by Susan Dundon
In Edward’s defense, I have to say that he’s much better than the average man. He’ll tell you every single detail about the food, right down to the kind of olive oil that was used in the marinade for the roasted red peppers. But I had my work cut out for me, given that food was not the focal point here.
The answer to the curly question was, “Not really.” And the color, for your information, of your new love’s hair is brownish, grayish, blond. His inability to absorb these simple details was maddening. I could forget about the fine-tuning. I knew perfectly well that if our positions had been reversed, that is, if I had found myself face-to-face with Pamela and a new boyfriend, I’d have returned with a thicker portfolio, so to speak.
Edward couldn’t even tell me how you were dressed, whether it looked like an evening out, something really special, or whether you looked as if you might be stopping in for wine before going back to her place. He was equally useless on what she seemed to think of running into Edward, your ex-wife’s boyfriend. I mean, it is possible to get a reading on these things, on whether, for instance, someone is indifferent—or not.
Now you might ask, as Nina has asked—loudly, I might add—what makes me think that who you’re going out with is any of my business. When you seemed to be getting serious about Isabel, and I was full of objections (I thought Isabel was absolutely wrong for you), Nina said, “Just a minute, Emily. You can pick your first husband and you can pick your second husband, but you do not get to pick your first husband’s second wife.”
I don’t know why not. Who’s in a better position, after all, to determine the most appropriate mate for a man than the woman who lived with him for twenty years? Not that I’m going to be completely objective. As June said of Harvey’s new girlfriend, “She’s incredibly good-looking, and she makes a boatload of money. I just know she’ll never make him happy.”
No doubt June pictured Harvey with someone less glamorous, and more wholesome, which is to say heavier; someone, well, more his type. Women naturally prefer to be succeeded by “nice” and “down-to-earth,” and perhaps a touch wide in the hips, as opposed to gorgeous.
It’s not that I don’t wish you well; I do. However, it’s one thing for me to wish for your happiness and quite another to wish for it in quantities that exceed whatever we had at our happiest. It grieves me to think of you and your new love lazing in bed on Sunday mornings, looking up at a peeling ceiling that is one big water spot and planning the New Wing. (Incidentally, since the children are so much older now, don’t you think that we should move the nursery to the guest wing?)
How I loved those times. They were not momentous; they were merely moments. But they were the links that connected us to each other in ways that were unique. Now they’re in danger of being relegated to obscurity by the presence of strangers. Our past as each of us remembers it will bear us no witness.
All the more reason, then, that I should choose your new mate. Like me, she should be sensitive to the tug of history, which is to say she should be a woman of my age and perspective, someone with a past of her own, some gray hair, and a former husband whose uniqueness only she knows. Such a woman is more apt to appreciate the sanctity of those recollections than someone younger, whose history has yet to occur.
I keep thinking about the woman Edward saw in the liquor store—the one with the not-really-curly, brownish, grayish, blond hair. I think of her and I imagine Harvey or June coming to me one day and saying, “She’s perfect—the woman he should have married in the first place.”
Forgive my proprietary interest, but I can think of somebody better. What’s wrong with the woman you should have married in the second place?
APRIL 23
It could only happen to Harvey. The day that he came to give us the news will live on in my memory as one of the more telling episodes of Harvey’s life, at once awful and hilarious. I was dying to talk to you about it then, but no one was to know. “You can’t say a thing,” Harvey had said. I knew, though, that he’d probably been saying that to all his best friends. Harvey can’t keep a secret, even—probably most especially—his own.
Now, since the word is officially out, I can share the story with someone who’d appreciate it. He came by on a Saturday a few weeks ago, and before I could say hello, he was racing around the house, breathlessly closing all the doors so that he wouldn’t be overheard. It was a move that made sense, considering that my house often has the appearance of a youth hostel these days. But spring break was over, Tony was back at school, and Melissa was spending the weekend with a friend. I explained this, but he continued sealing us off room by room. Finally, when there was no place to go but into the kitchen closet, he sat down and said, “You won’t believe this.”
“I’ll believe it,” I said, which was true, because only unbelievable things happen to Harvey. He makes the unbelievable completely believable.
“Meg is pregnant,” he said.
“I don’t believe it,” I said, and sat down.
Just then Edward came home, walking into an atmosphere of stunned silence.
“What’s up?” he said, after a quick glance at Harvey, who was wearing his wide-eyed, I’ve-really-done-it-this-time expression. Edward didn’t believe it either, not that Meg was pregnant, but that Harvey was going to get married.
“Married!” Edward said. “People don’t have to get married anymore, especially not fifty-year-old people.”
Then Harvey told us about the tests he was having, to rule out cancer. He thought he had an ulcer.
“Harvey,” Edward said, with a black cackle. “You’re the only guy I know for whom cancer could be construed as a solution. The bad news: Meg’s pregnant. The good news: You only have twenty-four hours to live.”
Well, as I said, it could only happen to Harvey. Meg is going to have the baby, period. She doesn’t want Jamie to be an only child and, at thirty-eight, she’s getting short on time. Harvey’s feeling is that he can’t not be part of it. So there you are. He probably would have gotten married anyway because he loves Meg, but he would never have decided to get married. Harvey doesn’t decide things. Fate decides. Well, fate has made some good decisions, ultimately. I hope it does as well with his divorce. Harvey isn’t sure if anyone has filed yet.
p.s. Everyone tells me that the woman in your life—Linda?—is “really nice.” Harvey apparently thought I was strong enough for him to add “cute.”
MAY 29
I keep waiting for things to change between us, but they never do. Maybe the trouble is that I’m not waiting; I’m expecting.
I’m not sure which is worse—that you couldn’t be happy for me, or that you couldn’t pretend to be. I suppose, given the choice, I’d rather have the truth, but it doesn’t exactly facilitate the occasion. You seem so much happier now yourself—the house, Linda—that I thought you could afford to be more generous, more gracious. Edward says that in Italian there’s an expression, “ti auguro ogni bene,” for which there is no exact English equivalent, but it means, I wish the best for you. It hurts me to see that you can’t wish the best for me, that this is what it’s come to, even when your life is going well.
Which brings me to what I believe has been at the core of so much of my frustration with you: You don’t want me to perceive you as happier. Whenever things work out for you, whenever there’s the smallest ray of sunshine seeping in under the window shade, you’re quick to point out how slight that ray really is, and that just behind it all is dark and hopeless. It’s true you’ve bought a house; it’s nice, but I’m given to believe that it hasn’t changed anything. You’re still alone. You still miss your family. You’re seeing someone named Linda, yes, but you’re seeing a lot of people. You say that for you, there’s only one marriage in life, one person. Every other woman seems wrong somehow, an affair. You’ve forgotten that at one time you didn’t seem to have any problem with that.
There’s nothing so terribly wrong, I guess, in being determined to be miserable. But I do think there might b
e something wrong in using it the way you have used it—to make me feel guilty, to diminish whatever pleasure I might have. You said once, in Dr. Block’s office, when you were apologizing for all the “bad” things that you had done, that you knew that you had been the agent of pain, not just for me, but for Annie and Peter. I wore the effect on my face; it moved you.
I feel that way now. I avert my eyes so that I won’t be brought in. Your unwillingness to let go and move on is a hook you hold out at arm’s length to snag me in my path.
You remind me of a child whose mother has left him at camp to have a good time and who, in spite of himself, has a good time. He learns to swim and play dodge ball. He makes friends. His misery is something he forgets. But when he comes home, there is reproach in his every look, every gesture. His mother has left him, and now the payment is due.
There was a time when I was furious about all this, especially when your vulnerability had so much power. Everybody bent over backward to protect you. The kids didn’t mention my name in your presence; I was careful never to say “we” when I talked to you, as if Edward didn’t exist. I didn’t want him to pick me up at the airport after Annie’s graduation because I didn’t want to run the risk that you would see him. It was enough for you to be in your shoes. Why did I have to be in there, too?
Then, one morning, Dr. Bloom asked me whether it would help if I knew that, for whatever neurotic reason, you couldn’t do better. “Couldn’t?” I had thought the word was “wouldn’t.”
And with that Dr. Bloom deprived me of much of my reason for being angry. I didn’t like giving my anger up. It had given me my energy; it had served me. But it was a habit, like smoking. What am I going to do instead, I wondered; what’s going to make me interesting? I didn’t have any idea, but it would be fun finding out.
JUNE 6
I wasn’t going to tell you this; I wasn’t going to tell anyone. But now, since I’ve told everyone, it only seems fair that I should tell you, too. Besides, I want to keep the record straight and this isn’t the time to start omitting things.
Edward and I were nearing the end of a bottle of zinfandel on Saturday night when I mentioned to him that you were having Linda and Annie to dinner so that you could introduce them. (Bear in mind that, although I’d heard a lot of nice things about Linda, I’d never actually seen her, and Edward wasn’t much help in filling me in.)
Edward listened, staring thoughtfully into his wine and twirling the stem of his glass between his fingers. “What exactly did you have in mind?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Just that I’d love to go peek in the windows.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” he said, putting down his glass and reaching for the car keys. I couldn’t believe it, a man who would indulge my mischievousness, my naughtiness. But then, as I was beginning to discover, Edward himself is naughty. Incredible, I thought. A naughty dentist. The man was full of surprises.
A few minutes later, we were walking up your street, trying to stay within the shadows of the trees. Edward was completely cool, as though we spied on our former spouses every evening, but I was both giddy and terrified. I thought that I might wet my pants.
We sped up the front walk, and then around to the side of the house and into the sticker bushes. (You might be gratified to know that we were both wearing shorts.) I’d had no idea how high the dining-room windows were. Even standing on our toes and gripping the window ledge by our fingertips, we could barely see into the room. The big problem, though, was that you were sitting with your back to the window, and it was almost impossible to see Linda, except for a corner of her hair.
Occasionally you would reach for something, and I could see some of her face. She seemed nervous. And Harvey was right. Linda was cute.
“What do you think they’re eating?” Edward whispered. “It looks like some kind of chops.” The food—of course. The real reason for his mission. Just then you got up from the table and moved toward the front door.
“He’s coming!” Edward said, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the bushes. We ran toward the gate to the backyard, but we couldn’t get it open. There was absolutely nowhere to go. I started giggling uncontrollably, so Edward pressed his hand over my mouth, which made me laugh all the more.
You never did come outside, as far as we know. We waited until we thought the coast was clear, then made our way back to the car. Edward walked; I ran. As we drove away, he said, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to run from the scene of a crime?”
The scars of my indiscretion are still with me. My legs look as if I’d been attacked by a raccoon. Edward’s probably do, too, but his shame is concealed by a manly carpet of hair.
I’m glad you didn’t catch us; it would have been awfully embarrassing. Much more fun, too, to tell the story myself, as one who’d escaped, than to think that anyone would hear about it from your perspective, as the captor: “I found my ex-wife and her fiancé peering through my dining-room window the other night … how perfectly appalling. God knows what Linda must have thought …”
God knows what Annie would think; but then, I’ve never impressed Annie as a model of decorum. I’m a woman, remember, who is known to have climbed over a construction barrier and sink into eighteen inches of freshly poured concrete because she was too lazy to walk around the block. Children form an early opinion of their mother when construction workers whistle, and people in traffic jams yell out the windows of their cars, “Whatdja think it was, lady, a Chinese restaurant?”
Annie’s always been so much more of a grown-up than I. Do you recall what she said that time I had my hair cut by that sadist who called himself an artist? “Oh, Mommy, why do you do these things?”
A sensible person might ask. But I expect I’ll go on doing them until I die.
JULY 14
Nina and I have been having nuptial talks. It was she who got me into this, so I’m holding her responsible for easing my every anxiety. She started working on me a year ago, when she was doing a review of Jake’s. I had just ordered the grilled chicken sandwich—she was having the tuna steak and a side dish of string sweet potato fries—when she said, “Emily, you just have to marry this man, that’s all there is to it.”
These were disquieting words to the waiter, who had just returned with our iced tea and thought she was talking about him; but one of us is always saying something disquieting. Just the week before, in a crowded outdoor cafe, Nina had asked me what my hairdresser charged for a haircut. “Forty dollars for a cut,” I said, “and five dollars extra for a blow job. Uh, dry,” I added quickly, but it was too late. Nina was on her way under the table.
Anyway, I don’t often argue with Nina; you know that. I tend to go along with her because she usually manages to convince me that hers is the only reasonable view. Almost invariably, she turns out to be right, a notable exception being the time she encouraged me to get a boarder and Valerie came to live with me.
So that day at Jake’s she was telling me I had to get married. I loved the vintage, old-timey quality of the phrase, calling forth the hasty selection of crystal and silver patterns. But she was thinking, actually, of health insurance. As someone who spends thousands of dollars a year on yeast treatments and other related ailments, I got her point. I had nothing against a good insurance plan, but my relationship with Edward had been a romance. Romance and marriage, as so many of us had learned, were two quite different things.
When you’re in love, you overlook annoyances. When you’re in love, the way his teeth clink on the spoon each time he takes a mouthful of soup isn’t something you really notice. But get married, and that noise will punctuate your sentences. It will be the conversational equivalent of water torture.
You and I had been married for twenty years—not forever, I grant you. But two decades is nothing to write off. Would I want to be married to Edward in twenty years? In twenty years he will be sixty-eight, an old man. Would I want to marry someone who’s going to be an old man?
> And what about me? What went through Edward’s mind as, each morning, I stirred a hefty teaspoon of Fiberall into a glass of orange juice? More and more of what went into my mouth each year was for medicinal purposes. I was waiting for the all-fiber fettucine, and then I’d be set.
Otherwise, I wanted everything to stay as it was. There were days, it was true, when I hoped Melissa would leave for school in the morning and run away and get married in the afternoon. I was too old for the habits of adolescents, too old for sulking and door-slamming. But Edward was the indispensable part of the package. No matter what was going on, even when we were arguing about Melissa, which was often, even if I was having menstrual cramps and was bloated, even if he was paying entirely too much attention to those fish, I craved him with a passion I had not thought possible in me. The relationship was not about children, though we had them and loved them and took care of them when they were here; the relationship was about us. We were not starting a family; we had none of the plans that younger couples do. There were no peripherals. We were not asking ourselves, What will the future hold, what will we be? We already knew.
The point was to be together, to revel in what we had to offer each other. I just didn’t see how being married was going to add anything. On the contrary, I thought marriage would subtract.
Nor had it escaped me that the success rate for second marriages was none too encouraging. One had a better chance of staying married the first time. Maybe that was because once you learn that you can get divorced and the sky won’t fall, you can do it again. The first divorce is like the first murder; you’ve already got blood on your hands.
But I didn’t want to get divorced again, not ever. And if I didn’t get married again, I wouldn’t have to worry about it. That was my guarantee.
Each day Edward lived here with me was by choice. He could leave at any time. At any time, I could ask him to leave. We were not stuck by contract. All the same, a time came when I started to change. Without realizing what was happening, I lowered my resistance. I started wondering if what I thought was choice, what I called not being stuck, was more like having one foot out the door. What had sounded like an option had all the earmarks of an escape hatch. So here I was, at lunch with Nina and having a nuptial talk. Maybe she had scared me about the insurance, I didn’t know. But I was getting excited. I felt different. “Commitment” seems like such a simple, overused word. But if that was it, if that was the thing that was making it different, then I was suddenly, wholeheartedly, all for it.