To My Ex-Husband (19 page)

I was glad you had to get Peter off to the airport. I had to pull myself together, do all the ritualistic, motherly things a woman does when she says good-bye to her child, the hugs, the have-a-good-last-term. But I could hardly take my eyes off you. Watching you help Peter put his bags in the car, then lean down and pat Dickens—each gesture I took in as though absorbed in an old and cherished movie.

After you'd gone, I rolled it over and over:
I'm never going to be that boy again
. You say I don't acknowledge the changes you've made. Maybe that's true. It's true, too, that I liked the boy more than I liked the man. The boy had been so alive, so game. But the years went by and he became disillusioned. He didn't get the recognition he deserved. He “worked his balls off,” as he put it, to maintain a standard of living that was insufficient. His family—his wife, particularly—was parasitic on his energies; demanding, needy. He got depressed. He lost the song he had.
I need new dreams
, he told his wife.

Yes, he made changes. But one critical change he does not seem to have made is in believing that his wife is the keeper of his dreams.

FEBRUARY 4

Settlement seems to be the topic of the day here in our town. Edward and I went for a bite to eat at Noodles and ran into Claire. She and her companion, a man I didn't recognize, were getting ready to leave. As she was buttoning up her coat, Claire came over to me and said, sotto voce, “Did you get the house? I got the house.”

Rob was obviously feeling a little guiltier than you are.

I felt like a traitor to my sex, battling over percentages, in not asking for the whole pie. I
am
a traitor. I haven't learned to feel entitled. Entitlement is a male gene, whereas a woman seems to emerge undeserving from the womb and struggles her whole life to think otherwise. All I have to do is think of Annie, at two, sitting on the toilet. If Peter needed to pee, too, she simply moved back farther on the seat, to give him room. If he'd been sitting there, he'd have told her to wait. The whole toilet. The whole pie. Is there any difference? Entire books are written for people like me who don't know how to protect their interests. If I were someone who knew how to protect her interests, I wouldn't have married an artist in the first place. I wouldn't have been a writer. I'd have gone to law school and become one of those people who writes letters to me, “Re: Moore v. Moore.” I would use phrases like “Affidavit of consent,” and “stipulated value.” I would promise to “effectuate the issuance” of my clients' divorce papers. But right now I am sitting in what has been referred to numerous times on stationery with engraved letter headings as “the marital home,” and thinking that even one hundred percent of it for either of us would be the shabbiest victory.

MARCH 22

Slowly, the background is changing; a curtain is coming down on the old set. The props are small, though; it's not a major production. To begin with, I've changed my laundry detergent. No more Tide. My pillowcases smell like Solo, and by association, like Edward. Solo is Edward's soap. Solo in the laundry; Dove in the shower. Illicit scents brought into my house, scents of a man who is not my husband.

Habits get branded into your skin. Recently, I realized how infrequently I listened to music because so much of what I liked was linked to history. I hadn't avoided it; I just hadn't gone out of my way to sit down and pay attention to it. But yesterday, in the car, I tuned into public radio and heard an exquisite piece of music that I was sure I'd never heard before. When I got home, I called the station and was told that it was Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss's
Vier Letze Lieder
(“Four Last Songs”). I went right out and bought the tape. You would love it. But now, of course, I've put my signature on it. Even if it's become a recent favorite, you will no longer let it in. “Four Last Songs” will not be for you.

Someone said to me not long ago, “Emily, you have a whole new life.” But I do
not
have a new life. What I have is an eclectic, often uncomfortable, mixture of past and present. I have kept a lot of the old by choice. I thought it said something nice about me that I kept so much of my former life intact; it said I wasn't a person who threw things away. I wasn't a squanderer. I was sentimental; I had attachments. Some of that image, I see now, was an image I created for you. It made me more like you, and if I were like you, I'd be hard to reject. This for the same reason I took up yoga a few years ago. It was Eastern, intriguing, exotic. People who practiced yoga were intellectual.

If I were more intellectual, I thought, you wouldn't have left me. Not that you were ever pompous or superior. On the contrary, you were generous that way, you assumed that everybody was smart, even people who were clearly not. Anyway, you never talked in those terms. But it was a feeling I had that I hadn't been challenging enough. I hadn't been like Esther. Harvey was always telling me how smart he thought you were. Another word he used was “abstract.”

Well, maybe if I concentrated on it, I could be smart and abstract, too. It would be like taking up occupancy in another brain. I'd shed the aspects of me that you'd rejected—the “controlling,” “dependent,” “childish” ones—and adapt new characteristics. I'd be completely different from the person who'd lost you.

Exotic, et cetera, cannot be grafted. In ten weeks, I went to my yoga class twice.

APRIL 5

“It could happen to anyone,” I said, “and does.”

I'd stopped by to see June's new bachelor house. She was beside herself, sitting in her lovely sunny breakfast nook with a magnifying glass and a small plastic container. She'd show me the house in a minute; first, there was something more compelling she wanted to talk to me about.

For the last week, she'd been driven crazy by itching, an allergy, probably. To what, she couldn't say. She had no new soaps, no new underwear, no new nightgowns or sheets. But the itch persisted and kept her up at night. She called her doctor who, after persistent questioning, asked her whether she'd seen anything in her underwear, anything at all. No, she said, but … well, there were these tiny sandy-colored dots, pin-sized.

“Look carefully,” the doctor said. “They probably move.”

Move?
A slowly dawning truth that turns the stomach: crabs. Of all people, June. So well-bred. So well-scrubbed. She had stopped seeing Klaus, as she knew she would, but not soon enough. He was apologetic, of course. Klaus is nothing if not gentlemanly—though an exception could certainly be made for this little incident. And he always did have a great sense of humor. That afternoon, he had delivered some flowers and a card.

June showed me the card. On the front was a large penguin wearing a formal dinner jacket and carrying a silver tray of delectables. Inside, it said, “Just because you have crabs doesn't mean you're an expert on seafood.”

Frankly, I thought it was hilarious. June did, too, although she refused to say so. “Look,” she said, handing me the magnifying glass. “I've been picking them off. Even after using this medicated shampoo, some of them are still alive.”

I peered into the dish. Like June, I was repelled but intensely curious. Sure enough, they were moving. Slowly and sideways, like real crabs. An undignified moment in an undignified stage of life. Somehow, we would all get through it.

I love talking to June now. She's so forthright, so earnest. I don't know anyone else who can talk about sex so openly, and without a trace of embarrassment.

I miss Harvey and June together. I miss the late nights and the talking and the big jugs of bad wine. I miss the occasions. They always rose to an occasion, playing off each other with an appreciation that never seemed false. They were a golden couple by night, two completely extraordinary people. By day they were just another couple who couldn't get along, who were willfully at odds. It was her silence pitted against his fury, his chaos and her secretiveness, his romanticism and her pragmatism, his fat and her hyperactivity, and finally, devastatingly, his blind adoration and her revulsion.

As time goes by, it gets harder and harder to imagine that Harvey and June were once part of the same marriage, or, for that matter, that they could have participated in the same conversations. What sends a chill up my spine is that I know it's been said of us.

MAY 3

It's awkward, having the same travel agent. So poor Shirley has a conflict of interest. You ask not to be seated next to me on the way out to Ann Arbor. I ask to be seated next to you. Whose request should be honored? Who's the troublemaker here? Is it the estranged wife who's only trying to be friends? Or is it the estranged husband who's only trying to be enemies?

My determination to be friends, to not let our divorce develop into a great continental divide, reminds me of my father during those hideous last months of my parents' marriage. My mother, who always maintained that silence was the ultimate weapon, had a habit of sulking, of drifting into a silent-movie routine, wordlessly placing his breakfast in front of him, including, on one occasion, an entire grapefruit, a big, yellow, uncut ball. My father always suspected that she stole that from Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar, but wouldn't have dared to bring it up.

For weeks at a time, the Woman Without Words, as my father called her, could not be reached for comment. Finally, my father had decided he'd had enough. “All right,” he said. “I've tried to be friends. If you don't want to be friends, the hell with you.”

I may get to that point, too. In the meantime I'll just say that college graduations are just the beginning of many events in which we will appear as separate agents, rather than two people united in a journey that has brought something wonderful to fruition. Somehow, we're going to have to make that adjustment without ruining the occasion for our children. Sit next to someone else on the plane if you want to, but at the graduation be with me. That day is for Peter.

JUNE 10

We don't have sin anymore, you know
. That has to be one of my all-time favorite lines, especially coming as it did from the lips of my mother. She's going to be living in the formerly sinful state, on the west coast of Florida, with Fred. She's sure that “tongues will wag” in the building where he lives, but she says this in the most mischievous way. She's thrilled with herself, and I'm thrilled for her.

I also wonder if our impending divorce has given her permission, whether until now she thought she needed to be a model for us of lifelong dedication to one partner. No matter that that partner was remarried, or even, that eventually, and in his own grand style, he died. The role of martyr wasn't exactly a struggle for her, as we know; she had a natural proclivity. That she's finally outgrown it has been her greatest gift to me. I'm sending her off with some new sheets and towels, just like a bride.

JUNE 28

Leon has forwarded a copy of your letter to me, written, I gather, under the direction of one Ms. Glass. You'll receive
our
response in a day or two, but I'd like to address one portion of your conditions directly, and that is the part that draws a cause-and-effect relationship between your continued payment of utilities and the possibility, in the future, of my “cohabiting with a man.”

It strikes me, apart from its legal haughtiness, as a rather cozy phrase. I like its juicy intent. I hope you won't mind, then, if I pass it on to my mother, who in her renewed vigor will soon be doing same.

Am I to assume that if I cohabit with a woman, one, say, who pays rent, that you will continue to honor your commitment with respect to gas, et cetera? Surely you would concede that this would be no different from a man who pays rent, such as a student. Thus, the emphasis should not be on gender, but on the nature of the relationship. You want to make a distinction here between one who pays and one who doesn't, between an issue of money and one of affection, although it's my impression that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And I could easily see to it that they weren't.

JULY 8

I wish, when you call to speak with Annie or Peter, you could bring yourself to extend to me the normal courtesies accorded the most casual acquaintances and complete strangers. “Let me speak to Peter,” without so much as a “hello” is a real slap in the face. Which is why you do it. Which makes it worse.

Time, I keep telling myself,
time
. It's the only solution to so many problems. But it's not the answer someone like me wants to hear, someone who wants immediate and complete solutions to all things. Patience is a virtue; it isn't, regrettably, one of mine.

So, in time, you'll be less angry. In time, you'll accept that I care about you and love you, though I don't believe we'd be any more happily married now than we were before. I've been fond of reminding you these last couple of years that you were the one who was unhappy, that you were the one who left. I wasn't willing to accept then, let alone admit, my own unhappiness. In time, I hope you can forgive me for that.

Meanwhile, it's evident that you can hardly contain the rage you feel against me. It makes me feel guilty, knowing that it's borne of pain. I've survived, and you're having a bad time. So I bounce along after you, like a puppy, eager to make amends so you won't be angry. I want to protect you because you don't seem strong enough for the truth.

Recently, I read something in a book of quotes. One that I thought particularly relevant, though I don't recall its author, was this:

Real love is when you want the other person's good;

Romantic love is when you want the other person.

When Esther and Don were able to work things out, I remember your asking me, didn't I want them to be happy. I couldn't bring myself to care about Esther's happiness at that point. I was more interested in Don's happiness, first because I always liked him a great deal, and second because he didn't have an affair with you. My point, though, is that you were rather magnanimous about Esther. You loved her. You wanted her good. How can I not draw the conclusion that you want less for me? You say you love me, but only if I stay married to you. Otherwise, you'd just as soon never see me again. As I've said before, that has more to do with power than with love.