A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “Dad,” she whispered, “I don’t really think it’s a dump.”

  I smiled in the dark and rejoiced at the thought that maybe the cross-training hadn’t worked after all. She still had some little girl in her.

  3.

  The handball courts at the YMCA were on the top floor of a six-story brick building in the middle of downtown Seattle. In the freight elevator, on the way up, I leaned against the furniture pads that hung from cleats near the ceiling. Although this was the night of the big meeting at Jude’s for the kids to decide who they were going to live with, I had my regular appointment with Warren to play handball first. It had taken some convincing—Jude’s attorney was adamantly against it—but Jude had agreed. Now that we were doing it, I’d been haunted with the thought of how it was going to come out and wished we could just back up instead of going forward. If it had just been me and Jude that would have been one thing, but how could we justify screwing up the kids’ lives, too? Didn’t we at least have to gut it out until Derek was through high school? The washer and dryer Jude’s parents gave us were going to last longer than our marriage. I realized I’d never really lost anything that mattered. This feeling of desperation was something new and made me feel more like an animal. I’d decided that Jude was trying to rip something off that wasn’t just hers to take. I wanted the kids. Despite all evidence, I had the unwavering feeling that the kids would be better off with me. But Jude had said it herself. She wasn’t just weary of our marriage, she was weary of motherhood. I was ready to compete for them. I missed them terribly. And, I hoped, it wasn’t just to get back at her.

  I could tell when the elevator had reached the floor with the handball courts because the air suddenly became cooler. Although it was only September, the winter rains had started and the weather had moved into that eternal limbo when clouds covered the city in a seamless dome. The elevator shuddered to a stop, bounced up and down, and the doors opened top and bottom like the jaws of a whale. I wished I’d worn sweatpants. It was too easy to pull a muscle when your legs were freezing. I heard the slap of a ball and someone bouncing off the back wall in what was supposed to be our court and peered through the napkin-sized pane in the door at Warren.

  I stooped into the court. The white walls, ceiling, and floor gave it the feeling of an igloo that had been dabbed with skid marks. Warren wore black Converse hightops that were laced partway up, cutoffs, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a red headband that made his hair stick up like a patch of weeds.

  “Hey, where you been?” he said.

  “Let’s see, what have I done today? Lubed the car, earned a living, and called home to cover for my brother.”

  “How’s Mom?”

  I slammed the door and pushed the loop latch flush into its notch. “Worried about the divorce.”

  Warren clutched his heart in mocking agony. “Oh, poor little Cyrus.”

  I slugged him on the ball of his arm the way my older brother Carl used to do to me. I knew that Mom was still praying for the survival of the marriage and why shouldn’t she? There had never been a divorce on her side of the family. Mom’s parents had been married fifty-three years when her father died of a heart attack. From my current vantage point, such longevity was stunning. I had no idea what marriages that long were made of. What fresh idea could you bring home in the fifth decade that made up for what had to be flagging energy and emotional complacency? Did they last simply because the convergence of expectations and rewards occurred at a much lower level? Could Jude and I have made it if we’d been born before the Depression?

  Warren shoved his hand down the inside of his cutoffs to adjust himself. “You need some handball to unwind.”

  When I reached down to touch my toes, my hamstrings felt like piano wire and the backs of my legs burned. “Ouch.”

  “You’ve got to start playing more. You move like you’ve got arthritis. You’re an item on the market now.” Warren’s theory was that I was pent-up from sixteen years of monogamy and needed to mess around before I’d be ready to settle down again. Maybe he was just trying to joke me out of the whole thing. It’s not that I didn’t think of women I could call on in case Jude ever went through with her threat, but the list was short. Sonya Carpenter, who was a year ahead of me at Quincy High when we did Carousel, was on it. She was the first person I’d wanted to marry, a gentle Middle Eastern girl, with smooth, almond-colored skin and prominent cheek bones. After the cast party, we climbed the water tower together and I watched the moonlight bounce off her bare calves as she scrambled up the welded ladder ahead of me. But she was in love with the kid who played Billy Bigelow. The day I found out she’d broken up with Billy, I also learned she’d joined the Franciscan nunnery in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Many nights when things weren’t going so well with Jude, I’d asked myself how things would have turned out with Sonya Carpenter, which was ludicrous given the fact that she’d chosen a cloister of nuns.

  I spread my feet on the handball court, shifted my weight to the right, and sank into a fencing pose. My inside tendons felt like a weak seam in an old pair of pants. The thought of the upcoming meeting at Jude’s had stiffened me. My brain and my muscles. Moving to the left, I stuck my arms out and rotated them to warm up the shoulder sockets. Handball was really armball and wristball; everything had to move like a whip. Warren threw the ball against the front wall and caught it on one bounce.

  “Hey, come on, I’m freezing my buns off.”

  “Let me hit a few practice shots.”

  Warren dropped the ball on the floor next to me and I launched it against the front wall on the upward bounce. He stepped out of the way and let me dig it out of the corner. The ball stung through the leather gloves. I didn’t play often enough to develop a callous and had to tape bunion pads over the bones in my palms. “Ready,” I said.

  “You serve,” he said. “No candy ass. I want your best stuff.”

  When Warren was little, I babysat him. For some reason, Mom and Dad had waited a while after me and my older brother Carl. Maybe Warren was an accident. If so, he was a happy one. Carl was four years ahead of me and always ran with friends I didn’t know. When I was getting out of grade school, Carl was already graduating from high school. When I made varsity football, Carl was already married with a kid. By the time I’d earned two letters, Carl had two kids. He was bogged down in night school and a day job to support his family while I was still figuring out how far I could go with a girl.

  So Warren was my main brother. I paid attention to his life the way I’d wanted Dad to watch mine. Until I left Quincy, I went to Warren’s Little League games and school carnivals. When I went away to the University of Washington, we corresponded. On long weekends and vacations, Mom would put him on the train to stay with me. I snuck him into R-rated movies, gave him sips of beer, and told him how babies were made. When Justine was born, he loved the idea of being an uncle and tried to make it to Seattle for all of her birthdays. Warren had come to me for the big decisions in his life—whether to leave Spokane, smoking dope, girls. I told him that joining the Peace Corps was procrastination and that he should get on with his life but he disregarded my advice.

  “I’m not ready for nine-to-five,” he’d said.

  I’d created another welfare recipient.

  What I liked most about Warren was the fact that he made me laugh. We shared the same sense of humor, wisecracks that sprang out of the moment, a neon sign with some of the letters burned out, word associations that ended in the absurd. Although he always got along with Jude and relished her irreverence, he was quick to take my side in the divorce.

  I didn’t have my heart in the handball, and Warren beat me two games out of three. I had about an hour before the meeting with the kids, and Warren chose McCormick’s for his victory beer. McCormick’s was a little pricey but the fact that I was now supporting two households was lost on Warren. The bar was decked out in dark mahogany, brass piping, and green linen curtains. There was a Wendell Wilkie for President sign and a moveab
le numbers calendar on the wall that said 152 Days Until St. Patrick’s Day. The floor was covered with the same miniature white, six-sided tiles that were in the courthouse lavatories. The place was full of guys who’d loosened their ties in hopes that the women had loosened their libidos. The roaming waitress brought Warren a Guinness and me a Coke.

  “So how’s it going, man?” He had to speak up to be heard over the smokey din. Some people would have said it didn’t make sense to air out your lungs in the handball court and then bring them here.

  “Ask me after the meeting.” I tapped the ends of my fingers against each other and tried to push down the rising taste of acid in my throat that accompanied these kinds of events. “It’s like a beautiful woman stepped out of the crowd and asked me to dance, and I had this fleeting moment. Then when I reached my hand out she walked right past and danced with the guy behind me.”

  “Lose the self-pity,” Warren said. “It’s a turn-off.”

  “The scary thing is the marriage with Jude was my best effort. I worked hard so she could stay home with the kids. I went along with all her movements.” Warren rolled his eyes. “Now I’m starting to feel cheated. How can she live with me and the kids for sixteen years and then just say, excuse me, I’m supposed to be doing something else? What was wrong with my trying to be on top of things, to worry about money, to want a Sunday dinner once in a while with a tablecloth and candles?” I was beginning to feel heated and looked around to make sure no one was listening.

  Warren pushed his glass against my knuckles, which were gripping the Coke.

  I smiled and took another sip. The soda cut through the mucus in my throat. There was silence as we looked at each other. “Do you think someone can ever really fall in love all the way more than once?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean make babies with them, pick out cemetery plots together.”

  “Once is a high number,” he said.

  “It’s not me that changed.”

  “Isn’t that her gripe?” Warren tapped the arm of a waitress as she swished by our table with a tray of empties and asked for two more. He ran his finger around the inside of his glass, then licked the foam off his finger. He tipped his glass up and let a single drop fall into his mouth. “I told you. You gotta’ start going out. If you don’t get the kids, it’ll make it easier to date.”

  “What a depressing thought.”

  The waitress returned with Warren’s Guinness and my Coke, announced the price, pursed her lips, and smiled. Her eyes were clear, probably the product of good vegetables, and her skin was creamy. Neither one of us reached for our wallet.

  “Loser buys,” Warren said.

  “That was first round.” I turned to the waitress and looked at her name tag. Gwen. She was blushing, and I couldn’t stand to see her suffer. “I’ll get it.”

  “Why would they choose you anyway?” Warren said.

  “Excuse me,” the waitress said.

  “I meant my brother’s kids.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey, would you live with this man?”

  “Ignore him,” I said to the waitress.

  “I’m serious,” Warren said. “We need an unbiased opinion.”

  “I’d need more information,” she said.

  Warren shoved my ten dollar bill toward Gwen.

  “You don’t have to play this game,” I said.

  She looked at me as she asked Warren. “Is he rich?”

  “He just tipped you six bucks. What do you think?”

  Suddenly, something caught in my contact lens, which I only wore for sports because my astigmatism made them ineffective for reading. My right eye was watering up and I blinked to clear it. Gwen bit her lower lip and I thought for a second she was going to reach out and wipe my eyes.

  “See, you’re making him bawl,” Warren said.

  “He’s probably married,” she said.

  “What was your clue?”

  “I’ve never seen him in here before.”

  The contact lens attack subsided and my lid opened and closed again without raking the eyeball. I couldn’t tell if Warren was selling me or himself but Gwen seemed to be handling it because her blush faded. She folded the ten in half and stuck it into a deep apron pocket. Hands went up around us as she headed back to the bar.

  “What do you think the kids will really do?”

  Warren ran a lime around the rim of his glass, tore the pulp off with his teeth, and puckered his face. “Justine’s a lot like Jude. She’ll want to negotiate a long-term, no-cut contract. When it comes to the voting, gender will prevail, though. She’ll stay with Jude.”

  I snapped the fingernail of my thumb against the underside of the table. “But she and Jude fight all the time.”

  “She likes fighting. She’s Jude’s daughter.”

  “What about Derek?”

  “Less predictable, but I think he’d die to be with his dad. No housecleaning, lots of fast food, playing football in the house, sloppy hours. Trouble is he’s too much like you. He’ll go where the women tell him to.”

  “God, you’ve become cynical.”

  “That’s my point. This country’s a jungle. Eat or be eaten.”

  “And I’m being eaten?”

  “Big time. No kids, no property, all the bills. You’ll need another job just to pay for the divorce.”

  Warren rambled on with advice to psych me up for the meeting. The sweet little brother I used to meet at Union Station with Mom and Dad’s hard blue Samsonite had suddenly become an expert on divorce. Although he was twenty-eight, he was still the baby in the family. He’d taken the apartment in the U District to keep alive Mom and Dad’s impression that he was still in college. I could have sponged off him until he finished a Ph.D. and still not have evened things up between us. Of course, he wasn’t going to school. He was arranging bouquets at Johnny’s Flowers during the day and playing guitar or seeing his girlfriend Mandy in the evenings.

  As Warren talked, I watched the flirtations around the room. There was a Scandinavian woman with soft blonde hair who looked like someone from a shampoo commercial sitting with a guy who stroked strands of his own hair between his thumb and index finger and then smelled his fingers. He looked like someone who would tie up schoolgirls in the basement and torture them with cigarette burns, but she gazed into his eyes with adoration.

  As I looked around McCormick’s, I felt small-town again and I missed Jude. I missed the patched jeans, the red hobo handkerchief, the scuffed oxfords, and the long-stemmed rose she’d tattooed on her midriff the week after I’d made her go to a firm dinner at the Rainier Club. I missed the looks on the faces of the guys waiting outside the Men’s room at service stations when she’d emerge buckling her belt and chewing her toothpick. Jude was my middle finger to the world. I could depend on her to set down all the pretenders.

  “I spent my childhood trying to shape myself into one of Mom’s Jell-O molds,” she’d told me. Now she was ready to take any train out. Trouble was, there was no room for me. I could only hope that her route was a big circle and the sooner she got on the sooner she’d come back and we could work out the details of a new beginning. I’d put her on that train so many times—when she started using her maiden name, when she ditched her ring, when we put Derek in day care so she could volunteer at the ACLU, when we divided cooking nights, when we fifty-fiftied the housecleaning. I always told her everything would be fine and waved until she was out of sight, but inside I was crushed because no matter how we dressed it up, it meant there was something in our life she wanted to get away from.

  We were different from each other, yet I’d have fought anyone who said we didn’t belong together. I was French’s mustard on a bun with a frankfurter; Jude was Poupon and Gouda. My people wore boxer shorts and Weejun loafers; Jude’s people wore lacquered-candy earrings, leather clogs, and muslin. Intimacy for Jude was a communal hot tub in the raw; for me, a crowded elevator sufficed. Jude was Voltaire and I was all the
czars and dictators of the nineteenth century rolled into a three-piece suit. I was a bean counter, she was the visionary. I memorized the rules like they were the Baltimore Catechism and Jude ripped them up like nasty notes from a jealous friend. I was comfortable in the middle of the pack, and Jude itched for the last spot in the chain when they cracked the whip. I looked at civilization as a cumulative process where the children took the wisdom of their parents, polished it, added modestly to it, and then passed it on joyfully to their own children. “The smart ones,” Jude said, “called their ancestors’ bluff, tipped over the board, and started their own game.”

  She’d chosen a hard path for herself. As soon as she’d succeed at something she’d debunk it, saying it was because someone knew her parents, or because she was white, pretty, and harmless. She wanted to be accepted on terms that bore no resemblance to her upbringing. But it was difficult to be a rebel when you lived in a spacious home with a remodeled kitchen and had two small children and a husband who worked in a downtown high-rise.

  When I drove up to the house, there was a white Corvette parked in front with a personalized license plate that said DIVORCE. I walked up the twenty concrete steps I’d swept and hosed down so many times and reassured myself again that I was smart to be representing myself despite the adage about the lawyer who represents himself having a fool for a client. I rang the doorbell and the familiar two-tone chime sounded. Jude had removed the paper insert in the door knocker that used to say “Stapletons.” Male name dominance in the marriage name had bothered her as much as the missionary position. You could still see the scratch marks on the brass from the scissors or screwdriver she’d used to pry out the old label.

  “It’s Dad,” Derek called out as soon as he cracked the door.

  I stepped into the hallway and cupped Derek on the shoulder. Jude had cut off her hair; it was so short that it changed the shape of her face. She was drinking from one of the eggshell china cups that were part of the wedding set she’d mothballed in the basement cupboards. I could smell Paris Interlude, something else she’d mothballed.