by Thomas Lynch
In the end, after the lawyers and shrinks, after all the hateful ballyhoo of tearing sheets, after all the sadness and the sundering, I borrowed enough to write her a check for her half of the much-mortgaged “marital home.” She left with her clothes, half the furnishings, high hopes for a new life, the cash, the cat and her visitation rights.
“Good riddance” is the thing I said.
I found myself the court-awarded custodial parent of four minor children, crazy with bag lunches and laundry, feeling the failure, seething quietly at the cruel twists of fate.
Poetry is not therapy. Got a problem? I say call a priest, see a shrink, have at one of those 900 numbers, take up macramé or marathons. But don’t, for God’s sake, think that you can write yourself into or out of good mental hygiene. It’s not going to happen. Trust me on this.
So I called the priest. He brought by forms for an annulment. He said I was a young man and would want to marry again and this would allow me to do it in church. All that was required was a fairly comprehensive history of my former wife’s business and my own. When I told him I wouldn’t be sending the intimate details of my failed married life downtown to the chancery for a panel of celibates to “consider,” he warned that without an annulment I could get only a “civil” marriage if I ever wed again. I said I thought that would be an improvement on the last one. I couldn’t imagine being married again.
As for shrinks, I’m afraid I had lost my faith. Oh, I was taking the kids, once a week. And it was good for them. But the bills were getting prohibitive and I really didn’t want to “get in touch with my feelings.” That was an altogether frightening prospect. A large dose of Irish every night kept me a safe distance from myself and helped me sleep and kept my anger keen.
I don’t run or do crafts, the more’s the pity.
And that’s how the unfortunate poem came to be.
“For the Ex-Wife on the Occasion of Her Birthday” gave voice to my unspeakable rage—a rage that simmered for a year before finding its way into carefully crafted lines, seventy or so of them—a kind of bitter litany, in loose blank verse, of all the things I claimed not to wish on her, venom done up as carefully off-rhymed birthday greetings, to wit:
. . . tumors or loose stools
blood in your urine, oozing from any orifice
the list is endless of those ills I do not pray befall you.
Night sweats, occasional itching, PMS,
fits, starts, ticks, boils, bad vibes, vaginal odors,
emotional upheavals or hormonal disorders;
green discharges, lumps, growths, nor tell-tale signs of gray;
dry heaves, hiccups, heartbreaks, fallen ovaries
nor cramps—before, during or after. I pray you only
laughter in the face of your mortality . . .
There was more, of course. Plenty more: mention of her mother, her “donkey lovers,” her “whining discontent” and “all those hapless duties husbanding a woman of [her] disenchantments came to be.” It finished with an allusion to the ancient Irish epic about Mad Sweeney, who was cursed into a bird and made “to nest among the mounds of dung” back in the good old days when “all that ever came with age was wisdom.” It was abusive, excessive, full of the half-rhymes and whole truths that make poems memorable.
The first time I aired it at a reading, some men cheered, some women hissed, but mostly everyone roared with laughter. The feel of the words in my mouth was a kind of balm. It made me feel better than any therapy. And though poetry is not therapy, every time I read it I felt better and better. Because every time I read it I felt more in control of a life that was still spinning out of control, with drink and house duties and a business to run and the lives of my children in constant danger. I feared my anger and I feared its opposite.
Once, with my darling daughter in earshot, I was coaxed into reading it to a group of writers at a summer workshop in northern Michigan. It had earned a certain celebrity by now. To my everlasting shame, I never thought how much hearing it would hurt her. And by the time I saw the pain and confusion in her face, I was too far into it to turn around. Or I was having too good a time being the center of attention. Later, I tried to tell her that the poem was really not about her mother, but about my anger, and that as a poet, I had artistic rights and license in the matter, that I was entitled to my feelings and their free expression. To her credit she did not believe me.
Once, at the University of Cincinnati, the poet and critic Richard Howard did me the honor of attending a reading of mine. At the end he was all praise, mentioning this poem and that poem, quoting me to me. It was an honor to have the great man saying such things. Then he said, “The poem for the ex-wife is really remarkable. You should probably never read it again.”
It was hard to make out what it was he meant. Was he trying to save me from the PC police that patrolled the universities? Or was he trying to save me from my own dark habits, which he recognized this poem was an emblem of?
It was strange counsel from a wise man and I took it. I’ve never read the poem to an audience since. The book is now out of print. The few thousand copies it sold are mostly in libraries or used-book stores now. The poem has never been anthologized. It and the rage it gave voice to are gone.
NOT LONG THEREAFTER I began hating the cat.
SOME POP-PSYCHERS ARE maybe saying now, sure, the cat and the ex-wife are in some way connected. Maybe you’re throwing around words like transference or surrogate or scapegoat or such. The dear knows I wish they were connected. The truth is they deserve each other. I was pleased when the one left with the other.
At the time I did not hate the cat. I could have gone either way on the thing. Still, I figured my hands were full enough of living, breathing things to care for. Every other weekend she would take the kids, some Tuesdays, some Thursdays, depending on her schedule. The exercise of her visitation rights was always “optional,” “contingent,” “flexible,” ever subject to the frequently shifting realities of her life and times. New housing, new romance, new jobs, new deals—the multiple variables made for a variable schedule. No plans could be made because nothing was certain. We would sit waiting in a kind of expectant limbo, for “Saturday at noon” or “Thursday by dinnertime”—the kids kept from straying too far from the yard, in case she’d come. Then the call would come—she was running a little late—twenty minutes, two hours, a day, a week. Or there’d be “rain checks” or “makeups” or “tomorrow, for sure.” It was years before we learned not to work our lives around her ever-changing schedule.
So in the early going I counted as a comfort that, though the children and the dog and the mortgage were my daily duties, the cat was hers, and a good riddance to it. I did not hate the cat then. I had no cause to.
For reasons best known to my former spouse, not six months after she’d moved out with the cat, back it came with its bowl and box of Tender Vittles and pan full of used kitty litter. It seems it was not working out with the new lifestyle or living space.
This pleased the children, especially my middle son, whose fondness for the cat owed, I supposed, to the sweetness in him, his gentle habits and the fact that he and the cat were about the same age—both of them going on seven that year. His brothers and sister, to be sure, all fed the thing and let it in and out the door and ranged between endearments and indifference in their dealings with it, but Michael’s attachment to the cat seemed primal. They understood each other’s eyes and sounds and moods and needs.
Because I loved the boy I could abide the cat’s return. Whilst marketing I’d find my way to the pet-foods aisle for little tinned delicacies, bags of kitty litter, even those little pastel-colored fishy-scented treats with which to curry the cat’s favor. At a church rummage sale I paid good money for one of those cushy little oval-shaped affairs in which the cat never learned to sleep next to Mike’s bed, preferring, instead, to curl itself in the corner by the pillow on which my darling golden boy himself would slumber.
I eve
n tried to pet it once. It rose and walked out of the room, sneezing as it went, as if it were allergic to me. Its indifference I could tolerate. All cats—it is well known—can take or leave their humans. But the cat seemed to bear toward me a malice quite inexplicable considering that I housed it, fed it, paid for its vaccinations and grooming, observed the little regimens to prevent distemper, diarrhea, hangnails and heartworms. It not only was disinterested in my life, it seemed disturbed by my very being. Whatever I’d do, enough was never enough. Whatever I didn’t do, it was too much. Damned if I did or if I didn’t—the cat’s discontent, at least so far as I was concerned, was manifest. It was developing an “attitude” with me. While it was always a bother, it could not, itself, be bothered to catch a mouse, or provide good company. Only Mike could make it purr.
Those few moments in the day not devoted to the office or the menu or the wash-and-wear or livery services, those minutes in which I reserved the right to hear my own self think, were always being interrupted by the cat. It whined, it roared, it needed to go out, come in, be fed or watered or left alone.
I’d get the children bathed, their homework done. I read to them. We’d say their little bedtime prayers and then I’d sneak downstairs to the day’s remains—the sink full of dishes, the bathtub ring, the sad facts of the matter. I’d pour whiskey in a glass, assemble myself at my writing desk and take up revisions to a poem, sent back by some “important” literary journal that paid nothing and was read by no one, whose editor hadn’t bothered beyond a form-letter version of the same rejection I saw in every aspect of my life. I’d be laboring over some adjective, some verb, some salvation from the word-horde that would make the thing desirable, when the cat would come roaring its late-night hunger or desires. It would not eat unless I watched it eat. It would not leave unless I held the door. In all weathers it would take its time coming and going. Still, for all my efforts, it looked upon me as a necessary evil. Thus were the seeds of my dislike of it sown.
Worse still were the rare nights when the children would be away with their mother. Sometimes a woman friend would spend the night. I’d freshen the bed linens, tidy everything, put the music on and put the cat outdoors. I remember one late December in particular. The children were spending Christmas with their mom. My true love and I had opened our gifts, built a fire, watched old movies on the TV and made our way upstairs, intent on hours of blessed coupling and uncoupling. It was bitter outside, the wind was howling, the snow drifting up and down the darkened streets, and the warmth of our consortium seemed so much more the gift. We were touching each other in that way that lovers do—slowly, deliberate, willing to pleasure the other for one’s own pleasure’s sake. The candles, the music, the beauty of her body, the quiet in the house—it almost seemed as if I wasn’t trapped and desperate and utterly rejected; it almost seemed as if I would survive.
It was then that I heard the cat outside the bedroom window. I had put it outside in hopes that it would freeze. At first it only meowed. Then it whined, the sound of it driven on the cold wind through the old walls of the house. Then it began to roar. Then it began to scratch at the corner of the window sash. The mood was being broken badly. I rose from our reveries, opened the curtains and saw the evil green eyes looking back at me. It had, apparently, made its way up the magnolia tree I’d planted too near the house some years before—a Valentine’s Day gift to the former missus—and onto the little roof outside my bedroom window from whence it sat making known its objections to our privacy and purpose. I opened the window and tried to knock it off the roof with a shoe, but it was too sure-footed. Then I thought I’d coax it in from the cold and that would satisfy it. It approached the open window but would not come in. It roared the louder. My shins were freezing, my passions were shriveling. It paced up and back the roof. The wind and snow were chilling the interior. It would neither come nor go. Not until I lumbered downstairs, naked and cursing, and opened the side door by the bald magnolia and called out the gray cat’s name did it deign to come down the magnolia tree, across the snowdrift, up the steps and into the house. By the time I got back upstairs, the room was freezing, the woman sleeping, the candles quenched, the music quieted. I went downstairs to kill the cat with a blunt object but couldn’t find it, though I searched for hours, shaking the box full of kitty treats, holding the baseball bat aloft, my eyes wild with murder and mayhem in them.
TO LOATHE SOMETHING your child loves is difficult. To harbor far-from-kindly feelings toward the object of an innocent’s affection is cause for secrecy. You cannot speak of the damage you would like to do it for fear of damaging the youngster. Every divorced parent knows these things. To let some loose word slip about one’s former spouse’s deplorable habits in earshot of the child is bad form. Already divided by divorce, the little self is cleft again by the war of words that puts the heart at odds with its own affections and identity. To object is a betrayal. To agree is a betrayal too. To consent, by silence, festers in the heart.
And knowing this I did my best around the children, to say only positive things about their mother, how she loved them dearly and would always be “there” for them, though where “there” was was often anyone’s guess. And failing that, to say nothing at all. And when my hateful poem hurt them all, when it was published in a book for all to see, I resolved never to write about their mother again, or my righteous anger, or my rage.
In my head I knew that what was good for her was good for our children. Her sanity, her security, her safety, her happiness—her well-being inured to the well-being of my sons and daughter. So while a part of me wished for her disappearance from our lives, I adopted, as a form of spiritual exercise, the habit of genuine daily prayer on her behalf.
And praying for the ones that piss you off can make for miracles. Whatever was going on in her life, mine got some better.
I quit drinking. The anger subsided.
I quit writing for fear it might rekindle the rage.
I quit fighting with my former spouse. I quit talking to her altogether.
The sound of a voice I recognized as my own—reason and rhyming and ranting—grew still. I listened for a while. But it was gone.
The children grew in grace and in beauty.
I might’ve held my peace but for the cat.
BY FORTY I had chest pains and teenagers, a new woman in my life, money in the bank and a cat that was trying to kill me.
My abhorrence of the thing, despite every effort to keep it corked, was beginning to leak into my daily meditations. Behind the glad face I turned toward my sons and daughter in the conduct of my parental duties was the certainty of the malice she bore me, the sense I had of her inherent evil and the worry over the powers she might have. One night she woke me from a deep sleep with her fierce crying. Making my way downstairs to fix what ailed her, I nearly fell to my death at the diabolical sound she made when I stepped on her tail. She had positioned herself halfway up the staircase in the dark, awakened me with her roaring and plotted the fatal fall or infarction to finish me. Only deft footwork and good conditioning saved me that night. I chased the thing around with a hammer in preemptive self-defense but could not catch her. Awakened by the ruckus, Michael came down half-asleep, took her up in his arms and, speaking baby talk to her—“Whazamatter, kiddy? Did that old man wake you up?”—took her up to bed. I stood barefooted on the cold kitchen floor, clenching a hammer, blazing with adrenaline and revulsion. I did not sleep for days.
As they aged, their attachment only grew stronger. He could not see the fiend beneath the fur. He’d rub her and brush her, and speak to her in the voice one saves for one’s beloved. He told me once, if she should ever die, he wanted to have her taxidermied. Some mornings I’d say she was looking especially lovely and we could have her stuffed today, thus freezing in time her abundant “beauty,” and I would pay for the procedure. Mike wasn’t amused. My detestation festered. My heart hurt with it, my head ached with it, my bowel burned with it. Because I could not speak my ra
ge, it spoke to me.
AMONG THE GIFTS I got one Christmas was a vocabulary calendar. Every day of the new year brought a new word to be learned and used and incorporated into the common speech. Along with the news that it was Wednesday 30 June 1990 came phlegm: “`flem n 1: thick mucus secreted in abnormal quantity *2a: dull apathetic coldness or indifference b: intrepid coolness or calm fortitude.” And, of course, it would be used in a sentence: “*Burt surveyed the accident scene with a lofty phlegm, maintaining the controlled detachment that allowed him to report on such grim events.” Better still, on the back of the page was some little-known etymological detail with which you might amaze your friends over dinner, if you had any.
The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that human personalities were controlled by four humors: blood (dominant in cheerful, optimistic types), black bile (which rendered a soul gloomy and melancholy), yellow bile (the source of irritable, angry attitudes) and phlegm (ruling cool, unemotional types). Logically, when the Greeks related these humors to their four elements (air, earth, fire and water), phlegm was linked to water. But the word’s etymology defies logic: “phlegm” traces back to the Greek verb phlegein, which means “to burn.”
Oh, how I longed to be like Burt, to exude detachment, to be free of the black bile, rid of the yellow bile, returned to my ordinarily optimistic blood, to achieve “intrepid coolness” and “calm fortitude”; to be the third-person singular masculine subject of a sentence my friends would use in which not too long after the appropriate verb the predicate object would be phlegm.
Such was the condition of my life that a new word every day seemed a beatitude, holding forth a bouquet of promise and possibilities.
Some day in May you’d get ennui. You’d use it ten times before dinner and folks would say, “My, but he’s enjoying the calendar this year.” Later there’d be irrefragable and mugwump and, in November, penultimate.
