Kramer vs. Kramer (11 page)

“How are you doing, pussycat?”

“I’m sick, Daddy.”

“I know. I think you ate too much popcorn at Joey’s house.”

“I ate too much popcorn at Joey’s house.”

“Try to sleep now, honey. Tomorrow is our last day here. We’ll have a good time. We’ll build the biggest sand-castle of the summer.”

“I don’t want to go home.”

“Well, it’s going to be the fall. The fall is terrific in New York. So go to sleep now.”

“Sit here, Daddy, until I fall asleep.”

“Okay, pussycat.”

“I ate too much popcorn at Joey’s house.”

O
N THE LAST DAY
at Chez Gloria, Ellen, the editor, who had not really met one person all summer, could not get out of her chair. George, the psychiatrist, Johnny-on-the-spot with his analysis, said Ellen was a highly suggestible person and was negatively influenced by the event of the July Fourth weekend when her former housemate also could not get out of her chair. It became part of the Fire Island folklore, going into the aural history of the island, a record, like most doubles by a shortstop in a single season—most nervous breakdowns in a group house in a single season.

It was a grubby game Ted was going to be making his comeback in, and it may have been over in Fire Island, but he knew by now that it was going to be a very long season.

T
HE DIVORCE TOOK SEVEN
minutes. The judge held the hearing in his chambers. John Shaunessy, the lawyer and football buff, sent his team up the middle, a few affidavits, the wife was not contesting, a doctor’s letter saying the husband had been tense, Ted answered a printed series of questions, he said the experience had been upsetting, and the judge did not appear to be involved. They rolled over the opposition, who did not put a team on the field. Judgment granted on the divorce and custody on the grounds of “cruel and inhuman treatment rendering cohabitation unsafe or improper.” Ten days later the actual papers signed by the judge came by mail, and Ted Kramer and Joanna Kramer were legally divorced.

Ted felt a gesture was in order. He took Billy out to Burger King. The celebration was restrained, since all Billy was celebrating was a large order for French fries. The boy had a fragile enough hold on what marriage was and where babies came from, so Ted had elected not to complicate his life by discussing pending judicial proceedings. Now he wanted him to know.

“Billy, there’s something called divorce. It’s when two people who were married get un-married.”

“I know. Seth got divorced.”

“Seth’s parents got divorced. Like your mommy and daddy. Your mommy and daddy are divorced now, Billy.”

“Didn’t Mommy say she’d send me presents?”

I don’t speak for the lady, Billy.

“Maybe she will.”

“Can I have some more French fries?”

“No, wise guy, you had enough.”

Ted looked at him as if he were admiring a painting, Billy in his Burger King crown.

This was pleasant enough, but eating junk food with his son did not seem appropriate to the event, which had a $2000 price tag on it. He thought he owed himself more. At the restaurant he called a teenager in his building who had offered her baby-sitting services and he arranged for her to sit that evening. There was not a woman in his life to celebrate this with him. In the two months since Fire Island he had let his social life, if it could have been called that, go untended. Larry would have been too manic. He did not want to go by himself to a bar and tell a stranger his life’s story. He called dentist Charlie.

Charlie had moved into a studio apartment with his hygienist, but they broke up after only two weeks of exclusivity. Charlie called Ted then, and said the guys should stick together and see each other. When Ted asked about getting together that very night, Charlie was ecstatic. They met on Second Avenue and 72nd Street in the heart of the singles’ bars. The plan was to drink their way along the line. Ted was wearing a corduroy jacket, sweater and slacks. Charlie, a portly man of forty-five, appeared in a blazer, and with plaid pants so loud they were like Op Art.

The first place they chose was called Pals, a suitable-looking bar from the outside. When they walked in, it was all men, dressed in leather. A cowboy at the door with a bulging crotch and leather eyes, said, “Hi, tigers,” and they scampered out of the corral. Rio Rita’s was next, with a blaring jukebox and a scene at the bar that looked like a Fire Island deck. College kids, Ted decided, and over a couple of drinks, he listened to Charlie absolve him of the blame for the break-up with Thelma. Hansel’s had so many strapping lads and lassies Ted wondered if they had stumbled into a European youth festival. Ted learned there that Thelma was going out with a colleague of Charlie’s, another dentist. By the time they reached Zapata’s, the crowd was getting older, but with Ted and Charlie still the oldest in sight. There, Charlie absolved Ted of the blame for his break-up with his dental hygienist. Ted, blurry from vodka, was not certain if he had been involved. At Glitter, the crowd was so sophisticated and the place so crowded, these two non-regulars were not permitted to stand at the bar, so they began to weave down the street and landed on bar stools in Home Again.

“We have said a total of sixteen dumb things to women at the various bars thus far,” Ted remarked, more aware of the inanity of saying anything better than dumb at a bar than Charlie, who was stuck like a broken record on “Hi, little girl. What’s
your
name?” Charlie approached a pretty girl looking up-to-the-second chic in a boy scout uniform and he tried out his line. The boy scout walked away to start a fire elsewhere.

Ted and Charlie leaned against a wall on Second Avenue and had the heart-to-heart they were building to all night, except they were too smashed to have it. “Did I ever tell you how sorry I was about Joanna?” Charlie said. Ted said, “I try not to think of her.” Charlie said, “I think of Thelma all the time,” and Charlie started to cry. Ted helped him along the street and suggested, with the clarity of a drunk, that they have a nightcap in The Emerald Isle, rye and soda, 850 special. Charlie tried to fall asleep, Ted dragged him out of the bar, walked him home, and then, attempting to draw himself up so that his new teenage baby-sitter would think he was a perfect gentleman, Ted entered the house and thanked her for a lovely evening.

H
E HAD INFORMED SOME
of the people around him about the divorce. He thought he should inform Joanna. When his lawyer began legal proceedings, Ted obtained an address from Joanna’s parents, a post office box number in La Jolla, California. He was going to send her a copy of the papers. Diplomatic relations had not improved between Ted and Joanna’s parents. They came into New York again and did not have much to say to
him.
“Ask him what time we should bring the boy home,” her father said. Ted wanted to know if they had heard from Joanna and her mother told him, “If Joanna wishes to inform you as to her activities, she is of age to do so.” Ted noticed that some hostility seemed to be directed at Joanna, and he concluded they might not know themselves of Joanna’s activities. Thelma, his expert on psychology, having been in analysis for seven years, said Joanna could be rebelling against her parents also, and that they might not know very much about what Joanna was doing. Joanna, originally, left it for Ted to tell them, running out on her parents, too, she surmised.

“You should worry about your own psyche, though,” Thelma said.

“Right. The hell with her.”

“That’s not what I mean. I really think you should go into therapy. This whole thing has happened to you. Don’t you want to know why?”

“Ask Joanna.”

“You’re part of it, Ted. Why don’t you see my doctor?”

“I don’t think so. It’s too late for that.”

He sat with the legal papers in front of him, composing notes in his mind to Joanna. “You’re free to get married in Nevada or New York, baby.” No, too childish. “I thought while sending you this I would tell you how we’ve been doing, specifically, how Billy has been doing.” No, she hadn’t asked. He decided to put it in an envelope, send it without a note and let it speak for itself. They had communicated in their times together by eyes, by touch, by words, and now they communicated by divorce decree.

T
ED’S PARENTS ARRIVED IN
New York on a long-promised visit, two rotund figures with suntans.

“The boy is so thin,” his mother said.

“He’s fine. That’s the way he’s built.”

“I know a thin child. I wasn’t in the restaurant business for nothing.”

After deciding “this Polish one” was not feeding him properly—they had met Etta when they arrived and greeted her with a warmth reserved for delivery boys—Dora Kramer decided to embark on her own grandparents’ festival, filling the refrigerator with roasts and chickens which she cooked and which Billy would not eat.

“I don’t understand his eating habits.”

“Try pizza,” Ted said.

“Billy, don’t you like your grandma’s pot roast?” attempting guilt on him.

“No, Grandma. It’s hard to chew.”

Ted wanted to embrace him right there. Generations had tolerated Dora Kramer’s overcooking, and only William Kramer, his boy, had stood up to her. Billy said good night, after not playing with a complicated jigsaw puzzle his grandparents had brought which would have tested a ten-year-old.

“Don’t you like the nice puzzle Grandma picked out for you?”

“No, Grandma. The pieces are too tiny.”

Afterward, the grownups were able to talk freely, Dora getting to her more serious concerns. “She’s not much of a cleaner, this Etta.”

“She does okay. We’re making out all right here.”

She declined to answer. Whether they came down from Boston or up from Florida, her parents or his, they were unified in their thinking in not finding him competent. He would not accept their appraisal.

“Billy is a fabulous child, Mother.”

“He has a faraway look in his eyes.”

“I think he’s been pretty happy, considering.”

“What do you think, Harold?” she asked.

“Yeah, he’s too thin,” he said.

W
HEN THEY WERE READY
to leave, Dora took a final look at the apartment.

“You should fix this place up.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Ted said.

“It’s
her
place. I’m surprised you didn’t get rid of some of this stuff.”

The apartment had been furnished in a modern, eclectic style—beiges and browns, a Swedish couch, Indian print curtains in the living room, a butcher block dining room table in the dining alcove—tasteful, but not specifically Ted’s taste, which was undefined. These were largely Joanna’s decorating decisions. After she left, he just never thought to change it.

“And this thing.” It was a large, black ceramic ashtray, a gift from Joanna’s parents. “What are you still doing with it?”

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

When they were gone, Ted had a headache. Was his mother dead center on the apartment? Was he so passive that he just accepted his state, did not change what he should have? Should he have redecorated the apartment,
her
apartment? Wouldn’t that have upset Billy? Wasn’t he using Billy, if he thought that it would have upset him? He took the ashtray which nobody liked, not even Joanna, and threw it down the incinerator. Was there something basically wrong with him that he had not done it earlier? He was not sure.

After Larry, seemingly uncomplicated Larry, confided that he had gone into analysis, Ted began to acknowledge darker forces out there, or in there.

“I’m afraid of a Casanova complex, old buddy. I make it with a lot of ladies because I’m afraid that I’m a fag.”

“Larry, are you kidding?”

“I’m not saying I’m a fag. I’m not saying that I’ve got a Casanova complex. I’m saying that I’m afraid I’ve got one and that’s what we’re working on.”

“It’s pretty complicated.”

“I know. Heavy shit. But I love it.”

Three weeks more passed, with the biggest event on Ted’s fall social calendar a Saturday matinee of
Aladdin
with Billy. Even Charlie had become a mover, passing him phone numbers, while he was still home at night, bringing work home from the office. Two more uncalled numbers went into a file. What about all the people who seemed to have been helped by therapy? He decided to call Thelma for the number of her doctor.

Her therapist said he would be available for a consultation at a fee of $40. Justifying it on the grounds that if he spent $55 on one of Billy’s recent head colds, he could spend $40 for his mental health, he made an appointment. Dr. Martin Graham was in his forties. He wore a bright Italian silk sports shirt open at the neck.

“Where have you gone, Sigmund Freud?” Ted said.

“Meaning?”

“I expected a bearded man in a heavy suit.”

“Relax, Mr. Kramer.”

They sat opposite one another across the doctor’s desk. Ted attempted to be composed—There’s nothing wrong with me, Doctor—as he told him about his marriage, Joanna’s leaving, and the events of the past few months. The doctor listened carefully, asked him a few questions—how he felt about some of the situations, and did not take any notes, Ted wondering if he had failed to say anything noteworthy.

“Okay. Mr. Kramer, a consultation is really just an exploration. One of the things that’s wrong with it, and what I object to, is you get into a kind of instant analysis.”

“Like you’ve got a such-and-so complex,” Ted said nervously.

“Something like that. So let me just give you some impressions. They may be off the wall, they may be on target. I don’t know.”

Ted thought it should be a science by now and not an I-don’t-know.

“Your feelings about all this seem to be pushed way down. Like where is your anger? You talked about not going out. Okay. Are you angry at women now? Your mother? Your father? Whatever you had at home there doesn’t sound like
The Waltons
.”

Ted smiled, but he did not feel like smiling.

“It’s possible—and again, this is just an impression—that you’ve got a history from your family experiences of pushing down your feelings, and that could have seeped into your marriage, and it could be holding you back now.”