A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  When I reached Blaine, the Canadian border, I turned around to avoid Customs and headed south. I finished the margaritas by Everett and opened my first manhattan. I kept thinking of those cultists in Guyana who’d put cyanide in their Kool-Aid and drank themselves to death. At least they weren’t alone. Isolation was a form of execution. It shut down all the systems. Jude and the kids were my systems. They’re what had justified the deal I’d made with the devil to work my guts out at the law firm. I couldn’t imagine quite what the point would be of taking that next step in the morning if Jude and the kids would rather live without me. I felt cheated because the kids didn’t even know who I was and now they never would. They’d interpreted my overtime at the office as disinterest. They saw only the remnants of my day, as I hurried to get out the door in the morning and stumbled home spent and grumpy in the evenings.

  As I crossed the ship canal, the glow of downtown Seattle swayed and liquefied. The red aviation lights on the Queen Anne transmission towers shimmered like the prongs of an electrified pitchfork. I took the next exit and parked under the freeway where Boylston swerved to connect with Lakeview. Eight lanes of freeway were supported by rows of concrete cylindrical columns on a sloping hillside. The kids and I went down there once and found a camp where transients had left old blankets, cardboard mattresses, Thunderbird bottles, and burned cans with teeth marks on the rim where they’d been opened with wedge keys. We sat there and made up names for each other, pretending we’d just blown into town. Outlaws on the lam. I let them spit and cuss as we sat around a make-believe Sterno fire and cursed our fate. It was the right place for cursing, a kind of Hades where the living roared over your head on the way to ball games and operas, leaving leadened exhaust fumes behind.

  I could feel the ground tremble as I unzipped and peed off some of the alcohol. The tires made a rhythmic bump as they sped over the steel expansion joint above me. An ambulance passed with its siren screaming, the beacon light momentarily flaring slices against the high ends of the columns. I zipped up and found a flattened Kotex carton to sit on. Then I placed a dirty corduroy shirt with one arm chewed off and a garbage can lid into the circle to represent the kids. We were going to talk. One of them was going to tell me what went down in Justine’s room, why they’d gone with their mom when she was the one who wanted to shitcan them.

  I looked at the corduroy shirt. Derek just sat there staring between his knees. “Cat got your tongue?”

  There was a manhattan in the pocket of my suitcoat and I popped it open. I didn’t even like manhattans. They were Carl’s drink. He made them by the pitcher when we went to his house. I could taste the maraschino and wondered why Carl had turned out so different, why he never seemed to mind how sporadic Dad was, why Dad was always his hero. He’d defended Dad’s driving. “Anyone else would have gotten us killed,” he said. “Dad saved your ass.”

  I turned to the galvanized garbage can lid with the flattened handle. “Just don’t turn out prickly like your mother. You can be such a beauty. And don’t be afraid to be wrong sometimes, huh?”

  The empty can I threw at the column missed. Through the booziness and cigar nausea, I couldn’t help thinking I was a failure. The kid who’d left Quincy to become a big-city lawyer and live in a larger house than his parents had flopped. My parents had hosted my college graduation party at the Grange. Mom’s church friends put out trays of wrapped cold cuts, a variety of crackers, and warm miniature meatballs. The mayor and most of the City Council were there as well as some of my high school teachers. The police chief, whose house I’d painted one summer and whose kids were named Jake, Jack, and Jake Jr., made a toast with cheap champagne. “This young man’ll graduate from law school and replace Scoop Jackson in the United States Senate,” he said. What a joke. I couldn’t even keep my marriage together. And worse, I’d turn out to be an absentee father.

  It was still dark when I woke up the next morning, and I felt like a boneless chicken breast that had been splatted on a piece of wax paper and left on the drainboard. I was dehydrated and my head throbbed. As I folded a piece of toast around fried Spam with mayonnaise and grape jam to cut the grease, I realized that cooking was one of the reasons the kids had chosen Jude.

  I welcomed the distraction of work that morning. The law didn’t fuss over my desirability as a father or a husband. One of the senior partners at the firm had been hospitalized with a fluttering heart and I had to help out on his embezzlement case. They thought he might have had a mild stroke. Bob was my assigned mentor when I was an associate, the person who was supposed to mold and inspire me. We went to his house for dinner once and Jude thought he was a howling bore. He was so frugal that he’d shut his car off at red lights and only make long distance calls to his kids after ten p.m. When he got home, he’d shut off the engine, open the garage door, and push his car in the rest of the way by hand. After our dinner, I saw him take his empty milk glass to the kitchen tap, swish a mouthful of water around to get the residue off the sides, and drink it. Bob was the kind of citizen that gave Jude the shivers—Eagle Scout, Symphony Board of Trustees, and Treasurer of the King County Republicans. On the way home, she said, “He probably rinses out and reuses his condoms.” We got the giggles.

  The day Nixon resigned, Jude called me at the office to play a tape of his goodbye speech to the White House staff. She was giddy. Nixon’s troubles had been better than a marriage counselor. After he fired Archibald Cox, even I got suspicious. Nixon had briefly made us allies. After the resignation, I traded my marble-brown plastic frames for gold wire rims and stopped parting my hair. One of my partners joked that I looked like Dagwood but Jude thought it was an encouraging sign.

  Our office devoted an entire conference room and two paralegals to the embezzlement documents. One of my jobs was to distill the contents of the stacks of file cartons that circled the table into a persuasive legal brief. At breakfast and lunch meetings, I’d go over testimony with nervous witnesses. Worrying about the embezzlement trial and the kids, my own heart was beginning to flutter.

  On the way to work, I’d drive by the house to see what time Jude left in the morning, see if she was taking the kids to school, count the heads in the kitchen nook, see what kind of choice the kids had made. I’d call at odd times during the day and hang up if Jude answered. I was desperate for a scintilla of evidence to prove that they missed me as much as I missed them.

  At night, I’d wait until dark and park several houses away, trying to find out if she’d gone out and left the kids alone or invited a strange man to the house. I wrote down the license numbers of cars parked near the house so that I could track them down later through the State Patrol. I slouched in the seat to make my car look unoccupied.

  One night after I’d worked late someone in a black VW bug parked in front just as I turned onto the street, walked up the stairs in a hurry, and disappeared into the house before I could get a good look. A light went off in the kitchen and then someone pulled the drapes in the living room. Finally, there was a fly in the trap.

  I took the keys from the ignition, got out of the car and closed the door quietly. There was no alley so I figured the best way to approach was from the Sweets’ house next door. The Sweets’ children had grown up and moved out but Mrs. Sweet still baked cookies and strudel that she shared with us. Every Saturday, Mr. Sweet mowed and edged his lawn, swept the walks and stretched the hose down to the street to wash his car. They loved our kids and sometimes took them to church. We’d stopped organized religion when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

  I took the Sweets’ walkway, which was leafless and clean as washed stones. It rose five or six steps, then ramped parallel to the slope, where there was another set of steps, then a switchback, and finally I was at the top. The grass was damp and slippery under my wingtips as I moved across the lawn toward the flower beds and fence that divided our lots. My shoes sunk into the softness of the peaty soil in the planter strip. Mr. Sweet used to always lean over the fence while I was working
on one of the kid’s bicycles and volunteer lawn and garden tips. He was a strong advocate of steer manure and turned truckloads of the putrid stuff into his beds every year. That’s why his roses exploded and ours looked like stillborn boutonnieres.

  I tip-toed along the fence, checking the Sweets’ windows for any sign of movement. Their bedroom faced our house and they had a good view into our backyard from the window where their corpulent Siamese cat used to sit. When I stepped onto the lower cross board and lifted my leg over the fence, the pickets stabbed me in the butt. I didn’t want to rip my suit but I couldn’t touch ground on the other side and tried to estimate the distance. In Quincy, Patty Petty’s dad had caught me and Strawberry Nelson in the same position the night we tried to spy on her. When he flipped on the floodlight, he had us sighted between the barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  I finally leapt as high as I could, trying to create enough arc to clear the pickets. Magpie barked from the back bedroom upstairs and I flattened myself against the side of the house. No lights came on. I was at the back wall of the house, just under the kitchen sink, and with my left hand I could feel the outdoor faucet. I reached for the windowsill and, with one foot on the pipe, pulled myself up to look into the kitchen. The stove light illuminated spilled Cheerios and dirty aluminum trays on the counter. I could hear Jude laughing. Maybe she and her caller were having a drink in the dining room to loosen things up. Jude kept a bottle of Stolichnaya in the freezer, something she said her grandma used to do, so she could drink it straight up in a martini glass without ice. The alcohol kept it from freezing, one more of Jude’s little secrets that she could now share with the male universe.

  I tried to guess who was making her laugh. I would have said Charlie Johnson, except he’d never be caught in a VW. Or maybe she’d followed up on the volleyball player. He’d drive a bug; he loved to cram himself into things that were too tight. More likely it was one of her ACLU friends, who all drove old VWs and Datsuns as a matter of principle.

  This was perverse. Jude and I were finished. What was the point of catching her balling some guy? It would disintegrate whatever residue of affection remained between us. Graphic evidence was unforgettable. But if I caught her, I could end this sickening, lingering fascination. Maybe I could make a case for having the kids if their mother was neglecting them in favor of a parade of tomcats sneaking into the house. You were who you slept with.

  I lowered myself to the patio. My arms were shaking and there were grooves where the edges of the brick windowsill had dug into my skin. I brushed the grit off the front of me, wondering if I’d have to take the suit to the dry cleaners. Avoiding the rake, wagon, and planter boxes on the patio, I crept along the back of the house. The bottom of the dining room curtain had caught against one of Jude’s cactus plants on the sill and left a triangular opening through which I could see two people at the table. They were engaged in an animated discussion, the kind that good first impressions are made of. The only light was the glow from the kitchen so I couldn’t make out their faces.

  When I reached the street, I tried the door to the VW and it was open. The hedge across the top of the retaining wall hid me from the house. The driver’s seat was in a forward position and I had to work to get my knees under the steering column. I could smell the plastic straw in the seat protector and a faint orange blossom perfume. Behind the laminated holder attached to the visor there were some papers that I slid out, looking for the registration. Instead, I found an envelope with phone numbers and dollar calculations on the back. It was addressed to Lillian Epstein.

  5.

  I went to the Deluxe Bar & Grill for dinner and took a table near the back that had enough light to write by. One of the Group Health therapists had suggested I start keeping a journal to get in touch with myself. I couldn’t stand to be home alone anyway. It didn’t matter whether I talked to anyone. The clatter of dishes and scraping chairs were company enough. Monday night football played on the TV over the mirror behind the bar.

  Jude and I had met once in a noisy tavern like this in Wallace, Idaho when a friend and I were driving home from a spring break ski trip in Kalispell. My friend’s girlfriend and Jude had taken the train and we’d agreed to meet at the biggest tavern that had the word silver in the title. In its glory days, Wallace had some of the most productive mines in the west and the most notorious whorehouses. When we walked into the Silver Bucket in our ski parkas, the girls were sitting there in skirts. “You sure look good with color in your face,” Jude had said. I don’t think she ever blinked that night as we drank pitchers of Pabst Blue Ribbon and she stroked the hair on my arms. On the way back to Quincy, my friend drove while Jude and I necked in the backseat. We were a little tipsy and massaged each other’s ears with hand lotion in lieu of other pleasures.

  A waitress with dark rings around her eyes, hollowed from lack of sleep, brought my open-face Deluxe steak sandwich. It was medium rare, with juice dripping into the toast, surrounded by thick, hand-made fries. She plunked a bottle of ketchup and A-l sauce on the table and left. Jude would have gone ballistic; she said I should cut down on red meat and the fries were poison. I wasn’t all that hungry and turned the plate the long way to make room for my journal. All I could see was the grease.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of the kids, how when I came home from school at their age my mom was there. I didn’t even own a house key because the door was always unlocked. There was always stuff in the refrigerator to make snacks with. Mom would often have something baked cooling on the breadboard. She’d ask how school went and, if I was going over to someone’s house, what time I’d be home. She always knew where I was.

  I tried chewing the matching squares of steak and toast that I’d cut, but the meat was gristly and made my jaw tired so I spit it onto my fork and put it back on the plate. I wrote down things I could do to make up for the black hole I’d created in the kids’ lives. More live theater instead of movies, after-dinner conversation, chamber music concerts at Kane Hall instead of the moronic jabber of their rock radio stations. I’d get Justine into girls’ soccer. It wasn’t too early to have a sex talk with Derek. When I’d filled two pages, I read it over and titled it “The Impossible Dream.” How was I going to remake their lives on two weekends a month?

  “Writing the great American novel?” someone said.

  I looked up and flipped the cover of the tablet closed. It was Lill Epstein. The last thing I wanted was to have my journal entries the subject of next week’s women’s group. “How are you?”

  She nodded at my plate. “Starving for some red meat.” I would have expected that she lived off of roots and earth worms. From what Jude had told me, I would have guessed that the only meat in her diet was male testicle.

  “Care to join me?” I said, to be polite, while my thumb pushed the chewed remnant of gristle under the fries.

  She brightened, actually projecting some inner warmth. “I’d love to. We’re practically neighbors, you know.” From Jude’s Sunday night tales, I’d come to think of Lill as someone in a cloud of steam with fangs and a hook nose. The real Lill was nice-looking, not someone who’d have trouble getting a man. Her hair was the color of fresh rust and her green eyes had a melted quality. The gold cap on one of her incisors gave her a savvy look. We only knew each other from the times she’d come by to take Jude to a women’s poetry reading and we’d sit nervously at the dining room table trying to talk about nothing while Jude brushed her teeth or changed. Jude told me that Lill had enlarged her breasts. She’d also told me that Lill and her husband had engaged in some ménage à trois before their divorce. The women’s group was apparently a way for Lill to dry out sexually. “I live in the Buckley, just down the street from you,” she said, her tongue teasing against her upper lip.

  Her energy had momentarily shocked me out of my depression but I had my guard up. This small talk was for a purpose. “I thought you had a house.”

  “Sold it.”

  I could see the wheels turnin
g. Wouldn’t Jude just love to hear how her ex is doing? There was this woe-is-me game that we’d ended up playing, each one of us trying to appear more financially impoverished but emotionally richer than the other. “Let me get you a chair,” I said, reaching for the empty one at the table next to us. Here I was practicing chivalry with one of Jude’s fellow travelers.

  She pulled a tight-fitting brown cowhide jacket off her shoulders. Apparently, animal rights wasn’t one of her movements. Without a bra, it was no trick to see the shape of her breast implants through the denim shirt. She hung the jacket on her chair, brushed the hair over her shoulders, and sat down.

  “This is a surprise,” I said.

  “Me being here, or me sitting down with you?” Here came the questions.

  “Come on, Lill, when’s the last time we were even in the same room together?”

  She threw her head back when she laughed and jiggled her hair. “I guess we weren’t exactly Sonny and Cher.”

  Not so fast, I thought. How could she be so facile? “What brings you here?”

  “The clatter,” she smiled, “and the margaritas.”

  “I didn’t picture you as a festive drinker.”

  “I like the salt,” she said, circling her tongue around the rim of her lips. “How did you picture me?”

  I laughed half-heartedly, but better we talk about her than me. “The truth? I’d pictured you into something more husky. Jack Daniels on the rocks. Somebody who likes to kick ass.”

  She challenged me with her gaze. “A ball buster.”

  “Amen.”

  The waitress put down a second place setting for her and asked for her order.

  “Give me a Black Label on the rocks,” she said, and winked at me. “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  “You need a menu?” the waitress said.

  “How about a baked potato with cheese and bacon.”