A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “That was good,” I said.

  “Shh, I’m not done.” Derek sat up in his sleeping bag. “When Ricky swung into the hedge, he hit a hornet’s nest and a thousand bees came swarming out. Ricky took off down the street with the bees buzz-bombing him. By the time he got to school, Ricky’s face was so swollen he looked like Frankenstein. And he never bothered Dad again for the rest of his life.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I knew Derek would get you out of it,” Justine said. “He thinks you can do anything.”

  I tucked the kids in, turned the hall lights off, and went to my room. When I climbed into bed, the water in the mattress moved like a tidal wave to the other side, bounced off the sideboard, and returned to jostle me. Up, pause, down, pause. Each wave more gentle than the last one. I’d bought the waterbed to show Jude I wasn’t such a tight-ass. She thought everyone in big law firms golfed at Broadmoor and slept in a four-poster.

  Someday Derek would know the truth about his dad. How he’d kept his waterbed but couldn’t keep his wife.

  I took the kids to Jude’s the next afternoon so they could go ice-skating with friends at the arena. On the way back to the Alhambra, before the postpartum depression set in, I drove by Lill’s apartment, a mid-rise with dark brick and a wrought iron gate next to the entry-way that opened into a courtyard. On the second pass, I drove to the end of the block and parked. I could taste the squirts of adrenalin beginning to irrigate the inside of my mouth, a flavor remarkably similar to the ginger of Lill’s tongue.

  The heat of my breath turned to steam as I walked back to her building, stepped into the alcove, and searched for her name next to the intercom. What if she walked out the door just then? Should I lie and say I was looking for someone else? “Epstein, L.” was on the fourth floor. My finger circled the rim of her button. She’d probably seen Jude since our evening together and I wondered how much Lill had told her. The sun must have set while I stood there with my finger poised over her buzzer because the alcove and garden lights came on simultaneously. They say you can tell a lot about a person from the way they keep their house. I pictured Lill’s furniture draped with the skirts, blouses, and lingerie she stripped off as she returned from her library job.

  I backed out onto the sidewalk and looked up to see if I could see her apartment. We hadn’t talked about other relationships; maybe she had a harem of guys like me. I crossed the street to get a better angle of the two units on her floor with lights on and watched for someone to walk in front of one of the windows. Nothing.

  I returned to the entryway and pushed the buzzer. If it was ringing, I couldn’t hear it so I pushed it again and held it for a two-count. I stared at the intercom speaker. Say something to me, Lill. There’s no reason we can’t just be friends. We can keep the lights bright. I’m not ready for anything serious either. Jude doesn’t have to know. I swallowed my juices and took a deep breath.

  One more short buzz. No answer.

  I got back into the car and debated whether to go home and read Looking for Mr. Goodbar or go to Warren’s. I decided I didn’t have the energy for Warren.

  There was a sign taped to my door that said the furnace was out and heat would be restored tomorrow. It was clammy in the apartment and I opened the oven door and turned it to about two hundred and fifty. President Carter had called the energy crisis the moral equivalent of war but I figured I had some heat coming; I hadn’t baked anything since I moved in. I’d resume the war when the furnace was fixed.

  I’d let the food supply dwindle. There wasn’t even any tomato paste to make a pasta sauce with. I found some freezer-burned burritos under the ice cube trays and put them in the oven. I’d make the British thermal units work twice.

  While I was changing clothes and putting on wool socks, ski pants, and my bathrobe, Warren called. I warned him there was no heat and no food but he wanted to come anyway. I turned on the tube and half-watched M*A*S*H* while I opened junk mail and bills and ate my burritos.

  Warren sounded like a man being chased when he answered on the intercom. He blew through the door to my apartment without knocking. “Jesus, it’s freezing in here.”

  “Depends if you’re dressed for it,” I said.

  He looked me up and down while he zipped his warm-up jacket to his chin and hugged himself. “You look terrible. Like some shut-in. Are you still going to therapy?”

  “Yeah, do you want something to drink?”

  “Jesus, we should have met in a food locker. What do you have?”

  “There’s a Zinfandel open in the cupboard. If you want something warmer, pour a couple of brandies and I’ll get you another coat.”

  When I returned with an overcoat and a scarf, Warren was holding up two socks that were as stiff as fan blades. “What in hell are these?”

  I laughed. “That’s my laundry. I sometimes do my socks and underwear with the dishes. They must have frozen.”

  “You wash your underwear with your plates?”

  “I do the plates first.”

  He grabbed the glasses off the table with two fingers of brandy in each. “Here.”

  We clinked our glasses and downed them.

  “What kind of stuff are you doing in therapy?”

  “A little of everything, even bioenergetics.”

  Warren set his glass down and stepped into the middle of the living room with his hands on his hips, leaning backwards. “Come on, men, make your body into a bow,” he said, doing a pretty good imitation of the Group Health therapist. “Like you’re trying to shoot an arrow right out of your navel. Come on, boys, arch it.” He thrust his pubes.

  “You got it.”

  “Give in to the shaking, boys. Tremble with me.” And he was.

  “I didn’t know you knew this stuff.”

  Warren bent over and let his arms droop like an ape. “Let go now. Open your orifices.”

  The truth was the bioenergetics had made it easier to talk in the group. Maybe it was my conditioning through team sports. The closest I’d ever felt to other men were those times in the huddle between plays when everyone was panting and bumping shoulder pads and we’d slap each other on the butt as we broke. “We’re also doing psychodrama.”

  Warren popped up and ruffled his hair. Then he ran around the apartment until he found a dishtowel and stuffed it under his shirt to make breasts. He came at me with his hands on his hips and his eyes squinting. “Come on, Cyrus,” he said in a falsetto voice. “You think your law job is a meal ticket? I’m supposed to punch your ticket and feed you? I’ve got news, Bub.”

  There was a creepy resemblance.

  7.

  On my twelfth birthday, Dad took his dinner hour from the Thriftway to celebrate with us at home. I remembered him grabbing my new Louisville Slugger bat and Mickey Mantle baseball and taking us to the backyard. He pushed aside a wheelbarrow full of potted plants, pulled a loose shingle off the eave of the garage, and stepped it into the grass.

  “This is home plate!” he said, shoving me into the batter’s box. Then he paced off to the edge of the holly bushes and spit on the grass to mark the pitcher’s mound. I stood there with the bat on my shoulder while Dad loosened his tie and rolled up his pitching sleeve. The first one came at me sidearm.

  Slam! The ball exploded into the chalky white siding of the garage behind me and bounced back to Dad. Hidden like a double exposure in the reflection of the garage against the dining room window, I could see Mom and Warren watching us. This was another one of Dad’s games where no one explained the rules and there were no practices.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, rubbing his palms into the ball.

  “I don’t …”

  Slam! The ball crashed into the garage again, this time ricocheting off my leg. I wanted to join the audience and eat Mom’s angel food cake with orange frosting.

  “One more chance,” he said, squinting at an imaginary spot somewhere in the strike zone.

  I readjusted my grip on the bat, remembering ho
w you were supposed to line up the knuckles, and looked down to see where my feet were in relation to the shingle.

  Slam! The ball flew by before I had a chance to look up.

  “You’re out!” Dad said gleefully as he walked toward the plate. I didn’t know if he was going to start telling stories about his old high school baseball team or slam me into the garage. “See this?” Dad held the ball so close to my face the strings were blurry. “This is life! You stand flat-footed with the bat on your shoulder, it’ll go right by.”

  At twelve, I’d already heard most of his platitudes. The guy who sits on his butt draws flies. Sheep are for eating. Most of them relied on a single theme: do something even if it’s wrong. I stared at Dad’s eyes, which were dry as marbles, and tried to invent a winning excuse. “I’m only swinging at strikes.”

  Dad grabbed the bat like he wanted his ups and carried it into the house. He had to go back to work and the rest of us ate angel food cake without him.

  Because Justine was at a girlfriend’s slumber party, it was just me, Derek, and Magpie at the Alhambra on the last Friday in January. I was beginning to worry that Derek was living under too much female influence, that he’d be the only feminist in his class. I didn’t want him to relive the embarrassment he’d felt the day Jude let him wear one of Justine’s culottes to school. Derek had gotten into a fight over it in the boy’s restroom and needed stitches where someone had pushed his chin against the radiator. I concocted opportunities to let him be a man. At dinner, we agreed to trade places. That meant he had to cook dinner, which consisted of wieners sticky with age that he sliced into the Kraft macaroni and cheese mix.

  “Well, son,” Derek said in his deepest voice, when we’d sat down to eat, “how are things at the office?”

  “Do we always have to talk about the office?”

  Derek stabbed two slices of wiener with his fork and looked at me sternly. “Maybe you can explain that last report your boss sent home. That sure wasn’t a Stapleton report.”

  “Geez, my boss has it out for me.”

  Derek pointed his fork at me and furrowed his brow. “I don’t care if your boss is Dracula, I want an explanation.”

  I wondered if I should play around his question or give him a real answer. “I guess I’ve been upset by things at home,” I said. “My wife and I have separated, you know. It’s been hard on us. Most of all, I’m worried about the kids.”

  He let go of his fake frown and looked down at his plate, where he was pushing a lone piece of macaroni around like it was a shopping cart in the Safeway parking lot. I’d miscalculated.

  “You want me to be the kid again, don’t you?”

  “If it’s causing so much trouble”—his voice was on the verge of breaking—“why don’t you and Mom get back together?”

  I suddenly felt vastly underequipped. Derek stuffed his palms into his eye sockets to stop the tears, his fork pointed aimlessly into the air. With his older sister gone, he could be an eight-year-old again. When I scooted my chair over next to his, he broke into a sob and I pulled him against me. His head was hot against my face. He tried to set his fork next to his plate but it teetered over the edge and fell to the floor.

  “I miss Mom when I’m with you.”

  I patted him on the back, “I miss her too.”

  He looked up at me, trying his hardest to be big in his rainbow Mork suspenders. His face was puffy and his temples were wet where he’d smeared the tears. “Then when I’m with her, I miss you.”

  The every-other-weekend-dad thing wasn’t working. We had no time to settle in. I was trying to entertain them instead of father them. Anything serious that happened after getting them on Friday night had to be finished by Sunday afternoon when I dropped them at Jude’s. I couldn’t leave any rough edges that would pique Jude’s disapproval.

  For an after-dinner treat, Derek and I roasted marshmallows over the oven element. Because I didn’t have graham crackers to make s’mores the way you’re supposed to, we squeezed the marsh-mallows and Hershey squares between saltines.

  I washed the dishes while Derek went into the living room to do his arithmetic. He’d asked if he could have Mork and Mindy on low in the background to keep him company and I let him. As I studied the soup and spaghetti stains on the wall over the sink, I replayed my conversation with him and realized that what satisfied the guys in the men’s group wasn’t solid enough yet for an eight-year-old.

  When I’d called Mom and Dad to tell them about the separation, Mom said it would break the kids’ hearts. Dad said he didn’t want to tell me what to do and then told me about the friend from high school he’d played baseball with, whose oldest had hanged himself with an extension cord from the banister after their divorce.

  Derek had put the burner on too high and the macaroni and cheese had stuck to the inside of the saucepan like crustaceans. I had to scrape it with a table knife to reach metal. For some reason, it made me think of Jude’s fantasy of us living in a commune so we could share cooking and child care with other adults. One night we’d actually gone to a planning meeting with friends of hers from the ACLU. The woman of one of the volunteer attorneys nursed her six-month-old while we talked. When her little girl tired and dropped off, her mother just left her breast hanging out. The executive director rolled a couple of joints and passed them around. Everyone else in the room was convinced of the merits of the enterprise. It felt like they wanted to get me stoned so I’d relent. The director’s voice strained as he held onto his hit.

  “There comes a time when you have to stop bullshitting yourself,” he said.

  What a joke. These people didn’t have two thousand dollars between them for a down payment. I was their capitalist. The lotus-eaters wanted to parade around in the nude at our little commune in the Elysian Fields and live off my dime. The grass made me anxious and I pictured these two bearded guys hitting on Jude. Share and share alike. I could see them stoned in the garden while I ferried back and forth to the office. At the firm, I was considered liberal because I’d questioned Ford’s pardon of Nixon. This group made me feel like J. Edgar Hoover.

  Jude could be funny when she got high. She did a parody that night of the executive director arguing in favor of mandatory school uniforms, turning him into Dr. Strangelove. Even the pompous executive director laughed. But her levity turned to vinegar on the way home.

  “For once,” she said, “consider the possibility that you don’t have all the answers.”

  “I didn’t say I had all the answers, I just don’t see how a commune is going to solve our problems. I’ll have to be away even more. Or doesn’t that matter?”

  “You had your mind made up before we set foot in that house.”

  “Not true.”

  “I could see it in your body language. You didn’t uncross your arms the whole night. You practically stabbed my boss with your glares.”

  “Come on, the guy’s a little arrogant, Jude.”

  “He’s brilliant.”

  “Like tinsel.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “I just can’t picture myself eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with him, that’s all. Okay, I thought his wife was nice. A little mousy, but nice.”

  “I thought you liked mousy women.”

  “Jesus, Jude.”

  “I noticed you enjoyed the young mom.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to notice her bare breasts? She practically invited us to take turns on her.”

  “Your fantasy.”

  “Oh, come on, isn’t that what communes are all about?”

  “I’m interested in a shared-living arrangement. You’re the one that keeps calling it a commune. I want someone to help with the kids.”

  “Isn’t that what I’m for?”

  “I mean someone who’s available.”

  “I think the kids are an excuse.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And I still didn’t. My memory had become manic-depress
ive. I tended to romanticize the good moments and embitter the bad ones. The only accuracy was probably in the emotional punch they still carried. Despite our best intentions, our discussions had often deteriorated into spit and scratch free-for-alls. But the fights made it easier to justify the fact that I was in the Alhambra trying to carve scraps of burnt macaroni into the dishwater and Jude was somewhere else. I decided to let the pan soak and joined Derek in the living room.

  “Let’s do something outside,” I said.

  Magpie had wedged herself against Derek and fallen asleep. “It’s almost over,” he said. Mork and Mindy was on Jude’s approved list because the characters’ sexes were indeterminate. Laverne and Shirley, Maude, and The Bionic Woman were also okay. Shows with traditional families like The Waltons were suspect.

  “I thought you were doing arithmetic.”

  He rushed to open the book that was turned pages-down on the floor. Magpie lifted her head to see if what was going on involved her. “It’s almost done.”

  “The show or the math?”

  “Both.”

  A single spotlight lit the green park bench in the center of the courtyard, and four gravel pathways extended like spokes from the bench to the corners of the garden. Even with the windows closed, we could hear TV commercials and clattering dishes. A lady with gray hair in a bun was watering the flowers on her windowsill with an aluminum saucepan. I still felt like a newcomer here even though people I didn’t know called me by name when we met at the mail boxes. I didn’t consider this place permanent enough that I had to formally introduce myself. It was my idea of a good commune.