by Richard Ford
“No,” Charlotte said. “We can’t.” She had no idea what he was talking about, but for some reason—goodness knew why—she felt irritated, and gladder than she had been that she was leaving him.
“I do like to be around you. I like it very much,” Jonathan said.
“I like being around you,” Charlotte said. “Maybe we’ll be able to do that better when we’re not married.”
“May be.” Then he said, “I think it’d be better not to tell Byron and Tweedy about this. Don’t you? They can find out later.” He’d said this suddenly. It seemed unlike him. But he was embarrassed, she supposed. It must be, Charlotte thought, his way of expressing shock and loss.
“Absolutely,” Charlotte said. “I’d been thinking about that.” Though she hadn’t. “We’ll tell them sometime. We can have two nice days together.”
“Yes,” Jonathan said. “We certainly can do that.”
And that was all they said that day on the subject of their divorce.
AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, A YEAR AFTER THEIR DIVORCE, CHARLOTTE called Jonathan to ask if he would drive with her to Yonkers to visit her mother in River Mansions, where her mother was living and which Charlotte had worked hard to arrange. The summer of their divorce Charlotte’s mother Beezy (Beatrice) had suffered a sickening, debilitating stroke in her home in Alpine, and Charlotte had moved her across to the Mansions, overlooking (almost) the Hudson. It was a nice clean facility run by Lutherans, and easy for Charlotte to stop off if she took the Saw Mill up. Jonathan had visited there once to be polite but had stopped coming once their divorce was official.
Since arriving to River Mansions, Charlotte’s mother, who’d turned eighty, had precipitously declined and was no longer always lucid. Though when she was, she talked enthusiastically about death and nothingness, and Charlotte complained to Jonathan that visiting her (three times a week) had begun eroding her—Charlotte’s—sense of personal vivacity, leaving her frequently feeling distressed. Charlotte feared, she said, that this could be moving her toward depression, since by the time she got home from Sotheby’s (even on the days she didn’t see her mother), all she wanted to do was pour a big glass of chilled Tanqueray and go to sleep watching TV. Most weekends, if she wasn’t showing houses, she just stayed home and slept. She’d also sometimes found herself crying for no apparent reason—which she thought was “not like Charlotte,” who didn’t have a depressive personality.
Jonathan had seen Charlotte only two times in the year they had become ex-spouses—an expression he detested, since it was glib and quite cynical, and missed important facets of human experience that couldn’t be glibly erased. A texture in things. Once, he’d seen Charlotte at the Loew’s on Second Avenue, as he was coming out of Other People’s Lives. Charlotte was with a tall, stern-faced man who looked to Jonathan like a lawyer—wide, clothes-hanger shoulders, angular like an eagle, with shiny, slicked-back dark hair, aviators, and a tan. Very different from himself. Charlotte had looked beautiful—lanky and loose-limbed in a pair of wafer-thin blue sandals and some kind of short, spangly Mexican dress he’d never seen her wear. She seemed surprised but happy to see him and introduced him the way you’d introduce a new friend to an old friend—not how you’d introduce your former husband to your boyfriend. At least Jonathan felt this way, but was cordial. Jake seemed to be the man’s name. He seemed indifferent.
The second time he’d encountered Charlotte was on his own block on Watts Street, a chilly morning in late October when he’d been for a walk to the river. Charlotte was seated on a building stoop, wearing a long green wool sweater, writing onto a clear-plastic clipboard, obviously awaiting a client. Jonathan wondered if the client was the raptor/aviator guy, but supposed not. When he approached, Charlotte seemed tired and kept looking him in the eye from where she stayed sitting on the stoop, as if she didn’t know what to say or why he was even here. Jonathan didn’t know what to say either. In Chicago, you wouldn’t have said anything, would’ve crossed the street to avoid contact. Which of course he wouldn’t do. Something about seeing Charlotte, though, made him think about his parents, dead and in their graves downstate, near Springfield—where they were from. Guy and Betty. Fifty-one years together. Divorce hadn’t been in their vocabulary, as Jonathan didn’t think it was really in his—though it was now. In his dream, they were sitting in a car, an old Ford, laughing. Thinking of them—which he didn’t do often—was like a strange, vivid but pleasant dream. He missed them.
Charlotte brightened, gave him her glorious, warming smile and overcame her fatigue and brief dislocation. She asked to know what he’d been up to, and if he was “well.” She blinked flirtatiously, the way she had when she’d shown him the loft, nearly three years ago. He told her—awkwardly—that he’d become more deeply involved in his school. He’d experienced some luck with the hedge fund, had fresh capital, and was adding an arts wing to the previously damaged building. He told her he was going up to Columbia for an extended ed class in European intellectual history, something he’d always expected to do. He’d been to Scotland fishing with Bailes (though he didn’t tell her he’d had a sorry time). He was about to tell her he’d met someone he liked—a woman who worked for the Metropolitan. But Charlotte’s phone began ringing inside her purple NYU bag. She’d frowned and said, “These things are the ruin of my life. I’ll get rid of it quick.” Whoever was calling, though, caused Charlotte to stand up off the step and walk slowly down the sidewalk, her voice going softer, changing in resonance to something private. Jonathan stood a few moments, waiting for her to come back and let him tell her about his new friend—Emma—or to signal this was a longer call than she’d thought. After a minute, Charlotte had put her hand against a lamppost and lowered her head, going on talking, her back to Jonathan. And he’d just walked on toward his building, since she seemed to have forgotten him. When he reached his entry, he turned and looked at Charlotte, but she was still talking, her head lowered. He had gone along inside.
After that, he did not bump into Charlotte again, as if it had been completely inevitable to see her two times, and completely inevitable that it never happen again. Once—it was only for an instant—he thought that he saw Charlotte in O’Hare. The tall woman he’d glimpsed going up an escalator as he was going down had had Charlotte’s thick, golden mane and stood on the escalator in a hip-thrown, sidelong way Charlotte often stood. But he quickly realized—when the woman noticed he was staring—that it wasn’t Charlotte, and thinking it was only meant she was on his mind not far below the surface. Which he didn’t expect was true, but still was natural, he thought, though not important; a human reflex that would fade with time, even if it never disappeared forever.
Still. He didn’t quite understand how one could be married to Charlotte Porter—or to anyone—for part of only two years, be happy with her, believe she was happy with him, and then get divorced as easily as you stepped off the #1 train at Canal Street. Or for that matter, as easily as you’d gotten married in the first place. And more. What he really didn’t understand was how it had all been not very difficult for him—given his traditional views, his previous long marriage, his parents’ extremely long and devoted marriage, plus his positivist thoughts about the enfolding rationales for marriage—which he’d believed he and Charlotte had mutually begun to fortify, but about which he’d apparently been entirely wrong. Charlotte’s views stressed spontaneity, discouraged complication and the examined life, while favoring a more immediate, simpler, low-hanging fruit mentality. Many people were that way, he knew. (This, he realized, was somewhat oversimplifying Charlotte.)
But how had he adapted?
Perhaps, quite possibly, Jonathan thought, even though his old system of proper knowing, learning, developing, penetrating didn’t comprehend what he was now experiencing, it was perfectly possible he himself did comprehend it—in the way, more or less, one comprehended by instinct that an oil well was about to pay off, in spite of much evidence to the contrary. Possibly there was a gap betw
een his old belief system and himself. The fact that it hadn’t been all that terrible not to be married to lovely Charlotte was arguably proof of a more genuine, up-to-date, if wordless, awareness of himself. Which (conceivably) was why he’d said to Charlotte, on the sun-warmed seawall in Tenants Harbor, when she’d told him she wanted not to be his wife anymore, that everything was a skein. (He had otherwise not made much sense that day.) It was a whole new way of seeing the world—something Charlotte did fairly naturally. He and Charlotte, by this rationale, were divorced, but still together in a way that lacked a positive vocabulary but was genuine and more reliable than marriage because it left each of them free—he wasn’t sure what the correct word would be. Autonomous, possibly, something he’d never placed that much value on—always preferring commitment, duty, and responsibility. It was, however, as if divorce could be a new and better version of long marriage—something he’d never thought of, but would.
Jonathan’s daughter Celia, who had been visiting from California, told him that in her view her mother’s death had brought about a “mini-nervous-breakdown” in him, and that Charlotte Porter (glamorous, winning, and mysterious—to him, at least) had just been a symptom. Someone who bridged denial and bargaining. Celia’d studied for a degree in public health at SMU. It was, she believed, healthy that it had ended congenially with Charlotte—good for the next stage of life—whatever that was to be. It was probably even good that he’d married Charlotte, and that she was the kind of alluringly impenetrable woman for whom longevity was never a reality. Celia used the expression “scar tissue” somewhere in this context, which caused Jonathan to speak sharply to her, to the point that her facile grad-school terminology diminished him and disappointed him that she could say these things. She was not seeing his life as complexly as it should be seen. To which Celia offered no argument, merely hung around for a long weekend in the city, went out a lot, then flew back to Tucson where she taught in a Montessori and lived with her husband.
The morning she left, however, Jonathan had waked in a tumult and a sense of jarring surprise at being where he was—alone in his apartment on Watts Street—and not somewhere else. Where, he didn’t know. This sensation seemed to have something to do with Charlotte, though he certainly didn’t want to call her up to ask what it could be, as if she might be feeling the same way. Which he was sure she wasn’t. A dimension of his intense but brief life married to Charlotte was that in addition to each of them seeming to have few friends, he knew virtually no one who knew her. And Charlotte knew virtually no one (apart from Bailes and Celia) who knew him—which didn’t matter to Charlotte. But this sensation of being jarred (frustration and disorientation, really), suggested he needed, or wanted, to know something he didn’t know from someone he didn’t know—about Charlotte. He couldn’t imagine what it was. Anyone might’ve said—Celia—that this was all just a veiled expression of loneliness.
Likeliest, Jonathan felt, the person (the only person) who might know what he was talking to himself about would be Charlotte’s departed former husband. In Ireland. The mariner/architect. Dolan. There’d always been a connection (at least Jonathan acknowledged one) between Francis Dolan and himself, which Dolan might very well respond to empathetically if offered the chance—even though Dolan had totally abandoned Charlotte to ply the seas, whereas Charlotte had abandoned Jonathan for no reason other than that she wanted to and seemed not to regret.
In mid-February, just after Valentine’s (in complete violation of his bold new understandings about marriage and the skein of life), Jonathan called Francis Dolan in County Kerry, where Dolan conducted his architect’s practice and lived with a Polish wife and his ungrateful children. It was not at all hard to find the number. And there would be no need to reveal the call to Charlotte, who (he realized) might not have objected, but would’ve made him feel strange just by knowing.
Francis Dolan was coolly polite when Jonathan spoke his own name into the phone and identified himself as Jonathan Bell, who’d married Charlotte, after he (Dolan) had been married to her, but was now also divorced from her just as he (Dolan) was . . . and was now calling from overseas, wanting exactly what? “Ah-ah-ah, yes. Right, right,” Dolan said, sounding surprisingly Irish. Jonathan hadn’t expected that. It was nine in the morning in New York. It was two where Dolan was. A place called Dunquin. By the sea. Francis Dolan would be in the middle of his architect’s work day, drawing up something on a big table.
“I’m sorry to call you in the middle of your work day,” Jonathan said, feeling stupid, as if the time was not his own choosing.
“There we are. Okay,” Francis Dolan said. “Has something got the matter with Charlotte?”
“No,” Jonathan said. “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s not why I’m calling. I don’t mean to alarm you.”
“Well. Good then,” Francis Dolan said. “What is it I can do for you? Is it John?”
“Yes,” Jonathan said. “Jonathan Bell. In New York.”
“What can I do for you, Jonathan?”
Francis Dolan was now a certifiable person, standing probably before a huge, mullioned window confronting the sea, possibly wearing a heavy woolen cardigan. Francis Dolan was fifty-two. Jonathan had seen a picture with the children at Charlotte’s—tall, lean with a scrunched Irish face and curly black hair—in just such a sweater. Suddenly, however, wishing to say what Dolan could do for him, all the brash, tumultuous, jarring alarm and disorientation that had caused Jonathan to believe he needed to know something about Charlotte went abruptly still. He’d expected a question to simply formulate in his mind the instant he was on the line with architect Dolan—as he now was. But it did not. Instead there was only silence. Which was not a question. He felt cripplingly embarrassed and childish.
“I wanted to ask you a question about Charlotte,” he managed to say to Dolan—eliciting another silence, a sigh, then the sound of something being poured into something else. A glass. Water. A glass of water on a desk.
“What would that be?” Francis Dolan said, his voice sounding as if he’d cast a glance out the window. “I’ve not spoken to Charlotte in quite a while. I’d say years. The children barely have contact though they love her well enough, I guess. Are you not married to her?”
“No,” Jonathan said. “We divorced. Last year.”
“Ah-ah-ah, yes,” Dolan said. “You mentioned that in your leader. Sorry. What is it you want to know, then? I don’t know anything anymore.”
Jonathan suddenly then did know precisely what he wanted to ask of this man whose life he’d intruded upon with no warning, had never met and would never meet, and with whom he had no connection whatsoever—in spite of idiotically supposing he might. “I wanted to know how you feel about Charlotte,” Jonathan said. “I’m having a hard time knowing how I’m supposed to feel, being divorced from her.” The possibility that he was having a mini-nervous-breakdown now seemed completely plausible. He stared out his own window toward the great airy sky-space that the World Trade Center once dominated.
“Say again,” Francis Dolan said. From Ireland. “How I feel about her?”
“I realize it’s . . .” Jonathan said.
“Well, that’s completely out of line, isn’t it?” Francis Dolan said. “Have you been drinking, Jonathan? How do I feel about Charlotte? How does anybody feel about Charlotte? She’s totally self-consumed. And totally irresistible. You have to survive her. You don’t know that? That’s why she has no friends.”
“No,” Jonathan said, only about the drinking.
“Is this a hoax of some kind?”
“No,” Jonathan said. “But this call’s out of line. Like you say. I hope you can forgive me.”
“Forgive you. Well. Grand. Of course,” Francis Dolan said.
“I’m sorry. I’ll just hang up,” Jonathan said. “You won’t hear from me again.”
“Well. That’ll be grand then, too,” Francis Dolan said. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” Jonathan said an
d hung up the phone and felt—though he did not succumb to it—the gasping, cringing, gut-cramping urge to shout out. He wasn’t sure what he would shout.
CHARLOTTE DROVE THEM—IN HER ’92, CREAM-COLORED MERCEDES estate wagon with three hundred on the odometer and Sotheby/Charlotte Porter realty signs stacked in the back. She picked Jonathan up after a showing, and they drove up the West Side toward Yonkers, where Charlotte’s mother was in River Mansions. It was Labor Day. Little traffic. That would come when the weekenders swarmed back and all the bridges and parkways clogged and things got hellish. The shining river beside them formed a steely mask in the late-morning sun, tidal currents working barges against the flow. The sky above New Jersey was flat summer white behind the rows of apartment towers and the big planes settling down to Newark.
As they drove up toward the Henry Hudson Bridge, a dog—a big loping saddle-brown hound that looked to Jonathan well cared for, a sporting dog—ran across the highway, stopped at the median fence and sat down to watch the cars whiz past. It was contemplating the other lanes. Not a good chance, Jonathan thought. He and Charlotte would see this dog again on their way back to town.
Charlotte didn’t seem the least depressed or concerned about her mother. She seemed happy. She was thinner and wore a pair of jaunty yellow-framed glasses and had shortened her hair and colored it darker. From weight loss she now had deeper smile lines, which made her look older than he remembered. He hadn’t seen her since the day in the street. A year. She was still radiant and spirited and engaging and lovely. He’d remarked to himself as he waited for her in the lobby, that he no longer had any interest in being married to Charlotte (for all the good reasons he’d schooled himself in); but he knew he would marry her, which was possibly exactly what they should do. It didn’t seem any less likely than that they wouldn’t. Those old, mossy congruities were long over with. Good riddance. It had made him feel pleasingly satisfied as he waited for her.
