To My Ex-Husband

by Susan Dundon

  The only thing I hadn’t squared with myself was the extent to which I was going to bring my first husband into my second marriage. We were at Odeon, and Nina was concentrating on the pork medallions in some kind of thick, dark, brown sauce. I had the premarital jitters and could have been eating anything. I mean that literally—anything and everything. Other people who have premarital jitters eat nothing. My appetite was affected only to the extent that I was indiscriminate.

  I took a forkful of something that may have been a breast of duck and said I would always think of Edward as my lover, not my husband. She nodded and said something that sounded like “piquant.” Hand it to Nina, the consummate professional.

  I don’t know how she does it, week after week. This may sound incredible coming from me, but I don’t know if I could earn my living by eating. Once it became work, I don’t think I could do it anymore. Nina, on the other hand, is always sharp, always concentrating. She never takes anything for granted. I’ve known restaurant reviewers in this city who chain-smoked or drank or both. They made or broke the reputations of restaurants on their impressions of food they could not possibly taste. I admired Nina tremendously, but I could hardly get her attention.

  “You know,” I said, “if Edward and Nick were each about to drop off the edge of the world, and I could only save one of them, I would save Nick.” She looked up from her plate.

  “You,” she said, “are retarded.”

  I smiled, though she wasn’t kidding. She means everything she says. I thought of Stephen, sweet, gentle Stephen, with his fatherly good nature and his innate sense of right; he can be funny, but, unlike Nina, never acerbic. “Oh, Nina, you don’t mean that,” he’ll say.

  “But I do mean it,” she’ll reply. He never believes her, of course.

  I told Nina that I didn’t really feel that way anymore, but that until very recently I had. I loved Edward; but I needed you in the world with me. I couldn’t be the only one who would remember the children when they were newborns, their first words, the way they sounded when they talked. It was too huge a responsibility. Even now I look at a picture of Annie at two, and I hear you imitating her froggy little voice.

  I didn’t go into all this with Nina. I didn’t bother explaining, because Nina wouldn’t have understood how confusing those feelings had been. I had them at a time when I was looking for perfect clarity. What changed was not my vision so much, but my willingness to live with ambivalence.

  JULY 26

  So once again Harvey has done the unbelievable. Or maybe Meg has; I’m not up on the gene stuff. Anyway, I don’t believe it. Twins. A boy and a girl, according to the amniocentesis. There is a reason, after all, why I see Harvey’s life as a Shakespearean comedy. I asked him if he was going to name them Sebastian and Viola, as in Twelfth Night. He wasn’t amused. “I thought I was having this second little family,” he said. “Instead, I’m having a farce.”

  Fate has again fallen right into Harvey’s hands and given him great material. He’ll pretend to be miserable, and we will all love to hear about it. But while we’re laughing, we will know that secretly he’s thrilled.

  AUGUST 8

  My mother is too much. This morning, a UPS truck pulled up with a big box from Florida. It was a silk negligee and a matching robe. And there was this subtle aspect—it was ivory rather than white. My mother has put her semi-seal of approval on my sins. She sure has mellowed! But, unfortunately, my marriage plans have made her somewhat self-conscious. When I called to thank her, she asked if it bothered me that she was not planning to get married.

  “Emily,” she said cautiously, “this way Fred and I have a little more money.”

  Hard to believe that this was my mother talking, hard to believe that she and Fred actually sat down and said, “Oh, let’s not get married; let’s just collect these two social security checks.”

  Everybody calls her Mrs. Graham, anyway. Just as everybody will no doubt call me Mrs. Ventura, though I’m not taking Edward’s name. My students are so disappointed. They love change. It’s romantic. One of the girls said, “But Mrs. Moore, why get married if you’re not going to change your name?”

  My God. What do you say to that?

  But I can’t be changing my name at this age. Nor, if it’s of any interest to you, will Dickens. He is, and has always been, Dickens Moore, though he will enjoy a new and interesting status officially as Edward’s stepdog.

  When you and I were divorced, I’d have given up Moore and taken my maiden name back, but for two reasons. First, it’s hard enough to get recognition as a writer without changing your name. And I’m not going to graft a new name onto an old name with the help of a hyphen. People are madly, joyously, hyphenating—until, in disillusion, they unhyphenate. Say Pearl Rudenke, the loan officer in your bank, gets married and becomes Pearl Rudenke-Betterbed. Then she gets divorced, and remarried. She calls herself Pearl Betterbed-Thames. Next thing, you know, she’s refusing to lend you money as plain old Pearl Betterbed. So fickle. You begin to think that maybe it was a marriage in hyphen only.

  The second reason I’m not snatching back my maiden name is one you already know. I hated Massengill. I always felt so fortunate to marry someone whose name was simple and pure and without pharmaceutical overtones. “There’s no connection,” my mother felt compelled to explain time and again. Of course, not everyone is so hygienically inclined as to have made the connection, so they had to ask.

  “Well, those douche things,” she would say, trying to sound offhand. As a teenager, this infuriated me. Why couldn’t she just shut up? Douches went into vaginas. Vaginas had to do with sex. Why did my mother have to be talking about sex?

  By and by, I saw that my mother was exercising her naughty side. Rebellion was so much more tasteful once upon a time, wasn’t it?

  Now here she is, sending her daughter a decidedly tasteful but nevertheless overtly sensual gift on the occasion of her second marriage. I’m incredibly touched at how supportive my mother has been. I don’t know if she blamed me for what happened to us. I thought so at first. Her impulse has always been to assume that I’m at fault. And mine, in turn, has been to believe that she was right. She wasn’t one who took a philosophical view, as my father did. She never considered that things had a way of working out for the best, especially if I had anything to do with them.

  Lately, though, she seems to have become so much more accepting of a larger, not to say divine, scheme, something outside herself, beyond her control. She sees that I’m happy. And maybe, for the first time in my life, that’s all she’s asking.

  I wonder if you remember, when he was about seven, Peter’s wanting to know why my mother and father didn’t live together. I guess he had assumed that it was something my mother had wanted, in part. But when I told him that my father had fallen in love with somebody else, he said, “Wouldn’t that make you sad for the rest of your life?”

  I have no recollection of what I told him then. But it pleases me to have shown him that indeed it does make you sad, but not for the rest of your life.

  AUGUST 9

  I meant to ask you yesterday whether you had ever seen the movie Patti Rocks. Someone asked me why I had gotten divorced, and Patti Rocks came to mind because of a piece of dialogue that puts perfectly what I have come to feel.

  Two men, Billy and Eddie, are driving in a car. Billy asks Eddie about the circumstances of his divorce. What Eddie says goes something like this:

  “I don’t know why we got divorced. She did something because I did something; I did something because she did something because I did something. And if you ask her, she’ll tell you one thing, and I’ll tell you another. They’re just stories, different stories.

  “You know, when you start out, it’s the same story. You speak the same language and everything’s great. You say, you want to go to the movies? And they say, yeah, I want to go to the movies. You say, which movie do you want to go to? And they say, I don’t care, as long as it’s with you.

&nb
sp; “And you say, do you want to get married? And they say, I want to marry you. So you get married, and you start arguing, and you don’t speak the same language anymore.

  “You say, it’s a door. And they say, it’s not a door; it’s a window. And you say, you want to go to the movies? And they say, I can’t stand that movie. You say, you want to stay married? They say, I don’t want to stay married to you. You see? Different stories.”

  A couple of years ago, Nina asked me if I could put in a sentence or two what had gone wrong in our marriage. I said that you had had a midlife crisis and dealt with it by having an affair with Esther. For whatever it’s worth, that’s not what I would say now, because I was there, too. I was part of it. If you had been married to someone else, someone more patient and supportive, you might not have had a midlife crisis. You might not have felt alone. If I had been married to someone else, someone less angry and disillusioned, I might have been able to be more supportive and patient.

  You did something because I did something; I did something because you did something because I did something. You see? Different stories. I don’t know your story; I’ve just been telling mine.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for its generous support.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Originally published by William Morrow and Co., Inc.

  Copyright © 1994, 2007 by Susan Dundon

  Dialogue from the motion picture Patti Rocks is reprinted by permission of David Burton Morris.

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3279-7

  Distributed in 2016 by Open Road Distribution

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  New York, NY 10038

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