Divorce Is in the Air (26 page)

I came out of that memory with the feeling I was moving through a tunnel that lasts longer than expected. We left behind a bank of clouds, purplish like cardinals. I prefer to travel at night; I like it when you can see a city's luminous skeleton among the broad sheets of shadows. I think it does me good when I can reassure myself that all that urban agitation—the racket of people getting on and off buses, the traffic, the array of dreams, plans and goals growing in all those heads—all of it, at a certain distance, gets simplified into a cold radiance.

I let the most impatient passengers rush for the exit. I turned on my mobile, and against all odds the home phone rang: two, five, six rings. I tried again on the steps of the plane, the runway crowded with carts stuffed with suitcases. The bells sounded in the void; any one of them could overcome the distance and connect me to my wife. When I heard the familiar sound of her picking up, I felt for the first time the slimy mass of fear rising in my gullet.

“When are you coming home?”

“Helen…”

“When?”

“Are you all right?”

“No. I'm not. When?”

“I'm going to pick up my suitcase and catch a taxi. I'd say half an hour.”

“Don't be long, please don't be long.”

“No, of course not, but—”

“Don't be long, I don't feel well, I'm not doing so good. And bring water, there's no water left. I'm thirsty. Don't be late.”

I must have brought her up a bottle of water, but instead of giving me an explanation Helen chose to lie down on the sofa and pour herself something stronger. It was enough just to have me near, she didn't even feel the urge to touch me. She wanted me there just in case, a living air bag. Nothing new, that was the sound track of our lives. I decided to push her that night, not only because she started lurching from one armrest to the other as if she couldn't hold her head up anymore. The urgency in her messages had bothered me, the pitiful tone of her voice floating in the void through the phone. I didn't let her twist my arm, I demanded a sensible explanation for her depressed energy, her recent spiritual lassitude. Unfounded crankiness is terrifying, you can't argue against something inchoate—I needed something solid to confront. It wasn't meant to be, though. While I was looking for her nightgown she flopped into bed. I kept at it for the next week (I delayed dinner, stamped down the hallway so she couldn't sleep), until finally her adversary emerged from her mind to enter the real world and name the one responsible for all that mental chaos and indolence.

“You're a good person, John, you don't know what evil is like. You haven't seen it, you don't know how it smells.”

“That's why I wanted to meet your parents, John, to know if I could count on you when he reappeared. But your father was good, you mother has grown old, and your sister is a pathetic woman, a fat, sad woman.”

“Now I know you're not going to save me, that Barcelona isn't far enough away, that this marriage isn't going to protect me.”

“Poor John, poor John, my dear John, we're going to suffer a lot if you don't leave me. You're going to suffer.”

“My father, my daddy has come back, and he wants me dead.”

It was one thing to be sick of interrogating her, and quite another for me to swallow that nonsense, which at best promised domestic drama and at worst a bit of criminality. My family was a disaster, agreed, but an honorable one. Skirting adultery, Dad had managed to maintain a fairly civilized arrangement with Mother. I was living with Helen because of a series of random events that in no way made me responsible for the grotesque complications starting to foment in Unfathomable America. I hadn't married her past! To calm myself down I repeated like a mantra that Helen's Daddy and mother (whose name I don't even remember, so you can see how much attention I paid her) were an ocean and several seas away. They couldn't stick their noses into our lives.

Helen's grandstanding was all about how, by moving away from her splendid homeland (Fuokville, land of Lewis and Clark) to marry me, she'd abandoned (abandoned!) her family. All the Thrushes were left bottled up (bottled up!) in the past, adrift and at the mercy of the waves. Of course, the standout word of Helen's private journal (which, when she left the apartment, I read with the justifiable goal of learning more about her) was “special”; when she extrapolated about herself, the girl could pass for an optimist. She was still joined to Daddy Rupert by flesh-and-blood ties, and when those ties took it upon themselves to transmit an electric charge to her, my Helen threw herself into transatlantic conversations that didn't exactly match his supposed indifference. Not to mention how they cut from my bank account (the phone expenses never went to the joint account we opened, I never knew why) another slice of the inheritance I was counting on. Not to mention the three boxes (“hidden” under our bed) where she kept half a set of baby teeth (a barbaric American custom), her third poem to Daddy (
Thank you, daddy/your smile cheers me/your words nurture me/your beard caresses me/Thank you, daddy
), three Valentine's Day cards (from three different admirers), an herbarium of romantic petals, and her first running shoes mended with blue thread. As she “distanced” herself from her parents, Helen was putting space between her senses and the school walls, the country dances, the array of cakes and pastries that would later flow in fatty rivers to settle on her hips, the family nicknames whose existence she acknowledged only when she was drunk, the Christmas dinners with Christmas silverware and Christmas tablecloths, the endless reruns of the same anecdotes about cousins and aunts and neighbors, the cavalcade of births, baptisms, weddings, and funerals whose respective rites comprised the main public entertainment modest people offer one another. Plus the visits to Glacier National Park, the preachers' sermons on local radio, the chewing gum, the regional baseball leagues, the kids' covetous way of fornicating after high school graduation, the deep-seated feminine rivalries, the shame with which people received the news of another tourist decapitated by a bear. The chain of reliable ingredients you can never be entirely weaned off and that, if you're not careful, will end up compacted into a vital paste that is the only dish you spoon into your mouth your whole life long. At the end of the day, only frigid girls and handicapped people choose to stay and live in the town they're born in.

What Helen told me while she sat there on the sofa with her legs crossed Indian-style; what she said while in her robe in front of the half-open refrigerator door, waiting for her hand to steady so she could finally pour some milk into her cup; what I could make out while she was tossing and turning on the sheets (and my eye captured at every half-turn the brand on the elastic in the area under her buttocks: a furrow in the flesh less than a centimeter deep); what I gleaned and thought I understood all led to the same short conclusion:

“I spent my childhood trying to please him.”

Sipping vegetable juice, convinced that concoction would cleanse the alcohol from her blood, Helen told me that as a child she'd willed herself to grow up pretty so she wouldn't disappoint him. She told me how she would seize his arms and shout, “I love you, I love you,” and that it would have been enough simply to hear a “me too,” an “of course,” a “ditto”—some echo of approval. She told me she offered herself like a gift, that she sang and drew just to gladden one of Rupert's hours. As a teenager she tormented herself about her figure so she would be a good jumper, to win a modicum of paternal respect. She never did.

All in all it took me a couple of hours even to understand that the Rupert she was talking about, so desperate to engender a son, was her
Daddy
, her father (who her grandfather baptized with the name Rudolf—the first Thrush to receive a sacrament on American soil—in the white church planted out on the prairie, in a baptismal font that was the town's artistic pride and joy). And that baby would grow into the expectant father who, overcome, peered at the ultrasound (whose fluorescent undulations reminded him of the granulated images in UFO documentaries) where the suspended boiling mass of his daughter was growing embryonic lungs, extremities, a stomach surrounded by arteries. The man who observed his wife and was moved when he superimposed the familiar face smiling at him onto that new creature on the inside of the belly's wall, mutating to the beat of a plan engraved in the DNA he bequeathed her the moment he spilled his seed in her mother. I didn't ask her how that memory was so clear in her mind. With one look, Helen made it very obvious that if I started to question those Montana-forged myths, she might just claw my eyes out.

Nor did it help that, on entering the world, Helen pushed her mother's ovaries out ahead of her. Or she tore up the placenta—what do I know?—some unpleasantness that ruins the oven. Covered in mucous and free of ideas, Helen was clearly innocent, but from that first moment on, Rupert saw her as one of those little meteorites that hit the Earth trailing a somber wake of sterility behind them.

“To Daddy, I will always be the murderer of my future brothers.”

I tried to defuse her past, and told her that she'd have the opposite problem with me, since I would rather have a girl. She recoiled. It was like I'd squirted a drop of lemon onto one of those half-alive slimy things that spend their dismal existence hidden inside a shell. Then she started to slap me with open palms, and when she finished her eyes were dry but shot through with red. I learned that I couldn't mix the central episodes of her family saga with the erotic interlude she'd chosen to enjoy in Barcelona. The epicenter of her existence was the interminable dispute with Rupert; what she and I had was a vicarious romance. However good a time she may have been having in that temperate city of serene skies, the only thing Helen read in the recap of her life was that she had always lost.

You're going to laugh, of course you'll laugh, but for months I'd believed that I had seduced her; I'd stopped in front of shop-windows and looked at those price tags as if they were meaningless numbers, signs for idiots blind to life's most intense pleasures: to win an argument, to possess a woman. My thoughts had been fuzzy. I'd felt like a bull with its snout smeared triumphantly with mud, but the eyes of the cows, the lionesses—of the subhuman female of your choosing—always waver between surrender and an instinctive shine of pride. Anyway, there's really nothing you can compare to Helen's scintillating and avaricious eyes, those little fragments that moved aside so my big body could take its place in the center of their enigmatic circles and I could play the part of the male companion she'd been ruminating on ever since she got her first period. It was a role that had fallen to me randomly, and not through conquest as my vanity had led me to fantasize.

But, who was this Rupert? Who was the man behind the myth? Who
was
Rudolf Thrush III? Daddy's story went like this: the son of a communist émigré from Hamburg, he had received the baton passed by his father after a life dedicated to survival, one that had been the lever for raising a prosperous business (in a humble sense of the word). For years he'd been his father's only employee (his brother Beryl enlisted in the Marines, and once they considered him crazy enough they sent him back to Montana with a certificate and a pension that helped cover the costs of the twenty years he'd spend building model planes). Rupert passed the decades delivering milk, cheese, and yogurt in a van that he never took to the mechanic. He changed its tires and shined its hood with the very same hands that delivered date and walnut cakes, that avidly dished out the goulash that year by year lost its Central European nuances until it was diluted in the genus of common savory stews. At the wheel of that van, Rupert drove the Thrushes into the comfortable territory of the middle class.

This was the father, with a soft and dark mustache, to whom age had added varicose veins and bluish spots in his left eye, iridescent like bruises. An average man, a prejudiced, sixty-something man. You need a fair amount of invisible misery to turn him into some sadistic creature; it'll make you dizzy just thinking about it. But the father and the father's contempt made up the precursor that, fattened by distance and imagination, assailed Helen and made her tremble until the color left her face. This was the beast that devoured our best hours, until the days collapsed in upon themselves.

I considered a possibility that was more humiliating for me yet more favorable to both of us. Maybe her despondence and the story of the sinister father were just a smoke screen to hide the simple, conventional explanation: a lover. I felt better prepared to handle a splendid cuckolding than the delights of family trauma. I promised myself that I would welcome adultery like an anniversary gift. If only Helen's nervous state would turn out to be the toll taken by hiding the fact that she went to bed naked with a gentleman who wasn't me: that they sent each other idiotic messages, that they fondled each other, that he stuck his index finger into her nostril (who knows what got it up for the filthy pig).

I made a fool of myself going through her papers, inspecting her call history, going over café receipts, even following her in the street! I imagined a rough composite: a kind of casual provincial, some guy from Solsona or Reus—places where it'd take you two weeks to notice if a virus wiped out the entire population—with a shiny, wet cleft lip (there's something maternal about women who experiment with the weird side of masculinity—you know, dwarves, three-hundred-pound lard-asses, redheads). And don't think I ruled out successive infidelities: a series of flings, Ethiopian-style. I'd have given her a hug. And I would have forgiven her immediately if she'd come to me and confessed that her abject state was because, before landing in Europe, she'd given birth to an illegitimate child outside the five-city radius in the United States where the law put up real obstacles to polygamy. Still, she managed to hide Jackson from me for another six months.