A Good Divorce (2 page)

“Nothing we do tonight has to be forever, right?”

She raised her glass and we clinked gently. “To an amicable … and provisional settlement.”

We drank, each watching the other, and I was already missing those forthright, unblinking eyes.

“I have an attorney,” she said, slipping it in quickly, the way a good dentist gives you the needle while you're finishing a sentence.

“Who?”

“Charles Johnson.”

My wince had to be visible. This wasn't just a weekend whim. Divorces were all that Charlie did. He was a mercenary. Now that she'd mentioned him, I remembered her telling me that Charlie was also the divorce attorney for her friend Lill Epstein, the leader of the Sunday night women's group.

“He's just an advisor,” she said. “I'd like the two of us to work things out by ourselves.”

The subjects on the list she took out of the folder were so rudimentary they were frightening: Kids, Property, Support. Her organization was both impressive and out of character. When the phone company cut off our service and Jude swore they hadn't billed us, I found the unopened statement as a bookmark in the “Gutters and Downspouts” section of the Yellow Pages, which were under the magazines in the wicker basket by the downstairs toilet.

“Let's do Property,” I said.

Jude pulled out some pages paper-clipped together that listed our assets and liabilities in two columns, hers and mine. The assets in her column included the checking account, the Smith Barney stocks, and the whole life insurance policy. In my column, she'd listed our savings account, the long-play record collection, the Raleigh ten-speed (which neither one of us had ridden since the gearshift turned to mush), the '73 Plymouth Fury (which needed a brake job and a replacement windshield), and a loan for three thousand five hundred dollars to Warren Stapleton.

“That's not an asset,” I said, “he's my brother.”

“You mean he's not good for it?”

“That's not the point.”

“It was your idea to give it to him.”

If Jude only knew how much we'd loaned Warren, she might have moved it to her column. He probably owed us three times what she showed. He needed “cold water” when he was in the Peace Corps to bribe the local police and bail out one of his friends. When he got back to the States, he needed his own bail for staging a one-man demonstration in the Spokane City Council chambers to protest the UN's support for baby formula. In the larger scheme of things, Warren was probably the most humanitarian investment we'd ever made.

I wasn't in the mood to haggle and pretty much went along with her list as well as the initialing of the furniture. The house wasn't in either column. It was assumed that I was the one moving out, and without the house it didn't make sense for me to have a lot of furniture. Jude had such a focused vision as to how life was going to unfold, for both of us. It was like we were getting ready to launch me into outer space and she didn't want to weigh me down with luxuries. I was numb when we moved to the subject of support and quickly agreed to an amount for the monthly payment. After all, this was at least for the benefit of the kids. The cynical side of me wanted to ask her what had happened to equal rights and women's lib, but deep inside I still wanted reconciliation. I couldn't say the division of assets and liabilities in a manner to benefit the wife was out of the ordinary, but it was traditional and, in that respect, unlike Jude.

When we turned to the issue of custody, I came out of my stupor. This mattered. “I'll take the kids.”

“You're working full-time. How could you even consider it?”

“You work too,” I said. “And they're in school. I could have a babysitter till I came home.”

“You don't have a place.”

“I thought you were feeling smothered by them. The yoke and all that.”

“I know but I couldn't …”

“I wouldn't criticize you for it. We could lie to your mom and say they're still with you.”

She sighed. “Oh, God, I dread telling her all this.”

“I'm serious.”

“I'm impressed you would offer.”

“You think I'd screw it up and they'd wither from neglect, don't you?”

“It's just that you haven't had that much practice parenting.”

“I feel like I'm breaking promises to them.”

She studied me and I could tell that she was moved in a way that had seldom happened when we were plain husband and wife instead of putative plaintiff and defendant. “Let me talk to my lawyer,” she said.

I grimaced openly. “Let's let the kids decide.”

“Cyrus! Derek's eight, Justine's fifteen.”

“They're smart kids. Why not?”

“Let's settle the dust first,” she said. “Let them stay here until you get a place. Then we can do some visitation and see how it goes.” For as much as she loathed the law, she had quickly become conversant in the jargon of domestic relations. Jude closed the folder and I felt a sense of triumph that we'd managed to get through round one of this more or less intact. It had been so long since we'd seen eye-to-eye on anything.

“I better pack up a suitcase and call Warren,” I said.

She looked over at the clock on the stove. It was eleven-thirty p.m. “Stay 'till the morning. It'll help the kids digest this better.”

“Which couch?”

She laughed. “I don't think one more night in the same bed will kill us. Besides, I don't have any clean sheets.”

When Jude and I announced we were going to get married, her family threw an engagement party in their Queen Anne mansion on Highland Drive. Mom made Dad buy a new blazer and slacks that he stained with grease from a Dag's Beefy Boy on the way to the Martins. Coming from Quincy, my parents had never been in a house with a dumbwaiter and an intercom. They tip-toed around the Martins' Mexican ceramics and South Pacific tribal masks like the house was a museum. All their prior doubts about my marrying a Seattle girl vanished once they saw Highland Drive. The Stapletons were commoners and the Martins were the Capulets. We'd been elevated and now, with the separation, they were going to be crushed.

Jude was curled around a pillow at her midsection with her face turned into the sheets when I turned off the light and felt my way to the waterbed. It sloshed when I got in despite my best efforts to be weightless. From the throbbing, I knew she was crying, and her tears smelled like the warm washcloth Mom used to hold against my forehead when I had a headache. I reached over and tried to work my fingers between hers but her fist was a Gordian knot.

When Justine was three weeks old and I could still feel the soft spot in her skull, Jude took her grocery shopping at University Village. We had one of those portable beds made of vinyl that folded up into a shoulder bag. The exterior sheathing was red, black, and navy blue plaid, and we took Justine everywhere in it. When they returned from shopping, Jude set Justine's bed next to the car in the parking lot behind our apartment while she unloaded. I was home studying for a Torts exam and Jude yelled at me to come down and help carry the groceries. As I came across the lot, a white Volvo station wagon that needed a wash was backing onto the plaid bed. I hollered and waved my arms, trying to get the attention of the driver. I couldn't believe that Jude had been so careless. The Volvo revved its engine to make it over the obstruction. I imagined Justine's skull being crushed like a cantaloupe. The driver stopped and rolled down the window to see what the matter was. Jude's face was red and sweaty as the two of us knelt down to extricate the port-a-bed from underneath the back of the car. There were dusty tire treads across one side of the crib and on Justine's blue-and-white checkered jumpsuit. The lady in the car was distraught, and Jude kept saying, “It's fine, it's fine.” I ran into the apartment with Justine screaming in my arms and we tore off her clothes to feel her bones. I couldn't believe Jude had put her at such risk and I was shivering uncontrollably. There were blood blisters in a thick belt pattern around her waist where the tire had pinched against the diaper and cinched it like a noose, but she seemed to be whole and she was breathing. Both of us fell whimpering onto the bed and cradled her between us the way I wanted to cradle Jude now.

When I awoke during the night, Jude and I were intertwined between the sheets like seaweed. In a night that I knew could be our last, I patched as much surface area together as I could, bone against bone, skin against skin. In the stillness, I tried to memorize that feeling. She was as soft of body as she was hard in spirit and I wished into my wet pillow one more time that I could relive, no, remake this decade.

In the morning, there was light in the window and Jude was folding my clothes from the dresser into a suitcase at the foot of the bed.

Jude didn't want to be there when I left and asked if I'd stay until she and the kids had departed on the overnighter to Lopez Island that we'd promised and never gotten around to doing. The last grains of summer were dropping through the waist of the hourglass.

“It'll be better than seeing you drive off in a car to God knows where.”

The kids weren't fooled and neither was I. As they traipsed down the stairway with their duffel bags bumping the walls, my Adam's apple burned and I didn't have enough saliva to douse it. The bravery in Derek's chin was betrayed by the trail of tears sneaking down his cheeks.

“Come on, Magpie.”

Breaking the rule that said we were all supposed to act as if this would be better in the long run, I spoke up. “I don't like this.”

Derek and Justine stopped. The dog looked up at me with her orphan brown eyes, begging me to throw my arms around the three of them and wrestle on the rug the way we used to after dinner.

“Come on, Derek,” Justine said, “Mom's waiting.” Jude had pulled the car out of the garage and parked across the street.

“I'm going to miss you,” I said.

Justine hiked the bag strap up her shoulder and grabbed the Safeway sack on the couch with her hair dryer and bathroom stuff in it. I held the door and patted them helplessly as they passed. Neither one of them slowed down enough for a kiss. Derek's flashlight fell out of the pocket of his pack and the lens shattered when it hit the cement porch. I stuffed it back under the top flap next to a pair of rolled-up jeans.

“Good luck, Dad,” he whispered. He was crying and when I hugged him to my stomach his bag clunked against me. I couldn't help but wonder how much this was going to cost them. And who was going to pay them back?

Justine disappeared down the steps to the street. I watched her, hoping she'd turn back to see me waving, but she plowed ahead, dragging her bag to the protection of her mom's fatherless car.

“Don't forget Odysseus,” I told Derek.

He let go of me, descended the steps, looked both ways and ran across the street. Magpie fast-stepped beside him to keep up. When he slowed down, I could still see the hitch in his gait from an old bike wreck.

2.

The University of Washington campus was only a few blocks from Warren's apartment, and I walked over there with Warren some evenings. The boughs of the giant oak trees along the walkways had already shed their easy leaves. The tenacious ones hung on. I told him that I kept hoping Jude would relent, send me a longhand confessional letter or make a late-night phone call.

“She'll wake up in a cold sweat some morning,” Warren said, “and realize that her sugar daddy is gone.”

“I have the sinking feeling she won't miss me a bit.”

“You gotta start dating. Get your mind off Jude.”

Although I was only seven years older, it felt like Warren was another generation. I'd inherited our dad's fear of the Depression and wasted no time in moving from college to law school to my first job. By the time Jude and I had Justine, Warren was just starting high school and seemed in no particular hurry to get anywhere. He was less interested in school than in playing guitar and he put together Sergeant Warren's Lonely Hearts Club Band. “So I can speak to the world through my music,” he said. Mom and Dad coaxed him into Spokane Falls Community College by promising that he didn't have to work as long as he stayed in school. That gave him time to write poetry that he published in Xeroxed magazines and mailed to coffee houses all over the country.

When he realized how unreceptive Spokane was to his politics and his music, he transferred to Western Washington in Bellingham where he eked out a degree in Humanities after five years. He spent summers in Seattle with me and Jude, living out of our basement, until he enrolled in the Peace Corps, where his flower-child ways hardened into a kind of anti-American missionary zeal during his two years in Turkey supervising the construction of public toilets. We kept up a steady correspondence in which he blamed the perpetuation of poverty in the third world on the United States. He thought we'd lost our way as a nation when we traded the farm for consumerism. We'd forgotten how to grow our own. Warren was skeptical of demagogues and subscribed to Lenny Bruce's philosophy that any man who called himself a religious leader and owned more than one suit was a hustler. Of feminism, he said, the women's movement had sold out for the worst features of masculinity.

I wasn't going to take Warren's advice. I was worried that dating would get in the way of a reconciliation with Jude, which was ironic considering all those times she'd turned her back on me in bed and I lay awake fantasizing how it would have been if I were only single. I'd also wondered whether her apparent indifference to me was because she was being unfaithful.

It was an argument over fidelity that had precipitated her first flight to Lill's. We hadn't seen each other for several evenings. Sunday was her women's group and Monday we traded cooking nights so she could go to the ACLU Board meeting. The next night she said she had to entertain someone from the national organization.