The Divorce Party

by Laura Dave

  “You’re having a girl,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re having a little girl,” she says.

  She can’t believe she has said it. She is glad it is out there, though, because she wants to hear an answer. She wants to hear an answer that will convince her—that will convince anyone listening—that people can come through, in their own time, that any love story can end well, even with endless evidence banking up that it is going to end another way.

  His whole face breaks open, joyful and full of pride. Real, stand-up-taller pride. “We’re having a little girl? Excellent. It couldn’t be more excellent.”

  Maggie nods. “It is. It is excellent.”

  He pauses. “You think Georgia would consider naming her Omaha?”

  And then there’s that.

  Gwyn

  They are driving Georgia to the hospital in Eve’s van. They are driving Georgia to the hospital in Eve’s van because it was the only vehicle they could get out easily, and quickly, all the other ones still blocked in by the people trickling out of the party, only slowly making their way off their property.

  Georgia is lying down in the back, and Gwyn is up front with Thomas, who is driving. Georgia seems to be sleeping in the back, which feels like more evidence that she is fine, that she has worked herself up—and nothing more.

  Thomas hasn’t bothered to change his clothes—neither of them has, making them look especially fancy, especially out of place, in this breaking-down van. She looks at the dashboard, which is covered with painted-on butterflies and socialist bumper stickers, a communist flag sticking to the top, suctioned there by a small cup. She doesn’t look at her husband.

  Thomas is looking straight ahead too, out the windshield, away from her. She knows that he wants to say something. He is still, after everything, just trying to figure out how.

  “I never thought it would get this far,” he says, finally. He speaks almost inaudibly. In case Georgia is awake. In case she is listening.

  “That’s no excuse,” she says.

  “You would have told me I was making a mistake and tried to convince me to do something else,” he says.

  “So you lied for you?”

  “I lied for both of us.”

  “How do you figure?”

  His whisper gets louder. “You would have told me I was making a mistake and tried to convince me to do something else.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “I was trying to make it easier, Gwyn,” he says.

  She turns and looks at his profile, his wide-open eyes. Usually they look innocent to her, and probably will again. But right now they just look cowardly. “Who says it should be easy?”

  “I didn’t say easy. None of this is easy. I said easier.”

  “Fine, Thomas, who says it should be easier?”

  He looks upset. He looks so upset that she looks away. What is she hoping to accomplish? To make him feel so bad that he stays? That won’t make her happy, not for long anyway. Not in a sustainable way. Besides, she learned this lesson a long time ago: just because a man looks upset, just because he is upset, doesn’t mean he is going to do anything to correct the situation. For himself, for anyone else.

  She turns and looks at her husband, carefully, takes a deep breath in. “You really think you love her,” she says.

  “I wouldn’t be putting us through this if I didn’t. I wouldn’t be risking everything.”

  “It wasn’t a question, Thomas.”

  “What is your question?”

  She won’t ask it. Not after thirty-five years of marriage, thirty-six years since they sat together on her building’s roof on Riverside Drive. She won’t ask it and sound like a love-struck teenager—even if, at our core, whenever we are asking someone to love us who won’t, we are all love-struck teenagers, trying to understand: Why not me?

  “Will it make you feel better, Gwyn?”

  “What?” she says. She doesn’t know what he is talking about. She hasn’t said anything out loud.

  “That I’ll be sorry?”

  She looks at him, and wonders if he believes that. He should. Because Gwyn can’t compete with Eve now. She can’t offer him the exact pleasures that go along with the opportunity to be a clean slate, again, everything possible in the eyes of someone new. But Eve—or whoever comes after Eve—can’t save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she has spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don’t. But if you don’t, you get to the same point with the next person, don’t you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can’t see in yourself.

  “Maybe it will all work out for the best,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  Which is when Georgia calls to her from the back. “Mom, I need you! Can you come back here? I can’t find my necklace, my horseshoe necklace. The one that Denis got me. Maybe I left it back at the house. But I thought I had it on. And it could be back here. It could be back here somewhere. Can you help me look, please? Because it does that. It falls off.”

  “Coming,” Gwyn says, as she unstraps herself and starts to head to the back of the van, where Georgia is on her back. But Thomas stops her. He reaches out and touches her arm, holds her there on the inside of her elbow.

  “I have been studying Buddhism, though,” he says. “For whatever it’s worth to know that. I’ve gone on Saturday mornings for silent meditation, and I did go to a retreat upstate. It wasn’t as long as I said, but I did go to one. I do feel . . . interested in the teachings.”

  She has wondered how Thomas is going to get out of the Buddhism thing after the divorce. How was he planning on getting out of that? Post-divorce, telling them he changed his mind? Post-divorce, telling their kids that he now believes in something else? Maybe in the end it won’t matter anyway. Maybe it is far easier to forgive your father for being fickle about his beliefs than for being fickle about your mother.

  “Thomas, I went to the meditation center in Oyster Bay. I know you haven’t been there. I know you have never been there.”

  “I’ve been going to a different one.”

  “A different meditation center?”

  He nods.

  It takes Gwyn a minute. It takes Gwyn a minute to get to where he is trying to take her. “To the one Eve goes to?”

  “To the one Eve goes to, yes,” he says.

  She looks at her husband, just looks at him. No judgment. “What have you learned, Thomas?” she says. “Tell me one true thing.”

  He thinks about it, and then he takes his eyes off the road, for a moment, and looks at her.

  “We don’t know anything,” he says. “About what is coming next.”

  Maggie

  Nate is getting ready to take Denis to the hospital. He has changed into jeans and a paint-stained THE HOLD STEADY T-shirt, and is still wearing his orange Converse, which she stares down at when he asks her to come with him, when she tries to figure out why she says no. She decides it is better for her to stay behind for now. She decides—even if the reasons aren’t entirely clear to her yet—that she is better off staying in this broken house without him, and if not right away, then soon, surveying the different rooms on the first floor for the worst damage, and using the empty wine boxes to store away what may get lost or damaged.

  They are standing on the porch, by the front door, Denis already in the car, ready to get going. Nate looks nervous, shifty, and shifting, from foot to foot. She knows he wants to ask her if she’ll be here when he gets back, and feels bad that she isn’t making that part easier.

  He smiles at her, but she can’t make that easier yet either. She can’t kick the feeling that something very important has
been forgotten.

  “Where did you go before? Did you walk all the way into town and change your mind?”

  “I didn’t even get that far. I ended up next door at the Buckleys’ talking to Eve.”

  “Eve as in the caterer?”

  “Eve as in the caterer.”

  She pauses, focuses on the word STEADY on his T-shirt before considering whether she is going to say it, before deciding that it really isn’t a good idea, and then saying it anyway.

  “I think she is having an affair with your dad.”

  “What?”

  He looks like she punched him. That’s what he looks like, instinctively stepping back from her. He gives her a stern look, and all of a sudden it feels like he isn’t sure he can see her. All day she hasn’t been able to see him, and now it is mutual. Maggie isn’t sure that this is better, but it surprisingly doesn’t feel a whole lot worse.

  She puts her hand on his chest, on the STEADY.

  “What are you talking about?” he says.

  “I’m sorry but there were just things she was saying. And then the way your father has been acting. And maybe I’m particularly sensitive to it today, but I still know what I know. I still think I know what I know. Eve said too many things, knew too many things, for me not to start adding it all up.”

  He shakes his head. “I think you’re wrong.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense. You’re talking about someone my mother hired to have here tonight. Someone my mother interacted with. This is who you’re saying my father is involved with?”

  Maggie doesn’t even have to think about this. She doesn’t even have to think if Gwyn knows. Ten minutes with Gwyn, and she knows that Gwyn knows everything: the way so many people do who are underestimated, for a million reasons or one, and therefore have more time to pay close attention.

  “Yes,” she says.

  She makes herself meet Nate’s eyes, wondering what he is thinking, wondering if he is mad at her now, too. And maybe he should be, maybe she would be if the situation were reversed. She has no proof about Eve, nothing really close to proof. But maybe being mad—either of them, both of them—isn’t so dangerous anymore, and doesn’t feel like the thing she should be running from at such incredible speeds. Maybe her fear of anger, and discomfort—both of their fears of that—has contributed to all of this. It has kept them less honest.

  She is surprised he hasn’t yet asked her: why is she saying this, why is she telling him right now, even if it is true?

  “Okay, well . . .” he says. “I’ll have to think about that.”

  And maybe they are being honest now, because he does it— what he seemed to be unable to do before. He looks annoyed, really annoyed in a way that seems to indicate that he isn’t going to retreat, but step farther in.

  “So you’ll be here when I get back from the hospital?” he says. “Do I get to ask you that?”

  She nods.

  “Does that mean I get to ask that or that you’ll be here?”

  “Either, both.”

  “Same answer?” he says.

  “Same answer,” she says.

  She knows he needs her to say something, something hopeful, but she isn’t sure what to say. And then Denis honks from the car. He honks, in beat, and it takes Maggie a minute to place it, for what it is. A song. A song she can recognize. “Harvest” by Neil Young. The very song she was listening to that morning. What are the odds of such a thing? What are the odds?

  “I think that’s ‘Harvest’ he is strumming out there on the horn,” she says. “I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure that is what is happening.”

  He looks in the direction of the car. “That’s something,” he says, raising his eyebrows.

  “No, you don’t understand. I was listening to it this morning,” she says. This morning in Red Hook. It feels impossibly far away now. And yet it’s not, is it? If she can still remember the song she was listening to, it’s only as far away as she decides it needs to be.

  Nate reaches out and touches her cheek, first with the outside of his fingers, then with the insides. “You listen to it every morning,” he says. Then he pauses. “Don’t think too much while I’m gone, okay?”

  “I was just starting to get somewhere hopeful.”

  He shakes his head. “Still, that can flip on a dime.”

  She smiles. “So what should I do instead?”

  “Well, you’re an excellent cleaner . . .”

  She shrugs. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  He smiles. “I’ll be back soon. We’ll start today over.”

  “There’s no starting over, Nate,” she says.

  He has started to walk off the porch, but he turns back, holds her gaze. “So, we’ll figure out a way,” he says. “To start here.”

  Gwyn

  She stands looking through the small window on the hospital room door at her husband holding her daughter. They are lying on the far bed in the room, the other bed empty. Georgia is not in labor—false or any other kind—but she is too worked up to go home tonight. And really, what home would she go to? There is a tree in the middle of the one Gwyn has to offer her.

  Georgia is better off here: Thomas’s arms wrapped around her, her head buried in his chest. His suit wrinkled, the jacket still on. He hasn’t even thought to take it off, to loosen his tie. But who is focused on what makes sense, on changing clothes, on getting on with it? Thomas isn’t. From here, from where Gwyn stands, her husband is focused on only one thing now, keeping Georgia calm.

  Gwyn holds a paper tray of watered-down decaf coffees from the hospital cafeteria. They are terrible and too hot, but they would be welcomed by both of them. She is planning to give them the coffee and then head home to get a change of clothes for Georgia. She plans to head home to get Georgia whatever she needs to stay here. Still, she can’t seem to make herself move. She stays where she is, doesn’t make a move to go in. But maybe she should have. Because, a moment later, as she is still standing there, she feels her presence behind her. Eve.

  Gwyn doesn’t say anything at first. She leaves it in Eve’s court to do whatever she has come here to do.

  “I thought we could trade,” she says, holding out Gwyn’s keys so she can see them, a strange peace offering. “That you’d want your car. I drove it down here for you guys to take home.”

  Gwyn turns to her, and takes them. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  “We left yours in the van. Thomas seemed to think it would be okay. He put them in the glove compartment. I hope he was right to do that.”

  “He was,” Eve says, and goes to stand next to Gwyn by the window—looking in on them. “About that.”

  “About that,” Gwyn repeats.

  “How is Georgia doing?”

  “She’s fine. Just a little shaken up. We would take her home, to what’s left of it, but she’s probably better off here. So she’ll stay here for the night. I’ll go home and get her some things, make it comfortable for her.”

  Eve nods and Gwyn wonders what she sees when she looks at Thomas and Georgia. Does she see her future stepdaughter, who is the same age as she is? Does she think about having her own child with Thomas? Or is she not thinking about any of that—just hoping that he’ll look outside, so she can catch his eye, and be sure that, despite tonight, he still loves her?

  “She looks peaceful,” Eve says.

  “Her father has that effect on her.”

  They are silent, both continuing to look through the glass at the man they share. Even being with Eve out here, she still feels it rising in her—a generosity toward Thomas again. She feels generous as she watches him with their daughter. He loves their daughter. He loves Nate. He even loves Gwyn. He has done the best he thinks he could for her, for as long as he could for her. Now he is going to go do something else. He has given himself permission.

  She turns and looks at Eve. “The storm’s over?”

  “Yes,” Eve sa
ys, a little enthusiastically. A little too happy to offer some good news. “It’s dry as can be outside, almost like nothing ever happened.”

  “Except I have a tree through my roof to prove that it did.”

  “As if you need proof,” she says.

  “As if I need the proof,” Gwyn says, and smiles. In spite of herself.

  Eve smiles too, and it lights her face up, almost makes her pretty. Not quite, but almost. When Thomas starts retreating from Eve years from now—when she gives up on him and heads back to Big Sur—she smiles at him in this exact way, but he has a different thought than Gwyn has now, or at least, he names it to himself in a different way. He thinks, just leave. He will tell Gwyn this, and she will laugh because they are friends by then. And because she knows Thomas misses her, misses telling her things, and just misses her. He never abjectly notes that he made the greatest error of his life in leaving her, in how he left her, but after Eve is gone, Gwyn knows he will wonder if this is true. Even if it is too late for him to do anything about it. Even if it is too late to even admit, fully to himself, the cost of it. Who can ever admit that, Gwyn wonders? Probably someone who wouldn’t have left in the first place.

  Only right now, Eve is still in front of her, present. More than present. And she is waiting for something more from Gwyn. This is her own fault, Gwyn thinks, for the shared smile—for the joke. It has probably made Eve think that things are about to go another way.

  “I really do love him, Gwyn,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tommy. I love him. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone, for whatever that is worth.”

  Gwyn reaches for the doorknob, her hand starting to turn it. This could go one of two ways. At the end of the day, how big of a person is anyone really supposed to be? “Not a lot,” she says.

  “Fair enough,” Eve says, and gives her a final, sad smile, and starts to walk away.

  She starts to walk away, out toward her vine van to wait at home for Thomas’s call, to listen as he says he isn’t coming to her tonight, but he’s coming tomorrow. He’s coming soon.