The Divorce Party

by Laura Dave

  Georgia crosses her arms over her stomach, clutching the top of her belly. “Wow! They’ve officially lost it,” she says.

  Maggie looks back at Gwyn and Thomas still watching each other. It isn’t such a great distance. It isn’t such a great distance to get to the worst place. And she turns toward Nate, even though she doesn’t want to. Even though she wishes that the person she loves most hadn’t put them in a position where the distance to somewhere irreversible feels shorter now, where everything feels so hard. But maybe it just is. For now. And maybe the best thing she can do is just to let it be.

  She reaches for Nate’s hand, holds on to it. “Let’s go somewhere,” she whispers.

  But he doesn’t hear her. “What?” he says.

  “I want to go,” she repeats.

  “Let’s go, then,” he says.

  And he starts to pull her out of the crowd, away from here. But before they can get out, Gwyn starts to speak again, and Maggie turns back. Maggie turns back, which may be the first mistake because she can hear it, something breaking in Gwyn’s voice. She hears something, impossible, starting to break.

  “This is the way we spent our first night together, in a way.

  And in celebration of that, and everything that has come since, we hope you will raise your glasses and join us in a toast as we cut the cake.”

  But there is no cake yet. Which is when Eve starts to wheel it in.

  And Gwyn says: “Please join us for this one last thing.”

  Gwyn

  This one last thing. Her words are drowned out by the thunder. Gwyn almost can’t hear herself, her voice sounding bizarrely far away, displaced, like she has just gotten off a plane, her ears popping, creating a remove she didn’t expect but feels relieved to have. It helps her keep going. To the part that is coming next.

  In a minute, the cake will be front and center. The red velvet cake. There is only enough cake to serve to ten people, or—maybe the way these women eat frosted carbohydrates— all two hundred guests. There is only one person this cake is really for, though. It is the cake he loves best, and the last time she will ever make it for him. This holy man. Holy and unholy. Right and wrong. Good and evil. Is anything that clear-cut? That able to be separated? If it was, it would be easier. It would be easier to avoid being fooled and confused by the people who hurt us. We could recognize the injuries before they came. We could recognize the places where we will never be safe.

  The rain sounds like it is going to break through the barn without any problem at all. Hard, deep raindrops. Breaking only for the claps of thunder. Breaking only for the lightning. Shocks running through her each time.

  There are things Gwyn knows. She is holding a poem in her hand. She is looking out at her children, and Maggie—at all of Thomas’s and her friends. The ones she likes, the ones she doesn’t particularly. They will try to be there for her, on the other side of this, all of them. She knows this. But she also thought she knew something else. She thought there wouldn’t be another side of this. She thought she could count on Thomas. She never thought they would actually reach this moment.

  But Gwyn turns and sees her wheeling the cake in, in a red chef jacket, matching, almost as though she has planned it, the inside of the beautiful cake. Gwyn is looking at the cake so intensely—the red creeping out beneath the white—that it takes her a minute to meet Eve’s eyes, and she almost misses it—almost misses it taking place, the moment that Thomas notices Eve. But Gwyn remembers. She remembers just as Thomas and Eve lock eyes on each other: Eve picking up the cake, holding it in her hands.

  They are still there, in that place new couples are in at the beginning, in that space where they are so happy to see each other. Surprised and in awe. It is you. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you weren’t just a dream. So it takes Thomas a moment to catch the rest of it—what it means that Eve is there. What that means that Gwyn has found out.

  Her husband turns toward her, his eyes open wide, and Gwyn braces herself against it—her natural inclination to support him, to offer herself to him. She looks hard right back at him so that he knows—without a doubt—that she knows everything. She knows the lies he has told, about where he has been these last nine months, about where he is hoping to go now. Without her.

  “Gwyn . . .” Thomas whispers. “Just, please. Let me explain.”

  Let me explain? This is the best he can say in this moment? This is the best he can offer? What three words could be worse? She can’t think of any. She can’t think of any that are less appealing, more useless, than these, promising an excuse for the inexcusable.

  Let me explain. Like: let it go. This is the job. To forgive. To understand. To be generous. Someone else can do that, thank you.

  Eve is standing there with the cake. Gwyn looks at her, and then down at her cart, takes the heavy knife from it.

  She holds it out to her husband. “Cut the cake, Thomas,” she says.

  He shakes his head, refusing to take it. She holds it closer to him, her heart beating in her hands.

  “Do it,” she says.

  “I’m not going to do it, Gwyn,” he says.

  She is aware that they are talking about something other than what they are talking about, but she isn’t sure that he knows exactly what.

  “Yes,” she says. “You are.”

  Everyone is quiet. She can see them, watching, wondering what is happening. She isn’t sure either. She isn’t sure what she is actually asking him to do. She just knows that he isn’t doing it. He’s not doing anything else either. He’s not doing what she needs. His hands are by his sides, and he is completely still— the way he has been, forcing her to move around him to get anywhere.

  Then she sees it. He glances at Eve. Because it is her that he is most concerned with. It is her that he wants to make sure is okay. First and foremost. Someone is always first. Eve, with her eyes cast down at the ground, is first for him.

  And it drops out of Gwyn.

  Her last bit of hope.

  The hope she didn’t fully know she was still holding on to: that confronted in front of their friends, in front of everyone, Thomas would see what he was doing to them, to himself. And that he would turn away from this old fool he is becoming: someone who throws a life away because he is scared. He is scared he is getting too close to the end of his.

  Is it as simple as that? All of a sudden it doesn’t feel much more complicated. All of a sudden, it doesn’t matter anymore.

  She looks over at the cake in Eve’s hand and imagines throwing it at Thomas. But she can throw the cake or not throw it, and he is still going away. He is still never going to make it okay for her: these two million painful decisions he’s made, every lie he’s told, every indignity, every injury at her expense, every bit of strength that she has had to conjure up in order to handle this alone, every one of her own mistakes, every piece of her that wishes she’d never end up here. Thomas is never going to make right the hard, miserable fact that even if she knew it was all going to end here, Gwyn would have chosen him anyway. She would have chosen their life, and spent all of it trying to change his mind.

  The only thing that is going to make any of that okay is Gwyn doing something else.

  Which is when a final, bright belt of lightning illuminates the doorway of the barn, and the driveway outside. Absolutely brilliant, blinding light, momentarily breaking apart the sky.

  It is so beautiful and sure of itself, the crack of thunder so immediate, that it takes a second to understand that it has hit the top of a tree—the tallest tree, wide and solid—about ten feet from the front door of the house. It hits the tree, and the tree starts shaking in place, shaking and stuttering—tilting left, first, then tilting right—and then it breaks, the top half of it, flying forward.

  Breaking through the roof. Sharp and clean. Less like a crash and more like a cut. An incision. Through the roof and down into the second floor of the house.

  The tree embedded there, like it belongs.

&nb
sp; Everyone looks at it, the broken tree, in its new resting place. And now it is truly silent. Gwyn can feel it in her chest. Her heart. She can feel it pushing its way out, against her corseting, against the tight material, absolutely unequal to the task. She starts counting windows, trying to figure out where it has landed. From here it looks like the upstairs hallway. But it could be her bedroom. Thomas’s and her bedroom. From here, it looks like, when she goes inside, she may very well find the heavy tree on top of their bed.

  But, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, Gwyn runs the back of her fingers gently across her forehead.

  She doesn’t look at Thomas. She is done looking at Thomas. In the periphery of her eye, she can make out Eve still holding the cake. It is hers now. Gwyn picks up her glass of wine and tilts it in her guests’ direction, in a final toast. “Thank you for coming,” she says.

  Then she takes a sip, which is lovely and sweet, but which doesn’t at all remind her of the first time she drank it. It could be any wine, it could be any person she first shared it with, any person she was sharing it with now.

  This feels like its own kind of hope.

  So she takes them with her—the bottle, her glass. She takes them with her, and starts to walk out of the barn, into the rain, and toward her newly broken house.

  part four

  parting gifts

  Never, never, never could one conceive what love is beforehand, never.

  —D. H. Lawrence, after meeting his future wife

  Maggie

  There is a tree in the middle of the house.

  No one is hurt, which feels like the biggest thing, until no one is hurt, and then the biggest thing is that there is a tree in the middle of the house. It has broken all the way through the roof, through the top floor of the house, down the center staircase, like the end of a hundred promises, like the end of whatever had been holding the place up before.

  It has cut the house down the middle, or at least from Maggie’s angle, it seems to have cut the house down the middle. She stands looking up at it from the bottom of the staircase—its branches coming down the steps, its leaves at her feet.

  Everything in here is still frozen. And outside—what just happened outside—feels far away. There was something remarkable about two hundred people stunned silent. Stunned silent, and still. Something grave and impressive about all those people watching in wide-eyed horror as things ceremoniously fell apart.

  After the tree hit, no one knew what to do. Most people departed, moving quickly back to their cars—those who could get to their cars. Others hitched a ride with people whose cars weren’t blocked. But some stuck around in the barn, offering to call for help, offering to help themselves, as if there were anyone who could make things better now.

  She saw one very short man who was particularly upset, talking about how he couldn’t believe that this was happening to his house. He was searching frantically for Gwyn.

  “I’m still interested,” he said, when he found her. “But less so.”

  “That’s shocking,” Gwyn said, walking away from him.

  Now, Gwyn is gone. Gwyn and Thomas and Georgia.

  It scared Georgia. Watching the tree hit her house, break it in two. It scared her enough that she felt something move around inside of her—felt something wrong and hard jump inside of herself—and despite Thomas’s assurances that she was fine, that she had nothing to be worried about, they are currently driving down into town, through town, to the hospital—to the emergency room, and a doctor who can hook her up to a machine and guarantee her that everything is fine.

  The three of them heading to the hospital. In Eve’s van.

  Georgia and Gwyn and Thomas in the van. Because it wasn’t blocked in. Because the Volvos were beyond blocked in. But Eve’s vine van was by itself over at the Buckleys’.

  And Nate is walking around on the roof. Like a crazy person. Like it is something he knows how to do: trying to measure the damage, trying to measure whether the tree will stay still or sink deeper into the house before the morning, putting them at further risk.

  And Maggie is alone again.

  In this house, alone again, but this time with the tree.

  The rain has stopped. Still, she is half expecting Nate to slip up there, and to come falling down through the branches. To ride the trunk downward, like a too-long slide. Barring that unfortunate outcome, she is feeling too outside of herself—too much like she is watching her life as opposed to living this moment in it—to figure out what happens next. In a general sense, and in a less general one. They will probably not be able to sleep here tonight. How could they? And yet, if not tomorrow, soon they’ll have to leave here. Not just Nate and her. But the rest of his family. They won’t be able to do anything here anymore unless they try to fix this place, and something tells Maggie that fixing anything here is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

  She hears someone behind her. She hears the footsteps behind her, and turns to see a handsome guy, but a little too baby-faced for his own good. He is carrying a duffel bag and a guitar case, and his hand is poorly wrapped in a thick Ace bandage.

  And he is, maybe, seven feet tall. Or he looks that tall. From where Maggie stands he looks not unlike the tree.

  “Hello,” he says.

  “Hello there.”

  He doesn’t look at her. He is looking up at the tree, turning his head to the side, as if staring at a tree from a different angle would help it make any more sense.

  “Quite a mess someone has made here, isn’t it?” he says.

  “You could say that.”

  “I just did.”

  She looks at him, confused and embarrassed for some reason. She feels, more than anything, a little embarrassed. “Can I help you with something?” she asks.

  “I’m looking for Georgia, actually,” he says, which is when she notices it. The French accent. Georgia’s name made to sound like a slumber party. Zoor-zsa. I’m looking for Zoor-zsa.

  “Denis?”

  He is silent.

  “You’re Denis?”

  He gives her a small wave, only he is still staring up. He puts his stuff down at his feet and keeps looking up at the tree. He doesn’t ask her who she is, which Maggie guesses means he doesn’t care.

  But then he smiles at her, a big round smile that makes his cheeks puff out, bloat, and it reveals a crooked tooth in his mouth—which, Maggie thinks, may be the best part of him.

  “You’re Maggie. The food writer.”

  “Former food writer.”

  He nods. “Former, of course,” he says. “It is nice to finally meet you. We’ve got a photograph of you in our living room, on top of the fireplace. On the shelf that Nate built. It’s of you and Nate standing under a tree at some vineyard, holding wine-glasses. You look a lot better in person, if you don’t mind my saying so. Less, what are the words . . . washed out?”

  She feels herself start to laugh, in spite of herself. “Thanks,” she says. “I think.”

  “No problem.”

  He rubs his hands together and heads to the staircase, starts bouncing up and down on the lower steps, pulling on the railing with a tight fist, leaves flying around from the impact.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking the endurance.”

  Checking the endurance? “Maybe I’m a little slow here, but what does that mean?”

  “It means the tree is stuck where it is. You don’t have to worry. It’s fallen as much as it is going to fall. It will stay where it is until someone gets here and does something else with it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you not?” he says.

  She looks at him, confused, this guy who came out of nowhere, just like Georgia was hoping he would, just like Georgia would be thrilled to see he has, if she wasn’t currently on a strange ride with her parents.

  He steps down so he is eye to eye with Maggie. “I guess I missed the party, then?” he says.

  “You co
uld say that.”

  “So where’s my girl, then?”

  “That’s a little complicated. I don’t want you to get upset, there’s no reason to get upset, but she’s on her way to the hospital with Thomas and Gwyn. Thomas says she is fine, that he’s sure she is just a bit rattled from everything. When Nate gets down from the top of the roof, we’ll take you there.”

  His eyes light up. “Nate’s on the top of the roof? Right now?” he says.

  This was his take-away?

  “How about I go and get him? Let him know my opinion about the tree? Afterward he can take me to see Georgia. By then she should be calm enough to welcome me with open arms.”

  He pats her on the arm, almost like she is his little sister, and starts to head back the way he came. To find Nate. To go on a little adventure with him, jumping around on the badly broken roof.

  “You know, no one thought you were coming,” she says.

  He stops walking. “What’s that?”

  “No one thought you were coming tonight,” she says. “No one thought you were going to show up.”

  He looks at her, not the least bit offended, giving her a big, slightly aggressive smile.

  “Except for Georgia,” he says.

  “Except for Georgia,” she says.

  “So apparently she knows something that everyone else doesn’t,” he says.

  “Apparently,” Maggie says, because maybe she does.

  Maggie feels Denis looking down at her, as if waiting for the next thing she was going to say, the next thing she was going to throw at him. So she pretends she has a right, or permission to say it.