A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “You’re just sperm. Once it’s in her, it’s her choice. If she wants to have the baby, she can have it and there’s not a thing you or a warehouse full of lawyers can do about it.”

  His shoulders drooped and he drew a slow determined breath. Warren had curly chestnut hair, the color of a good acoustic guitar, even though he preferred electric. He looked as angelic as Art Garfunkel, even though he wanted to be demonic like Mick Jagger. He was someone on whom you could see beads and a bandanna whether he was wearing them or not. Although he had a decent build, he’d grown soft. He’d never been interested in contact sports or weights. “I had plans, man. I’m tired of being poor. I wanted to live on a houseboat and do my music.” I knew he had no clue as to the contradiction in what he’d just said. The houseboats on Lake Union and Portage Bay were some of the highest rents per square foot in the city—that is, if you were lucky enough to find a vacant one. “I met a guy who wanted our group to cut a demo. I wanted to wait until I had a contract and just drop it on you. Watch your eyes pop out of your head. I could have repaid your loans.” He wiped the bottom of his chin with the side of his hand. “If she has the kid, does this mean I’m responsible to pay for it?”

  “Only for twenty-one years.”

  “I won’t live that long.”

  I found myself doing most of the talking during dinner, extolling the virtues of fatherhood, while Warren moped and wound spaghetti noodles onto his fork. I told him about the time the kids begged me to let their dwarf bunnies play in the living room. Jude was away somewhere and I was just trying to read the paper in peace. Pretty soon Derek came in bawling because their bunnies had disappeared into the motor under the refrigerator. Without thinking, I tipped the refrigerator up and the milk, leftover peach halves, and whatever else was in there clattered to one side. But then I couldn’t set it down without crushing the bunnies.

  “This is supposed to encourage me?” Warren said.

  “Justine held a match under there to find them and singed her hair. They rattled dust mop and broom handles off the bottom of the refrigerator. I thought we were going to have to call the fire department. But they finally scampered out and the kids clapped. I dropped the refrigerator back down and we rolled on the kitchen floor laughing. We swore to never tell Jude.”

  “So you’re telling me to get used to living with a little rabbit shit?”

  “I’m saying there are built-in consolations. And I remind you that our wills still make you the guardian if Jude and I kick off. The kids think you walk on water.” That had been true ever since Warren babysat them on the weekend that Jude and I were in San Francisco for an American Bar Association seminar. He made a one-story high papier-maché’ dinosaur that was tied to the chimney when we came home.

  “This ode to children from the mouth of the man who’s marriage has just crumbled like a dry sand castle.”

  Warren seemed uncharacteristically moody and finished two beers for every one of mine as we talked. “I just can’t believe she’d do this,” he kept mumbling. He grew increasingly resentful each time I sided with Mandy, and I finally decided it was time to go. On the way to the door, he insisted on a nightcap at the bar but there was only one stool free.

  “I want to be one of the reg’lars.”

  “Skip it, Warren.”

  “No, you take the stool. I’ll stand. Let’s have a shot Rhode Island-style. Short and straight up.” His words slurred.

  “Then we go.”

  “Say, fella.” Warren was talking to a burly man in overalls on the stool next to me. “Move over and make me a little standin’ room.”

  The guy looked down at Warren with a sneer, then went back to his beer mug.

  “That’s all right,” I said, “we’re only going to be here a few minutes.”

  “Bullshit. My money’s good as his.” Where the guy’s overalls had come unbuttoned on the side, I could see the top of his grungy boxer shorts. He looked like someone who demolished buildings for a living.

  “I can move a little more the other way.” I stepped off my stool and scooted it over a few inches. Meantime, Warren had squatted down and had a grip on the legs of the other guy’s stool, trying to move him over.

  “Let go,” the man said, “or I’ll rip your fucking kidneys out!”

  “Come on, Warren!” I couldn’t remember seeing him this way. He was the Mahatma Gandhi of the family, the last person I’d expect to pick a fight. “Sir, don’t pay any attention to him. My brother’s way out of line on this one.”

  “That bumfuck is your brother?” His breath smelled like a can of tunafish.

  “He’s dealing with some bad personal stuff. Let me buy you a beer. What are you drinking?”

  “Don’t give ’em shit,” Warren grunted, as he continued to pull against the chrome legs, twisting them so hard that the stool was going to either move or break. Thank God he hadn’t lifted weights.

  “I don’t want your handout,” the man said. “Just get his clammy hands off my chair.”

  “He’s had one too many. Just ignore him.” I pulled on Warren’s shoulders. “Come on, this guy’s gonna’ clobber you and I’m going to help him.” I looked around the bar. Everyone was staring at us. The sick waitress who was supposed to have waited on us peeked out from behind a post.

  “Bartender,” I said, “can you give me a hand here?” I hadn’t wrestled with Warren since he was in grade school. He was an inch taller than me now and twenty pounds heavier.

  The bartender wiped off his hands, lifted the gate in the bar, and joined me.

  “You get that arm and I’ll take this one,” I said.

  Warren held on like his hands were welded to the stool. We squeezed him between us and inched our grip toward his wrists. The burly guy stayed put, anchoring the stool. When we finally broke Warren’s hold, he tried to get away and the bartender put him in a headlock and dragged him toward the exit as the people at the bar cheered. The bartender and Warren burst out of the swinging doors onto the front sidewalk with Warren still cussing into his armpit. The bartender turned him loose and Warren flapped like a rooster, yelling back at they guy inside.

  The bartender stood in the doorway. “He comes back, I call the cops.”

  Warren’s hair was flattened against the sides of his head. His face was red, and his eyes were grenades ready to be lobbed back into the J & B. “I can’t believe it. They’ve kicked us outta this cheap place.” He looked around and noticed for the first time the small crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. “I would’n go in there if I were you,” he said. “They kicked us out ’cause we’re inspectors from the Health Department.” He smiled. Whatever switch had flipped on in the bar had just flipped off.

  We strolled up Yesler, then down the Occidental promenade past transients on the benches sharing bottles wrapped in brown sacks. Compared to Warren, these guys looked harmless.

  “What happened in there?”

  “I guess I was feeling a little trapped by the whole Mandy thing.” He put an arm around my shoulder and smiled weakly. “Sorry. I forget you have a reputation to protect.”

  It would have been stupid to get our teeth busted out over six inches of floor space but I was a sucker for Warren’s reckless passion. I’d have hit him in the head to protect him. His arm around me made all the brotherly juices well up inside again. “The guy had a good question,” I said. “Is that bumfuck my brother?”

  A legal messenger delivered a proposed separation agreement to my office on a Tuesday in April despite the fact that I’d asked to have all divorce correspondence sent to my home. There was a halfhearted apology in the cover letter from Charlie Johnson. “Jude was in a rush,” it said. “You know Jude.” A separation agreement embodied all of the elements of the divorce, and if it was agreed to by the parties it could simplify or avoid the need for a trial. I wanted to sit down and digest it, but I had a trial starting the next day that I wasn’t ready for.

  Alex Monticello, our client, was the owner of a newly
constructed apartment house in Ballard. Like every other construction job I’d seen, it ran over budget and over deadline. The place still leaked like a sieve and Monticello had been unable to rent some of the units. I’d advised my client to withhold final payment, which he did. The contractor sued for payment and we countersued. Now we had to sort through seven thousand pages of documents, twelve change orders, and twenty-one witnesses to decide who owed what. It was a case that should have settled. We were within a hundred thousand dollars of each other in negotiations and it would cost that much to try the case. Surprisingly, I thought, for construction litigation, our opponent was represented by a woman. I was starting to catch on: the female lawyers who’d made the climb up a slope that was still spiked against them were something to be reckoned with.

  Litigation was a glutton; the more detail you fed it, the more it demanded. I was working harder to save Alex Monticello’s money than my own. I carried the proposed separation agreement to the restroom and came back to it between phone calls with witnesses and the client. The agreement gave Jude the house, child support, medical care until the kids were out of college, and installment payments for her share of the goodwill. I was pleased to see the Smith Barney stocks and the New York Life policy, which had a modest cash value, back under my name. In addition, I got the Plymouth, the furniture I’d already hauled over to the Alhambra, a pine dresser still at Jude’s that Dad and Mom had brought us from home when Derek was born, and all the debts. Jude received full custody of the kids, subject to my visitation rights two weekends a month. The stingy visitation schedule hurt, but unless I could prove that she was an unfit mother, my chances of winning custody at trial were nil.

  The tabernacle of my goodwill was an office in a high-rise building downtown known as “the black box.” My office faced east, toward Fourth Avenue and the freeway, which was where I was the night before the Monticello trial. I got up to stretch and pressed my forehead against the glass, which was cool and smooth. The tail-lights of the cars on I–5 wound south like glowworms toward Tacoma and Portland. I could see the main branch of the Seattle Public Library across the street and the federal courthouse, mostly dark, up on the next block. The only lights on at the courthouse were the floodlights at the entrance and what looked like the table lamp from a window in the law library on the tenth floor. So there were at least two of us fools still working. Looking towards Capitol Hill, I tried to find Lill’s apartment. If I signed on to the proposed agreement, maybe Jude and I could stop fighting and Lill and I could proceed unencumbered to wherever it was we were heading. Jude had probably collaborated with her women’s group in making the offer. They were probably out there somewhere strategizing her next move.

  I’d always believed that Jude and I would somehow settle our differences and get back together, but her proposal in black and white mocked that notion. We seemed fixed on a course that probably represented the biggest mistake of our lives. Gazing into the void at more than thirty stories above the earth, I felt isolated. Who cared if I won the Monticello case? Alex Monticello didn’t even know I was getting divorced. When I was on my deathbed, I wouldn’t be able to remember his name.

  Getting over Jude was like scaling a mountain. I’d reach a summit, thinking I was there, only to discover that it was false and I had farther to go. I’d considered jettisoning the men’s group at Group Health, thinking that I could be more honest without an audience. Through my journal entries, I was trying to figure out on my own why the marriage had disintegrated. I always thought there had to be a singular catastrophic event, an explosion you could point to and say, There, that was it! My current explanation was the drifting sand theory. The hundreds of single sentences, words, grunts that we’d uttered in frustration at each other. Grains. Sterile, minute, and nearly weightless grains of sand. Without realizing it, the sand had drifted and finally buried us. It was implosion, not explosion.

  The kids made it through the school year and, by arrangement with Jude, I had them one week each month during the summer. The time with them was magic. We ate out without the two of them arguing. At the Spaghetti Factory, an elderly couple next to us who the kids had amused during dinner secretly paid for our meal and left a note with the waiter saying the kids reminded them of their own. We were living proof that one coping parent could be more effective than two distracted ones. Not only did Derek play catch with me but Justine joined in. I told her the woman who could do a hookslide and a hookshot couldn’t help but love her body. The kids and I wrote up a contract to deal with our most difficult subjects—chores, bedtime hours, TV, bad language, and overnighters. Each time we had another problem, we amended the contract. It was Justine who noticed the absence of legal consideration.

  “Dad, this just lists what we have to do.”

  So we added my obligations: limits on my office hours, reasonable and necessary taxi services, and refraining from saying anything that started with, “When I was your age.”

  Still, I couldn’t help but compare their summer to the way mine used to be. And it depressed me. Summer wasn’t just a season between grades; it was the sum and substance of what a kid lived for. In summer, the air was supposed to be filled with the sweetness of alfalfa, carrot seed, oat hay, seed beans, and sugar snap peas, a time when adults faded into the audience and kids took over the stage. We had the run of the town when I was growing up. We organized circuses and carnivals in our yards with magicians and games of skill. At night, we spoke with the dead in the Quincy Cemetery and confessed whom we’d die for. Summer was our sex education, when hot nights emboldened us to ask things we couldn’t in school. Summer was a free zone, the chance to shed an old friend and grow a new one, to fall hopelessly in love with a girl at the pool who didn’t know your name. I could remember crying on the first morning of school every fall as if summer was a best friend who’d moved away.

  For Justine and Derek, summer meant catching the bus at Aloha and Tenth for Country Day School. Although Jude and I billed it as a camp, it was really day care for kids whose parents worked. There was a swimming pool, horses to ride around a turnstile, an archery range, a craft center, an art studio, and a typing room. The kids at Country Day were mostly grade-schoolers and Justine had to put up with spitwads and name-calling on the bus.

  “It’s humiliating, Dad.”

  “Next summer you can get a job instead.”

  Derek had a couple of friends from Seward who went to Country Day and they turned it into a soccer camp, setting up tournaments with co-ed teams. But I knew that anything scheduled and supervised couldn’t really be summer.

  Although I tried to share as much of my new life as I could with the kids, the revelation of my budding relationship with Lill was still out of bounds. For all the kids knew, I was a monastic with a downtown law job.

  9.

  “I’d like to see you, Lill.”

  “I’ve got dinner made, why don’t you come over? Meet my friend from Germany.” She caught herself. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Isolde’s a woman. You’ll like her.”

  The corset in my abdomen loosened. “How did you say her name?”

  “Isolde. Like he sold the guitar.”

  I hung up, changed clothes, and stopped at Safeway to buy a bottle of wine on the way over. The sky was bottomless blue and I wished I had my sunglasses. Finding the shades that you hadn’t touched for a year was a ritual in Seattle. There was a pickup basketball game going on in one of the alleys. The people sitting on an old picnic table were drinking beer, smoking, and ignoring the game. I knew it was totally absurd for me to be pursuing Jude’s friend, the woman who’d probably convinced her I was the yoke she had to break free of. Was I a masochist or some door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness who thought I could convert her? Or maybe I didn’t care what she believed as long as I could be with a woman.

  Lill rang me into the Buckley and I stepped into the lobby, which was nicely appointed with overstuffed sofas and throne chairs. The crystalline drops in the chandelier shot off rays of blue-g
reen and silver light. The banister curled into a carved ram’s head at the base of the stairs. I knocked lightly when I reached her unit. The voices inside stopped and I heard a cupboard door slam, a chair scoot, then the pad of bare feet. Suddenly, the door came unstuck like it had been newly painted and there she was. I offered my hand and she took my sack with the bottle of wine. The room smelled lemony. Her friend gripped me unexpectedly firmly.

  “Guten tag.”

  “Isolde?”

  She smiled and Lill said something to her with lots of ichs and meins.

  “I didn’t know you spoke German.”

  “Long story. Enough to get along.”

  We had halibut that was poached in a white sauce and garnished with pearl onions and button mushrooms. It crumbled as my lips pulled it free of the fork. Isolde and Lill took small pieces of the fish and a green salad serving barely large enough to cover a dollar bill. It was obvious they’d only fixed enough for two. As soon as the first bottle of wine was empty, Lill uncorked the Pinot Gris I’d brought. Isolde dominated the conversation, starting ideas in broken English that ended in German. My jokes got two laughs, one in English and a second one from Isolde after the translation. I plowed through my memory for anything German, mostly memories of my trip through Europe the summer after my junior year of college, one of those three-week wonders with a new city every other day. I remembered lying on a grassy hillside above Heidelberg, floating down the Rhine to Rudesheim, visiting Dachau, vomiting up beer and sausage I’d bought from a street vendor in Munich. I told her about the Adolph Hitler speech I gave in a high school speech contest, but Lill didn’t pass that one along.

  “They don’t talk about that War.”

  Isolde acted a little drunk and I thought she might be slurring her German as she cross-examined me through Lill. How long was I married? What was Jude like? Why didn’t it work out? Were the kids suffering? Was I going to remarry? The language barrier and the Pinot Gris seemed to free her to ask anything she wanted. For all I knew, she was talking about the weather and these were Lill’s questions. When it was my turn to be the interrogator, Isolde was ready.