A Good Divorce (15 page)

“Thanks to Jude and Isolde, you know my story. What about you?”

“The sordid history of Lillian Roundheels Epstein.” She pulled her hand back and let her head droop. I'd touched a sore spot. I should have waited.

“You don't have to.”

“People I don't care about anymore know it, so why shouldn't you?”

I let the pads of my fingers brush the flaxen hair on her arms. “Hey, things happen. I didn't think I'd be living in a basement when I was thirty-seven.”

“You're right, I do know something about you. You're a pretty straight arrow.”

I continued to stroke her arm, combing the hair the way it naturally leaned. If she wanted to tell me, fine. If not, that was all right too. We'd done enough for one weekend.

“I feel like your big sister and you've just asked me how babies are made. I'm a woman with a past, Cyrus.” Her voice was serious. “You asked me why I went in the Army. My parents made me. I was out of high school and starting to sleep around. Walla Walla's little tramp. That's when my dad sat me down and introduced me to the alternative of military service. I was thrilled, actually. It was the first non-sexist thing he'd ever done for me. He thought it would make a man out of me. Well, it was more like putting a bumblebee in a cherry orchard. There were twenty hims for every her.”

“Wasn't fraternizing against the rules?”

She grabbed her knees and rolled back. “You slay me. We're talking about a batallion of horny men and women. This was after the invention of the backseat and the telephone booth.”

“You did it in a telephone booth?”

“And broom closets. You probably believe the pros don't do it on game days.”

“It saps your strength, doesn't it?”

“Or doubles it,” she said. “I started palling around with this woman from Defiance, Ohio who drank like a fish and had a dirty mouth. We were a great match. Anyway, she started inviting me along on some of her dates”—Lill rested her hand on me—“are you sure you're all right with this?”

It took me years to get over the idea that I wasn't the first man Jude had slept with and she'd avoided the details at my request. But with Lill there was such glory in her voice, like she'd walked on the moon. I signaled her to go ahead.

“We shared her dates, took turns doing her guys. That's how I met my husband. And the rest is history, as they say.”

This was a long way from Rumi and should have turned my stomach, but I surprised myself at how protective I felt toward her. “Hey, your dad made you do it.”

“I don't believe in all that crap about blaming your parents for everything. Hey, they did their best. One kid's an engineer, the other's a nympho. I could've been a serial killer.”

I hoped that she was exaggerating. On the other hand, it was better to know everything about each other now so that we could adjust our expectations. That's what killed relationships, the false expectations. With Lill, there was very little room for that. She came at you in a gallop with her red hair flying.

10.

It was hard to keep a poker face at work when people asked me how things were going. I felt light-headed and wanted to tell them how Lill was drawing me in like a moth to lamplight. Something was alive in me again. I'd even started to wonder how she and the kids would get along and decided they'd think their lives had turned to clover to have someone fun like Lill in the family. But I couldn't rush it. Pace. I had to keep the right pace.

Out of the blue, the Italian contractor whom I'd beaten in the Monticello case called to fix me up with his second cousin. “She's built like Sophia Loren,” he said.

In the interests of someday winning him as a client, I played along. “Can she cook a decent parmigiana?”

“She'll cook you all right, counselor,” he said, sinking into a sneer that finally erupted into a belly laugh.

“Would I be wrong in saying you're a chauvinist pig?”

He laughed again. “Is the Pope Catholic?”

Lill, deliver me from this bondage.

I called Warren to meet for lunch at Bruno's pizzeria on Pike Street in the middle of the red light district. It was the same place we'd gone with the kids once after a rerun of
West Side Story
when the four of us had marched down the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue afterwards, snapping our fingers in unison like the Jets and Warren danced off the sides of light poles and window sills singing
Maria
at the top of his lungs.

“So tell me more about this trip to Oregon,” he said. “I have a feeling I got the version you'd tell Mom.” He drummed the table. “You didn't drive five hundred miles just to clean out the valves in the Plymouth. What's she look like?”

“Pretty.”

“What kind of build?”

“She speaks German and reads eastern poetry. She's also been a belly dancer and a palm reader.”

“A perfect fit. The lawyer and the moonbeam. How's she built?”

“You're so deep, Warren.”

“Come on, you're telling me you don't care?”

“She looked great in a swimsuit.”

“You went swimming?”

“Wading.”

“And? Come on, you're holding out, Cyrus. I invite you into my soul to talk about my love life and have to pry out of you whether you had sex?”

“This is more than sex. I'm nuts about her.”

Warren insisted we take the afternoon off and go golfing. We hadn't played golf together since Dad's heart attack three years ago. “The tees will be deserted. We can finish eighteen holes in three hours.”

Warren was right. If I didn't sometimes shirk my job, it would own me. “As long as we get home in time for the kids,” I said. “This is my weekend.”

We swung by the apartment and found my clubs in the storage locker underneath the empty suitcases, skis, and camping gear. Warren's were under his bed, with dustballs clinging to the canvas. “Sheep's wool,” he called it.

We put the top down on his Mustang and I turned up a Louis Armstrong song on the radio. “That guy's rasp'll scrub the grime off you,” I yelled, as we sailed down the freeway, chiming in whenever we knew the words. Our golf bags stood up in the backseat like a couple of old pals. We were in college again, skipping chem lab. People waved at us.

The pro at Jefferson directed us to the first tee without a wait. By the second nine, the remains of the six-pack we'd stashed in our bags had warmed and the cans foamed over when we opened them on number ten. We stopped keeping score when Warren lost three balls in the ravine on number eleven. Instead of fighting the obstacles, we joined them. If we didn't land in the traps, we'd kick our balls in so we could practice our sand shots. Whoever sprayed the most sand won. We used a one club-length rule, which allowed us to move the other guy's ball behind trees and fenceposts. When I won best ricochet by playing off a maintenance shed to get back onto the fairway, Warren rolled in the grass like a dog with fleas. By the time we reached the clubhouse, it was dark and my arms felt water-logged from so much swinging and my cheeks rubbery from laughing.

I could hear the tape deck playing in the kids' bedroom as I snuck by on the sidewalk. Jude had dropped them off early. Still a little buzzed from the beer, I crept down the stairs, put my golf clubs back into the locker, rifled through the ball pocket for a piece of Spearmint and tried to think of a good reason why I was wearing jeans instead of a suit. Even though the kids disliked the idea that I worked so much, I couldn't bear to let them know I'd goofed off. It was a transparent ploy for their sympathy. The martyr dad. Derek met me at the door, and looked me up and down as if we'd traded places again.

“Where you been, Dad?”

In situations like this with my own dad, I'd learned that the best way was to say very little and be humble. “How you doing, son?”

Justine joined us with a book in her hand and I hugged them both at once, praying they wouldn't smell the beer. “Where've you been, Dad?”

“With my brother. Warren,” I added.

“You've been playing pool or something.” She must have smelled the Rum Crooks.

“I had to help him with some stuff.” They still looked unconvinced. This was the spot I'd always stumbled on with Dad. I wanted to go to my room, change clothes, and brush my teeth.

When Lill called on Monday to tell me that Isolde was gone, the adrenalin started leaking through the balloon-smooth surface of my glands again. “Just ring the bell, and I'll let you in,” she said, and I wondered if it was a Freudian slip.

“Give me twenty minutes.”

I stripped off my shirt as I ran for the shower. If it was just talk she wanted, we could have gone to the Deluxe or the bar at Jimmy Woo's. For that matter, we could have done it by phone. This had to be something more. I soaped myself and imagined what it would be like washing her hair. I'd read in
Ms
. that the quantity of hair on a woman was a measure of testosterone and I tried to visual Lill's body hair.

The buzzer in her door latch was still vibrating like an alarm clock as I crossed the foyer; she must have thought I was slow-handed. The interior of the elevator had brass handrails and a see-through glass door the same as the elevators in the Smith Tower. It moved slowly as I peered at the rose carpet on the second floor, more humming and jostling as we passed the third floor. It ran out of steam and bounced a few moments on the fourth floor before the door opened. The air in the hallway was stale, another reason I never wanted to live in a conventional apartment. At least in the basement of the Alhambra, the smells were invigorating ones like laundry soap and Purex.

Lill touched me lightly on the arm as I entered her apartment, an ambiguous gesture, something between a shake and a mistake. I was beginning to love her place. There were plants climbing on poles out of Grecian urns, vines drooping from baskets hanging in the corners, and infant plants in the incubator on the window sill. It was Hammurabi's garden and Lill smelled as fresh as mint.

“You have quite a thing for flora,” I said.

“It's my small way of restoring the balance between civilization and the jungle.”

“I applaud the maternal urge.”

“It's a matter of motivation,” she said. “Gender has nothing to do with it.” Barefoot and in a full skirt, she looked as if she'd been dancing to the Rolling Stones from the tape deck on the bookshelf. I inspected the hair on the backs of her calves as she went to turn it down.

While she was in the kitchen to get us wine, I checked out her bookshelf, which was a feminist reading list—Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett—but there were also male authors I'd read—
Tropic of Capricorn, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Lord of the Flies
, and
Leaves of Grass
. Maybe we could find a middle ground. On the notepad next to the phone, spiral doodles emanated like wisps of smoke from the words, “Call Jude.”

She returned with two glasses and set them on the coffee table, one on each side of a fishbowl with pink coral. Without saying anything, she pulled a pillow off the couch, dropped it on the floor and lowered herself Indian-style as her skirt billowed like a parachute and settled over her legs.

I took a seat on the couch. “I guess you called this meeting.”

She laughed nervously. “We have a problem.”

I scooted to one side so I didn't have to look at her through the fishbowl.

Lill sipped her wine, eyeing me over the rim. “I happened to mention to Jude how much Isolde liked you and, of course, that led to the trip to the beach. I couldn't lie, Cyrus.”

“What else?”

“Well, I didn't tell her I tried to screw you with your pants on, although I think that's what she suspected. She knows me too well.”

I looked at the black-iron fire escape that ran diagonally across her living room window. The marmalade sunset made the room glow. “We haven't done anything we have to apologize for.”

“I don't want to do a head trip on her, Cyrus. She's a friend.”

“What are you saying?”

Her face was a mask bronzed by the sunlight, and it was difficult to tell if this was hurting her as much as it was me. “I don't want to add to her pain.”

“I'm supposed to get her clearance to see you?”

“I don't blame you for being pissed.”

“What about you? Jude blanches and you retreat?”

“I feel caught in between.”

“Can't you tell her to back off?”

She was shaking her head. “We need to cool it for a while until things settle. She needs me.”

“I need you too.” I was the boatman on the River Styx ready to row her across.

“Jude and I tell each other everything. There would be things I wouldn't want to tell her.”

“So don't.” She was forcing me to display my capacity for duplicity.

“I care for her. I can't.”

“And you and I were just a couple of dogs in heat? Another GI?”

She dropped her head. “That's not fair, Cyrus. I like you. I think you have a lot to offer.”

“That's what they always tell the runner-up.”

“Let's wait,” she said, “that's all I'm saying. The timing is shit.”

She gave me a hug at the door, making sure her breasts didn't make contact. It felt more like the embrace of an elderly aunt. I was the last one to let go.

I kicked a beer can ahead of me in the street on the way home until I lost it under a pickup that was loaded with chunks of broken drywall and twisted door frames from some remodeling project. The rain had made pockmarks in the plaster dust. There were a couple of crushed Miller cans and a ripped pair of cotton work gloves tossed into the corner of the load. I tried to imagine a path that stretched from here to my grave and walking it alone.

Jude answered on the second ring. I tried to be as matter-of-fact as I could.