I took notes, marvelling as I sometimes do that my handwriting can be so small and round and even, so preciously trained into my hand, despite the turmoil that’s overtaking everything else I do.
The judge, who was named Doyle, reduced the entire case to spare prose and straight lines. I envy that kind of simplicity: simple language and obvious, basic logic, no stopping for broken dishes, revenge and recriminations. No late night crying silenced with fists pressed up to your mouth so the children don’t get woken up. No vicious words that smack into each other and hurt, words that you no longer even have the will to try to undo. Just huge amounts of two intertwined lives reduced to mathematics: this share of the matrimonial home set off against that share of the summer place and the car.
There was bitter late March sleet coming in over the harbour in St. John’s, straight off the ocean and completely unforgiving, and it was catching like a solid orange curtain in the lights over the pier where the offshore supply boats dock.
It was eight-thirty, and I was still in my Duckworth Street law office, staring through the big square windows out into the night. The office is in a three-storey green clapboard building that I and my partners bought and renovated. We rented out the ground floor to a souvenir store, so sometimes in the daytime when there’s a quiet moment I can hear the bells they have hanging over the door to let them know when customers come in.
Down on the street, everyone had been reduced to the oversized black wet footprints they left behind after they’d gone. It was a hopeless kind of night, a frustrated, nasty kind of storm, a leftover scrap of winter that should have already given up but wouldn’t take no for an answer.
There were cases I should’ve been working on, scattered across my desk in buff file folders with multicoloured tabs, and hours full of work that was supposed to be billed out to clients. Instead, after endless Internet searches of marriages gone wrong, I found myself sitting at my desk, occasionally balling up scraps of paper and throwing them across the room into the wastepaper bin, wondering just how I ever got into this business.
And why I stay in it.
Well, the why part—actually, I know that. There’s an explanation right out front on a brass plaque by the front door: Williams, Carter and Wright, Family Law. Williams and Wright have gone home, along with everyone else in the office. We do well on other people’s misery; the money’s good for partners, even in a town with a clear oversupply of lawyers. I’m the Carter in the middle of the sign. Michael Carter, twenty years out of law school now, forty-seven years old and greying at the temples in a way I tell myself is distinguished.
I’ve been a lawyer long enough that I keep expecting to see my name pop up on the Queen’s Counsel list, for longevity and constancy in political donations, if for nothing else. I’m fit enough for squash, handsome enough for deliberate flirting, and old enough to regularly be brutally practical and hate myself for it. To make my way straight to the point and to get rid of all the non-essentials right away.
It wasn’t always that way.
In law school, I was well steeped in the idea that everybody deserves representation in a necessarily adversarial system; that everyone needs an advocate. That’s the kind of word they always used in law school, and it sounded grand the first time I heard it. I suppose for journalists it must be the “freedom of the press” kind of thing that resonates, just the way that for doctors it’s the Hippocratic oath.
But eventually, you get used to the comfort that good money brings, and that begins to ring true more clearly than abstract principles. So you keep on going even after you start doubting.
I expected to leave law school and stand up for people who couldn’t stand up for themselves. I always thought I’d be there to give them the kind of representation they needed, when they were too busted up to do anything. Except that it all grinds you down; it all works away at you like the ocean chewing away at the edge of a cliff. Family law is forty percent—no, more like sixty percent—about someone else’s disaster, and there’s hardly ever a client who doesn’t start crying in your office at one time or another.
Sure, they thank you sincerely enough when everything turns out all right, even though nothing ever turns out exactly right. It’s no wonder divorce lawyers generate so much hatred. Too much of the job is trying to balance distinctly different positions against one another, and the compromises always cut someone. Often, they cut everyone.
And it’s amazing how many cry even when you win.
Some of them never manage to stop.
In Métier versus Métier, in the New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench, the wife wanted to take the children halfway across the country to Alberta because she had a boyfriend there with a good job. Her ex wanted to stay where he’d always lived, in Bathurst up on the North Shore along the Baie des Chaleurs, even though he was on unemployment half the year. A judge named Simon had to decide whether the once Mrs. Métier could follow love and make a new life for herself, or whether she had to answer to simple parental fairness first, staying somewhere where all the personal wreckage would be visible outside her front door every single day.
Often the judge takes the easy out, and says that something or other would hurt the children—and almost always, when the kids come into the equation, when they turn up in the judgment, it means the status quo, the staying put, will win. When I hear the word “children” come up when I’m in court, listening to a judge reading a decision, I know right away where the chips are going to fall, even though I always wonder who the hell really knows what’s going to do the most damage to kids.
In Barrett versus Barrett, Ontario Court of Appeal, the husband wanted a cut in support payments even though he hadn’t ever bothered to pay anything. Ever. And the wife wanted every missing payment back to the dawn of time. The total her lawyer had worked up at the bottom of his submission looked like the kind of number you usually associate with a lottery win. That’s a case where you can tell that someone—probably everyone—is bound to end up dissatisfied.
There was a French case I once saw where everyone was accusing everyone else of spousal violence, and the kids told the judge they didn’t want to live full-time with either parent. The husband said the wife tried to run him over with the car, and the wife said she had her right hand slammed in a door. I can imagine the daughters, three little girls, lined up prim and proper and serious in pressed dresses in front of the judge. Their names in the court documents were a simple triptych—A, B and C—and in his ruling, the judge made each one of the girls out to be more mature than anyone else in the courtroom. And he was probably right.
Mary had left before the sleet started, when it was still fat drops of rain weeping down on the outside of the big streetside windows. I could tell that it was getting colder outside. The chemistry of weather was changing right in front of my eyes, so when the drips started to form into a lacy skein of wet ice at the bottom of the glass, I wasn’t really surprised.
I watched her go, watched her heading down to the underground car park half a block away where the firm leases a handful of spaces. I never have to scrape the car windows when I leave work, but the route to almost anywhere is an uphill right-hand turn that’s slippery whenever there’s a snowstorm or ice.
Mary had the collar of her long coat pulled up around her neck and ears, and when she pushed her way into the rain, she pulled her head down into her coat so that it looked as if her neck had completely disappeared. I found myself hoping that she was warm enough, that she wasn’t going to get soaking wet before she got down the short hill to her car.
I always think of Mary the way I know her best, eight buttons down on a smooth blue blouse, her arms always open.
While she’d been here, we’d left the blinds open the whole time, even though there’s a hotel across the street with at least twenty rooms where anyone could just walk to the window and peer across into my office. You get to a point where there’s a grim kind of fatalism to it all, where you know the end result is that
you’re going to get caught, and the only real questions are when and where and how. Because nothing except being caught will ever be able to break the spell.
Mary would be known as the adulteress if she cropped up in Smith versus Smith-Coté—Smith-Coté’s lawyer obviously favours the classic language, and I expected a “heretofore” to pop up at any moment—and Mary, some version of Mary, appeared in her supporting role as mistress in Harris versus Pender, and Tobin versus Tobin, and Henry versus Barber-Henry too.
I used to get in trouble with clients sometimes, because they would say I had barely included the other woman when I was drawing up the nuts and bolts of their case, dismissing her in too few words, because she mattered, often passionately, to everyone involved. My problem was that, before Mary, I wanted to point out the far from surprising fact that a third party wasn’t that original, that a sudden extra was always the protagonist in someone else’s two-act play, entering right before the climax and staying onstage all the way through the short sharp slide to the denouement. But that, as much as she mattered to everyone involved, she didn’t matter a bit to the law anymore.
It wasn’t that simple in my own life, where the other woman was Mary. Suddenly it wasn’t the way I’d always told my clients it would be—especially the women—the way I’d told them the other woman was just a transition, that she was only a bit player, and not to focus on her because the root causes of a marital collapse were sunk far deeper than whoever had recently arrived, the real roots were deep in the wreckage of a marriage they had already lost.
But with Mary, it was right and natural, the way things are supposed to be. And believe me, I know exactly how stupid that sounds. I’ve probably heard the same thing a hundred times myself from clients.
Sometimes, when everyone else is winding up for the day, Mary comes in to help me finish up the paperwork. I’ve spent the tattered edge of a hundred days watching my partners leave the office purposefully looking straight ahead and away, waving their good-night waves without even looking at us. Williams and Wright are perfectly happy convincing themselves they haven’t seen anything if it’s something they don’t want to see.
Mary has been working with me for six years and she knows just about everything there is to know about me: my shirt size, my shoe size, the way I love to touch the wispy hair on the back of her neck. Yes, Mary knows way too much. She knows when my wife’s birthday is, and twice she’s bought Beth’s birthday present because I was tied up late in court.
Mary knows both my kids, Will and Liz, and sometimes they’ve sat at her desk for hours while I finished up with a client, Liz with her tongue stuck out and a pen looking oversized in her small hand. Mary’s got some of her drawings up on the side of a filing cabinet, stuck there with tape because Liz gave them to her. William always wants to talk to Mary—always wants to talk to anyone, actually—his words the pure little ringing bell that is a young boy’s voice. I wonder about the jumble of emotions she must feel every time she looks at those kids.
“Christ, Michael,” Mary has said to me more than once. “I can’t go on like this. It’s ripping me apart.”
She’s right. And I can’t either.
This is plain exquisite and unstoppable hell.
I know there are people who can go cold turkey, can decide to go back and try to rebuild the house that has crashed down all around them. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they surrender what they’ve got, or how they could possibly go back, knowing that the marriage they’re going back to will be even worse than the despair they were already in. That it will be every bad thing it was, along with extra servings of guilt and blame. You look at the ceiling in a house with a leaking roof and you always see the patches where the plaster is shot from water coming in, never noticing the parts where there’s no mark at all.
In Matheson versus Matheson, there were no children, but there was twenty-eight years of combined property—including the matrimonial home and a cottage and an RV—and still, with all those years of water under the bridge, one of the two had made a list of every single wedding present, and whose side of the family each one came from. The judge bravely marched through the list, step by step, in his decision—red wineglasses to this party, white wine to the other—until he got to an entire set of copper-bottomed pots that he suggested should stay together, even if the marriage couldn’t.
So, who gets the good memories, and the memories of the meals cooked in those damned pots? Who gets the inside jokes, now hollow because no one’s left who understands them anyway?
In Royal versus Moore, they were fighting over the fact that they each brought condos and prior lives into the merged equation, and unravelling the tangle was as complicated as calculus—percentages and mortgages and different rates of interest, all being spun together into a knot while the judge hunted for fairness like an Italian hog hunting for truffles it can’t see but still scents.
Every single case reduced me to almost complete, thudding despair, wave after wave of hopelessness passing over me and leaving me behind in the trough, followed by the next case that picked me up and flung me farther ashore. I couldn’t stop reading, scrolling down through the legal websites and picking off every single case where two people with the same name were battling each other. Sometimes I got lucky and it was a probate case instead, a brother and sister fighting about some obscure or unclear clause in a will, and it was a relief to be able to follow the skeleton of the argument without having to invest anything in it except professional legal curiosity.
There was nothing pleasant or tidy about where I was, no legal shorthand that was going to make it all right. There was no excuse or even a clear explanation—and I wasn’t offering or expecting one. It just was, and it had been from the very moment I realized something was wrong.
Mary had a familiar, sad half smile when she left my office, and she trailed a finger along the line of my jaw from my ear to my chin, cool, smooth skin, and she adjusted her clothes briefly before she left, like she was shaking herself into them, a motion that, to me, has a curious formality—and a curious finality—about it every single time I see it.
You’re supposed to step back every now and then in my job. I kept trying to remind myself of that: step back to cut through the emotion and the fury and find the analytical lines that I used to use to make rational decisions—the sharp lines that clear points are based on.
Clients always want to explain what happened, and I always have to keep myself from stepping right in and stopping them. Why stop? Because like any lawyer anywhere, I bill by the hour, whether the discussion is useful to the case or not. It’s like clients feel they have to regale me with the reasons first; that it’s essential we spend a bunch of time on “she didn’t care about me anymore” or “he picked up some tramp” before we do anything else. The whys don’t matter to me, I’ve always wanted to say, and the hows matter even less. So let’s cut to the chase and get the one thing done that almost everyone can agree on.
There was a time in divorce law when everything was essential, when blame was paramount and critical, when scarlet letters actually left a mark, but that’s an archaic concept now.
People always want to put an explanation out there for why it all failed, for why they won’t get to be the couple putting the fiftieth wedding anniversary advertisement in the newspaper, both of them staring out of the photograph like slightly amused survivors of a long infantry campaign. You always see the ones who made fifty; there’s no newspaper ad for “crashed and burned two years in.”
People don’t want to hear that the successes are as arbitrary and chance-ridden as the failures, and that the reasons are only justifications for much more deeply hidden flaws. Even if reasons mattered in law, I’d have to tell them that I won’t ever believe it was that simple anyway. I would never accept it was all one person’s fault, no matter how egregious or horrible his or her behaviour. I’d like to tell clients we should spend the time in my office concentrating on what comes next, on
where they’re going, and not waste any more time worrying about how they got here.
There was a time when Beth and I spent every moment together. Joined at the hip, her friends used to say. It’s trite, but every couple has to have those moments tucked somewhere into their joint past; otherwise, they wouldn’t end up being couples, would they? No matter how hard things get later, those wonders, those high points, shine and prickle with possibility. If you never had candlelit dinners and firelight and fine-fingered passion, you would have found yourself shaking hands at the end of that first evening and looking forward to a date with someone new.
I can remember when Beth and I drove out to Bonavista, almost broke and making believe it was a vacation. We stayed in a small, square, flat-roofed white house surrounded by a patchwork green yard with boulders sticking up through it, close enough to the lighthouse that we could see the sweep of the light pass over us, peeking around the heavy curtains to finger into the room with every midnight sweep.
Occasionally, we even made our way out of the small house, and the owner of the bed and breakfast asked if we were newlyweds, and told me that we should eat well to keep our strength up. When I told Beth what he said, she had to hold a pillow over her mouth because she was laughing so hard. I can remember that the RCMP highway patrol was, for some reason, billeted in another room in the same Bonavista house, and they were always coming in the front door late and waking us up at strange hours so we could dive into each other’s arms all over again.
I told Beth I kept expecting the cops to bust into our room, guns drawn, because they’d heard a struggle, which made her laugh more.
She used to laugh a lot then.
That was when we could park the car anywhere on that spine of Bonavista road and just walk out into the bog and brush, and never be at a loss for words, finding wonder right there in the juniper ground in front of us. We could walk for miles along grey stone beaches, hearing—almost feeling—the clatter of the stones pulling back into the surf, and never even have to speak. Back then, I could read a book about a couple being one and believe that I knew exactly what was meant. And back then, when we drove anywhere, no matter who was driving, the driver would reach across without even looking and put their hand either onto a leg or into the passenger’s hand, the perfect marksmanship of familiar touch almost every time.
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