Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

  “I spent my childhood trying to please him.”

  Sipping vegetable juice, convinced that concoction would cleanse the alcohol from her blood, Helen told me that as a child she’d willed herself to grow up pretty so she wouldn’t disappoint him. She told me how she would seize his arms and shout, “I love you, I love you,” and that it would have been enough simply to hear a “me too,” an “of course,” a “ditto”—some echo of approval. She told me she offered herself like a gift, that she sang and drew just to gladden one of Rupert’s hours. As a teenager she tormented herself about her figure so she would be a good jumper, to win a modicum of paternal respect. She never did.

  All in all it took me a couple of hours even to understand that the Rupert she was talking about, so desperate to engender a son, was her Daddy, her father (who her grandfather baptized with the name Rudolf—the first Thrush to receive a sacrament on American soil—in the white church planted out on the prairie, in a baptismal font that was the town’s artistic pride and joy). And that baby would grow into the expectant father who, overcome, peered at the ultrasound (whose fluorescent undulations reminded him of the granulated images in UFO documentaries) where the suspended boiling mass of his daughter was growing embryonic lungs, extremities, a stomach surrounded by arteries. The man who observed his wife and was moved when he superimposed the familiar face smiling at him onto that new creature on the inside of the belly’s wall, mutating to the beat of a plan engraved in the DNA he bequeathed her the moment he spilled his seed in her mother. I didn’t ask her how that memory was so clear in her mind. With one look, Helen made it very obvious that if I started to question those Montana-forged myths, she might just claw my eyes out.

  Nor did it help that, on entering the world, Helen pushed her mother’s ovaries out ahead of her. Or she tore up the placenta—what do I know?—some unpleasantness that ruins the oven. Covered in mucous and free of ideas, Helen was clearly innocent, but from that first moment on, Rupert saw her as one of those little meteorites that hit the Earth trailing a somber wake of sterility behind them.

  “To Daddy, I will always be the murderer of my future brothers.”

  I tried to defuse her past, and told her that she’d have the opposite problem with me, since I would rather have a girl. She recoiled. It was like I’d squirted a drop of lemon onto one of those half-alive slimy things that spend their dismal existence hidden inside a shell. Then she started to slap me with open palms, and when she finished her eyes were dry but shot through with red. I learned that I couldn’t mix the central episodes of her family saga with the erotic interlude she’d chosen to enjoy in Barcelona. The epicenter of her existence was the interminable dispute with Rupert; what she and I had was a vicarious romance. However good a time she may have been having in that temperate city of serene skies, the only thing Helen read in the recap of her life was that she had always lost.

  You’re going to laugh, of course you’ll laugh, but for months I’d believed that I had seduced her; I’d stopped in front of shop-windows and looked at those price tags as if they were meaningless numbers, signs for idiots blind to life’s most intense pleasures: to win an argument, to possess a woman. My thoughts had been fuzzy. I’d felt like a bull with its snout smeared triumphantly with mud, but the eyes of the cows, the lionesses—of the subhuman female of your choosing—always waver between surrender and an instinctive shine of pride. Anyway, there’s really nothing you can compare to Helen’s scintillating and avaricious eyes, those little fragments that moved aside so my big body could take its place in the center of their enigmatic circles and I could play the part of the male companion she’d been ruminating on ever since she got her first period. It was a role that had fallen to me randomly, and not through conquest as my vanity had led me to fantasize.

  But, who was this Rupert? Who was the man behind the myth? Who was Rudolf Thrush III? Daddy’s story went like this: the son of a communist émigré from Hamburg, he had received the baton passed by his father after a life dedicated to survival, one that had been the lever for raising a prosperous business (in a humble sense of the word). For years he’d been his father’s only employee (his brother Beryl enlisted in the Marines, and once they considered him crazy enough they sent him back to Montana with a certificate and a pension that helped cover the costs of the twenty years he’d spend building model planes). Rupert passed the decades delivering milk, cheese, and yogurt in a van that he never took to the mechanic. He changed its tires and shined its hood with the very same hands that delivered date and walnut cakes, that avidly dished out the goulash that year by year lost its Central European nuances until it was diluted in the genus of common savory stews. At the wheel of that van, Rupert drove the Thrushes into the comfortable territory of the middle class.

  This was the father, with a soft and dark mustache, to whom age had added varicose veins and bluish spots in his left eye, iridescent like bruises. An average man, a prejudiced, sixty-something man. You need a fair amount of invisible misery to turn him into some sadistic creature; it’ll make you dizzy just thinking about it. But the father and the father’s contempt made up the precursor that, fattened by distance and imagination, assailed Helen and made her tremble until the color left her face. This was the beast that devoured our best hours, until the days collapsed in upon themselves.

  I considered a possibility that was more humiliating for me yet more favorable to both of us. Maybe her despondence and the story of the sinister father were just a smoke screen to hide the simple, conventional explanation: a lover. I felt better prepared to handle a splendid cuckolding than the delights of family trauma. I promised myself that I would welcome adultery like an anniversary gift. If only Helen’s nervous state would turn out to be the toll taken by hiding the fact that she went to bed naked with a gentleman who wasn’t me: that they sent each other idiotic messages, that they fondled each other, that he stuck his index finger into her nostril (who knows what got it up for the filthy pig).

  I made a fool of myself going through her papers, inspecting her call history, going over café receipts, even following her in the street! I imagined a rough composite: a kind of casual provincial, some guy from Solsona or Reus—places where it’d take you two weeks to notice if a virus wiped out the entire population—with a shiny, wet cleft lip (there’s something maternal about women who experiment with the weird side of masculinity—you know, dwarves, three-hundred-pound lard-asses, redheads). And don’t think I ruled out successive infidelities: a series of flings, Ethiopian-style. I’d have given her a hug. And I would have forgiven her immediately if she’d come to me and confessed that her abject state was because, before landing in Europe, she’d given birth to an illegitimate child outside the five-city radius in the United States where the law put up real obstacles to polygamy. Still, she managed to hide Jackson from me for another six months.

  Once we were watching a nature program, and I waited for her to get bored with hunting and fishing and fall asleep before I started fondling her; this time, I was interested only in the asexual function of her breasts. But Helen wasn’t showing any gestational signs, and I dismissed the idea of a phantom pregnancy. I didn’t have the skill I do now when it comes to the Internet, and I had to make do with the Larousse Medical Dictionary. I remember molar inspections, and that one night I delicately separated her toes to rule out the possibility that she was growing fins. It may seem excessive, but it was very important to me to be sure that the emotional darkness squeezing Helen’s spirits was temporary, that it wouldn’t be impossible for me to pull her out of that state. The wretched reason couldn’t be rooted that deep in the past. I needed to convince myself that we weren’t going to live like a couple of stinking rags from then on just because Rupert had imagined his old age would be spent with a little Mike, John, or Brad beside him (didn’t matter, just someone who could pee standing up), watching baseball on TV, hunting butterflies, or whatever it is that macho Montana men do.

  When she started to go really d
ownhill, I bought a couple of serious books on depression, and it felt as if I were rolling up my sleeves to take on a physical task: force open a door, carry furniture up the stairs, push a car until the motor starts. I faced Helen’s sadness the same way I had overcome my juvenile problems: by injecting the heart with a shock of adrenaline. Of course, Daddy Rupert wasn’t a window or a motor, nor could I grab him by the wrist or wring his neck. He was little more than a slippery impression, and we were defenseless before him.

  Enlisting the same passion with which I’d turned to the classic repertoire of the jealous and paranoid husband, I launched her into rounds of appointments with psychiatrists I paid to find a physical cause for that rampant anxiety. I know no one who passed her on the street and saw the rack on her would believe me, but the truth is that during that time the only part of Helen that interested me was her brain: the very marrow of our problems.

  Last Thursday at Pedro’s apartment I found a BBC documentary about some neurologists who injected a chemical dye into a brain and could trace the movement of a thought. When the cycle of reason is short and obsessive, it’s spectacular—you know, those people so terrified by germs they need to wash their hands every three minutes. You can see the electrical tracks of the ideas biting their own tail; it reminded me of a carousel. Back then, though, they just stuck Helen into a sarcophagus and irradiated her head until they had a blueprint of her brain. Dr. Fronkonstine showed us some small dark spots: weak material, areas that didn’t get enough minerals, something like that. It was amazing to think that all our malaise could depend on those shady areas moving across the dunes of cerebral material like clouds’ shadows. But I wasn’t about to buy any lithium or mercury tablets. I’d already seen what they could do when we set them loose in Mother’s brain.

  “Other than that, there is no lesion. You can always go to a psychologist; they’re the best-equipped healers of the soul—we’ve got them more controlled than any other kind of shaman.”

  Healthy atoms, clean molecules, robust fibers. In the taxi I realized that a smile was showing through Helen’s usual sad rictus, as if in the end she were happy not to have to dilute Daddy’s black influence within a broader scheme of neural deterioration. She seemed pleased to keep the face-off going.

  Rupert was hoping for a son and he got a daughter, a girl he had not wished for with all his heart—that was it? Are we really so simple, so predictable? None of the people who had known me six years earlier (living it up on the southern coast, celebrating the degree that qualified me to direct the businesses Dad started and that, as I boasted to my friends back then, pretty much ran themselves) would have believed that some girl born five thousand miles away was going to stick me with her family mess and impose a lifestyle on me that consisted of growing old next to a head case. Of course, Helen denied that her torment would last long: it would be over once Daddy was “no longer alive.” The sinister echoes of that decree held me obliquely responsible that Rupert hadn’t kicked the bucket yet. What did my sweet love expect me to do? Buy a plane ticket and drive along back roads to Fuokville, where I’d stab my father-in-law with a marble-handled letter opener? If a continent of salt water wasn’t enough to cauterize her wounds, I didn’t believe putting the planet of the dead between the two of them would work either. That imbroglio was the most interesting part of her past, it was stuck to her, so hot you couldn’t separate it without pulling off her whole skin. Freud rules because he lets you interpret your pathetic sex life as if it were some extraordinary entanglement, so complicated and steamy. Really though, it should be against the law to dump all that shit on yourself.

  Our life started to burn out before our eyes. She lost interest in making love, and tried to keep me satisfied with an early-morning oral offensive. And I won’t deny it, that dawn exercise was a powerful reason to stick around. I must be true to my priorities, they’re certainly more loyal than people, they won’t just up and leave you overnight. It filled me with tender pride that my physical self, my precious soma, still responded to the initial attack and to the delicate (and mortifying) slow motion that followed, and which, after an early period when I employed any trick I could to keep her there another half-minute, Helen had come to dominate with icy mastery. But even when blurred by waves of oxytocin, my mind would have been grateful for any hesitation, an impulse to kiss, an attack of modesty, an embrace. Blow jobs are overrated: if they’re dragged out for too long there’s something decidedly gay in the passivity you’re reduced to. Helen served me too many portions of the same dish: a juvenile recipe, glazed in a sickly sweet sauce. She no longer had the will to stew us with an adult palate in mind. I guess some emotion was a lot to ask for; she was already making such an effort. Plus, the pills (which she started taking on the sly) were like a shovel that can’t distinguish the quality of the earth it digs up: as they heaved the pain from her mind, they also yanked the roots of desire from her body. To go to bed seriously with a man, a woman has to feel complete. She can’t have parts of her brain asleep.

  Helen was a woman who had to make an effort to read headlines to the end, but one day she asked me to go with her to the bookstore, where she stocked up on esoteric tomes, trying out self-help, willpower-building, family horoscopes. She got interested in a certain therapist named Jovanotti, who advised using one’s bodily fluids to draw pictures of all one’s relatives in order to overcome the coercive behaviors that we carry (according to him) fossilized in our chests. (And how was I to help her—me, who wanted only for my father to return, so I could ask his advice again, feel the touch of his hand?) She experimented with a spiritualist diet, and I was forced to eat out because that slop was so vile. Helen switched from one approach to the next without seeing any one method through to its end. Nor did it seem that delving deeper into “say yes” or chromotherapy was really going to improve our situation.

  Helen barely mentioned what she hoped to find in those books that she left open like bored crows, their spines creased end to end with a thick wrinkle. But then I’d see her tuck her hair behind her ears (have I mentioned that she was—she is—left-handed?) and I’d watch, motionless and spellbound, as the locks fell loose again one by one to form a new fringe. When I looked at all that beauty polluted by the pills, I knew that Helen was searching for a bit of hope. I don’t know how things work for horses or beavers but when it comes to humans, as long as you still have words there’s always some hope left. The tongue passes over the lips and the words leave behind a residue of energy. That’s the vital compensation for using them, that’s the trick—keep ideas active, shake up your thoughts. Helen would have gotten some comfort just reading aloud the label on the pasta sauce.

  Do you have any idea how many women carry magic stones around, spread potions over their bodies to prevent aging, monitor the movements of the stars to fit the small events of their lives into some kind of cosmic causality? How many believe that they are watched over by a friendly, superhuman presence? That the universe, the interminable mass that spreads out and folds in on itself, peppered with incandescent bodies, insensate material, and stardust, is conspiring in their favor? There are no reliable statistics, but let’s say one in every three women in the comfortable, urban West is going to turn to pills (as if there were a world free of suffering folded inside them). Look, I don’t think all of you are bonkers. I tend to think that something isn’t right in women’s brains, that there’s a piece that breaks off from the inner workings of sanity ahead of time, like a built-in obsolescence. One night you lay your head on the pillow, and something cracks inside it and breaks. You get up, frightened, and wait for it to pass, but the day spreads through the streets and afternoon arrives and your fear surges because those gears are still busted. And don’t think I’m just ranting, there’s a physiological basis to this, actually. The hormones you all have floating around in your bodies like invisible medusas don’t sweat out enough of the substance of happiness. Helen’s must have been practically all dried up.

  She didn’t l
ike the beach anymore, and walks in the mountains were too much for her. Her dejection on opening her eyes ruled out any plan I might propose. I missed the way alcohol used to have more exhilarating effects on her than a stupor; I missed feeling the contractions of her body when I grabbed her neck with the firm sweetness of my desire. I was bored, I was imprisoned in a life that wasn’t for me. Our fights stopped seeming like two splendid currents of energy that tripled their force on meeting. Helen’s dazed voice conveyed only serial complaints:

  “I want to leave Barcelona.”

  “This apartment is a rip-off.”

  “I want to leave, we have to get out.”

  “Barcelona, it’s the city’s fault.”

  By now “Helen’s situation” was swallowing up our days. I could still corner her verbally, but that’s like using physical strength against a virus, against falling rain. You can’t imagine the patient fortitude weak people have until you’re shackled to one. You can’t understand how they just absorb all warmth, all happiness, all the moments that beg to be enjoyed with all your heart. The only part of the day I could enjoy was its first minutes, when Helen amassed heat under the sheets, a little animal dirty with sleep, and I took the chance to wrap her in embraces salvaged from our best times together. What can you do when someone sinks so deeply into despondence? Even if you stick your arm into the slippery hollow after them, there’s no guarantee you’ll get it out whole again, the way it was before. How do they remember their former lives in that doleful state? I like to think they still keep some sense of their old relationships, even if the view is as poor as when we look out at the spinning galaxy from Earth: a swarm of points blazing in space.