rarely seen her, except from a distance, since that night a couple of years ago, when all we suddenly single women had dinner at Isabel's. It was a measure of Claire's distress that she said anything to me.

She started to say something else, but dropped her head down onto her arm, which was resting in the window. Her shoulders were moving up and down, and I assumed she'd started crying. It must have been a full minute before I realized she was vomiting all down the side of the car.

What a strange experience, lifted out of the ordinariness of a day like that. I felt disoriented. In retrospect, my reaction struck me as strange, too, mechanical, almost as if I were not in the picture, but watching it. I got out of the car and went around to help, but I watched myself performing these motions—getting her a paper towel from Corelli's, wiping her face, noting, by the car door, that she seemed to have eaten a soft pretzel recently, all that—with total detachment.

Maybe Claire's position is too threatening for anything but detachment. I try to imagine what that would be like, to have to perform all the daily rituals of my life in the random presence of your second wife, radiant with child. In a few weeks, Claire will come face to face with the infant itself, a tiny blend of her former husband and her successor. Why does that fact, that there is a baby, make what happened between Claire and Rob so much more concrete, so much more real and awful? It's simple, I suppose. It's living, highly visible proof of a second union that, unlike the one before it, is fulfilling.

OCTOBER 9

It's hard for me to believe that I've agreed to this, especially considering that I feel, without giving it a name, that I've moved into some other phase of life. As I said, I'm distrustful of couples-counseling in the first place. And what am I supposed to say to Edward? He'll understand the reason for it, the need. And I believe he'll respect it. But that doesn't mean he's going to like it.

I'm not reneging on my promise. But this is more of a struggle for me than you seem to realize. Edward is not a diversion for me; it's far more substantial than that. You're asking me to hold all that in abeyance, now, and do this thing, this
process
, with you and Dr. Block.

I'm agreeing because I don't want to be someone who wouldn't. I don't want to be someone who would leave just because leaving is easier than dissecting a marriage and putting it back together. I don't want to look back someday and see myself as someone who discarded twenty years without trying to do otherwise. So, really, I'm doing this for me.

Still, I wonder: What's the game plan? What would we be working toward? Is this to find out why we're apart, or is it to see if there is any reason why we should be together?

You were unhappy, remember? That's why you left. Is it your plan to parade me in front of your doctor so that he can see what exactly is wrong with me and then help me/us fix it so that I'll be more acceptable to you?

But I'm already in the process of reconstruction, so that I can cohabit happily with myself. How do I reconcile what I'm doing for myself with what you'd like me to be doing with you and Dr. Block? Do I now walk into Dr. Bloom's office, and say, “Hold everything. We're going to make some adjustments in the blueprint. I thought I saw myself as a Victorian house with small, cozy parlors and a fireplace in every room, but scratch that. Nick needs me to be more of a loft”?

One other thing: In the last few months, you've seen quite a lot of Dr. Block. You've seen him twice a week, once in group therapy and once in individual therapy, and you say you've seen him for occasional “emergencies.” In the last couple of months, you've seen more of Dr. Block than you saw of me during the last two years of our marriage. I feel that I'm at something of a disadvantage here. From where I sit, you two are thick as thieves. Dr. Block is
your guy
.

As I say, I'll go. But not without skepticism.

NOVEMBER 14

Sitting in Dr. Block's office yesterday, you said that for the first time you could see my “scars.” How astounding that in 1986, more than two years after we separated, you would have your first glimpse of the pain I was in—have been in. So much of what we're doing now, this therapy, for instance, seems to be a delayed reaction. We should have been doing it two years ago, when you wouldn't consider it. These feelings you have—the wistfulness about our marriage, the agony of reliving our wedding day over and over, the loss of “my family,” as you put it—make me want to scream at the top of my lungs, “Where have you been?”

If you didn't see any scars, it was, in part, because I hid them from you. I told you that while everyone else was reading books about
relationships
—yechh!—I was reading Miss Manners. She says that the smartest thing a dumped one can do is to get out of sight, or at least to hide all traces of misery. It isn't easy, but it takes the sufferer's mind off suffering so that he or she can start the recovery. It also makes one's former lover worry that this supposed act of cruelty was actually a relief to the one it was intended to hurt. And that hurts.

It was a game, and I don't like games. But I thought it was the only way I would get through it. I wanted you to be sorry. And now that you are, I can't say it feels good. When I see you cry, I feel the tears sliding down your face as if they were mine. I catch myself curling the back of my hand into my sleeve, and reaching up to my cheek to wipe them away.

On the way home, I feel guilty.
Look at what I'm doing to him
, I think. By the time I walk into the house I'm furious and I can't figure out why. I start slamming kitchen cabinets, and snapping at Dickens: “Finish your dinner!” And then I realize what I'm doing. I stop and ask what's this all about? Who am I angry with?

I'm angry with you for being miserable. Those damned tears—they make it seem like this thing was all my idea.

And then Edward calls, trying to get a reading on what's going on. He doesn't want specifics, he just wants to know: Where am I today? One of my friends—I think it was June—said, when she first met Edward, that he seemed like someone who could be hurt. I passed that on to him. He said, “You tell June that I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

And he can. It's that confidence I find sexy. The man is no movie star. But there is simply no way I could convince him of that. He is so comfortable in his own skin, so sure of what he wants, that it's difficult to doubt him. He's my movie star; he's made it so.

Now all I have to do is figure out what I want; all I have to do is stop doubting myself.

NOVEMBER 24

I know this won't be much consolation, but I do feel bad about Thanksgiving. But when you thought, Nick, that you wanted to think it over about coming to dinner, how long did you think I'd wait before making another plan? You seemed pretty sure that that would be too painful for you. I understood. Annie and Peter understood, or seem to have. The kids are long past the point when they expect us to do things together, ever. Frankly, I think it's easier for them if we don't.

It just hasn't been one of those easy, “amicable” arrangements that more civilized people have. It's up and down. Yes, we talk on the phone, and we've worked out who goes where for Christmas, and all that. We can do business. But we don't socialize. So maybe it was inappropriate of me to ask you to come for dinner in the first place. We'd been having so much more contact since seeing Dr. Block that it seemed like a natural enough thing. But, having taken your cue, I went ahead and invited Edward because his son and daughter will be with their mother and grandparents. Yes, it could be awkward. Anything—no, everything—I do is awkward. The kids think I'm playing musical boyfriends, and my mother, who says she likes Edward, insists on calling him Ethan.

1987

JANUARY 13

I don't know if I've given you an adequate picture of life here. The sleeping arrangements, for one thing, are not uncomplicated, especially during the holidays.

The Saturday after Christmas, in preparation for the arrival of Peter's girlfriend, I was performing what I understood to be an exercise in futility. I was making up the guest room.

Washing sheets that would probably never come into contact with Sarah's skin, I had all the unsettling, if obvious, thoughts of a woman who knows that her role as a mother is more perfunctory than real. I was to look like a mother and talk like a mother while having all the personal interest of a proprietor of a bed and breakfast.

So, however I looked at it, I had my duties. I dusted the room, vacuumed up all the dust balls, put out clean towels, selecting those with the fewest number of strings hanging from the edges, made up a little basket of sweet-smelling soaps, and was finishing making the bed when Peter stepped into the room. “I think,” he announced with a crooked little smile, “that if your boyfriend gets to sleep in your room, then my girlfriend should get to sleep in my room.”

I dropped the pillows into their cases, spanked them hard in the centers, and plopped them into place like naughty children. As if to say, and that is that.

“This is Sarah's room for the time being,” I said. “If she gets lost during the night, that's between you and her.” The thing that's so stunning about this is not that kids are all doing it and being completely open about doing it, but that they're willing to have their parents involved. The very thought of having either of my parents within a six-mile radius of my sexual activity when I was their age was paralyzing.

When I was nineteen and spent the night at my boyfriend's house, my boyfriend's mother made me sleep on a cot placed, in a statement of trust, between her bed and the window. Now, I may have spent the entire night plotting my escape. I may have thought I would deftly slide over the edge of the bed, squeeze sideways through the three-inch space between the two mattresses, roll under her bed and fly, barefoot and breathless, down the hall. I may have been deterred, not by reasons of propriety, but by fear, wild and insane fear that maybe she had tied an invisible string to my wrist and to hers, and that I would turn the corner into my boyfriend's room to find that I had brought his mother with me. Or, typically insecure, maybe I was afraid that he was sound asleep and didn't really want me there. Whatever the reason, I was free of guilt in the morning, with no awkwardnesses, no regrets.

It's taken roughly twenty-three years for it to occur to me that those wakeful hours served a purpose, that in their own fashion they were well spent. I don't expect to convince Peter and Sarah of that. They're living in a different time, a time that is not going to spare them any trouble. Parents don't do what they used to do—regrettably. And so Peter and his friends are all going to have to grow up the hard, but possibly not the worst, way. They're going to have to do it by themselves.

FEBRUARY 6

You whispered, as we were leaving Dr. Block's office last time, that you thought I liked him. I do like him. He particularly endeared me to him when, at the start of our second session, he had clearly just been in the men's room. He had this little telltale water spot, about the size of a quarter on the front of his pants. It was a small window to his vulnerability, a great equalizer among men, and a tender reminder of you.

Your advocate, as I had feared he would be, hasn't pointed a long finger at me, saying in effect, “Well, no wonder.
Here's
Nick's problem.”

I have this feeling, though, that he thinks this marriage is over, and more than that, he thinks it should be over, and he's trying to get you to see that. Why else would he mention, more than once, that the lifespan of the average marriage used to be about eleven years? So we would both be dead by now (or, at the very least, toothless), and rather than be consigned to a second lifetime with each other, we should do the sensible thing and get divorced.