A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “Bosh!” Martha almost spit on me. “Women’s lib is bunk. Don’t you see that?” She looked past me to Justine and her friend at the bedside. “It’s just bunk.”

  Jude and I stayed with Justine at the hospital that night, and Lill stayed with Derek. I called Derek to tell him what was going on.

  “Justine’s going to make it, pal, but the doctor wants to keep her under observation and take some more tests to make sure her levels stay down. How are you doing?”

  “Magpie and I want to sleep in her bedroom.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Jude and I took turns sleeping in the second bed in Justine’s room, which had a thin mattress and a button to raise and lower the pillow end. Justine woke up in the middle of my shift and seemed to be free of the weariness that had possessed her earlier. The last time I’d tended to her at bedside she was seven and they’d taken out her tonsils.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” she whispered, her lips too dry to stretch. She gripped my hand. Then she looked over to see if her mom was listening, but Jude’s breathing was slow and rhythmic. She clamped her eyes shut. “I’ve been feeling so ugly.” Her lips quivered and her chin tightened into a knuckle. “Someone at school said I was sexless.”

  “Jesus, Justine.” Her accuser’s words resonated with my own guilt; I’d periodically thought the same thing of Jude.

  “I couldn’t go back to class, so I just left school and wandered around. I knew he was right. Because of Mom.”

  I knelt down next to the bed so that my head was near hers and wrapped both hands over her fists like they were a warm stone. “Justine, daughters don’t always turn out like their mothers. Look at your mom and Martha.”

  She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Don’t tell Derek about this. He’ll be freaked out.”

  “Don’t worry about him. Just you get better.”

  I knelt next to the bed until she dropped off and her breathing became audible. Then I sat in the chair, rested the back of my head against the wall, and closed my eyes.

  When Justine was five, we dressed her in a bunny costume and took her to Volunteer Park for the public egg hunt. It was a madhouse with all of the kids crowding around the man in the microphone who was dressed in a padded rabbit suit. His little helpers in fairy suits with transparent wings stood inside the rope barrier to keep kids from hunting until the gun went off. It was a children’s version of the street demonstrations at the ’68 Democratic Convention. Justine wanted to go home, but we made her stay and helped work her closer to the rope. Most of the kids were uncostumed, including a gang of boys next to Justine with pillowcases and plastic bags tucked into their belts who whistled and shouted at the bunny to shoot his gun. Besides marshmallow eggs and chocolate bunnies, the fairies had hidden plastic eggs with quarters in them and golden eggs with tickets to the Poncho Theater.

  When the gun fired, someone knocked Justine over and her headpiece twisted down over one of her eyes. We lifted her up and urged her on, watching as she shuffled across the grass with her bamboo-weave Easter basket. Every bush and tree she looked behind had already been picked clean. Older kids flashed by her like skyrockets, showing off eggs and candies to their parents behind the rope. When the whistle blew to stop the hunt, Justine had an empty basket that she dropped at our feet. She was crying. I scurried around until I found one of the boys with a pillowcase and paid him a dollar for a handful of candy that I put into her basket.

  I could hear the sound of voices at the nursing station and the pad of tennis shoes passing the open door to Justine’s room. Jude and Justine were both snoring and, I thought, they did sound a lot alike. Justine had inherited so many traits from her mother that I wondered if sexual perplexity was one of them.

  The first night Justine was out of the hospital and the kids stayed with me I found a half-smoked joint in the cigar box from my dresser amid the campaign pins, contact lens case, mood ring, Canadian coins, spare keys, football needles, and other miniature paraphernalia. It was dry and hard and the paper was bumpy where it molded around the crumpled grass. One end of it tapered to a smoking hole the size of pencil lead and the other end was blunt and ashen where it had been tamped out, the leftovers from one of our nights with the Baldwins, when they’d bring their kid over for a potluck dinner and a jug of Gallo Burgundy. Their girl was the same age as Derek and we’d have Justine play out in the yard or the basement with them while we passed a joint in the kitchen for an appetizer. After dinner, we’d put the kids to bed, pass another joint, and turn on the Moody Blues. Then we’d get ravenous and vandalize the kitchen for strawberry shortcake makings. We figured Justine was too young to know the difference between cigarettes and pot.

  Jerry Baldwin worked on the UW campus and had access to all the dope he wanted. I was scared of getting caught and losing my bar membership so I never kept a lid in the house. We bartered sandwich baggies with a little dope in the bottom in exchange for our babysitting their girl. I only smoked when we had company. For me, the laughter was the turn-on; for Jude, it was the idea of my breaking the law. I used to worry when we made love after smoking pot that she was fantasizing I was one of her ACLU buddies. The first time Jude let me come down on her we’d had some of the Baldwins’ grass. Maybe that was the start of her transformation.

  I rolled the little butt from my cigar box between my fingers, closed the lid, and put the box back into the sock drawer. When Justine turned twelve, we stopped doing the grass. I hadn’t even thought of the stuff for years. But with the kids in bed, I thought, why not close the door, open the window, and finish this one off? It was better than having them find it. Besides, I needed an escape from the stories of adolescent suicide that had begun to jump out at me from the newspapers and I also needed relief from watching Justine for the least hint of depression.

  I lit a candle and dripped wax onto a saucer to create a base. Then I turned off the light, climbed into the center of the bed, and put the saucer on the bedspread. The joint crackled when I lit it off the candle flame. Seeds. I was surprised at how easily I was able to open my throat and draw down the first drag. I held my breath and let the dope find its way into the bloodstream where it created a rush of parental euphoria. It felt so reassuring to be under the same roof with the kids, even if it was only for the weekend. Justine’s incident had made me treasure our limited time together even more. We were surviving the pandemonium.

  The first exhalation left me light-headed as I sat there motionless. A wisp of smoke trailed off the end of the joint, making it look like it had died. Against the cement wall of the bedroom, I could see my shadow. The torso that rose out of the mattress fluttered and swayed like a genie coming out of its bottle as the candle flame flickered next to me.

  I lay back, closed my eyes, and took another toke that went straight to the groin, microdots of cannabis leaking into my scrotum. Lill floated into the room, unwrapping herself as she moved. Her clothes were translucent and fell off her pale skin like silk sliding from marble as she walked toward me, her pubic hair the color of port wine. Go ahead, Lill, I thought, unzip me. She swept the air with her free hand like a blind woman trying to find the edge of the bed, and I tried to imagine the orange blossom scent of her hair and the pad of my thumb brushing over her scar.

  Then the hot cone from the joint dropped onto my bare stomach and I jumped up and brushed it to the floor. I thought I heard something from Justine’s room and put my ear next to the crack. What if one of the kids walked in on me? I held the roach up to my eye and there was no sign of heat. It was dead. I thought of flushing it down the toilet but I didn’t want to leave the bedroom with it so I pinched it off the hairpin, threw it to the back of my throat, and swallowed it the way Jerry had taught me. It lodged partway down like a spitwad, and I tried to make saliva but the insides of my mouth were juiceless. I opened the window and waved the smoke out with a pillow. Then I wondered if the probation officer upstairs with the pug face would smell it and call the cops. The window accidentally banged
shut when I unhooked the chain and I clenched my teeth, sure that I had aroused either the kids or the pug.

  With my clothes still on, I slid under the covers and pulled them up to my chin. This was the other reason I’d stopped smoking this stuff: it made me paranoid. But this time the paranoia was warranted. I felt horrible for even thinking of Lill, especially with the kids here. I kept thinking of Justine bringing home a girlfriend in overalls and a pocket protector, of Derek loitering around rest rooms in the park to pick up men, of some zealot like Dan White who gunned down Harvey Milk in the San Francisco City Hall coming after them.

  In my dream that night, I took a woman to the Greyhound bus station who slipped off her ring and stuck it into my pants pocket as we stood in the breezeway next to an idling bus, the diesel fumes making me nauseous. She turned, handed her ticket to the mustached driver standing at the door, and bolted up the steps. Once she reached her seat, she whispered something to me through the tinted windows, and I answered her with voiceless words that moved my lips.

  Derek was at a friend’s house that Saturday, so I had to think of something to do with Justine. I asked her if she wanted to have someone over. Negative. Or go bicycling. Negative. Or take Magpie on a hike.

  “You can go without me,” she said.

  There was no way I was going to leave her home alone. And I couldn’t imagine just the two of us sitting home without talking about it. I needed distraction. I wanted cheerful. She finally agreed to go to Longacres.

  In order to save two bucks, I used general parking, which was distant from the entry way but free, and took the shuttle train, which looked like a series of coupled golf carts. I thought she’d get a kick out of the open-air ride, but she seemed glum. I wanted sunshine, but the sun was behind a cloud formation resembling a pile of poker chips. Justine dragged behind as I led us to a bench close to the finish line.

  “Look at that infield,” I said. “It’s landscaped like Buckingham Palace.”

  “The people seem just ordinary.”

  She was right on that one. They called it the sport of kings, but the stands were filled with paupers and pretenders, a melting field of races where every tongue could utter win, place, show. She hung her hooded sweatshirt over the back of the bench and I folded my Scotch-plaid sportcoat, a Christmas gift from Mom, into a square on the seat next to me. I taught her how to read the racing form—date and length of race, track condition, position at each call, jockey weight, speed rating. She seemed to be coming alive and started studying the form, circling and ranking her top three horses the same as I did, but our choices seldom matched. During the parade to the post, she’d go over to the rail and watch the jockeys canter their horses by.

  “Don’t just go with the prettiest silks,” I told her.

  She scoffed. “I’m more interested in their rump muscle.”

  In the fifth race, with quinella wagering, she put her two dollars on Indian Justice and Suicide Sue. I almost said something—the doctors said it was healthy to talk about what had happened—but I didn’t want to put a damper on things. I put five bucks on Shindig across the board on the basis that she was coming down in class, had a five-pound weight advantage, and had recently been claimed by the leading trainer. Justine’s two horses thundered past in a photo finish for first, and she whipped me with her form and laughed as Shindig limped over the line second from last. She was so excited she knocked her coke off the bench.

  “My horse must’ve pulled a rump muscle.” I didn’t care who won. I just wanted her to smile, to put some experiential distance between the incident and the rest of her life. I just wanted her and Derek to stay with me, to start doing all the stuff we still hadn’t done.

  I was glad for the distraction of the two black gentlemen who sat on the bench behind us and chattered constantly. From their conversation, I gathered they were machinists at Boeing. They’d bet at the window, and then bet against each other from their seats. The guy in the checkered shirt tapped Justine on the shoulder after she won the quinella.

  “Ma’am, do you mind telling me who you’re on in the next race?”

  Justine was taken aback and looked at me as if to see if it was okay. “I’m on Momma’s Boy,” she said. “His jockey’s already won two today.” Justine may not have been gleeful, but she was still a quick study. She’d already picked up on the importance of propensities, including gender. The jockey she liked was a her.

  “Say, I hadn’t noticed that,” the man said, looking down at his program. Then he laughed and nudged his friend, “Whad I tell you?”

  We made our bets and squeezed out a place against the cement railing for the last race, watching the wheel-tractor drag a rake-frame around the track to erase the footprints from the last race. Erasure was one of the things I liked about the track. Each race was a new start, independent of whatever confusion and bad luck had preceded it. After the tractor passed, it looked like someone had combed the ground, leaving narrow peaked rows of nutrient-rich topsoil that birds lit on searching for angle worms.

  Our friends were still there when we went back to the bench to get my coat and Justine’s sweatshirt. The man with the baseball cap, who’d bet against Justine’s horses earlier, extended his hand. “Say, young lady, you wouldn’t mind telling me where you’ll be sitting tomorrow?” Then he broke into a belly laugh and swatted his buddy.

  Justine smiled. She was better, but it seemed temporary. What would she feel like on Monday, in school, in her room? On the way home I tallied up in my head how much I’d spent for the day’s entertainment, including pretzels, roast beef sandwiches, ice cream, drinks, admission, and bets. It was less than the cost of the eighteen block ride Justine had taken in the Shepard ambulance.

  I tried but I couldn’t get the image of Justine’s pallid face in the hyperbaric chamber out of my mind when they went back to their mom’s. I was measuring my life by the number of days it had been since the incident, hoping that each additional day would blur some of the detail in my memory. You didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that Jude’s situation was eating at Justine. She spent a lot more time in her room; she wasn’t eating well. She didn’t even get on Derek’s case as often. Maybe we could excuse the first incident as a surprise, but if it happened again, it would be because of negligence. I needed Jude’s help.

  I didn’t recognize the person who answered the phone at Jude’s and thought I might have dialed the wrong number. There was a cackle of voices in the background. Not sure if it was the right house, I asked if Jude Martin was there. I still wasn’t used to calling her Martin.

  “It’s me, Jude.”

  “We’re having women’s group, can I call you back?”

  I was still miffed that she hadn’t called me back when I’d left a message at her office. “I’ve been doing some more thinking about our situation.” As I said it, I realized that it sounded like the preface to a request for reconciliation. There was no interruption; she was still on the line. I closed my eyes and just said it. “I think you need to break it off with Lill, Jude. At least, don’t live together.”

  “Lill’s moved in. She doesn’t even have a place.”

  “That isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.”

  “It isn’t just a matter of leases and legal arrangements.” Her voice sounded tired. “We have a relationship. What have they been saying to you?”

  “Nobody’s trashing you.”

  “They pick up on your silence, Cyrus.”

  “Am I supposed to spend my weekends extolling the virtues of this arrangement?”

  “You’re homophobic.”

  “Jude.”

  “I need her. I’m not going to let another relationship die.” It was the closest she’d ever come to saying she regretted what had happened to us.

  “This isn’t a matter of blame.”

  “You make it sound criminal.”

  “Jude, I think the kids are afraid of you.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with you and Lill, do
es it?”

  The glass panels of the Safeway phone booth, which I’d chosen so the kids wouldn’t eavesdrop, were steamed up. The proverb written in ballpoint pen on the aluminum just over the coin slot said: Marriage is prostitution with one man. I wiped my elbow against the glass and noticed a little girl standing outside clutching a quarter in her fingers. Her mom had probably told her to call after she’d seen what kind of fish was fresh. The things mothers made their kids do. “What are you going to do, Jude?”

  “I’ll spend some more one-on-one time with them away from the house. I’m as concerned about them as you are.”

  It was a start but it wasn’t enough. On the walk back to the apartment, I went over the conversation the way I’d reexamine the argument in a motion I’d lost. I decided that I was the wrong person to carry the message; there was too much clutter between us. We always ragged on each other. She didn’t have it in her constitution to give in and I took too much glee in seeing her squirm. We needed someone she trusted. Maybe Warren. She always liked Warren. She said he had inherited all the virtue in my family. But he’d still be perceived as mine. I needed someone who was hers.

  13.

  Lill agreed to meet me at Volunteer Park on the benches by the cylindrical brick water tower, which looked like an English fortress. From the top of the tower on a clear day, you could move from barred window to barred window and take in a different postcard view of Seattle: sailboats tacking in Lake Washington, the snowcapped Cascades, the site of the 1962 World’s Fair, Queen Anne hill, the Olympics. Because I was early, I walked the pathway around the park and gawked at someone throwing a tennis ball to his dog, a man practicing chip shots, and a woman on a camping stool doing a watercolor painting of the greenhouse. In the city, the park served as the surrogate for the deserted roads and coulees that were so plentiful in places like Quincy.

  Jude had taken me to Volunteer Park to watch a meteor shower the night we made Justine. She had a blanket in her trunk that her dad made her carry for emergencies, and we laid it on the grass next to the reservoir and talked about the black holes in the universe that sucked light into them like magnets. She unbuttoned her shirt and I tickled her with a long, tasseled weed. When it got cold, we rolled ourselves up like a rug in her blanket.