fourteen
As Sarah’s February Court Day came on, Merriwether felt suspended in nostalgia and melancholy. “This is the last Monday of my married life.” And the day itself: “So it’s really here. It’s all over.” That morning he lectured his undergraduate class about the evidence for thinking the genetic nucleus had been formed out of the symbiosis of two organisms. “As, say, the word ‘another’ is independent of both ‘an’ and ‘other’ yet is clearly their product. So the older, rather inflexible transmission capacity of cytoplasm gave way to this superbly organized method.” The analogy in his notes was marriage, but today he couldn’t talk of the “family unit of transmission.” There was a fly in the analogy. Divorce was not meiosis, not division for reproduction, it was not death. It would be the separation of symbiots into independent creatures.
It was the shank of winter. The tiny lawns of Ash, Acacia and Acorn were streaked with snow filth, the neighborhood dogs dropped their excrement in steaming cylinders—why didn’t Cambridge adopt London’s system of doggy pick-ups with fines for delinquents?
Tomorrow, a new life. He was ready. He’d had the joys and difficulties of family life, he’d still have some of them, and always, always he would watch the children to see if he could fix whatever went wrong because of what he and Sarah had done. But now, fresh fields. Last night, he’d tried to drug himself watching television. He’d lasted through half the Late Late Show, could remember nothing after the MGM lion. He was just eerily conscious of this night, this last night as a husband, of George and Esmé sleeping yards away from the television set. They still didn’t know. He and Sarah had agreed to tell them during the April Easter break.
He went to sleep, head a swirl of inarticulate trouble. He replayed the Super Bowl, himself a hero, blocking pass rushes, rifling passes, then on defense, laying linemen out, and throwing, literally, taking up the quarterback in one hand and throwing him twenty-five yards back. He got some sleep.
Sarah and he sat across the breakfast table. They did not say but felt, “The last breakfast in our married life.” Twenty-two years. She called George and Esmé, they bundled up, he kissed them off and, at the door, touched Sarah’s arm, “I hope it’ll go all right, Sarah.”
“It’s been a long time.”
Her court hour was two o’clock. He came home early.
“How did it go?”
“Quick and horrible. The worst was before. Sullivan read all the things I had to say about you. I didn’t know if I could go through it. Tina too. Dev just had to confirm. The court hardly mattered, it was an assembly line. I suppose the judge was all right.”
“What was he like?”
“I can hardly remember. I didn’t look at him. The whole thing in court took ten minutes.”
“So, we’re not married anymore.”
“The final decree doesn’t come through for a while.”
“I suppose I’d better get on the ball about finding a place.”
“What about the Schneiders’ garage?”
“I don’t think they want me around. A domestic death’s-head for their kids.”
“I hope you can find a place soon.”
“I’m trying hard, Sarah. The Faculty Housing Office says places show up around March first. The leases start coming in.”
“I guess we can make it till then.”
“I’d thought we could make it till the kids’ school ends.”
She shook her head and went into the kitchen.
Except for the astonishing fact that he was no longer married, after having been married since Albie’s age, there was no further sense of change.
Though the next day, when he came home from work, he came home to the house that no longer felt his. It was now—at least till June—Sarah’s. Yesterday it had been his. He was here now on her sufferance, she could tell him to get out, legally, as three or four times she had told him to get out emotionally. It was a strange feeling for him. “Maybe this is what women feel.” He hadn’t even felt this way when he was competing for tenure.
“I’m free without being free,” thought Sarah. “Once again he’s got the better of me.” She went on cooking (or going out to supper with him and the children), she threw his dirty shirts and underpants in the washer and dryer and sorted them out; each throw, each sorting was a humiliation. He was home much of the time, and never had he been so sweet with the children. George and Esmé clung to him when he came in the door. “He’s trying to cripple me with their love for him. He always has.” She could not bear it, could not bear the sight of him reading in his leather chair, couldn’t bear sitting next to him on the sofa when they ate in front of the television set. With the domestic tribulation of Dick Van Dyke barely ruffling the bliss of television domesticity, there he sat laughing and eating her food (a heated Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak; she didn’t have the strength for anything else). Every other day he suggested they eat downstairs. “I’m too tired,” she’d say, or “I want to see the Olympic figure skating.” She would take no more dinner seminars.
She could not bear to see him drinking wine and watching the news. “Some people don’t have time to watch the news.” (Looking at the children.) “Or even read the newspapers.” When she took them to school in the morning, he would be finishing the Times in his torn blue bathrobe, which she knew he wore as an indictment of her lack of wifely—unwifely—care. (The symbols they threw at each other’s heads.)
These days, it was as if there were ten thousand slivers of glass between them. Instead of air, glass. The glass was pain. That is, if they moved, if they said anything to each other, the glass moved, and it was painful. Impossible; but not impossible, for there he was; and every day put more glass in the space between them. It was not so long ago that there had been nothing, a neutral space, if not comforting, not discomforting. And before that, a warm space: how good to have you there across the lazy susan, the coffee cups, his, hers, the same as they used now, his blue with the gray vines, hers striped green, bought in the same store at the same time. By her. With “his” money. That old division of labor or of love had turned to glass and nails. Everything that had allied them separated them. Here in the breakfast nook off the bright kitchen off the wood-paneled dining room off the hall, the living room, the sun parlor, the bottom floor of the old house, here in this safe nook, cold and glass.
Pain found expression in money; money was the medium of hatred. Much that’s said to begin in passion begins in money; and almost every human conclusion has a monied superstructure.
Sarah had never been greedy. If anything, she thought goods were tainted; growing up, she had battled the comfort of her own home, and since, especially since working in the poverty centers, tutoring poor children, her shame at comfort had an ascetic’s force. Now, she faced the problem of permanently accounting for her own bed and board; she felt money as threat, means, as weapon, one that had been used against her, one she could use in defense.
When she and Merriwether had sat down to work out the settlement, the main thing for her had been quick, easy, reasonable division. Now she felt the weight of goods as things which could be replaced only with money. The money was her—proper—share of his income (plus whatever she could earn as a middle-aged woman teacher in a world that was not lavish with such people). One day, she’d have a little money from her parents, that other kind of money that meant you could afford to despise it, but now she had to carve her economic life, her ability to live, out of his. And he was no Rockefeller, either for quantity or charity.
It looked as if she could make it on the settlement; but you never knew, equipment could break down; the condominium’s insurance covered only space, not goods, she would have to insure household goods, and then car insurance, and health insurance. What if the car broke down? If she broke down?
It was a time of fierce worry for her, and meanwhile she had to keep going, her degree was almost in hand, and beyond that was a job, some job or other. Her exams were the month before the household
move; she did not know if she could make it.
Merriwether saw only the harsh outside, Sarah hardening, cursing. “That’s full of shit,” she said once after he told her she’d have no money troubles. She’d never used that word. She belched and passed wind, without apologizing. Once, when he frowned angrily at George for doing the same thing, she snapped, “How dare you. A person can’t help that.”
“I don’t believe an eleven year old’s sphincter muscle is beyond control,” he said. “If there’s a lapse, the tongue can atone for it.”
“It’s your calling attention to it that makes him uneasy.”
Whacked up at every orifice, Sarah went on cursing, farting, belching. Merriwether connected it with what he thought of as her new greed. “Perhaps as she tightens in one way, she has to let loose in another.” (He had not read the psychoanalytic literature on money and excrement.) The worst was at breakfast. Low blood pressure made it difficult for her to get moving. He supposed he was her morning coffee. She went after him about household money—he’d questioned her about a check, and said it was about time they had separate bank accounts—about his cheapness, about the pauper lives he’d made them lead all these years.
“Couldn’t we live these last weeks in peace?”
“Easy for you to say. But you dog me for every nickel.”
“Just for an occasional two hundred bucks.”
“We’ve been needing a new dryer for a year.”
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to wait till you moved?”
“I notice you’re still putting your shirts in the hamper.”
“That is unfair, I know. I’ll do the laundry every other time.”
“You better get used to it.”
“Is it so hard?”
“Nothing’s hard for you when I do it.”
“Until now, no. I’m grateful.”
“You’re grateful. Go to hell.”
When he got home that night, he found a note from her on his bed. (It bore neither salutation nor signature.) “You’ll have to get out, whether you find a place or not. You can have till March 20. Here are the things you can take with you: your books, your grandmother’s bed (this was the one he now slept on), your mother’s oriental, any presents the children gave you, your desk and desk lamp, etc., the Brueghel baboons (a print of the two apes chained to a barred window which he’d bought at the Albertine Museum as a joking anniversary present at a time when it was a joke), the blue vase …” (a crusted blue mug from Sicily which held his pencils: she had given it to him for his thirty-fifth birthday and had dropped it on presentation; he’d glued it together; badly).
There were seven other things, including “some wedding china.” (Did this mean she would be giving no dinner parties?) He would refuse this memento, although there’d been a hundred wonderful—in his view—dinners, after which he and she had done the dishes in the kitchen, congratulating each other on the dinner’s success, recalling the choice moments, the best remarks.
“Some extra pots.” He would take these. Another world. He would buy a cookbook. Did she give him the pots as a reminder of all that she’d relieved him of for twenty years? Too much? Nothing was too much. Maybe it was a burst of thoughtfulness. A way of getting him out of mind and conscience.
He went downstairs; she was playing the piano. He stood by, waiting for her to look up. “Well?”
“There are a few other things that mean a lot to me. If you want to live among my family ghosts, all right, but otherwise I would like Grandpa’s desk and the glass cabinet in the upstairs hall.”
“Take them. I don’t want them.”
“And I want you—or the kids anyway—to have at least half the books. I want them to have books around.”
“They have plenty of books. We can work details out later. The main thing is for you to get out.”
“Is it so unbearable for you?”
She looked up from the piano, took the cigarette from the ashtray on the mahogany shoulder (she’d begun smoking constantly) and took a deep drag; he could see her drawing strength and peace from the—to him—repulsive cylinder. Then she said, quietly, “It is unbearable.”
The nights, with their insomniac bloat and cardiac pounding, were the worst for him. He fought them with Sominex, music on the transistor by his bed, books. In daylight, there was his routine, now charged with his awareness of its transience. The house felt luxurious, the coffee and newspapers in the breakfast nook were a small heaven. Going down the steps, up Acorn and Ash Street, across Brattle to Agassiz, crossing the Common, skirting the Physics Labs, and entering the quadrangle of his own labs. Much of his life was in that walk.
He saw little of Cynthia these days. The energy of love, the sexual energy, the excess which made for tenderness and generosity dried up in anxiety; his feelings circled George and Esmé. Luckily Cynthia had an enormous amount of work. She studied Japanese seven or eight hours a day. Yet loneliness crept in. She felt Merriwether’s need to stay close to what he was going to leave, but the very feeling evoked a counter-feeling of resentment that she was secondary. This opened her mind to blackness. She could not think, only felt the nausea of emptiness. In this pit, she called him, he rushed over, comforting, holding, lying beside her. Mostly, she suppressed desires to make him demonstrate more, but now and then, she could not endure the resentment she felt he felt for her weakness. In such a mood, she saw his smile as stretched muscles and bared teeth, his tenderness a matter of pressure and gesture. Unbearable. “It’s only a transition, darling. It’s just these awful weeks.” But time made no sense to her. Time wasn’t weeks or minutes. It was outside the terrible blank that was all she was. “Weeks don’t mean anything to a dead person.” He didn’t understand, or pretended not to.
Usually, though, things were easier. He’d come, they would drink wine, play cards, go over the day’s events, the boys coming on with her in class, the stuff of lectures, hers, his. They almost never went out. He brought wine and delicatessen meats, they drank and ate, watched the news, and sometimes wove fantasies around it. She said, “Kissinger’s having an affair with Madame Mao.” (Kissinger had been a distant Harvard colleague, a rolypoly who ran the Summer Seminar for foreign students. Merriwether had eaten with him once at a committee meeting which did little more than decide to dissolve itself.) “I know that’s what’s behind all this China-visiting. He’s setting her up for Nixon. When we see them rolling around together, we’ll know good relations are restored. All this diplomatic stuff is a cover-up.” Cynthia sat bare-bottomed in her blue denim shirt, her hair tied back with a black fillet. She held him, and they rolled around in her sofa-bed. “‘Nixon and Mao’s Wife Tussle Lovingly Before World’s Love-Starved Billions.’ That’s what east-west intercourse is about.” She spun out networks of world-orgies, the late De Gaulle and Jackie Onassis, Martha Mitchell and Jomo Kenyatta, Spiro Agnew “tied naked, front to front, with Pat Nixon,” pictures taken, mailed to Life and Paris-Match, “unless Nixon stops the bombing.”
Two or three times a week now, Sarah wrote notes to him. He’d find them on his bed, written in pencil on his stationery. (She was too distraught for delicacy.) Mostly they were defenses of her conduct and indictments of his. She was unable to say these things to him, could not trust her voice in his presence; she felt he always got the better of her.
One note was a defense of her years of sexual refusal. She said she was a naturally warm woman, but it had been clear to her that he didn’t want her as a person, only as the nearest woman available. He wrote on the bottom of the note, “I understand. Naturally you couldn’t be intimate with someone you felt didn’t respect you.” He brought it down and handed it to her. After supper—he cooked himself a hamburger, but ate with her and the children in front of the television set—she handed him another note: “Perhaps I should have been able to tell you what was bothering me. But it wasn’t my way to open up like that.” He wrote in ink over the penciled sentence: “How I wish it had been.” Her note went on: “If sex
is the basis of your relationship with your girl friend, it doesn’t seem enough to me.” In ink, he crossed out “is the basis,” and wrote “was the origin.” He gave her the corrected note and said, “Every time you say ‘girl friend,’ you make it sound like a curse.”
“I pity her,” she said.
Another note asked him to pay the taxes on the house. He told her the house was hers now, and she had more money than he. She said she’d call the lawyer.
“What did Sullivan say?” he asked her after the call. “He said I was legally responsible for the taxes. But while you’re here, you should pay rent. It better not be long.”
“I’ve been paying the bills; but I’ll pay half the taxes.” She took this with grace for a few days, then tracking him to the TV set, she said, “You were clever to transfer the property to me. Making me responsible.” He saw the chemical rhythm behind her muted fury, but muttered something about his legal obligation to make the transfer.
“Then why are you here?” She was in a floor-length flannel nightgown, an outfit which made her seem especially vulnerable and could almost evoke his pity for her unhappiness. The drained face above the little lace collar of the gown was streaked with red, the eyes glowed with the battle she sought, the pain felt, the hatred for him; he felt something close to fear. Who knows what she’d be capable of in this state? “Why are you here? Get out.”
“I haven’t even told the children.”
“Tell them.”
“I thought we agreed it should be in two weeks.”
“You assume I agreed. When it’s to your advantage. Tell the children Sunday. Anything you want. I’ll tell them I was on the edge of a breakdown and would have had it if you’d stayed. Everyone says it’s unheard of for you to be here.”
“It is unusual. I only thought we’d decided we would manage it to keep the children as fine as they’ve been so far.”
“You can’t keep using the children to kill ME.”
“Whatever it is that has made you a monster, I hate. I pray to God that if there’s a hell, you and I will burn for what our monstrosity does.”
Other Men's Daughters Page 18
