A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  Jude was curled around a pillow at her midsection with her face turned into the sheets when I turned off the light and felt my way to the waterbed. It sloshed when I got in despite my best efforts to be weightless. From the throbbing, I knew she was crying, and her tears smelled like the warm washcloth Mom used to hold against my forehead when I had a headache. I reached over and tried to work my fingers between hers but her fist was a Gordian knot.

  When Justine was three weeks old and I could still feel the soft spot in her skull, Jude took her grocery shopping at University Village. We had one of those portable beds made of vinyl that folded up into a shoulder bag. The exterior sheathing was red, black, and navy blue plaid, and we took Justine everywhere in it. When they returned from shopping, Jude set Justine’s bed next to the car in the parking lot behind our apartment while she unloaded. I was home studying for a Torts exam and Jude yelled at me to come down and help carry the groceries. As I came across the lot, a white Volvo station wagon that needed a wash was backing onto the plaid bed. I hollered and waved my arms, trying to get the attention of the driver. I couldn’t believe that Jude had been so careless. The Volvo revved its engine to make it over the obstruction. I imagined Justine’s skull being crushed like a cantaloupe. The driver stopped and rolled down the window to see what the matter was. Jude’s face was red and sweaty as the two of us knelt down to extricate the port-a-bed from underneath the back of the car. There were dusty tire treads across one side of the crib and on Justine’s blue-and-white checkered jumpsuit. The lady in the car was distraught, and Jude kept saying, “It’s fine, it’s fine.” I ran into the apartment with Justine screaming in my arms and we tore off her clothes to feel her bones. I couldn’t believe Jude had put her at such risk and I was shivering uncontrollably. There were blood blisters in a thick belt pattern around her waist where the tire had pinched against the diaper and cinched it like a noose, but she seemed to be whole and she was breathing. Both of us fell whimpering onto the bed and cradled her between us the way I wanted to cradle Jude now.

  When I awoke during the night, Jude and I were intertwined between the sheets like seaweed. In a night that I knew could be our last, I patched as much surface area together as I could, bone against bone, skin against skin. In the stillness, I tried to memorize that feeling. She was as soft of body as she was hard in spirit and I wished into my wet pillow one more time that I could relive, no, remake this decade.

  In the morning, there was light in the window and Jude was folding my clothes from the dresser into a suitcase at the foot of the bed.

  Jude didn’t want to be there when I left and asked if I’d stay until she and the kids had departed on the overnighter to Lopez Island that we’d promised and never gotten around to doing. The last grains of summer were dropping through the waist of the hourglass.

  “It’ll be better than seeing you drive off in a car to God knows where.”

  The kids weren’t fooled and neither was I. As they traipsed down the stairway with their duffel bags bumping the walls, my Adam’s apple burned and I didn’t have enough saliva to douse it. The bravery in Derek’s chin was betrayed by the trail of tears sneaking down his cheeks.

  “Come on, Magpie.”

  Breaking the rule that said we were all supposed to act as if this would be better in the long run, I spoke up. “I don’t like this.”

  Derek and Justine stopped. The dog looked up at me with her orphan brown eyes, begging me to throw my arms around the three of them and wrestle on the rug the way we used to after dinner.

  “Come on, Derek,” Justine said, “Mom’s waiting.” Jude had pulled the car out of the garage and parked across the street.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said.

  Justine hiked the bag strap up her shoulder and grabbed the Safeway sack on the couch with her hair dryer and bathroom stuff in it. I held the door and patted them helplessly as they passed. Neither one of them slowed down enough for a kiss. Derek’s flashlight fell out of the pocket of his pack and the lens shattered when it hit the cement porch. I stuffed it back under the top flap next to a pair of rolled-up jeans.

  “Good luck, Dad,” he whispered. He was crying and when I hugged him to my stomach his bag clunked against me. I couldn’t help but wonder how much this was going to cost them. And who was going to pay them back?

  Justine disappeared down the steps to the street. I watched her, hoping she’d turn back to see me waving, but she plowed ahead, dragging her bag to the protection of her mom’s fatherless car.

  “Don’t forget Odysseus,” I told Derek.

  He let go of me, descended the steps, looked both ways and ran across the street. Magpie fast-stepped beside him to keep up. When he slowed down, I could still see the hitch in his gait from an old bike wreck.

  2.

  The University of Washington campus was only a few blocks from Warren’s apartment, and I walked over there with Warren some evenings. The boughs of the giant oak trees along the walkways had already shed their easy leaves. The tenacious ones hung on. I told him that I kept hoping Jude would relent, send me a longhand confessional letter or make a late-night phone call.

  “She’ll wake up in a cold sweat some morning,” Warren said, “and realize that her sugar daddy is gone.”

  “I have the sinking feeling she won’t miss me a bit.”

  “You gotta start dating. Get your mind off Jude.”

  Although I was only seven years older, it felt like Warren was another generation. I’d inherited our dad’s fear of the Depression and wasted no time in moving from college to law school to my first job. By the time Jude and I had Justine, Warren was just starting high school and seemed in no particular hurry to get anywhere. He was less interested in school than in playing guitar and he put together Sergeant Warren’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “So I can speak to the world through my music,” he said. Mom and Dad coaxed him into Spokane Falls Community College by promising that he didn’t have to work as long as he stayed in school. That gave him time to write poetry that he published in Xeroxed magazines and mailed to coffee houses all over the country.

  When he realized how unreceptive Spokane was to his politics and his music, he transferred to Western Washington in Bellingham where he eked out a degree in Humanities after five years. He spent summers in Seattle with me and Jude, living out of our basement, until he enrolled in the Peace Corps, where his flower-child ways hardened into a kind of anti-American missionary zeal during his two years in Turkey supervising the construction of public toilets. We kept up a steady correspondence in which he blamed the perpetuation of poverty in the third world on the United States. He thought we’d lost our way as a nation when we traded the farm for consumerism. We’d forgotten how to grow our own. Warren was skeptical of demagogues and subscribed to Lenny Bruce’s philosophy that any man who called himself a religious leader and owned more than one suit was a hustler. Of feminism, he said, the women’s movement had sold out for the worst features of masculinity.

  I wasn’t going to take Warren’s advice. I was worried that dating would get in the way of a reconciliation with Jude, which was ironic considering all those times she’d turned her back on me in bed and I lay awake fantasizing how it would have been if I were only single. I’d also wondered whether her apparent indifference to me was because she was being unfaithful.

  It was an argument over fidelity that had precipitated her first flight to Lill’s. We hadn’t seen each other for several evenings. Sunday was her women’s group and Monday we traded cooking nights so she could go to the ACLU Board meeting. The next night she said she had to entertain someone from the national organization.

  “A he or a she?” I asked.

  “Does it really matter?”

  I rested on the couch reading Open Marriage while I waited up for her. It was one of the books on the reading list Jude had made for me, which also included The Female Eunuch, Fear of Flying, and the Whole Earth Catalog. Reading about people who tried to make promiscuity sound l
ike a spiritual quest and drew no distinction between social and sexual intercourse made me feel worse, but I knew the jealousy would cripple me if I didn’t immunize myself against it. Open relationships were the natural evolution of the species, Jude had said. I could either join the survivors or become part of genetic history.

  She seemed a little boozy when she came home. Her hair was mussed and she held her coat around her like she’d broken the zipper in her cords. Guilt was written all over her face.

  “Kind of a late dinner, wasn’t it?”

  She hung her coat and fussed in the hall closet. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean it’s after midnight and I didn’t know where you were.”

  She stepped into the room and planted her legs with her hands on her hips as if she were Annie Oakley. “You’re wondering if I slept with him, aren’t you?” I wished she’d moved away from the stairwell so the kids wouldn’t hear us. “Why are you so paranoid? Men think the only thing a woman’s good for is what’s between her legs.” Her hair was throwing sparks as she moved toward me. “Well, fuck you all!”

  “Is that your long-range plan?” It was mean, but I couldn’t help it.

  She towered over me on the couch so that I was looking straight at her zipper and she glared at the book in my hand. “Marriage doesn’t mean you have to be Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Her breasts bounced under her shirt as she fired off rounds at me. Then she seemed to tire and sat down next to me; her voice changed. “I’m suffocating, Cyrus. We need a break from this.”

  Tiger Lill, as some of the women called her, was a refuge for frustrated wives, and Jude was one of her projects. But I didn’t get it. What kind of an advance for humanity was this if the transformative action consisted of jettisoning your spouse? We’d had this discussion before too. Males didn’t know how to bond; all they could do was pat asses and talk sports.

  “How long are you going to be gone?”

  “A week, maybe longer.”

  “What will we tell the kids?”

  “Tell ’em their mom needs a vacation.”

  I’d suspected there was someone else—the unexplained extra dishes in the sink, the mysterious telephone calls she pulled into the hall closet to handle—I wasn’t naive. By the seventies, who hadn’t been cheated on? After Vietnam and Watergate, people were tired of loyalty to institutions. They wanted to break out, find their own space. Sociologists and psychotherapists had painted monogamous couples as slow-witted.

  Maybe I was slow-witted. Maybe I should have taken my nose out of the newspapers. Jude would have said I’d become apathetic about our marriage the same way someone let their VW bus get out of tune, putting in more oil instead of getting a ring job, holding the license plates on with duct tape, letting the hinges rust. I’d settled for something that got us there, forsaking the quality of the ride, and ignoring the increased likelihood of total breakdown. But I didn’t care as much where we were heading as who I was riding with. Jude desperately wanted me to cut loose of my forty-two long middle-class straightjacket and stop apologizing for the Jerry Falwells and Archie Bunkers of the world. “For a change,” she said, “just screw what everyone else is doing.”

  She came back after two weeks. Warren was convinced she was sleeping around. I assumed that she was and resented her for it but, without proof, I was haunted with the possibility that she was innocent and I was the paranoid, cultural pygmy she’d accused me of being.

  Two weeks after Jude’s and my separation, I moved out of Warren’s apartment and into a two-bedroom basement unit in the Alhambra Arms, a building which bore no more resemblance to Moorish architecture than it did to the Taj Mahal. Warren, dressed in a suit with a black shirt and Cuban heels for a party he was going to afterwards, helped me haul the stuff from the house, and I restrained myself from asking whether he’d bought his outfit with money from Mom and Dad. We siphoned the water out of the waterbed with the garden hose. Although the bed was Jude’s idea, she was tired of it and gave it to me. A friend of Warren’s had lent us his pickup and we loaded out the back door while Jude and another mother catered a birthday party for one of Derek’s buddies in the dining room.

  Moving out of your own house was the stuff of tragedies and I didn’t particularly want the kids to witness it. Between loads, I’d sneak a look from the hall closet at the festivities in the dining room. It was a masquerade party and everyone had a mask, Jude’s a Cinderella face that she pulled down each time she went in the dining room. Derek was Dick Nixon and made a peace sign each time one of the mothers brought them something. I was out of body, hovering, looking back on how they would live without me, and it hurt to see how smoothly things ran. The laughs were just as loud, the lights just as bright, and nobody seemed to notice me and Warren.

  Jude and I pretty well avoided each other the night of the move. She’d scotch-taped tags to everything that was mine. I used a plastic drop cloth from the basement to cover the load and secured it with rocks from the flower beds between trips into the house. The wind whipped the plastic loose and impaled it on the antenna. It was just as well she hadn’t given me any of the good furniture.

  Warren’s bachelor’s program had included an introductory course in psychology. Whenever he could, he practiced on me. He called around and discovered that there was a men’s therapy group starting at Group Health. The first twelve sessions were covered by my medical plan.

  “You’ve got to get in touch with your bitterness,” he said. “Own it.”

  “If I’m neurotic, how does throwing me into a room full of other neurotics help?”

  Raised Catholic, I considered confessions private affairs. But in the spirit of new beginnings, I told Warren I’d go once to try it. The sessions were held in a room at the hospital with nothing but couch pillows in a circle on the floor. I never would have imagined that Group Health had such non-medicinal-looking space. As men came in, they saw the sign by the door, took off their shoes, and sat silently on one of the pillows. Everyone was so serious. At five past, with one of the eight pillows still vacant, I knew someone had chickened out.

  The guy in a black turtleneck and beaded necklace sitting in a lotus position opened the meeting. “Hello, everyone. I’m Rick.” He looked around to make eye contact with each one of us. “I’m a sociologist and I’ll be one of your facilitators along with my partner here, Tony.” The man next to him nodded in recognition. “Men’s groups are one of the most rewarding parts of my work. We see so many breakthroughs.” As he looked around the circle again, I turned my gaze to my navel.

  When it was Tony’s turn to talk, he fidgeted and pulled at his collar like he craved a cigarette. His gray slacks had a small split in the crotch. He told us he was an M.D. and a psychiatrist. I could have killed Warren. He didn’t tell me there’d be a shrink. I’d have to start checking “yes” on the forms that asked if I’d undergone psychiatric treatment.

  “There’s a tradition of men’s groups,” Rick said, “that goes back to the apostles.” He rocked gently and extended his neck as if to stretch out his spinal cord. “Men’s groups have existed in tribes and clans on all continents and in all cultures. The industrial revolution and single-family homes have isolated us from each other. We’ve forgotten how to talk man-to-man.”

  I didn’t need this. As I looked around the room at the other blank faces, I could hardly imagine us sharing a last supper together. If this was men’s answer to women’s liberation, I felt sorry for us. Jude was right; men didn’t know how to relate.

  When Tony invited us to go around the room and share our reasons for joining the group, I felt panicky. I suspected I wasn’t the only guy in the group to deal with a possible divorce. Big deal. I needed something more juicy.

  The guy on Tony’s left started and told us he was a data processor for an insurance company. He rubbed his hands over his sock to cover up the hole in the big toe. “I’ve been married for seven years. We’ve got two healthy kids, but”—he bent his toes back and his
voice was weak—“we’re having trouble in the bedroom.”

  “Down here you mean.” Tony cupped his crotch.

  “Yeah,” the guy whispered.

  “It’s okay, man,” the turtleneck sociologist said.

  “Are you on any medications?” Tony said.

  “Just aspirin for the headaches.” His shame sapped the energy from his voice. “My wife has lost patience with me.”

  The beatnik with a pullover blouse and Jesus haircut went next. I figured him for a druggie, one Tony could fix with a prescription. “My problem is a little different,” he said, in a cowboy twang, with a smirk on his face. “Fact is I don’t think it’s a problem at all but my woman does. She caught me diddling around on her.” He looked around the room; his eyes were beautiful and unshielded. “Actually more’n once. She said she wouldn’t care if it were strangers, but I diddled with a couple of her friends. I guess I’m the man who loves to fuck too much.” The guy with the hole in his sock stole an admiring glance at him.

  I was shocked at the candor. Men weren’t supposed to talk like this. As people took turns around the circle, moving closer to me, I changed my story several times. It was the same feeling I used to get in gym when I had to play on the Skins basketball team. My chest never developed the mat of gorilla hair other guys had and I wasn’t muscular. I needed to get mad at Jude but I kept thinking of the things I admired about her, how she laughed off scorn, how she treated the kids as adults, how she cut through the crap. I’d expected everyone to be more guarded and hypothetical, especially in the first session. I consoled myself in the fact that I didn’t have to see these people again.