A Good Divorce (24 page)

As I descended the stairs to the basement and fumbled for the key, the nausea in my stomach swelled like a bladder that knows it's close to a bathroom. I pushed open the door, left my key in the lock, raced down the hallway, snapped the switch on, lifted the seat, and knelt with my hands on the rim of the bowl. The first heave turned my belly over but nothing came out. I detested the thought of cream sherry and vowed never again to drink it. The next movement forced my mouth open and expelled another dry, gagging heave. My face felt as clammy as the porcelain. I thought of the beatnik Jesus from therapy who'd fooled around with his wife's sister and realized we were cut from the same plain male cloth. I hadn't made any progress.

The water in the bottom of the toilet bowl shimmered from the leak in the tank that the landlord had never fixed and it reminded me of the sunken battleship
Arizona
that I'd seen at Pearl Harbor, the way water distorted things that didn't belong. I studied the rusty brown stain under the circumference of the rim and the hairs between the bolts that hinged the back of the seat. Another dry heave, more violent than the first, left a twice-cooked taste of Harvey's that burned my throat. I fixed my brain on the image of wormy duck meat and the vomit finally sprayed out of my mouth, spoiling the water a chunky orange. Saliva dripped from my lips and I knew that the disfigured face looking up at me from that pool was my own.

16.

In January, I left for work in the dark and came home in the dark. Sometimes, I'd drop my clothes on the bed as I undressed, get under the covers in my stocking feet and underpants, and listen to the water gushing down the drainpipe as people flushed their toilets or unplugged their bathtubs. The gutter emptied onto the sidewalk next to my window and, when the rain slowed, the drips echoed as they hit the galvanized elbow at the bottom. Occasionally, the woman with the cat in the unit above me had overnight company and I had to listen to her bed creaking and thumping. One night at about three a.m., I heard her giggling outside the door to my apartment and bumping the walls like she was trying to get away from her fellow. One of them hit my door and rattled the latch. Then I heard the gushing of hot water into the washer, which meant I'd later hear the tumbling of the dryer. The excesses of love.

One night, I sat on the edge of the bed in my shorts and studied the black and white pictures of the kids on the dresser. Derek was about four years old with long, curly hair, wearing those quilted pants that had burned up on a camping trip when I tried to dry them out over the fire with a marshmallow stick. He sat on the top step of the porch at the old house with an arm over the dog and one leg tucked under his bottom. His foot barely touched the next lower step. Without the distraction of motion or color, my imagination breathed its own life into the picture. I could feel the heat of the red-painted cement rise from the porch and hear the whap-whap of the sprinkler from the Sweet's lawn next door. If Derek had stood up, I would have held my arms in front of him like a gate in case he stumbled.

Justine was flying down the slide at Roanoke Park in her corduroy brown parka, with her knees rising over the hump in the middle of the slide and her hands gripping the railings to slow herself down. The gulping smile of a controlled fall. When she hit bottom, I remembered how she knocked me over and ran back up the make-believe rocketship to do it again. I also remembered how Justine cried once when I tucked her into bed because the Martin cousins were coming the next day. She said they made her feel stupid because they all played musical instruments and did sports. Jude's brother used to chatter constantly about what his kids had done at scout camp, how many candy bars they'd sold for the school raffle, and what they were going to be when they grew up. I secretly hoped that one of them would serve time.

Jude's brother was a card-carrying Republican, who'd led Freedom Fighter discussion groups in college with Herb Philbrick tapes that described how the Communists had infiltrated the State Department and were systematically giving away the third world to the Reds.

“The only time he ever cried in his life,” Jude said, “was when Goldwater lost the election.”

Jude's brother knew all of her buttons and never hesitated to push them when his family stayed with us. For those brief interludes, there was someone in the house with less consciousness than me.

“Kids who go to daycare are fifty percent more likely to have eating disorders,” he said.

“But their socialization skills will be higher,” Jude said. “They'll tap dance on the graves of the kids who don't go.”

“Where is the women's movement on families?” he said.

“We're taking fertility pills to outbirth the silent majority,” she said.

These were the discussions we had on obligatory holiday dinners while I stacked the dishwasher, Jude covered the leftovers, her brother's wife swept up crumbs in the dining room, and her brother fingered an unlit Jamaican cigar that Jude made him smoke outside. In his own house, her brother had a paneled den with stand-up ashtrays and a portrait of Douglas MacArthur over the fireplace.

It was with trepidation that I accepted Jude's invitation for lunch. We hadn't seen each other face-to-face since the divorce was finalized. We agreed to meet at the Athenian, a restaurant in the Pike Place Market just off the produce aisle, with swinging saloon doors and a counter for the regulars who came in for coffee and loaded it with sugar and non-dairy creamer. The handmade sign over the grill said “No Loitering.”

When I arrived, Jude was in one of the narrow two-person booths next to the windows that overlooked Elliot Bay and the ferry terminal. She looked good in a gray blazer and pants and, despite the exhaust grime on the windows, the sun gave her hair a pleasant glow.

“I thought it would be handy to your office,” she said.

My antennae were twitching while we talked about whether Iowa City, Iowa's first female firefighter would be allowed to breastfeed her baby at the firehouse, a subject I'd brought up.

“How are the kids?” I finally asked.

“It hasn't exactly been Ozzie and Harriet.”

I fiddled with the plastic-laminated menu. “They're getting along with Lill?”

“Lill's been wonderful. She gives them lots of space.” I pictured the kids sitting alone in those big upstairs bedrooms, listening through the heat registers to Jude and Lill giggling in the kitchen while they cooked. “It'll take a while. How's it going with you?”

The waitress saved me, asking if we wanted anything from the bar. If anyone still ordered double-martini lunches, it was here.

“What do you have on tap?” Jude asked.

“Rainier, Miller, Heineken, Bud,” she said, without moving either her lips or the pencil in her hand. She returned to chewing on her cud while Jude deliberated.

“I'll have a bottle of Mickey's,” Jude said, nodding to me to order.

“I'll have the Athenian steak sandwich, medium, and more water.”

The waitress studied the top of Jude's head while she flipped through the plastic pages of the menu. Jude wasn't my responsibility anymore; she could take as long as she wanted. I looked down on the Alaska Way Viaduct and watched the cars on the top tier heading north. It was a concrete monstrosity built before the days of environmental consciousness, when people just wanted to get there. Puddles of water spotted the tar roofs of the warehouses and industrial buildings below us.

“I'll have the Manhattan clam chowder and a slice of garlic bread.”

The waitress stabbed the pencil tip into the pad and ripped the menus out of our hands. Jude gave me a smile like someone had just said cheese. Tap, tap. The butt of my knife continued to rap through the napkin to the table.

“This isn't about money,” she said, “in case that's what you're worried about. As far as I'm concerned, the decree put all that to rest.” That left her relationship with Lill. I laughed nervously but my eyes were on her fingers, which were pressed together so tight that the blood darkened the skin under her nails. “I'm worried about Justine. She's been distant again. Coming home late from school. Missing dinners. She won't say where she's been or who she's with. I got suspicious and went through her drawers.” One of Jude's feet accidentally kicked me under the table. Her lips quivered. She reached into the pocket of her blazer and set three condoms on the table in our booth.

I felt like someone had kneed me in the groin. I thought we'd passed through Justine's hell. “She's only fifteen.”

“A fifteen-year-old has all the equipment.”

“I know but …”

“At least she's using protection,” Jude said.

“There's something so calculated about these things.” I flipped one over with my index finger. The ring shape showed through the foiled label that read
Stimula
and
Vibra-Ribs
. “How long do you think …?”

“It's post-separation, probably post-Lill.”

“You've talked about sex with her?”

“I told her it was overrated, but obviously she isn't taking my word for it. Any suggestions?” I stole a glance at the Alaska Way viaduct where the cars were now swimming upstream like sperm. “Maybe you should talk to her. I can't even tell her what to eat so I doubt I'm going to be able to tell her what she can put in her vagina.”

“Jesus, Jude. Don't be so crude.”

“I'm sorry, I'm just worried. Mad I guess. I didn't want to surprise you again.”

I picked up the check but Jude insisted on paying the tip, with a short stack of Susan B. Anthony dollars. We parted in front of a fishmonger, where a monkfish lay sideways in a bed of ice with its mouth gaping at us as Jude surprised me with a hug.

The finalization of the divorce had re-opened the old wound of whether I knew anything at all about what it took to make a relationship work. Between a husband and wife or between a parent and a child. I realized I'd been hiding behind Jude's zaniness and pretty much blaming her sexual identity crisis for what had happened between us. Maybe it was something else. It was as if we'd successfully assembled a complicated machine from a set of plans and found a place for every part but, when we plugged it in, it sputtered and died. I had earned a good living, went to the kids' recitals and games, and helped around the house. But I was never very good at all the little moments, when Jude and I were sitting alone in the kitchen nook eating leftovers on a Saturday afternoon and I had nothing to say. Or when the reading light was snapped off in the bedroom and we were sliding down under the covers and there was that awkward silence, wondering whether if I stroked her hair she'd think I wanted something, but afraid to say anything for fear that it would start a discussion that would make sleep impossible.

Jude had crossed lines that I hadn't and when I tried to pull her back onto the safe side she fought me and we found ourselves in a tug-of-war. If I'd let myself see her in all of her passion the way other people saw her, I feared that she wouldn't have been mine anymore, so I tried to possess her the way a kid clutches a favorite blanket and sucks on it and pulls on it and eventually tears it to shreds.

The school district's counselor called me for an appointment, saying that she and the social worker from Child Protective Services wanted to meet at the Alhambra. The night before the meeting I mopped the floors with PineSol, cleaned the oven, sponge-washed the fruit and vegetable bins in the refrigerator, and scrubbed out the rug stains. I didn't want to take a chance they'd find a causal connection between the dustballs under the bed and Derek's dope smoking. I recognized the competitive element in this. They'd also be interviewing Jude in her four-bedroom Capitol Hill home with a peekaboo view of Lake Union and a yard. If all I had was a basement, at least it would be a proud basement. I didn't want me or my home to be the reason for Derek's behavior.

The woman from CPS, Mrs. Leonard, had a gray bouffant hairdo and could have been a classmate of my parents. I knew those values and they didn't include divorce. “Do you mind if we look around?” she asked, clutching a clipboard with a pen holder.

They snuck in and out of rooms, their heads bobbing and whispering as they went, and I thought of my college poetry and Prufrock.
The women come and go talking of Michelangelo
. Mrs. Perryvan, the counselor from the school district, had wide nostrils and I worried she'd smell traces of the dried-up joint I'd finished off in the bedroom a few months ago.

“Both kids sleep in there?” one of them asked, nodding with her forehead toward the second bedroom.

“They rotate,” I said. “This is transitional. As soon as things level out, I'm moving back into a house.” I'd promised myself not to apologize—it red-flagged the holes in your case—but I knew that the single-family home was the benchmark of respectability, a place where everyone had space to be alone. Truthfully, I'd grown to enjoy the inventiveness of living in the Alhambra, where a dining room chair had to also serve as a nightstand, where we had to check each other's plans so we wouldn't all end up in the bathroom at the same time. Mrs. Leonard seemed confused. “One of them uses the couch and the other takes the bedroom,” I said. She lengthened her face and stared once more through the bedroom door.

Mrs. Perry van opened the refrigerator. I'd beat her to the punch and stopped at Safeway for lots of leafy green vegetables and fresh fruit, as well as milk, yogurt, and cottage cheese, items which I knew without the kids to eat them would grow mold before I could finish them. She inspected the canned foods and cold cereal shelves and the liquor cabinet over the refrigerator, which I'd slimmed down to a single, respectable bottle of Cutty Sark. The total absence of vice would draw suspicion. When the visual inspection was complete, we convened at the coffee table, with the ladies on the couch and me in the chair I pulled up across from them.