The Divorce Party

by Laura Dave

  Fabulous.

  The only good news is that knowing this is what she is headed to puts a new fire in her belly to get her own house in order. (Who is she kidding? Not wanting to come back to an apartment that is even messier than it was before she started cleaning it is putting a new fire in her belly.) But just as she is tearing open the first Champ Nathaniel Huntington envelope, she turns to see Nate standing in the living room doorway.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  He is wearing a pair of boxer shorts, no T-shirt. Dark hair standing on top of his head. Green eyes shining at her. Yawning. It is only 8 A.M., and Nate was downstairs breaking apart walls with the contractor—Johnson the Contractor, as they call him, as Johnson calls himself—until well after 5 A.M.

  “What am I doing?” she asks. “What are you doing? Why are you up already?”

  He shrugs, starting to stretch. “I can’t sleep, I guess,” he says.

  Can’t sleep? Nate can never not sleep. But here he is: walking barefoot across the floor, like proof that she is wrong, until he is standing directly above her. She follows his gaze as he checks out her endless piles of papers and newspapers, wrapped glasses and packs of wire hangers. She points to the open Fantastic bottle by her feet. She hadn’t used it yet, but it is there.

  “What?” she says. “I’m cleaning.”

  “I can tell,” he says. He smiles his smile, the one that goes all the way to each ear, opening up his whole face, making him look younger and older at once. The first time she saw it, he was across the table from her at a farmer’s market in San Francisco. They were both searching through a pile of heirloom tomatoes. Dozens of tomatoes. He picked up a large yellow one with thin black ridges, smiled, and tossed it across the table to her. Somehow, she managed to catch it. That’s the best one there is, he said.

  And what were you going to say if I’ d dropped it? she asked.

  He looked down at the table, looked at all the tomatoes left. I had about forty-nine more chances, he said, for things to go my way.

  “Maggie,” he says, now gingerly pushing her piles out of the way, as if they were truly piles, and sitting down across from her, so that their knees are touching, so that his hands are holding her bare thighs.

  “What?”

  “Please tell me you haven’t been doing this all night,” he says.

  “Why? Someone has to.”

  “Yes, but . . .” He wipes something off her face, maybe newspaper markings, maybe ink or dirt. “Hopefully someone who is actually getting somewhere with it.”

  Maggie looks away from him, tries to stop her face from turning red. He isn’t making fun of her—or he is, but only because he wants her to make fun of herself. She can’t, though, not exactly. She still harbors this idea, in the small place inside of herself that justifies her Real Simple subscription and the $250.00-plus tax she paid for her Bissel Healthy Home super-vacuum, that one day she will become the type of woman who is good at making things neat, beautiful, brand new.

  She is good at other things—has already organized the entire computer and accounting system for the restaurant; feels more than confident about her ability to manage the front room once they open, her ability to run the bar.

  But as fate would have it, she is marrying a man who has in him more of the woman she wants to be than she ever will. Nate is the best cook she has ever known, a natural cleaner, a builder. He keeps jars of fresh herbs on the kitchen counter. He carved their ratty rafters into a dining room table. He makes everything he touches beautiful. Even—though Maggie never imagined she’d feel this way—her.

  She moves onto Nate’s lap, wrapping her legs around his waist, her hand reaching around to rub his back. He is sticky, sticky from sleep and last night’s sweat. She doesn’t care. She could live like this. She smiles, and kisses him—his soft bottom lip, meeting hers, holding her there.

  “What were you thinking about that you couldn’t sleep?” she asks him. “How you don’t want to marry me because I can’t clean?”

  “I want to marry you more because you can’t clean.”

  “Terrible liar,” she says.

  “Terrible cleaner,” he says.

  He buries into her neck until she feels his smile press against her, his hands making his way under her panties—which is when she looks down at the floor, and her eyes catch them again. The pile of CITIGROUP SMITH BARNEY envelopes. The ones addressed to Champ Nathaniel Huntington.

  “Hey, Nate,” she says, over his shoulder. “Who is Champ Huntington, by the way?”

  As soon as the words are out, she feels his body stiffen. And when he pulls back from her, slightly, she sees a bad look—one she doesn’t recognize—come over his face.

  “What did you just ask me?”

  She reaches for the envelopes and hands them to him. “I just found these. Are they yours? Are they bank statements or something? I didn’t know we had a bank account there. Do we?”

  He looks down at the envelopes, flips them over in his hand, and nods. “Kind of.”

  This makes sense to her. They have “kind of” accounts open all over the city now, different accounts from many different institutions—lending them too little money at too high interest, all for the restaurant. Eight out of ten restaurants fail within the first year. Six out of ten marriages fail sometime after that. They are playing with some dangerous odds, if she lets herself think of any of this as playing. She tries not to.

  “But who’s Champ?”

  He looks from the envelopes, up at Maggie’s face. “I am,” he says.

  She starts to laugh, assuming that he is kidding. “Okay. Something you forgot to tell me about, Sport? I mean Champ?”

  He smiles, but it is a nervous smile, and he doesn’t say anything. He puts the envelopes down.

  “Wait, you’re serious? Your name is Champ?”

  “No, my grandfather’s name is Champ. Or was Champ. And I was named after him, but I’ve never used his name a day in my life. No one’s ever called me Champ, but it is my official birth name. Champ Nathaniel Huntington.”

  Maggie knew that Nate was named after his grandfather, the one on his father’s side, but she assumed that his name was Nate. She assumed it because Nate never told her otherwise.

  “How have you never mentioned that?” she asks.

  He shrugs. “Would you want to mention that?”

  It isn’t a bad point. But, inadvertently, she must make a face because Nate looks pretty nervous.

  “Wow,” he says, “you’re never going to have sex with me again, are you? Who would? Who would have sex with someone named Champ?”

  She starts to laugh, and grabs the back of his neck, holds him. He is blushing—Nate, Champ, whoever—really blushing. And it makes Maggie feel bad that she mentioned the envelopes.

  “It has nothing to do with you. I just don’t think it was very nice of your parents, that’s all,” she says, making him meet her eyes. “Or your grandfather’s parents . . .”

  Nate nods, putting the envelopes down. “No kidding,” he says. He looks at Maggie in a way she does recognize—in a way that tells her he needs to say something that is hard for him to say. “But I think that’s why I couldn’t really sleep.”

  “What?” she says. “You thought someone would call you Champ and blow your cover?”

  But he isn’t laughing. “Truthfully? I’m a little nervous for you to meet my family.”

  “Why? Because of the divorce?”

  She looks at him carefully, his sweet and handsome face. She reaches out to touch it with the back of her fingers. She would understand if he was nervous for her to meet his parents because of their impending divorce, but he keeps insisting that he is okay with it. He keeps insisting that his parents have just had a partingof ways since his father decided he wanted to convert to Buddhism and started moving his life in that direction. He keeps insisting that his parents, together, decided this meant their lives were going in very different directions. After thirty-five year
s together. How can Nate be so okay with that? Maggie’s wondered to herself more than once. Isn’t it the point of marriage— Maggie can’t make herself ask out loud—that you figure out how to make the different directions meet?

  “There are just things,” he says, “important things that you should know before we go. Things that I probably should have told you before now.”

  She tries to figure out how to say it so he hears her. “Nate, they could have three heads, and it wouldn’t change anything. I don’t care,” she says.

  And she doesn’t. Historically, she would have. But historically she has been the one in any relationship looking for the way out. It used to take less than half a reason for her to look for an exit: someone’s parents, someone’s use of cologne, someone’s affection for Sting. But with Nate it is different, has been different from the beginning.

  “Like what?” she says. “Your parents are actually going to stay married?” She is joking around, but he isn’t biting.

  “I’m not sure you’re ready to hear.”

  “I’m ready to hear,” she says. “Of course I’m ready to hear. Do I need to remind you that my childhood was not Leave It to Beaver?”

  And it wasn’t. Unless you consider being raised alone by a less-than-fully-grown-up bar and grill owner in Asheville, North Carolina, Leave It to Beaver. Unless you consider Eli Mackenzie’s well-intentioned, but ill-advised choices—like having his fifteen-year-old daughter help with midnight shifts at the bar so they could have more time together—idyllic.

  Nate smiles. “Wasn’t Leave It to Beaver a little before your time?”

  Nate is four years older than Maggie is. He likes to pretend he is ten years older. Or, when it serves his purposes, a hundred. “Just tell me,” she says.

  “You sure?”

  “No time like the present.”

  But then she puts her nose to his neck—and a heavy smell, like a swirling heat, like a combination of salmon and bad milk, comes back at her. “Jeez. What on earth is that smell? Do I even want to know?”

  “Not good?” he says.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Not good.”

  “That is Johnson the Contractor’s homemade one-hundred-herb gel. Complete with garlic extract and dried fish flakes from a sorcerer in Chinatown. He carries around a huge jelly jar of the stuff, and swears that it will relieve any residual pain I feel from last night’s labor.”

  “Well, I hope it does, but . . . yuck,” she says, and for some reason, moves in closer to get a more pungent whiff. “That is one of the worst things I’ve ever smelled. You are maybe one of the worst things I’ve ever smelled.”

  “That may be good news.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because when you move away from me when I tell you this next thing I’m going to tell you, I can blame it on the gel.”

  “I’m ready,” she says, covering her eyes, in an exaggerated fashion, pretending that she is bracing herself, as if for a doctor’s needle shot, flinching in anticipation.

  “It’s about my family’s money situation. It’s about what you would have found out if you opened those envelopes.”

  She uncovers her eyes, meets his. She feels herself breathe out, feeling terrible that this is what he’s worried about. She has already made the assumption that while Nate’s family may be fairly comfortable—his father a pediatrician, his mother a former art teacher—they are certainly not very comfortable, considering that even with the restaurant’s silent investor, even with Eli giving them a little help, Maggie and Nate have been scrimping and saving and scrimping more, and taking out loans from three banks starting with the letter W and two different ones starting with C. Apparently, actually, three banks that start with C.

  But maybe she was wrong to assume that Gwyn and Thomas were even fairly comfortable. Even if Nate did grow up out in Montauk. Maybe she was wrong to assume.

  “I don’t care about that, Nate,” she says. “How can you think I’d care about that? Your family’s money situation . . . it makes no difference to me.”

  “Really?”

  She nods. “I promise you.”

  “Good,” he says, putting his mouth on her forehead. “Because my family has close to half a billion dollars.”

  Gwyn

  There are rumors, you know. There are always rumors. Rumors that people take as truth without ever getting to it.

  You know, what the actual story is.

  This bothers Gwyn. Rumors, half-truths. Like: with the cake, just as an example. The red velvet cake. The rumor with the red velvet cake is that it was invented—that the first one was made—at the restaurant in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City in the early 1900s. The story goes that the pastry chef there made a cake one night using red dye, and a hotel guest liked the cake so much that she asked for the recipe, only to find out at checkout that she had been billed several hundred dollars for it. When she tried to complain, the hotel refused to remove the charge. Looking to get even, she spread the recipe to all her friends, all over the country. And all her friends forwarded it on to all of their friends. . . .

  The point is that it’s a charming story, but it’s crap. Gwyn knows this. She knows the real story of the red velvet cake, its real history, is less like a fun rumor and more like a warning. The real story, about anything, in Gwyn’s recent experience, is often more like a warning.

  Of how things go wrong.

  Of how they go.

  She sighs—she is not normally a sigher, but she sighs— thinking about it. Then she checks the car clock: 9:15 A.M. Gwyn has been sitting here for a half hour already, in the small parking lot at the East Hampton airport, in her red Volvo wagon. Thomas was supposed to have landed by now. But, of course, he hasn’t. At these small airports, you can’t count on things to go as planned. And besides, Gwyn should be blaming herself, if anyone. She is the one who organized it so that Thomas would get back from his medical conference the morning of their party. It took quite a bit of finagling, in fact, to orchestrate it this way: an overnight flight from LAX to JFK; a second private flight out here. She wanted—no, she needed—Thomas to get back now, this late in the game, so she would know what to do with him, how to keep him busy, so that her plans for tonight stayed in motion, without disruption, exactly as she planned them.

  She isn’t confident, though. Not about any of it going the way she needs it to. Except for the cake. She is confident about the cake. Because she is good at making it, and because it is Thomas’s favorite. It is his favorite thing that she makes for him. It was the first thing she ever made for him: their first date, the two of them sitting on the roof of her building in New York City. The only building she ever lived in in the city, on Riverside Drive. The best thing that it had going for it was its proximity to Columbia (where she had been enrolled at the Teachers College), and its roof—the piece of the river that the roof looked out over. Thomas brought a bottle of wine with him—a 1945 Château Mouton-Rothschild. And they sat on the roof until 2 A.M., eating the red velvet cake, sharing sips of the wine straight from the bottle.

  Of course, the wine could have been from the corner deli for all she knew. She didn’t have any idea then that the wine was worth thousands and thousands of dollars. (Thomas didn’t either. He just grabbed a bottle from his father’s wine cellar before heading in to the city to see her.) Especially, at twenty-two, she wouldn’t have agreed to drink it if she had known.

  But Gwyn knew the most important thing that first night, even if she hadn’t wanted to. Thomas got the last piece of cake. There was the sweet arguing back and forth—you take it, no you take it—but Thomas got it. It makes it fitting, then, that he will get the last piece now too.

  Her phone rings, loud, too loud, even from the bottom of her bag. She searches for it, hoping it is Eve. Let it be Eve. This is the woman Gwyn has hired to cater tonight’s party. Eve Stone of Eve’s Kitchen. Quogue, New York.

  Gwyn has been trying to reach her, all morning, to no avail, and a
ll she can think is that she has no idea how to do this.

  She has no idea how to plan this divorce party tonight. She has been to a few divorce parties. And there are plenty of books she’s found that encourage the idea of having a healing divorce, of celebrating it—Filing Is Not Failing; The Last Dance You Can Dance; Good-bye Can Be Another Word for Hello! But they are for people who aren’t secretly laughing at the idea of a divorce party, people who buy into something Gwyn is only pretending to buy into.

  That things can end well.

  That things can—just—end.

  She flips open her phone right after the fourth ring. “Eve?” she says. “Is that you?”

  “Who’s Eve? No, Mom. It’s me.”

  Me is Georgia. Gwyn’s daughter. Gwyn’s daughter who has no idea what is really happening with her parents. Not her daughter, not her son. Yes, they know their parents are getting divorced. She has been trying to shield them from the rest. Or, at least, this is what she’s told herself. But maybe her motives aren’t as pure as that. Maybe she hasn’t told them everything because, once she does, there is no going back. Once she’s said the words out loud, about what’s really going on, she can’t decide to believe something else.

  “What’s going on, sweetheart?” Gwyn asks, adjusting the phone in her hand. “Is everything okay?”

  "Defiine ‘okay.’ ”

  “Are you in labor?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Good.” Gwyn nods. “That’s good.”

  That is good. Even if Gwyn knows that Georgia gets annoyed every time she asks, it is a relief to her. Georgia has been in from L.A., staying with Gwyn for the last couple of weeks while her French boyfriend, Denis (pronounced, as Georgia loved to remind them, as if they’ve ever gotten it wrong, Den-ee), has been making a record with his band in Omaha, Nebraska. Twenty-five-year-old Georgia, who is eight and a half months pregnant. Eight and a half months pregnant with the baby of a man she has known for ten and a half months. Not the wisest course of action, if anyone asked Gwyn’s opinion on the matter. But no one did.