A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  I put my hand on the shoulder of his jacket. “I’m trying to help you, Derek. The way to get your friend in trouble is to ignore this. The next time it’ll involve the police. I can tell you this: if it happens again, the police will be the least of your worries.”

  I felt like a truant officer marching him up the stairs to the old house. Before opening the door, I brushed my hand through his hair to make him look less disheveled. He gave me a tentative smile, but he still looked like a chastised dog. I stayed with him until Jude came home, explained the situation to her and then left.

  I descended the twenty stairs slowly, my heart coiling and uncoiling like a slinky. I didn’t feel right leaving Derek there. I felt so inept. I didn’t know how to be a parent. The kids needed more than self-reliance. I needed to show them an emotional intricacy that I’d never developed. They needed to trust me with their pain. Whatever was bothering them, they were willing to risk it with a mother they were embarrassed to be seen with in public. Maybe they didn’t know how much I wanted them.

  15.

  While Derek prepared his sauerkraut and wieners for our Friday night dinner, Justine and I walked Magpie by the mansions in the historic district on Belmont. The bushes were trimmed like poodles, bare in the legs and torso and puffy at the extremities. Real poodles stared at us through leaded glass windows from cavernous dining rooms with chandeliers that glowed like upside-down wedding cakes. There were brass emblems on marble columns at the entrances to the driveways. At a house with railed balconies and flower boxes outside each of the upstairs windows, a man in rubber boots hosed mud off a driveway that curved under the portico.

  “If you and Mom had stayed married, could we afford to live in one of these?”

  “You mean after all my lectures on the difference between happiness and net assets, you want to throw it over for a thirty-room house with servants’ quarters?”

  Justine jiggled Magpie’s leash to distract her from the base of a stone wall which held the secrets of the canine universe. Magpie braced her feet, disconnected her voice command center, and sniffed up and down the wall like an anteater. “I don’t even know what net assets are,” she said.

  “It’s something your parents tell you after puberty.”

  “You’ve never told me about that either.”

  “Didn’t your mother?”

  “Kind of,” she said. Fortunately, she didn’t pursue it as we sat on someone’s curb and petted Magpie.

  “What’s going on at home, Justine?”

  “Everything’s about the same.”

  “How’s Derek doing?”

  “He was bitchy during the week. Pulled practically everything he owned out of the closet and spread it around his room.”

  “Sounds normal.” Magpie had meantime left a big dump on a parking strip that was manicured like the felt on a pool table. I’d forgotten to bring along plastic bags, and tried to jostle it with a stick toward the tree circle.

  “Ick. Just leave it, Dad. One of their servants can pick it up.”

  “It’s no worse than changing your diapers.”

  “I thought Mom did all that.”

  The kids went back to their mom’s on Sunday night and I hoped that Justine would call to give me a report on things at the house. Maybe she and her mom had had their talk. The only person who called on Monday was a carpet cleaner who said he’d be in the neighborhood with a special.

  Downtown Seattle felt like a pile of highrise office buildings in a wasteland of pissed-on sidewalks and clogged arterials again. I came home before dark and walked to Safeway for something to cook or, more accurately, heat up. Even on Capitol Hill, the air was smoky with exhaust and cluttered with noise as I followed a parochial school girl in a Navy blue uniform dress and knee socks, walking hand in hand with her father. She bumped against his side, taking direction from the swing of his arm and the nudge of his hip, showing unconditional trust in his guidance.

  In the men’s therapy group, we’d done some father work which I’d thought at the time was pretty far removed from what was bothering me. My dad was a good provider and generally urged me forward, but I couldn’t remember him ever actually listening to me. His vision of me was independent of anything he really knew about me. By default, I’d usually done what he wanted. He complained that he’d missed college to fight in the war, married early, and ended up working for wages most of his life. Although I’d married early too because Jude was pregnant, I was obedient in the rest of his regrets, running scared as a jackrabbit straight from kindergarten to law school and becoming a partner in the minimum six years.

  “A man’s only as good as his job,” he’d told me. Whenever I’d tried to broach the subject of my problems with Jude, he’d brushed it aside and asked instead about my work, and when I started to tell him about my work he’d talk about his even though he was already retired. I’d sworn that I’d listen to my kids if I ever had any.

  Jude and I had always scheduled a Christmas trip with the kids. The last year we were together we rented a condo at White Pass and skied. There was a heated outdoor pool where the adults brought their drinks and planted them in snowdrifts next to the Jacuzzi while the kids threw snowballs at each other and watched them melt in the pool like sugar cubes. This year Jude was meeting her brother and his family at Whistler, where he’d rented a place large enough for both families. I knew she had to be doing this strictly for the kids because, as Jude was fond of saying, her brother could be a pain in the ass. And she’d gone without Lill.

  Most lawyers in the firm took off the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Those of us left felt like we were doing time, and I needed to break out. I was worried about the kids but there was nothing I could do when they were with their mom. Hopefully, they were having the time of their life skiing. Seeing them only on occasional weekends, I was learning to stuff my parenting into a bag when they weren’t there. Denial was one of the skills I’d developed as a lawyer. There were simply too many crappy things happening that you couldn’t change.

  On the day before New Year’s Eve, I called Dana Dukelow, the mother of one of the girls in Justine’s class. I found her number in Justine’s school folders. She was the single mother I’d seen at parents’ nights in the miniskirts and patterned nylons, the one who let her daughter Sarah take friends to their cabin on Whidbey Island unchaperoned. I asked her to go roller-skating New Year’s Eve. I hadn’t roller-skated since senior prom when our class rented the rink at Soap Lake and people wheeled around in suits and evening gowns.

  After we’d picked out our skates, Dana disappeared into the ladies’ locker room and changed into Spandex tights, a flared green skirt, a white ruffled blouse, and a matching green ribbon for her hair. The rink had tied balloons to the lights and taped an “Auld Lang Syne” poster over the refreshment stand. As we skated around the floor to the sounds of Linda Ronstadt and Barry Manilow from the cluster of boxed speakers laden with mistletoe that hung over the center of the floor, Dana seemed oblivious to the fact that most people were wearing jeans and sweatshirts. On a couples-only number, she took my hand.

  “Come on, I won’t bite you.”

  Fortunately, many of the roller-skaters there probably hadn’t been born the last time I skated so there was little risk I’d run into anyone who knew me. Besides, lawyers didn’t skate. I envied her the way she could close her eyes and let her head float back on the straightaways, careless as to who saw us or what they thought.

  She invited me in when I dropped her off at her house. “We can turn on the tube and watch the year end.”

  “I hate that countdown with the ball thing.”

  “I hate being alone when everyone else is having fun,” she said.

  I looked around the living room while she went into the kitchen to fix us a Harvey’s Bristol Cream, which didn’t sound all that good after the spiked eggnogs at the rink. Everything was neat as a pin. Magazines and sections of the morning newspaper were fanned across the coffee table. I lifted t
he lid off a giant glass apple and found it filled with jelly beans. The purple ballpoint pen in the holder next to the phone was lilac-scented. There was a pillow carefully positioned in each corner of the couch. I slid my hand between the seat cushions and fished out a pair of dirty sweat socks, and felt a pang of discomfort for being there. I should have at least asked Justine if it was okay to go out with the mother of one of her friends. When Dana returned, I quickly stuffed the socks back into the sofa.

  “It’s so quiet here when Sarah’s at my mother’s.” She stopped at the bookshelves, shoved in an eight-track cassette, and turned down the lights. “Morning Has Broken.” I loved Cat Stevens. We had the same initials.

  She handed me my drink in a crystal glass and then took a seat so close to me that her bottom brushed my arm on the way down. “They were my grandma’s,” she said. “We have a set of eight.”

  I must have had a puzzled look.

  “What?” She laughed and leaned her shoulder into mine. “What did you think I was talking about?”

  “I guess I was spaced out.”

  “He has a sexy voice,” she said.

  “But how many words a minute can he type?”

  No reaction.

  She went back to the kitchen for a second round, this time returning with the bottle and using one of the magazines for a coaster. Things were getting more homey and I slid down next to her on the floor.

  “I used to be a pretty good skater,” she said. “My boyfriend would tie a ski rope to the back of his bike and pull me around the neighborhood.”

  “We used to line up people on the grass and build bike ramps to see how many we could jump over.”

  She sipped her Bristol Cream and studied me. “It’s okay to tell the kids about this, isn’t it? I tell Sarah everything.”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  Dana was a bit of a talker, or else she’d been starved for an adult audience. She told me her story, how she loved being a travel agent, how her husband had cheated on her, where she went to church, how proud she was of her Sarah. Her voice grew velvety. “If you’d been the one who pulled me on my skates, do you think we would have, you know, done something about it?” She giggled and nudged me.

  This was where I should have turned on the Times Square rally and sobered up. She was just trying to be nice and I was letting myself slide back into a state of self-delusion, forgetting everything I’d learned. I stretched my arm out and drooped it over her shoulder. With my eyes closed, I stroked the back of her neck and imagined her floating with her arms thrust behind her the way she did at the skating rink. She leaned over to set her glass on the coffee table and, on the way back, I greeted her with a slow kiss. There was no flexing of her lips; she let me do all the moving. She whispered something into my mouth and I guided her to the floor in the space between the coffee table and the couch, making a perfunctory effort to sort out the consequences of this.

  “Is this okay?” I asked.

  I slipped my hand between the rug and her back, trying to feel the knobs of her vertebrae. She arched to give me more space. Then I noticed the rag doll sitting on a throne of floor pillows in the corner, watching us with her button eyes and thready smile. She looked like the doll Justine had slept with until the face rubbed off and Derek amputated its legs with a pair of scissors. I couldn’t think of the kids and do this. Starting to feel very Catholic, I rolled onto my side, away from her.

  She slid her hand down my ribs, stopping at my groin. Then she lifted her head and looked at me. “I don’t usually have this effect on people.”

  “It’s not you.” Something was holding me back that I didn’t have the heart to even bring up. A good body and a puckered mouth weren’t enough. We needed roots and we didn’t have any. In their own mushy dialect, my insides were speaking to me with the profundity of Churchill.

  “This way, you can still like me in the morning,” she said.

  She mussed my hair and gave me a kiss on the cheek at her door when we parted.

  I drove down Broadway on the way home. Usually, I would have stopped at Dick’s for a cheeseburger but my stomach felt queasy. A couple of people were trying to do one of the dance steps that were embedded in bronze on the sidewalk. Punks with purple hair, bicycle chains, and handcuffs hanging from their belts leaned against parking meters smoking and gawking at passersby. Girls with blue lips and frizzy hair strutted their stuff. The Hari Krishnas and Moonies had gone home to bed. Everyone left was on the make.

  There were no parking places at the Alhambra and the streets were full so I used a rounded corner that nobody had taken. Walking back to the apartment, I pushed on my stomach trying to find the source of the pain I felt in the intestines. My forehead felt sweaty and I held onto several deep breaths to force oxygen into my brain. I looked up to find stars, wanting something expansive, but a dull fogginess hovered just beyond the tops of the buildings, reflecting back the lights of the city. The only noises were the buzz of streetlights and accelerating car engines. I would have fallen on my knees and prayed to the chirp of a cricket, the cackle of a chicken, anything living.

  As I descended the stairs to the basement and fumbled for the key, the nausea in my stomach swelled like a bladder that knows it’s close to a bathroom. I pushed open the door, left my key in the lock, raced down the hallway, snapped the switch on, lifted the seat, and knelt with my hands on the rim of the bowl. The first heave turned my belly over but nothing came out. I detested the thought of cream sherry and vowed never again to drink it. The next movement forced my mouth open and expelled another dry, gagging heave. My face felt as clammy as the porcelain. I thought of the beatnik Jesus from therapy who’d fooled around with his wife’s sister and realized we were cut from the same plain male cloth. I hadn’t made any progress.

  The water in the bottom of the toilet bowl shimmered from the leak in the tank that the landlord had never fixed and it reminded me of the sunken battleship Arizona that I’d seen at Pearl Harbor, the way water distorted things that didn’t belong. I studied the rusty brown stain under the circumference of the rim and the hairs between the bolts that hinged the back of the seat. Another dry heave, more violent than the first, left a twice-cooked taste of Harvey’s that burned my throat. I fixed my brain on the image of wormy duck meat and the vomit finally sprayed out of my mouth, spoiling the water a chunky orange. Saliva dripped from my lips and I knew that the disfigured face looking up at me from that pool was my own.

  16.

  In January, I left for work in the dark and came home in the dark. Sometimes, I’d drop my clothes on the bed as I undressed, get under the covers in my stocking feet and underpants, and listen to the water gushing down the drainpipe as people flushed their toilets or unplugged their bathtubs. The gutter emptied onto the sidewalk next to my window and, when the rain slowed, the drips echoed as they hit the galvanized elbow at the bottom. Occasionally, the woman with the cat in the unit above me had overnight company and I had to listen to her bed creaking and thumping. One night at about three a.m., I heard her giggling outside the door to my apartment and bumping the walls like she was trying to get away from her fellow. One of them hit my door and rattled the latch. Then I heard the gushing of hot water into the washer, which meant I’d later hear the tumbling of the dryer. The excesses of love.

  One night, I sat on the edge of the bed in my shorts and studied the black and white pictures of the kids on the dresser. Derek was about four years old with long, curly hair, wearing those quilted pants that had burned up on a camping trip when I tried to dry them out over the fire with a marshmallow stick. He sat on the top step of the porch at the old house with an arm over the dog and one leg tucked under his bottom. His foot barely touched the next lower step. Without the distraction of motion or color, my imagination breathed its own life into the picture. I could feel the heat of the red-painted cement rise from the porch and hear the whap-whap of the sprinkler from the Sweet’s lawn next door. If Derek had stood up, I would have held my arms i
n front of him like a gate in case he stumbled.

  Justine was flying down the slide at Roanoke Park in her corduroy brown parka, with her knees rising over the hump in the middle of the slide and her hands gripping the railings to slow herself down. The gulping smile of a controlled fall. When she hit bottom, I remembered how she knocked me over and ran back up the make-believe rocketship to do it again. I also remembered how Justine cried once when I tucked her into bed because the Martin cousins were coming the next day. She said they made her feel stupid because they all played musical instruments and did sports. Jude’s brother used to chatter constantly about what his kids had done at scout camp, how many candy bars they’d sold for the school raffle, and what they were going to be when they grew up. I secretly hoped that one of them would serve time.

  Jude’s brother was a card-carrying Republican, who’d led Freedom Fighter discussion groups in college with Herb Philbrick tapes that described how the Communists had infiltrated the State Department and were systematically giving away the third world to the Reds.

  “The only time he ever cried in his life,” Jude said, “was when Goldwater lost the election.”

  Jude’s brother knew all of her buttons and never hesitated to push them when his family stayed with us. For those brief interludes, there was someone in the house with less consciousness than me.

  “Kids who go to daycare are fifty percent more likely to have eating disorders,” he said.

  “But their socialization skills will be higher,” Jude said. “They’ll tap dance on the graves of the kids who don’t go.”

  “Where is the women’s movement on families?” he said.

  “We’re taking fertility pills to outbirth the silent majority,” she said.

  These were the discussions we had on obligatory holiday dinners while I stacked the dishwasher, Jude covered the leftovers, her brother’s wife swept up crumbs in the dining room, and her brother fingered an unlit Jamaican cigar that Jude made him smoke outside. In his own house, her brother had a paneled den with stand-up ashtrays and a portrait of Douglas MacArthur over the fireplace.