A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “Let’s get a popsicle or something, Dad.”

  “You have any money?”

  “Come on, you can spare twenty-five cents.”

  “I think they’re thirty-five.”

  “Cheep, cheep,” he cackled.

  We laughed and I dribbled a stream of pebbles onto his shoe.

  “How much money do lawyers make, Dad?”

  “Wait a minute, how did we get onto that?”

  He picked up a handful of the gravel from the path and rained it onto my tennis shoe. “I just want to know. I was thinking of being one.”

  “So you could buy your kid a popsicle without worrying about the price?”

  “I’m not sure I’ll have kids.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t have to, do I?”

  “No, of course you don’t have to. I just thought …”

  “Then I probably won’t.”

  I studied the back of his head as he formed his initials with pebbles, a perfect “D S” on Magpie’s ribcage. Derek’s naturally curly hair had gradually lost its reddishness and was turning a pleasing bronze more like his mother’s. Until told how much Derek disliked it, my dad used to call him “carrot top” and “radish head.” Derek would come to blows if someone did that now. The changes inside his head were harder to figure out. He was starting to hold onto secrets.

  As he stood, so did the dog and Derek’s initials slid back into the path. Magpie shook herself off and Derek rubbed her hard around the ears. “Let’s go, girl! Maybe Dad’ll buy you a bone.”

  We left a note for Justine in case she came back while we were at the store. Derek dictated and I wrote:

  Dear Rustin’ Justin’

  Dad just settled a big case and decided to take me to Jaws II, then to Shakey’s for pizza, and maybe horseback riding. If we’re not back in time for the Johnny Carson Show, don’t worry.

  Your dearest brother Derek

  Without Derek’s permission, I added:

  PS. Translation: we’re at Safeway to get a popsicle.

  We ran into Lill Epstein near the dairy case. She lit up at the sight of us. “Haven’t seen you at the Deluxe lately,” she said.

  I looked at Derek to see if he’d caught it. He politely said hello and then suddenly developed a keen interest in the buttermilk. “We’re shopping for popsicles in the middle of winter. How’s that for crazy?” I didn’t want to talk to her in front of Derek, but the tingle was coming back.

  “Look at me.” She swished open her trench coat, revealing cutoffs. “I’m dressed for the beach.”

  We checked out, untied Magpie from the bike stand, and walked home, Derek licking his root beer popsicle and me with a dreamsicle. The apartment buildings faced on the sidewalk and I could smell freshly cooked asparagus, then sauerkraut. Instead of the generous lawns from the old neighborhood, there were narrow planter strips and ivy climbing vertically up brick faces. Winter had stripped the trees of their leaves and dried the branches brittle. The parking lane in the street was piebald with different shades of crankcase oil. Derek’s and my closest moments together had happened in silence, playing catch in the backyard or walking the dog, when the only communication came from the slap of the hardball or the jingle of the leash. Jude never understood my silences.

  “I didn’t know you knew Lill,” Derek said.

  “She lives around here.” If he’d asked, I could have told him the color of her apartment buzzer and mimicked the sound of her breath when she was hot. But he didn’t so we just continued walking in silence, my son who’d sworn off children at the age of eight and his father who’d sworn off women but couldn’t keep his lips from parching when he saw the leader of the Sunday night women’s group in a trench coat. Warren had said I was going to have hot flashes now and then, but I wanted to be more cerebral and less glandular than Warren’s model.

  Justine was on the couch watching Three’s Company, with her Afghan wrapped around her shoulders, when we got back. Magpie tried to get her attention for a pet, and returned to me unrewarded.

  That’s when I remembered I’d forgotten the dog bone.

  8.

  Every time the kids went back to Jude’s I went into a funk and worked late, emerging from the building with my briefcase in the dark, trudging up Capitol Hill toward the Alhambra. I’d started walking to save gas money and avoid the hassle of finding a parking place when I came home. I’d pass groups of kids cruising the sidewalk in torn jeans eating pizza by the slice, couples holding hands, ordinary people in street clothes, and I felt pissed at them because they didn’t have to work like me. We’d look each other up and down as we passed and I knew that if anyone grumbled “lawyer” I’d take a swing.

  At home, I’d punch the power button on the portable TV and flip channels, watching anything that had a canned laugh track while I ate a Swanson He-Man dinner. I thought of what I hadn’t done with the kids when they were with me, like have that talk with Justine to find out if any of her friends were sexually active. I didn’t know if Jude had given her the “this is my body, keep your hands off lecture or the “open marriage” version.

  At the office, everyone seemed to have their outings to the Shrine Circus or the magic show at the Moore Theater on the same weekends I didn’t have any kids. They’d ask me to join them and then catch themselves. Oh, that’s right, they’re not with you. I could have hung out with the single men in the office but most of them were younger and never-marrieds whose idea of a good time was happy hour at the Top of the Hilton. Occasionally I joined them, eating a dinner’s worth of chicken wings, chips, and dips, coming home buzzed enough to do something productive like call Mom and Dad or write a letter.

  I wondered some days how I could have the kids for extended periods and still meet the firm’s quota of billable hours, which required that I work a night or two each week and some Saturdays. I’d dragged the kids to the office more than once and let them play with the Dictaphone while I drafted a brief or edited an agreement, but that was hardly the stuff that kids’ dreams are made of.

  But now I had another reason to keep up the pace at work: the negotiations with Jude had deteriorated. Her attorney had introduced the concept of “professional goodwill” to the mix. This was a theory that treated my ability to practice law as another asset of the marital community. In other words, Jude owned half of me. I called Charlie to complain.

  “If a garbage truck hit me,” I said, “the goodwill would be as worthless as toe jam.”

  “And if that happens, you can also stop paying child support,” he said calmly. “But as long as you’re alive and kicking, she wants half.”

  “What did she do to earn it?”

  “It isn’t just for her, it’s the kids.”

  “Bull. If she wants my goodwill, she can buy it.”

  “We’re offering to take it in installments,” he said.

  “You mean I’d be indentured to her.”

  “I didn’t make up the rules, Cy. You married her, you fathered her kids.”

  I fiddled with a paper clip. “You’d look at this differently if you were married.” There was one more approach I hadn’t tried. It required me to grovel, but that was better than paying through the nose and feeling resentful of Jude for the rest of my life. “Charlie, someday you could be on the other side of this one. Jude and I are probably history, but you and I will be doing business in this town for a long time. Consider it a personal favor. What goes around comes around. What do you say, good buddy?” The fakery shamed me.

  There was a long silence. “You know if I don’t fight for everything Jude has coming I’m not doing my job.”

  “Spare me the sanctimony. Jude’s not going to starve. She’s got the house and I’m paying support. If she wants more, tell her to go out and get a paying job like everyone else.” In the denouement of our marriage, when we’d argued about her volunteer jobs, she’d asked me to pay her for the value of her work as a dietician, food buyer, cook, di
shwasher, laundress, seamstress, gardener, and chauffeur using the hourly rates from a Chase Manhattan schedule that ran in Ms.

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Goodbye. I’ve got work to do.” And I hung up.

  I wanted to take him to court and make him earn his fees. The trouble was, the court would probably make me give Jude half of the goodwill and pay his fees to boot. Unemployed mother versus downtown lawyer-father, the odds said pick the mother. Unless a stroke wiped out the circuits in my head first, I was dead meat in a contested case.

  I finally screwed up the courage to call Lill for a movie and she consented. Revenge of the Pink Panther was playing at the Lewis & Clark down by the airport. I was still apprehensive about the kids seeing me with someone so I wanted to stay away from Capitol Hill.

  Lill looked great in a dark green velvet vest, which she wore unbuttoned, and a blouse with ruffles up the front and on the cuffs. Maybe she was a size smaller when she bought it but the tightness through the chest had a pleasant effect. I always thought Jude had a salty aroma. Lill was definitely dairy, with a hint of butterscotch. I kept glancing at her during the daylight scenes, just to make sure it was her and not Jude.

  After the show, we stopped at the Bai Thai, the first restaurant on Pacific Highway that looked like it had some atmosphere. The front door was built into a gigantic bamboo barrel.

  “I love foreign food,” Lill whispered as an Asian girl led us to a table in the back.

  So far, Lill had been a lot easier to please than Jude. Her likes came in broad categories: warm, funny, foreign. There was none of the gender-dueling that I would have expected. I pulled out her chair and took the seat across from her. The waitress dropped the menus and snatched away the other two place settings. Our table was next to the restrooms so there was a constant parade of women in tight pants and patterned nylons going in and out. The ones in leather squeaked like horse saddles as they passed and the spiked heels made even the squat ones look leggy. The waves of cologne that washed over our table made the Pud Thai taste like orchids.

  “Everyone’s dressed to kill in this place,” she said.

  “Too much make-up.”

  Lill quickly glanced at herself in the mirrored tiles on the wall next to our table. Her lashes were heavy with black wax. She had gray eye shadow, emerald green eye liner, and pink lipstick with gloss, although much of that had already come off on the rim of her water glass. “Some of us will stoop to anything.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  The prospect of dating had returned all of the old fears about the size of my ears, the plainness of my face, and the shallowness of my imagination, flaws that I’d been largely able to ignore while I was married. Familiarity tended to camouflage physical imperfections and magnify character defects. Struggling for subjects we had in common besides Jude, I talked about Derek’s soccer. Throw-ins, slide tackles, and corner kicks. It turned out that Lill loved sports.

  “Especially those played in short pants,” she said.

  “I wish Justine played sports.”

  “I always closed my eyes when someone threw the ball to me.”

  “You don’t strike me as a blinker,” I said. “Did you ever want kids?”

  “You’re putting me on the spot. Here I am talking to a father who can’t mention his kids’ names without getting mushy.” She rotated her glass to find a clean space on the rim and took another drink of water. As she set it down I inspected it to find the new lip marks. “When other girls played doll house, I played doctor with the boys or shot beebee guns at cars. I was always scared that if I had a kid I’d feed him the wrong food and make him retarded.”

  “I think everyone has those fears.”

  “But I had facts to back them up.”

  “How so?”

  “That’s another story.”

  “I thought all little girls dreamed of being a mother.”

  “Hey, I’m not knocking it. It’s a gift. You and Jude got it, I didn’t.”

  The calm introduction of Jude’s name into our conversation was actually reassuring. It represented an advancement in our relationship. “I think I dreamed of being a father. I just didn’t dream of having kids. Until you see their faces, they don’t exist. I couldn’t see their faces back then.”

  The goodnight in front of her apartment was as awkward as I’d feared. What had started out as a roll of the dice had turned into something I wanted to become a keepsake. I let the motor idle while we talked. When she turned to face me and rested her hands on the seat between us, I put one hand on hers. It was a long journey from there to intimacy but I found myself visualizing the steps. The streetlight sparkled off the cap on her front tooth as she talked. Before leaving the restaurant, she’d excused herself to cake up her lips and they looked soft again. We were both leaning on the emergency brake handle, sharing a cane.

  Her blouse pooched open where a button had come loose and I wondered if she’d done it on purpose. When I dated in high school, you kissed for months before moving on, but Eisenhower was President then. There’d been a sexual revolution. Lill swayed her back and gave into my kiss, nibbling my lips, and I could taste the cinnamon in her lipstick. She moved closer and I twisted to embrace her more fully, but my hip was trapped under the steering wheel. Her face pushed my glasses against one eye and I let my mouth open wider in response to her. The journey was getting shorter and shorter. I was as erect as the brake handle. She said my name and stroked my face but I was uncomfortable saying hers so I just moaned. In my mind’s eye, I could see the spot where her blouse had come unbuttoned. When my hand slid down the front of her and across the ruffles, she made no attempt to withdraw. I rubbed neutral territory between her breasts and wished I had eyes and brains in my fingertips.

  At first I thought it was a dream but a man was knocking on the passenger window.

  Lill stiffened and pushed my hand down. “Oh God, it’s Douglas!”

  The man’s voice was muffled. “I don’t have my key.”

  We returned to our own sides, ironing our fronts. I pulled out my handkerchief, scrubbed the lipstick off my mouth, and straightened my glasses. When I turned the volume of the radio back up, the news was on. Who was Douglas?

  “I better go, Lill.” I wasn’t ready to duke it out with a man who had a key to her apartment.

  “I’m coming,” she yelled through the closed window, “hold your horses.” There was a matter-of-factness about her tone, like this had happened before. “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “About my brother.”

  “Your brother?”

  “He’s staying with me while he does interviews.”

  My heart resumed pumping; the tickle returned to my lips. I shook her hand and she sprang out.

  On the way home, I stopped by Dick’s on Broadway and ordered fries and a Special. The Thai food had left a hollow spot and I needed protein. The parking lot was full of high school kids with their car doors open and boom boxes playing even though it was March and cold enough to see your breath. People sat on their fenders and sipped milkshakes, bobbing to the music. Watching them made me wonder if the part of me that was young and careless had atrophied, but I yearned for something old-fashioned that would last. Something cast iron instead of plastic.

  Warren’s phone message said he’d buy me dinner at the J & B Cafe in Pioneer Square, the oldest part of Seattle, which was filled with art galleries, funky restaurants, red brick, stained glass, and soup kitchens for transients. A place where the chic and the shiftless shared the sidewalks. He must have needed another loan, and I momentarily wished that I’d charged him interest on the old ones. With the divorce, this wasn’t a good time to be lending more money to my little brother.

  The J & B used to be a cardroom—Warren said it stood for “jacks or better”—with a long oak bar that looked like a bowling alley with beer glasses for pins. The regulars on the bar stools eye-balled us as a pale-faced waitress
showed us to our table. The place was more bar than restaurant and the menu consisted of corned beef sandwiches, spaghetti, green salad, and garlic bread. Our tabletop still showed the ring marks and catsup and mustard streaks left by previous customers. I wadded up a couple of napkins from the dispenser and wiped the table.

  “Before we order, I should let you know I’m tapped out. I’ll buy you a beer but I can’t play Household Finance this time.”

  Warren laughed. “What kind of monster have I created? Do you think I’d hit a guy when he’s down?” Then he looked over his shoulder and back at me again, all business. “Cyrus,” his voice was lowered to a whisper, “Mandy’s pregnant.”

  “Congratulations!” I extended my hand.

  “Knock it off, I’m serious.”

  “This can hardly be a surprise. You’ve been sleeping together, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah, and she’s been on the pill …”

  “And she got tired of filling her body with chemicals.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “We went through the same thing after Derek.”

  “So how come you didn’t have another kid?”

  “Abstinence.” I hadn’t told Warren that Jude had her tubes tied.

  He pushed my arm away. “Get outta’ here. No wonder you’re getting divorced.”

  “Why didn’t you use a rubber?”

  “I hate rubbers. They take away the spontaneity.”

  The bartender finally came to our table, wiping his hands off on his apron as he spoke, explaining that our waitress had gotten sick. We looked at each other and I was thinking of a dozen places on Broadway where we could have met instead of this sinkhole. Not wanting to contract whatever our waitress had, we ordered our beers by the bottle.

  When the bartender returned, he slapped down two long-necked Buds hard enough to make foam ooze out the top. I toasted to Warren and Mandy, and then took the best swig of the bottle, the one that shocked the taste buds. Warren half-heartedly tipped his.

  “Now look who’s moping? I thought you loved her.”

  “She’s already planning the baby’s wardrobe. Can’t I make her get an abortion? I’m the father.”