A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  The waitress shrugged and left.

  “I hope you don’t mind the company,” Lill said.

  “I guess we’re all social animals, huh?”

  “At least animals,” she said, throwing her hair back again. “I’m just kidding. I find it easy to slip into dogma.”

  “To each his own.”

  “It can get in the way,” she said, letting some wistfulness into her voice. “What’s yours, Cyrus?”

  “My what?”

  “Your dogma,” she said.

  “Wow. Couldn’t we start off with my favorite music or read any good books lately?”

  “I’m sorry. Seen any good movies?”

  We both laughed.

  When her drink came, I ordered a margarita, choosing to blame my last hangover on the manhattans. And then we each had another. This time we clinked our glasses, toasted to dogma, and laughed again. I told her things had been going just great, how the time alone had given me a chance to reflect. The way she watched my eyes, I don’t think she was fooled by any of it. Neither one of us had mentioned the only thing that connected us.

  “I had a shitty marriage,” she said. I glanced around to make sure nobody was listening but we had the privacy of noise. “I could have handled the fact that he didn’t do a damned thing around the house. But he stopped talking to me.”

  I was tempted to ask her whose idea it was to do the ménage à trois. “What do you mean?”

  “He was inscrutable.” She made fists against her chest. “I never knew what he felt … or whether. About anything.”

  “Don’t you think he was frustrated by it too?”

  “Hah!” She raised the bottom of her empty glass an inch off the table and gaveled it down. “He loved it.”

  We had our last drink together at the Alhambra. It happened spontaneously as we were walking home. Lill said she’d considered taking a place there herself but had never seen the units so I invited her in for a look. I put on a Simon and Garfunkel tape. The only liquor I had was Scotch so we drank it straight over ice. She took off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the couch, facing me. She said she couldn’t see my face in the lamplight so I reached around and turned it off, leaving just the afterglow from the kitchen light. She tilted her head and looked at me with those soft green eyes.

  “How are you really?” she said.

  It was the question I most didn’t want to answer, but the way she said it, devoid of any hint of personal advantage, something gushed inside me like a river suddenly freed of its banks. I covered my face and started crying. I could feel her hands petting my head. The jetsam and flotsam of my marriage rushed through me—pieces of furniture that our parents had given us, bedspreads and pillows with lipstick and drool marks, wooden pull toys with bells and popping balls, Saturday Evening Posts, Dr. Suess books, Jude’s jump rope. Justine’s and Derek’s heads were bobbing and sinking, arms waving, with screams on their faces that I couldn’t hear over the roar, and Jude was in a dead man’s float, face down, beyond my reach. “I’m sorry, Lill.”

  “That’s all right. We all have to blow it out once in a while.”

  I sniffled and tried to find my handkerchief but I must have left it in my coat. “Wow, where did that come from?”

  She raised up on her knees and pulled a Kleenex out of her front pocket. “Something I said?”

  I smiled. “As a matter of fact, yeah.” My voice was nasal from the swelling of the passages.

  She scooted over and put her arms around me. I let my head fall against her. I couldn’t remember helplessness feeling so good. The smell of leather from her jacket mixed with the orange blossom in her hair that veiled my face. She painted brushstrokes with her fingers against the back of my neck and I closed my eyes and collapsed into her. Nerve endings were apparently indifferent to ideologies.

  When I lifted my head to look at her, she kissed me on the mouth. I slid my hand between her and the couch and pulled us closer together. She rose up on her knees and pushed the weight of her body against me. I tried to move sideways to her but she kept pushing me backward until my head was against the arm of the couch. We scooted down until my head was on the cushions and she flattened herself against me like she was riding a surfboard. Our belt buckles caught against each other as she wriggled between my legs. Her breasts were firm, independent of each other.

  She pushed me deeper into the cushions as I tried to reconstruct the events of our evening together, searching for any moral turpitude on my part. I felt contrite because she was Jude’s friend, but I couldn’t help but want more of her. I cupped her buttocks and encouraged each thrust as they stiffened on the advance and softened on the retreat. I spread my legs and hooked my heels behind her knees. Her breath was coming in shorter and shorter strokes. Jude had always said that males had no corner on sexuality. Some women were so carnal they could fantasize to multiple orgasm. The knockout orgasm. Status orgasmus. I slid my hands up her back, which was warm and sticky.

  “No!” She pushed my hands down, but her grinding continued unabated. “We can’t.”

  “But we are.”

  “We can’t … do it … on Jude.” Her voice was strained.

  I didn’t know if she came or she repented but she finally stopped pushing and fell limp against me, nestling her head under my chin. Simon and Garfunkel harmonized about the bridge over troubled waters. I listened to the sink in the kitchen dripping and waited until her heartbeat slowed.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I guess I have a soft spot for men who cry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Don’t tell Jude.”

  “We never took our clothes off, right?”

  “You must be Catholic,” she said, raising up on her forearms against my chest. I expected her to be smiling, but she wasn’t. “You’re still married, you know. You felt nice.”

  “Jude and I are separated.”

  “I know, but it still feels like you’re hers.” Using her hands to brace against my thighs, she pushed herself up and rested on the back of her heels. Her hair looked wind-blown. She unstuck the front of her shirt from her chest and looked at my crotch. “Not so dogmatic, huh?”

  At the door, she hesitated and I hoped she would say something about getting together again. I could see my silhouette in her iris. “I’m sorry to barge in on you like this.”

  “I could have said no.”

  Once the door slammed shut, I pressed my forehead and nose against it, and that’s when the remorse flooded me. It wasn’t for the fact she was Jude’s friend: people fell in love with friends of friends all the time, that’s who they knew. Jude would probably have done the same thing to me. Her next husband, the stepfather to my kids, would probably be someone we went to school with. I regretted that we’d gone as far as we had. I’d probably already blown it with Lill. She’d peg me as just another guy who wanted to get his hands on her breasts.

  The dryer was spinning in the laundry room next to my apartment, with the random clicks of zippers and snaps hitting the sides of the tumbler. Did everyone in this apartment have to do their laundry in the middle of the night? I thought. Were we that far out of sync with each other? I kept thinking of Lill and wondering if it was really Lill I wanted. I turned the tape over, twisted the volume up to cover the sound of the dryer, and hummed along with Simon and Garfunkel.

  6.

  Jude had the kids for Christmas and I drove home to Quincy with Warren. It was raining in Snoqualmie Pass and I tried to imagine that the raindrops hitting the windshield were snowflakes. The wipers stroked the blur like oars in the water, shuddering on the backstroke.

  “Hey,” Warren said, “quit moping. Look how great it will be to sit on our butts and watch football without Jude making us help with dinner.”

  At home, everyone avoided the subject of the pending divorce. Jude’s name was never uttered by Mom, Dad, Carl, his wife, or any of their kids. They even tiptoed into conversation
s involving Justine and Derek for fear that those would lead back to Jude.

  “Think of this as a sort of reverse canonization process,” Warren said when we were alone. “They’re taking her off the pedestal.”

  “But they don’t have to pretend she doesn’t exist.”

  “It’s the Stapleton way of grieving.”

  When I woke up the first morning in Quincy, I was disoriented without the background hum of the freeway. It was the first time I’d been home since the separation and everything in the house reminded me of something I’d done there with Jude and the kids. I mentioned at breakfast how the Plymouth was starting to burn oil, and Dad told me to bring the car into the garage. Warren rode with me on the trip up the driveway as Dad gave us hand signals, cutting us off as soon as the hood was all the way inside.

  “What weight oil you using?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You don’t know what oil you’re burning?”

  Warren looked at me, hopeful that I’d come up with a better answer. “I take it to a garage.”

  “Have you checked the gaps?” I wanted to say what gaps. I hated internal combustion engines. I also hated pheasant hunting, cleaning the leaves out of rain gutters, and diagnosing problems with the toaster, all activities that Dad excelled at. He’d rebuilt several car engines before he was old enough to vote. “Pop the hood.”

  He flung an extension cord over the rafters, plugged it into the socket above the workbench, and pulled a trouble light down into the engine hole. He pulled the wires off the tops of the sparkplugs and started unscrewing them with a socket wrench. Warren turned over a mop bucket and stood on it so he could get a good view. “When’s the last time you had it tuned?”

  “In the spring.” I was guessing. If he’d asked me the last movie I’d seen, I could have told him who directed, who starred, and maybe who did the screenplay. I didn’t watch the mechanics at the garage work. When something acted up, they fixed it and I forgot about it. The only thing on the invoice that interested me was the size of the bill.

  “These things are shot,” he said, holding the bottom of a dirty plug next to the light. “Look at the buildup.” He flicked his thumbnail against the bent prong at the end of the plug. “I just hope you take better care of your clients than you do your car.”

  “They’re why I don’t have time to worry about crap like this.”

  He pulled his head out from under the hood and scowled. “What kind of uppity attitude is that?” He jabbed his greasy finger in the air at me. “Your brother’s got an office job but he sure as hell knows what the butt end of a plug’s supposed to look like.”

  He’d done it again. “Dad, don’t fix my car. Can you please just put it back the way you found it?”

  “Why don’t you, hotshot?” he said, dropping the plug in the approximate location of the hole he’d screwed it out of. The sparkplug bounced off the motor, ricocheted against the fan blades, and fell to the cement. Then he stormed out the side door, slamming it behind him.

  Without saying a word, Warren climbed off his bucket and dove under the car, reappearing with the sparkplug cradled in both hands like precious metal. “Carl may know how to fix cars, but I bet he can’t throw a hanging slider to save his soul. Lighten up, Cy. You make too easy a target for him.”

  “That’s your secret?”

  “I use the rope-a-dope. Wear him down from swinging. Once he mellows out, he’s a puppy.”

  The kids and I celebrated Christmas later in the week back in Seattle. We had two days and one night together. Instead of Quincy snowdrifts, we had puddles that spanned whole intersections where drains had plugged from the downpour. The same haze that hid the sun rising over the Cascades hid it when it set over the Olympics. I’d bought one of those painted silver trees and put it on a card table in the corner of the living room. It was small enough to cover with a single string of lights and a box of red bulbs. The only original element was at the top, where I mounted a stuffed dog that looked like Magpie. It didn’t take long for the three of us to open the presents. Derek gave me a Dog Calendar with big stars drawn in for everyone’s birthday, including Jude’s. Justine bought me a Lawyer Joke Book with her own inscription. Dad, you always said to be prepared for the worst. I thought you better know what they’re saying about you.

  I gave them the choice of where they wanted to go for Christmas dinner and they chose the Food Circus at Seattle Center. We walked around the grounds before eating, inspecting the amusement rides that had been dismantled and covered with canvas tarps. Through a fence littered at its base with leaves and candy bar wrappers we studied the rust on the roller coaster rails and dreamed of times past. The booths in the arcade were boarded up, padlocked, and spray-painted with graffiti. A lone American flag drooped from the forest of poles at the flag pavilion. The musical fountain was dry and silent. Derek circled the booths in the Food Circus twice before choosing strawberry waffles and hot chocolate. Justine bought a hickory smoked hot dog and spaghetti which she couldn’t finish. Because it was Christmas dinner, I saved her the lecture.

  When we got home, we turned the lights on and sat around our stubby little silver tree and talked. Derek told me how Jude dropped him off so early at Seward that he’d started helping Buster, the janitor, until the other kids showed up. Buster had an office in his broom closet where he kept baseball gum for kids who were good. Derek was shooting for the whole American League.

  “We sweep the halls in formation, like the Blue Angels.”

  Justine, on the other hand, hated the early dropoffs. She refused to show up at Garfield until there was a crowd. The ideal was to get to your locker just in time to pick up a book and slide into homeroom while the bell was still ringing. The slightest hint of overpreparedness was poison. High schoolers didn’t come from homes; they materialized out of the fog around eight every morning and vaporized again when they wandered to the edge of the school grounds in the late afternoon. I suggested she have Jude drop her at the Seven-Eleven so she could read magazines until it was time for school.

  “I’d feel stupid not buying anything. Besides, the manager of the store gives me the creeps.”

  “Find a friend, then.”

  “None live close by. And the rain would mess up my hair.”

  “Carry an umbrella.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Umbrellas are dorky.”

  She wanted me to flounder in her helplessness. “You’re right, there’s no way out.”

  The kids each had a key to Jude’s house and walked home from school on their own. Derek wore his on a neck-chain along with a quarter that had a bullet hole I’d made while target-shooting at the Quincy dump. Derek had spotted it when I was looking for a football needle in the top drawer of my desk and liked the idea that his dad knew how to shoot a rifle.

  For old time’s sake, I told Derek I’d do a bedtime story. Justine must have heard us because she wandered out to the living room and perched herself on the couch at the foot of his sleeping bag. We agreed to a chain story.

  “Something scary,” Derek said.

  “I can’t think of anything that would scare an eight-year-old.” The idea was to pretend that the story had really happened and it was just a matter of recall. I lay down on the couch and scooted Derek over far enough so I could have a piece of his pillow. We were head-to-head and I could feel his feet squirming through the bag. “Okay, I remember one,” I said. Justine tucked her arms into the sleeves of her nightgown. “When I was little, I had to walk a couple of miles to school. The only way to get there was to pass through Innis Glen. It was the richest neighborhood in town.”

  “Like Innis Arden,” Justine said. She was on to my technique; I’d have to win her over with credible details. “All the houses were mansions that sat behind iron gates with huge sweeping driveways and everyone had chauffeurs and gardeners. You never saw the owners because they traveled in the backseats of long black limousines with shades pulled down over the windows.” Derek rubbed his hands toge
ther in anticipation. “You know those trees the Sweets have in their backyard?”

  “Weeping willows.”

  “The street where I passed was lined with them, so many that it was always dark. They had to keep the streetlights on during the day.” Justine caught my eye and smirked. I reached up and turned off the three-way bulb in the lamp. Derek pulled the sleeping bag up around his chin. “Well, one day when I came by, a kid jumped out from behind a tree with a big stick in his hand. It was the kid I hated most in the whole school. Big Ricky.” Derek snapped his head to look me in the eye. His current nemesis was Ricky Sampson, the kid who’d rubbed snot on Buster’s baseball cards. “Okay, Justine, you tell us what happened next.”

  “Does it have to be Ricky?” she said.

  “That’s who it was,” I said.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s see.” She closed her fists and massaged her jaws. “It scared Dad so much he almost wet his pants right there under the willow trees.”

  Derek giggled.

  “Ricky slapped his stick against the trunk of the tree and said, ‘I told you not to come through here!’ His voice was gruff. He had a big cut on his forehead from a fight he’d been in that day. The blood from the cut had dried up and caked on his face.”

  “Ugh,” Derek said.

  “‘Why are you coming to school so early?’ Ricky said to Dad.” Justine had come a long way since the last time we did this. She wasn’t going to pass up the chance to get her licks in. “‘Only the dinks come early enough to suck up to the teachers.’ Ricky whacked his stick against the tree again and the streetlights flickered out. Your turn, Derek.”

  “No!”

  “You can do it,” I said softly.

  He crammed his eyes shut. “When Ricky looked up to see what happened to the streetlights, Dad ducked into a driveway where someone had left their gate open. Ricky started yelling, ‘I’m going to kill you, Stapleton.’” I couldn’t help but laugh, and Derek frowned at me. “Dad had one trick that Ricky didn’t know about. His uncle was a ventriloquist and he’d taught Dad to throw his voice.” Derek cupped his hands, “‘I’m over here, you little twerp!’” I guessed that Derek had softened the language for my benefit. “Ricky heard Dad’s voice coming out of the hedge across the street and picked up a rock and heaved it at the hedge but it missed and landed on the sidewalk. ‘I’m going to bash your brains in, Stapleton!’ When Dad heard Ricky whacking his stick against the hedge, he ducked back out of the driveway and ran faster than he’d ever run in his life until he was clear to the other end of the Glen.”