by Rona Jaffe
She wondered if bursting into tears would help, but she was still too stunned to cry. Some survival instinct held her calm, but she was aware that her nails had been digging into her chair. A divorce? Just like that? Twenty happy years gone, forgotten? Maybe those years weren’t as happy as she had always thought, but she couldn’t believe that. At most only the past year had been bad.
“We need to have a separation,” she said, in that same neutral voice she had found herself using more and more with him lately. “Not just this, where you sneak off and lie to me, but a separation with ground rules and an understanding that you’re going through a period where you’re trying to find yourself, and that I’m giving you enough time to get over this thing with Lucie or whoever you’re living with. I’m willing to let it run its course. It will, you know. The other woman is the key that opened the door to your married life and let you out to freedom. But we weren’t unhappy enough or bored enough for you to want to be married to her instead of to me.”
“Don’t blame it on Lucie,” Carl said. “She’s just a little girl.”
So it was her, after all. “She’s twenty-eight,” Gara said. “That’s not a little girl.”
“But she’s like one. She needs me.”
“Of course she does. For a while. I see older men with much younger women in my practice all the time. They get married and then soon she’s cheating on him with a man her own age. Then he comes to me to find out what happened.”
“It’s not your fault either,” Carl said.
“Thank you. Just tell me, did I nag you or complain too much? The other things, like getting older, I couldn’t help.”
“You never nagged or complained.”
“But I did get older.” She heard her voice crack.
“So did I,” Carl said. “You’re still a beautiful woman, a wonderful person. But as you said, things change. I changed.”
“I can change too,” Gara said. “What do you want me to be?” As soon as she said it she regretted it, because she knew she wasn’t what he wanted, changed or not.
“Don’t change anything,” Carl said. “You always think you have to be perfect. You’re fine the way you are. I just can’t be with you anymore.”
How civilized they were being, when each of them knew they had the power to hurt, maim, and kill the other. But then she thought: He already has killed me.
They sat there in the bar, afraid to go up to the room, talking quietly, neatly clearing up the shards of their shattered marriage, making plans while the waiters cleared away the breakfast things and set the tables up for drinks. Carl agreed to separate informally for a year and see what happened, but only, he added, because they could get a no-fault divorce in New York after a year. He said he didn’t want to be unreasonable about any of the things that belonged to them. He already had his art, and since Gara would probably want to stay in their rent-stabilized New York apartment he wouldn’t try to take any of the furniture. He wanted only the rest of the art that was in both of his galleries and in storage, and he would give her the beach house in return. He said she could have the paintings that he had left behind in their apartment if she wanted them, and she said that she did. She knew he was taking too much, but she was too confused and numb to be vindictive.
There was no question of her going to see his new gallery now. Lucie would be there, and Gara never wanted to set eyes on Lucie again. Carl said he had to go back to work, that she should try to rest since she was jet lagged, and they could have dinner together with Cary that night. He had made reservations, he told her, at a nice brasserie he thought she would like.
And then am I to stay or go? Gara wondered. Will he see me, will he avoid me and spend the holidays with Lucie? I have a hotel room, but what will I do here? She could not possibly imagine herself shopping or sightseeing after what had happened. Then she realized that since they had agreed to separate, of course tonight was their farewell dinner, and after that she would be on her own.
She went up to her room and looked at his suit in the closet, his hypocritical piece of window dressing, and pulled it off the hanger and held it to her body and sobbed. It smelled of him, it had been next to his skin, he had worn it to places that had so many memories for them both. How easily her husband had been able to shed his old life, as if it were simply another garment.
Why did he bring a suit here and put it into the closet in the first place? Gara wondered. To fool me? To put me off? Because he was really ambivalent? She had no answers; she couldn’t think. When she had cried herself out she walked heavily to the chair and laid Carl’s suit on it. She had pushed away the pain for the moment, until it would come back with greater force, and now she knew she had to start to deal with the rage. She addressed the chair with the suit as if it were him, the Gestalt method she made her patients use when they had problems with people who were not there, dead or alive.
“You’re both ludicrous!” she screamed. “You and that bitch, you’re a fucking joke! She’s the same age I was when you married me, but you’re not. You’re thirty years older than she is. You’re not even rich. She’s hideous. She has a face like a duck and at least four too many teeth. Nee, nee, nee, nee, she talks like Betty Boop. Her friends must be laughing, and when our friends meet her they’ll laugh twice as hard. I hate you, I hate you both, I hate you for hurting me!” When she was finished screaming she felt a little better. She wondered what the people in the next room were making of it all and hoped they weren’t there.
That night she and Carl had dinner together, with Cary. Cary’s girlfriend did not come along and of course neither did Lucie. The brasserie was a blur of noise and light, and Gara couldn’t eat a thing or say a word.
When Carl went to the men’s room she finally spoke, but it was to his son, the stepson she had thought was her friend for so many years. “Cary, why didn’t you tell me he wasn’t living with you?”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “It was none of my business.”
“I guess it was hard for you, too.”
He shrugged uncomfortably.
It’s his father, after all, Gara thought. “I’m sorry he put you in that difficult position,” she said. “You shouldn’t have had to lie for him.”
“I don’t like Lucie,” Cary said, to make amends.
“You don’t?” she said, pleased, grasping at anything that would make her feel less alone.
“I never did. But I only met her a few times.”
“You don’t work together in the gallery?” Gara asked, confused.
“Of course not. I have my own job.”
Oh, Carl, Gara thought, stunned at what was one more lie. I don’t know you at all.
There was no point to staying in Paris over the holidays anymore. What would she do? She couldn’t bear to be alone there and she couldn’t bear to be alone in New York. Jane and her husband had not gone to the Swiss Alps after all, so Gara gave up her Supersaver and bought a regular return ticket to New York. She spent Christmas and New Year’s on Jane’s couch, since Jane’s children were in the guest rooms. During the day Gara was weak with grief; at night she could hardly sleep, and whenever she did fall asleep she had nightmares of Carl telling her he was in love with Lucie. When she was awake she kept telling herself it was not over, that he would reconsider, be sorry for the mistake he had made, and come back to her. Jane kept telling her he would, although they both knew she had no more idea what would happen than Gara did.
The week finally passed. When Carl called her to wish her a happy New Year, Gara felt briefly, idiotically happy. She knew it was not an attempt at reconciliation but simply his separation anxiety; but she took it as a sign of hope all the same, even though a part of her, the part that sought self-preservation, was dimly aware that she shouldn’t even want him.
She wished she could cancel her patients for the first few days after New Year’s, but she knew they had probably been going throug
h traumas of their own while she was away from them, and it would not be fair. Yet she felt so disorganized, so numb and beaten, that she wondered how she could listen to them with her whole heart. Carl had even destroyed her work, she realized, and she felt as enraged over that as she had over his destruction of their marriage. But her work was also her solace—she knew that too.
She sat in her office under the bright, happy primitive paintings she liked and Carl didn’t, with snow drifting down outside the window, listening to stories of loneliness, fear, and pain. She had done this for years, but now it was as if someone had pulled aside her skin and let her feel firsthand what her patients were going through. If a patient said her grief felt like a knife, Gara knew that knife. It had cut her, too. If a patient said the night felt like a prowling animal, Gara could see its shadow and smell its breath. “It hurts!” a patient wept, and Gara finally, truly understood.
For this insight at least, she thought, I can thank the son of a bitch.
Chapter Twenty-eight
KATHRYN, AT TWENTY-EIGHT, had made up her mind that she was never going to be weak enough to marry again. Marriage, she had decided, was much too difficult. But after she met Rod Henry at the Morgan Life Christmas party and started dating him, it took only five months before he started trying to persuade her that if she married him her luck would change.
He, too, had been divorced, but he had no children. He was thirty-five, not handsome like Alastair had been, not sweet like Ted, but decent-looking enough (tall, dark, and lanky), and pleasant enough (he laughed at her witticisms and told her she was beautiful), and almost stereotypically normal. As a young man he had been a professional tennis player, traveling the circuit until his knees gave out, and now he was a vice-president at a company that supplied Eastern hospitals with medical equipment. He traveled a great deal for business, which meant he wouldn’t be around too much. He had family money. He had a nice large house in the suburbs with trees around it, and a tennis court in back, where he was giving her tennis lessons, and a new Cadillac, and Kathryn knew if she accepted his proposal she would have a comfortable life for herself and her four young children. He could afford to send them to private school. She was overworked, overextended, and tired, and she would be able to quit her job and be a full-time mom. She would make a good home for Rod and help him entertain his friends. She didn’t love Rod Henry, nor was she particularly attracted to him, but she was sure she could stand to go to bed with him after they were married. Naturally, she wouldn’t let him touch her before.
She had married the first time because she had little choice, and she had married the next time for passion, and now she decided was the time to marry for good sense, for her children. The poor little things had been uprooted so much they had a bewildered look on their faces half the time. They had grown up with chaos, and they accepted everything. As soon as Rod started coming around regularly to take her out, they began to get attached to him. If they all lived together he could give them tennis lessons when he was home, Kathryn thought, and she could buy pretty clothes for her girls. The whole family could go on vacations together. She watched Rod turning the steaks on his outdoor grill on a warm spring night and thought how domestic their lives would be, how normal. Surely she deserved that, too, as much as her lonely little kids did.
Her mother was working in a beauty salon and doing well. People liked her, and it kept her busy. Sheila had had friends before but precious little time to enjoy them. Now she was free to do what she pleased, and although she was not particularly happy she wasn’t miserable or suicidal anymore either, as if she had finally put the events of that violent night behind her. At least, she didn’t talk about it. When her five-year probation was over and she could travel, she took a trip to Southern California, and when she came back she announced to Kathryn that she was going to move there.
“It’s too cold here in the wintertime,” Sheila said. “Those snowy, rainy nights bring back bad memories. I’m going to work in a hair salon in Santa Monica, near the beach. You can all come to visit me.”
I guess I’d better marry Rod, Kathryn thought, and get on with my life, too.
* * *
They had a lovely little family wedding in Rod’s garden, and went to the Bahamas for their brief honeymoon. The four children moved into their newly decorated rooms: The two boys in one, the two girls in the other, and Kathryn quit her secretarial job and became a full-time mother.
From the day she let Rod consummate their marriage, it seemed he could never get enough of her in bed. But her passionate love match with Alastair was a thing of the past; now she was merely a dutiful wife. She was sorry she didn’t love Rod and therefore was not attracted to him, but she had made her bargain, and pretended to like it.
There were other disappointing things though, she found, that came with her bargain. Rod didn’t want to spend the money for private schools, even though it certainly wasn’t a burden for him, and so he sent the kids to public school. When it was time to buy school clothes, he was shocked at the cost and made her go to Pik-a-Penny. There were no fairy-tale party dresses for her girls. Rod complained that the children ate too much, and asked how a boy could drink an entire quart of milk at one meal.
“They’re growing,” Kathryn said, annoyed. “You never had kids, how would you know?”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Jim Daniel said. “We get milk at school.”
“I hope you’re listening to that,” she said to Rod, but he didn’t seem to care.
As the years went by, it turned out they never went on family vacations either, because Rod said hotel rooms for six people were too expensive, he had to travel for business so he was glad to be home, and besides, wasn’t his house and tennis court just like summer camp? Kathryn was annoyed about the vacations because she had wanted to broaden the children’s horizons and have adventures herself. Except for being so cheap, Rod was a good and affectionate father to her kids, and they were devoted to him. She supposed it was better that her kids not be spoiled, that they could be just regular kids, even though they lived in such a nice house. The boys went to Little League, and joined the Scouts; the girls took ballet lessons at the Y.
When they were very young, Stephanie and Gaby, who had never really known their father and did not remember him, kept asking Rod to adopt them, but he wouldn’t. He said it wouldn’t be fair to the boys, who had a father. “It’s love, not legal things, that make a family,” Rod would say to the twins. “Don’t you think we’re a real family already?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then.” After a while they gave up.
More years went by. Everyone was getting along the way Kathryn had always hoped they would. People had told her how hard it would be to find a man when you had four kids, but she had done well, all things considered. Under Rod’s tutelage, Jim Daniel was turning out to be a promising tennis player, and they discussed the possibility of his following in Rod’s footsteps. Then, without any warning, a pointless, senseless tragedy struck.
Jim Daniel was fourteen and, as all children in the suburbs were, impatient to be old enough to drive a car. One afternoon he took Rod’s car out by himself, lost control of it, and crashed into a tree. Kathryn rushed to the hospital, and by the time Rod had been located that night she had already heard the devastating news: Jim Daniel’s right arm had had to be amputated below the elbow. She looked at her son, small for his age, and slim, with her red hair and pale skin, so vulnerable looking, and now with only one arm, and felt a combination of rage and grief. How could he have been so stupid? The fact that he had lost the arm he played tennis with so promisingly was of little consequence next to the realization that life from now on would be more difficult for him in so many ways.
After he lost his arm, Jim Daniel changed. Rod was still away on business a lot anyway, which Kathryn thought was probably for the best, because now for the first time he and Jim Daniel started getting on each other’s n
erves. She didn’t know why, but try as she would to get them to make peace with each other it got worse all the time. By the time Jim Daniel was in high school there was hardly a day he and Rod didn’t get into some kind of argument which Jim Daniel always started. Jim Daniel had turned into an angry and moody teenager. Kathryn told him to accept his childish mistake, that it was past, to make the best of what life dealt him, and he looked at her with an expression she could not read at all. He seemed totally ungrateful for the loving home Rod had given him. She was glad the three younger kids were having an easier adolescence. They were still devoted to Rod.
Kathryn had much too much energy to stay at home indefinitely, so she decided to go back to work. Rod was so stingy she knew her added income would help with four growing children who needed things all the time. She remembered the decorating magazine she had been caught reading at boarding school and realized she had always liked home decoration, so she took some courses in decorating, and got a resale license, and then she got a job at a small firm called Charming Interiors. She was so cheerful and enjoyed her clients so much that they found it a pleasant experience too, and recommended her to their friends. It was like the old days when she gave her Tupperware parties, in a way, but now she was also decorating for men.
Her mother was happy in California. One day, out of the blue, she announced that she was going to marry again. His name was Arlo, he was the man who owned the beauty shop where she worked, he was a widower, and they had fallen in love. Kathryn was surprised Sheila wanted to marry anybody. She supposed this one would be kind to her, but why couldn’t they just live together? If her mother married him she would have to give up her substantial widow’s pension. Her father owed that to her, at least, for all her years of suffering, and Kathryn tried to talk her out of what she considered a reckless idea.
“I don’t care,” her mother said.
“You’re making a big mistake to give up that money. I mean it. It’s crazy. A steady income like that doesn’t grow on trees.”