A Good Divorce (3 page)

“A he or a she?” I asked.

“Does it really matter?”

I rested on the couch reading
Open Marriage
while I waited up for her. It was one of the books on the reading list Jude had made for me, which also included
The Female Eunuch, Fear of Flying
, and the
Whole Earth Catalog
. Reading about people who tried to make promiscuity sound like a spiritual quest and drew no distinction between social and sexual intercourse made me feel worse, but I knew the jealousy would cripple me if I didn't immunize myself against it. Open relationships were the natural evolution of the species, Jude had said. I could either join the survivors or become part of genetic history.

She seemed a little boozy when she came home. Her hair was mussed and she held her coat around her like she'd broken the zipper in her cords. Guilt was written all over her face.

“Kind of a late dinner, wasn't it?”

She hung her coat and fussed in the hall closet. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“I mean it's after midnight and I didn't know where you were.”

She stepped into the room and planted her legs with her hands on her hips as if she were Annie Oakley. “You're wondering if I slept with him, aren't you?” I wished she'd moved away from the stairwell so the kids wouldn't hear us. “Why are you so paranoid? Men think the only thing a woman's good for is what's between her legs.” Her hair was throwing sparks as she moved toward me. “Well, fuck you all!”

“Is that your long-range plan?” It was mean, but I couldn't help it.

She towered over me on the couch so that I was looking straight at her zipper and she glared at the book in my hand. “Marriage doesn't mean you have to be Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Her breasts bounced under her shirt as she fired off rounds at me. Then she seemed to tire and sat down next to me; her voice changed. “I'm suffocating, Cyrus. We need a break from this.”

Tiger Lill, as some of the women called her, was a refuge for frustrated wives, and Jude was one of her projects. But I didn't get it. What kind of an advance for humanity was this if the transformative action consisted of jettisoning your spouse? We'd had this discussion before too. Males didn't know how to bond; all they could do was pat asses and talk sports.

“How long are you going to be gone?”

“A week, maybe longer.”

“What will we tell the kids?”

“Tell 'em their mom needs a vacation.”

I'd suspected there was someone else—the unexplained extra dishes in the sink, the mysterious telephone calls she pulled into the hall closet to handle—I wasn't naive. By the seventies, who hadn't been cheated on? After Vietnam and Watergate, people were tired of loyalty to institutions. They wanted to break out, find their own space. Sociologists and psychotherapists had painted monogamous couples as slow-witted.

Maybe I was slow-witted. Maybe I should have taken my nose out of the newspapers. Jude would have said I'd become apathetic about our marriage the same way someone let their VW bus get out of tune, putting in more oil instead of getting a ring job, holding the license plates on with duct tape, letting the hinges rust. I'd settled for something that got us there, forsaking the quality of the ride, and ignoring the increased likelihood of total breakdown. But I didn't care as much where we were heading as who I was riding with. Jude desperately wanted me to cut loose of my forty-two long middle-class straightjacket and stop apologizing for the Jerry Falwells and Archie Bunkers of the world. “For a change,” she said, “just screw what everyone else is doing.”

She came back after two weeks. Warren was convinced she was sleeping around. I assumed that she was and resented her for it but, without proof, I was haunted with the possibility that she was innocent and I was the paranoid, cultural pygmy she'd accused me of being.

Two weeks after Jude's and my separation, I moved out of Warren's apartment and into a two-bedroom basement unit in the Alhambra Arms, a building which bore no more resemblance to Moorish architecture than it did to the Taj Mahal. Warren, dressed in a suit with a black shirt and Cuban heels for a party he was going to afterwards, helped me haul the stuff from the house, and I restrained myself from asking whether he'd bought his outfit with money from Mom and Dad. We siphoned the water out of the waterbed with the garden hose. Although the bed was Jude's idea, she was tired of it and gave it to me. A friend of Warren's had lent us his pickup and we loaded out the back door while Jude and another mother catered a birthday party for one of Derek's buddies in the dining room.

Moving out of your own house was the stuff of tragedies and I didn't particularly want the kids to witness it. Between loads, I'd sneak a look from the hall closet at the festivities in the dining room. It was a masquerade party and everyone had a mask, Jude's a Cinderella face that she pulled down each time she went in the dining room. Derek was Dick Nixon and made a peace sign each time one of the mothers brought them something. I was out of body, hovering, looking back on how they would live without me, and it hurt to see how smoothly things ran. The laughs were just as loud, the lights just as bright, and nobody seemed to notice me and Warren.

Jude and I pretty well avoided each other the night of the move. She'd scotch-taped tags to everything that was mine. I used a plastic drop cloth from the basement to cover the load and secured it with rocks from the flower beds between trips into the house. The wind whipped the plastic loose and impaled it on the antenna. It was just as well she hadn't given me any of the good furniture.

Warren's bachelor's program had included an introductory course in psychology. Whenever he could, he practiced on me. He called around and discovered that there was a men's therapy group starting at Group Health. The first twelve sessions were covered by my medical plan.

“You've got to get in touch with your bitterness,” he said. “Own it.”

“If I'm neurotic, how does throwing me into a room full of other neurotics help?”

Raised Catholic, I considered confessions private affairs. But in the spirit of new beginnings, I told Warren I'd go once to try it. The sessions were held in a room at the hospital with nothing but couch pillows in a circle on the floor. I never would have imagined that Group Health had such non-medicinal-looking space. As men came in, they saw the sign by the door, took off their shoes, and sat silently on one of the pillows. Everyone was so serious. At five past, with one of the eight pillows still vacant, I knew someone had chickened out.

The guy in a black turtleneck and beaded necklace sitting in a lotus position opened the meeting. “Hello, everyone. I'm Rick.” He looked around to make eye contact with each one of us. “I'm a sociologist and I'll be one of your facilitators along with my partner here, Tony.” The man next to him nodded in recognition. “Men's groups are one of the most rewarding parts of my work. We see so many breakthroughs.” As he looked around the circle again, I turned my gaze to my navel.

When it was Tony's turn to talk, he fidgeted and pulled at his collar like he craved a cigarette. His gray slacks had a small split in the crotch. He told us he was an M.D. and a psychiatrist. I could have killed Warren. He didn't tell me there'd be a shrink. I'd have to start checking “yes” on the forms that asked if I'd undergone psychiatric treatment.

“There's a tradition of men's groups,” Rick said, “that goes back to the apostles.” He rocked gently and extended his neck as if to stretch out his spinal cord. “Men's groups have existed in tribes and clans on all continents and in all cultures. The industrial revolution and single-family homes have isolated us from each other. We've forgotten how to talk man-to-man.”

I didn't need this. As I looked around the room at the other blank faces, I could hardly imagine us sharing a last supper together. If this was men's answer to women's liberation, I felt sorry for us. Jude was right; men didn't know how to relate.

When Tony invited us to go around the room and share our reasons for joining the group, I felt panicky. I suspected I wasn't the only guy in the group to deal with a possible divorce. Big deal. I needed something more juicy.

The guy on Tony's left started and told us he was a data processor for an insurance company. He rubbed his hands over his sock to cover up the hole in the big toe. “I've been married for seven years. We've got two healthy kids, but”—he bent his toes back and his voice was weak—“we're having trouble in the bedroom.”

“Down here you mean.” Tony cupped his crotch.

“Yeah,” the guy whispered.

“It's okay, man,” the turtleneck sociologist said.

“Are you on any medications?” Tony said.

“Just aspirin for the headaches.” His shame sapped the energy from his voice. “My wife has lost patience with me.”

The beatnik with a pullover blouse and Jesus haircut went next. I figured him for a druggie, one Tony could fix with a prescription. “My problem is a little different,” he said, in a cowboy twang, with a smirk on his face. “Fact is I don't think it's a problem at all but my woman does. She caught me diddling around on her.” He looked around the room; his eyes were beautiful and unshielded. “Actually more'n once. She said she wouldn't care if it were strangers, but I diddled with a couple of her friends. I guess I'm the man who loves to fuck too much.” The guy with the hole in his sock stole an admiring glance at him.

I was shocked at the candor. Men weren't supposed to talk like this. As people took turns around the circle, moving closer to me, I changed my story several times. It was the same feeling I used to get in gym when I had to play on the Skins basketball team. My chest never developed the mat of gorilla hair other guys had and I wasn't muscular. I needed to get mad at Jude but I kept thinking of the things I admired about her, how she laughed off scorn, how she treated the kids as adults, how she cut through the crap. I'd expected everyone to be more guarded and hypothetical, especially in the first session. I consoled myself in the fact that I didn't have to see these people again.

“I'm Cyrus and I think I'm getting divorced.” I laughed nervously. I'd decided to forego the obligatory penis biography. Rick's was the only friendly face in the room. “My wife, or ex-wife … whatever, she's been a good mother and a good wife. We've had a pretty good marriage. Well, up until recently. Things have kind of tapered off.” I realized I was running off at the mouth, going nowhere. “If you asked me why we're getting divorced, I couldn't really tell you for sure except that my wife's really gotten into the women's lib thing.” It was the worst thing I could think of. When I looked around for some knowing smiles, it was as if I'd said something in Latin. “Women's groups, no bras, all that stuff. I'm not really complaining. I know a lot of it is overdue the way women have been walked on.” I'd lost my train of thought, plugged into one of Jude's National Organization for Women tapes. I flashed on the time I gave Jude “
J
”
The Sensuous Woman
, mistakenly thinking that I was honoring her sexuality, and she ridiculed the butterfly flick. “Another male book on how to titillate the female doll,” she'd said. I thought it might resurrect our sex life, but she said, “Good sex starts with what happens between breakfast and bedtime.” I felt cheated. Just when I thought I'd overcome the guilt of a Catholic upbringing, a new movement came along that amounted to the same thing. Deny the flesh.

Rick brought me out of my trance. “So how does this make you feel?”

“Confused, I guess.”

People laughed.

“How are the children handling it?” Tony asked.

“Fine, I think.” I would have said more but nobody here seemed to be into kids.

“Thanks for joining the group,” Rick said. I had the impression he was unconvinced I had anything big enough to bother with, that he was patronizing me.

The session lasted an hour and a half. An alcoholic dominated the discussion, and I couldn't imagine some woman staying around for this guy. The more he talked the more I thought it could work out between Jude and me. I'd never laid a hand on her. I'd never broken chairs against the door jamb. Maybe Jude was the one who needed the therapy, to rid herself of the notion that everyone who peed standing up was a Neanderthal. If she could only get a glimpse of this group, she'd grab onto me and never let go.

It was tempting to blame my predicament on the Sunday night meetings at Lill's when Jude came home supercharged with reformist ardor. Women had a way of reaching out and taking care of each other while men egged each other on, always trying to compete. Men would rather have a good job than a good friend. At first I'd thought I could get in on the new religion, but whenever I asked her how the meetings went, she just talked about the problems everyone was having with their husbands. What emerged was a picture of women continuing to live in the same house with husbands they'd given up on emotionally. They were living with men they refused to collaborate with. These weren't guys who were sleeping around; they were just guys like me who didn't get it. For a while I figured the women's group was a salutary thing. The more shit that other husbands pulled, the better I looked, but that had turned out to be wishful thinking.

On the way out of the therapy session, I ended up at the urinal next to the diddling Jesus. “This Jude must be some package,” he said. Close up I noticed that his face was pockmarked and he looked more like Judas Iscariot. He was doing it no hands with his pants belted. I always unzipped, loosened my belt, and took it over the top of my underpants. The public urinal was another test of manhood. When he peered over the divider, I let go, a rebel gesture to show Jude that she wasn't the only one who could ride the roller coaster, scream on the steep drops, and go bug-eyed on the corners. Somehow I was going to get even with her and Gloria Steinem.