The Real Mother

by Judith Michael

  “Reuben, you’re awake, right?” asked his lawyer in New York. “Not in the middle of a deliciously illicit moment?”

  Reuben laughed. “Awake and working. Nothing illicit, delicious or otherwise. What’s going on, Gus?”

  “I just got off the phone with Ardis. I have been on the phone with Ardis since seven o’clock. In case your math is slow, let me tell you that this adds up to five hours. Unbearable in almost any circumstance; with this very angry lady it was torture. I am quadrupling my fee every hour I interact with your Ardis.”

  Not mine. Never mine, even when I thought I wanted her.

  “Reuben? Have I stunned you into silence?”

  “What does she want? She’s accepted our offer.”

  “That was this morning. Since then, she’s thought about it, agonized over it, she told me at length, and is now refusing it.”

  “She can’t do that. We’re signing the papers tomorrow.”

  “Not anymore. Not any-fucking-more, to use her exact words.”

  Reuben switched on the speakerphone and was out of his chair, striding the length of the room and back, his anger building. “What does she want?”

  “In a nutshell, more money. No, not a nutshell, a basket. No, a god-damn freight car. She wants a freight car full of money.”

  “She won’t get it.”

  “How badly do you want this divorce?”

  “I intend to get this divorce—haven’t I made that clear?—but I don’t intend to impoverish myself.”

  “Bravo. So how will you do that?”

  Reuben picked up his letter opener. Sara had given it to him; Ardis had used it on him as a weapon. Our lives are filled with mixed messages, he thought wryly. “Gus, we made her an offer, a hell of a lot more generous than she deserves.”

  “What she deserves, according to her, is compensation for twenty-two years of love, devotion, homemaking, cherishing, support, encouragement, and… hold on, let me check my notes; I want to make sure I get this right. Yep, here it is: being forced to accede to sexual demands that verged on the bestial.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Now, of course,” Gus went on, “she can’t prove it. But neither can you prove it’s a lie. In one day the lady found herself a new lawyer, and a clever one. I know him; he’s good. A shark, but good.”

  Reuben’s anger exploded. “How long can she drag this out?”

  “Hey, don’t yell at me, I’m not—”

  “She keeps inventing new lies and ups the ante each time, is that it? For how long? Until—”

  “Reuben! Hey, Reuben? Hold on, we know she’s greedy, but we have to think of a—”

  “—she’s wiped me out, is that it? That’s what’s going on?”

  “Don’t kill the messenger,” Gus said wearily. “I had five hours of Ardis yelling at me; I’m not up to another five hours with you.”

  “She agreed to our offer!” And I called Sara to say I’d closed those chapters.

  “I know that. She knows that. Her lawyer knows that. She’s got new ideas about those twenty-two years of devotion.”

  “She threw those years away.” His fury was so great he flattened his voice to a monotone, to control it, even as he kept circling the room with seething energy. “She did what she wanted; she got what she wanted, from the time I married her, and she threw it away. She was a leech, sucking everything she could out of me, and it was all I could do to make a life with her hanging—”

  “Okay, okay, I hear you. I don’t need a litany of Ardis’s bitchiness or the shambles of your marriage; I’ve known you for a long time, and I’ve seen it. It’s not relevant now, Reuben, we’ve got to—”

  “Relevant. Are you out of your mind? Goddamn it, everything that happened between us is relevant.” His hands were shaking. “She had three abortions without telling me. She knew I wanted children, we’d talked about—”

  “Hold on, hold on a minute. Listen to me, damn it, is that true?”

  “True? What the hell are you talking about? Why would I make up something like that?”

  “You never told me.”

  “No.” He stopped pacing. “The third one ended our marriage— well, in fact, the first one did, but I didn’t leave until the third. I’ve never been able to talk about it. I thought…” He gestured helplessly. “I thought I wouldn’t have to.”

  “Tied my hands, Reuben. It would have helped if I’d had this earlier tonight.”

  “You have it now.”

  “Okay, give me a minute to digest it.”

  His turbulent energy suddenly drained, Reuben sat in an armchair near his desk, hands clasped between his knees. He had called Sara because of the agreement this morning. He thought he had gone some distance, in a sane and accommodating way, to making up to Ardis for his harshness in the past, including the last time they had been together in this house. He had believed, with some self-satisfaction, that he had severed the bonds that had tethered him to his past. So much for self-satisfaction, he thought. It never goes unpunished.

  On his feet again, at the bar in a corner of the room, he poured gin on ice and walked about the room, drinking. “Gus,” he said at last to the speakerphone.

  “Right. Okay, options. I always start with the one that requires the least work and the least expenditure for my client. Which means, the status quo. You support her but you don’t have anything to do with her. She goes her way, you go yours. Married but not married.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Another lady?”

  “I will not be married to Ardis. Under any circumstances.”

  “I understand that. But…another lady? Reuben, give me a break. I can’t juggle blind; I need to have all the facts if you expect me to keep them up in the air. You just gave me something I can use after years of keeping it from me; give me another one.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes there is another lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that brings us to option two: How high do I go? Right now we’re giving her the apartment she’s living in, with the furnishings and art, seventy-five thousand a month, that’s nine hundred thousand a year, for the rest of her life unless she remarries, in which case it’s reduced in half to thirty-seven five a month. Generous but not lavish. She wants lavish. So how much higher do I go?”

  It’s only money; I can always make money. I want Sara; nothing else is important.

  There is a limit to the money I can realistically expect to make. I don’t build projects that maximize profits. I can’t change everything I believe in to satisfy Ardis.

  And I will not ask Sara to come to me if I cannot take care of her and her family in the way I want to take care of them. Three kids in college, for one thing…

  He almost laughed. Thinking like a parent already.

  “I have to know what she’s asking,” he said at last. “There’s a limit.”

  “You want to tell me what the limit is?”

  “Not now.”

  “That’s supposed to be our negotiating position?”

  “It’s where I am right now. Gus, what the hell—”

  “Okay. So, let’s finish the options. Number three: I use the abortions. To a judge they might nullify the so-called bestial sexual demands, then we’d be back to our offer. And if she still balks, she could end up with a lot less. But, realistically, another judge might say she had no choice but to abort because she was impregnated in such unspeakable ways that she was sure the child would be deformed. Something like that; that’s how her lawyer would play it, I think. But either way, my friend, it’d be about as ugly as you can imagine, and believe me you don’t want that mess.”

  “What are the chances she’d turn it down if you threaten to make the abortions public?”

  “Hard to tell. Lots of people get abortions these days; she might think it’s a badge of honor, especially if she plays up her sexual victim-hood. You know: ‘I’d rather go through the pain and sorrow of an abortion than h
ave the child of a bestial husband.’ ”

  “You just said it would nullify so-called bestial—”

  “I said it might nullify. Anyway, I have to think like her lawyer, that’s one of the things you’re paying me for. Okay, hold on.” There was a pause. “Look, there’s an option four, a Hail Mary, but in fact it works more often than you’d think. A testament to how nutty people can be. I call it the personal touch. It would cost you a little more money.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, how about a charge account at Bergdorf’s for five thousand a month, in perpetuity?”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Actually, I am. True, it’s peanuts when she’s already got almost a million a year, but this is different. This is personal. The million doesn’t say anything except that you’re willing to pay it to get rid of her. Cold, legal, not exactly flattering. The sixty thousand at Bergdorf’s says—and if she doesn’t get it, I’ll tell her—you know she’s a beautiful woman, and even if you’re not with her anymore you want her to look her best: sharp, glamorous, a head turner, on the cutting edge of fashion… where she belongs. You want that for her because you always admired the way she dressed and you know she deserves that. I know it doesn’t make sense, but in a few cases it’s been enough to tip the balance.” He waited. “You following this, Reuben?”

  “I’m depressed by this.”

  “Not surprising. You want to go with it?”

  “That’s it? Nothing bigger than that?”

  “Not right now; let’s give it a try. Look, she’s not completely rational, therefore give her an irrational offer that’s focused on her. It worked with my ex, with both of them, in fact. What the hell, it even worked with a guy I know; his wife, ex-wife, was my client and we offered him a practically unlimited supply of Armani suits for the rest of his life, and he bit. This is something that crosses all lines: gender, age, income. The personal touch. It could be the key to your future happiness. I hope she’s terrific, your new lady.”

  “When will you offer this?”

  “Tonight. Right now. I’m willing to bet she’s sitting by the phone, figuring I’m talking to you, waiting for some kind of miracle. Not drinking, though; did you know that? You have to hand it to her; the only thing she’s done that I admire, and it’s a big one. Maybe I’ll get her together with the guy in the Armani suits, and they’ll live happily well dressed ever after. Is she terrific, your new lady? You deserve it.”

  “Thanks. She is. Call me back.”

  “Right.”

  Reuben tried to work on the last paragraph of the text he had been writing—SHALL RIVER BEND HAVE OPEN SPACE, OR THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OPEN DOOR TO GAMBLING? SHALL THIS LAND BRING BENEFITS FOR THE COMMUNITY, OR POSSIBLE CAVALCADES OF POLLUTING BUSES BRINGING GAMBLERS WHOSE MONEY BENEFITS DISTANT OWNERS?—but he could not concentrate. He tried to picture Ardis sitting beside one of the telephones in her apartment—fifteen of them, because, she said, someone important might call her at any time—but he could not focus on her, either.

  His thoughts swung, like the needle on a compass, to Sara, sitting beside him on the porch of the lodge in Galena; walking with him through the quiet, Victorian neighborhoods of Chicago; lingering over coffee in his kitchen on the rare occasions when she had been able to stay overnight; their first picnic; the last time they had made dinner together.

  “You give me so many reasons to be grateful… companionship, friendship, understanding, being patient and sensitive with my family… wonderful sex, more wonderful than I ever imagined.”

  He shoved back his chair, fixed another drink, wandered from room to room, never far from a telephone.

  If Gus’s crazy idea did not work, he would have to call Sara and tell her he could not, in conscience, ask her to accompany him to New York. Nothing would be finished, and he could not predict when he would be able, finally, to say the chapters were closed. He had told her he would wait until then to come to her and he was not about to fudge that with caveats and excuses. He wondered if the past ever could be shed, or if it always hovered in the wings, butting in randomly on the present. What was my hurry, that I called tonight, without waiting for signed papers, for the fact of divorce instead of the dream?

  He knew the answer. He was too impatient to wait for certainty. Like a teenager, he thought, and remembered asking himself, earlier that evening, how long it takes a man to grow up.

  Always longer than we’d like…if we manage it at all.

  (Of course, there might be another reason he could not see Sara on Monday, though he did not like to face it: the possibility that she could not get away. One night, he had thought impatiently when they were talking on the telephone, but he knew that childless Reuben Lister had no right to judge what Sara Elliott, responsible for three youngsters, could or could not manage.)

  The telephone rang and he lunged for it. “Well?”

  “She’s turned cagey. Will you go to fifteen thousand a month?”

  “That’s more clothes than any one person can wear.”

  “Agreed. This has nothing to do with how often she changes her dress. She doesn’t want you to like any of this. Be glad you don’t have kids in the mix.”

  Reuben thought of the irony of that, and let it drop. “All right.”

  “All right for fifteen K?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call you back.”

  This time it was only a few minutes. “Damn, Reuben, she’s pretty tough. It must be being on the wagon; she’s gotten stronger. She said she’d let me know tomorrow. The best I could do was tell her it had to be morning; the Bergdorf application in her name gets shredded at high noon. I still think she’ll take it, but she keeps fooling me.”

  “It’s not encouraging, hearing that from a lawyer.”

  Gus sighed. “I hope you don’t use that tone of voice with anybody but me, and then only at midnight. Listen, she has a right to think about it; she may know it’s as imbecilic as we do, but give her a chance to keep her dignity. I said I think she’ll take it; it’s only a few more hours. Reuben, go for a long walk by the lake; it’s good for the soul. I’ll call you tomorrow, as soon as I hear from her.”

  He went for a walk. A mist drifted over the park and the lakeshore, blurring the orange streetlights, turning the running path where he walked to a damp strip unrolling arrow straight through glistening grass. He could hear the lake, invisible in the mist, and he pictured waves washing over the rocks with long hisses and the sigh of retreat, punctuated with the cries of gulls. Zipping his leather jacket against the fog, he cut across the grass and climbed onto the square-cut boulders that lined the shore in stepped-down tiers to the water.

  Once, Abby had told him she liked to sit on the rocks. “When I have a lot to think about, especially sad things, I like it there.” He had wanted to ask her what sad things she thought about, but they were not yet close enough. And now might never be, he thought, frustrated and bitter. Ardis had had twenty-two years to stop drinking, to be strong, to keep her dignity; she chose now, when he finally had other plans. Consistent, he thought caustically; she never compromised anything to make room for me.

  (How easy it would be to feel sorry for himself…and he did. Like a teenager, he thought again, and smiled ruefully. A lot of growing up still to do.)

  He stood on the highest row of boulders and looked out at black water, whitecaps, long lines of waves breaking and curling over themselves. Fog drifted in long tendrils that muted the city lights around him and swallowed up the horizon. His life work was to transform space into livable communities while retaining a sense of space. Here in front of him was space that would be transformed by no one: self-defined, primitive, unconquerable. It was good to rediscover that: there are only so many places we can conquer.

  But events were something else. Looking at the lake and the fuzzy outlines of Navy Pier to his right, its enormous Ferris wheel a ghostly circle in the haze, he made a mental list for tomorrow: finish the brochure, messenger it to a pr
inter, and fax a copy to Isaiah in New York; set up an appointment with the mayors of River Bend and neighboring towns in the hope that community feeling soon would support them (breaking ground this fall instead of last spring, if they did get approval, which translated to more time and money, but at least it would be this year, not next), meet with the engineers and architects to revise the construction schedule; confirm a dinner reservation with friends for that night. And call Sara. It would be Saturday; she’d probably be home. He could walk from his house to hers; he’d never been inside it.

  No. He stepped down from the boulders and turned toward home. Of course he wouldn’t walk to her house; they were not ready for that. A simple telephone call. To find out if she had arranged to go with him on Monday. Or to tell her…

  Or to tell her the whole story with no neat conclusion. One way or another, whatever he heard from Gus in the morning, he would tell Sara everything that afternoon. He remembered the look on her face— dismay, humiliation, anger—when Ardis had appeared. If, tomorrow afternoon, he was still married and uncertain when Ardis would accept a settlement he could handle, why would Sara not think—correctly— that he had lied, or stretched the truth, when he called her to say he had closed those chapters in his life? Why would she not feel the same humiliation and anger as before? Or would her anger have faded, as it did so quickly the night the Corcorans came to their table at Spiaggia? Might she understand his struggle, and agree that two people who love each other could wait for some kind of settlement at some vague time in the future?

  He knew Sara, but not well enough to answer with certainty.

  But it did not matter; he would tell her the story, in New York if possible, while Gus was writing the final divorce agreement, or in Chicago, where everything would be unknown.

  Inside his front door, he hung his damp jacket on a coat tree to dry. He did not accept the second possibility. He focused on believing that he would call her tomorrow, midafternoon, when she would likely be home, to tell her he had their tickets for New York and would pick her up at nine o’clock Monday morning. Because of course by then she would have figured out how to leave her family, and Gus would have taken care of everything.