A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “She’s looking for a rich man,” Lill said, “and when she finds him, they’re going to make a big family.” Isolde pushed out her stomach and we all laughed.

  To my surprise, Lill made me sit on the couch while they did the dishes, and I wondered if she hadn’t duped Jude, preaching doctrines that she didn’t practice herself. I pretended to read the Seattle Times, but instead read Lill, trying to gauge what kind of effect the divorce might have on her if we finalized it. They talked in German as Lill washed and Isolde dried. I listened for my name to pop up and, not hearing it, decided that Cyrus must be something unrecognizable in German. Lill scraped something into the garbage can and glanced over at me with those eyes. I loved those eyes.

  When they finished the dishes they joined me in the living room and Isolde offered me cognac in a clean wineglass, which I accepted. Lill declined. Isolde smoked while we talked about American movies, the major common denominator between our cultures. Isolde thought Dustin Hoffman was too dull, but Robert Redford was a dreamboat she’d make kids with.

  “Very Aryan and sexy,” Lill said, and we all laughed.

  Lill and Isolde finally had an untranslated exchange which ended with Isolde winking at me like Groucho Marx and excusing herself with an ashtray and a book as she headed to the bathroom and drew water for her bath. That left me and Lill sharing the floral peach loveseat, her on one cushion and me on the other. She told me that she and Isolde met while Lill was stationed in the Army in Hamburg.

  “I wanted to go to Viet Nam but they wouldn’t let us near combat. So instead of fighting the Viet Cong we fought off the advances of our superior officers.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t know how to do anything else. The ads said they’d train me for a new career.” Each time she furrowed her brow, the high part of the arch in the hairline scar over her right eye blended and disappeared. “My father and grandfather were Army. We were into obedience.” She smiled and let her arm climb to the back of the loveseat next to mine.

  “Weren’t you bothered by the war in Viet Nam?”

  “It was just an extension of the obedience thing.” She tapped me on the arm. “I’ll bet you were a protester.”

  Her taps felt nice, and I wanted to oblige her fantasy by bragging about some of Jude’s anti-war activity and claiming it as my own. “I was too busy worrying about law school and the draft.”

  “I’ll bet you were a hellion as a kid.”

  “In Quincy, rebellion meant not getting bombed on Friday night. I was afraid to get drunk just like I was afraid to get shot in Viet Nam.”

  Isolde emerged from the bathroom in a yellow terry cloth bathrobe, with her pocketbook sticking out and her hair wrapped in a turban. Without eye shadow, she looked more wholesome. The huskiness of her hips swished the bathrobe as she walked over to the couch and gave Lill a hug. Then she turned to me.

  “Thank you for meeting me.”

  “Guten Nacht, Isolde,” I said, using exactly half of my German vocabulary in the process.

  When Isolde’s bathrobe disappeared down the hallway, I rested two fingers on Lill’s wrist. “Was it the Army that turned you into a feminist?”

  She smiled. “You make feminist sound like Communist. I don’t believe in grand causes. Feminism is good like laughter is good and sex is good. It’s great if you have it but I’m not going to rule out everyone who doesn’t.”

  “But I thought …”

  “I’m not going to give any group that kind of power over me.”

  Lill called me Saturday morning with an invitation to go with her and Isolde to the coast. She said to pack a change of clothes, a sleeping bag in case we stayed overnight, and a swimsuit. Just before they picked me up, Justine called to ask if I wanted to rent a rowboat with her and Derek at Green Lake. I could hardly say I was going on an overnighter with one of her mom’s friends, so I mumbled something about being tied up with work. It just came out, I didn’t have to even compose it, and I felt terrible for doing it. Now I wondered what would happen if one of them were hurt and they tried to get hold of me?

  Lill and I took turns driving while Isolde sipped white wine in the backseat. At Salem, I jettisoned the freeway in favor of Highway 99, the scenic route. It was a two-lane road that passed big farmhouses with vegetable gardens in the front yards and extra cars in the driveways. There was a string of empty boxcars stored on the track that ran parallel to the highway. The air smelled like pumpkin and straw. It reminded me of Sunday afternoon dinners in Quincy when four or five families brought potluck and the adults drank highballs and square-danced while the kids roamed the fields and played hide-and-seek in the barn.

  I slowed down to thirty-five and flipped the tape over to hear “People” again, a song Jude had introduced me to when she thought Barbara Streisand was a prophet and we still needed each other. I couldn’t help but think of the trip Jude and I took to the Oregon Coast for our delayed honeymoon, when we stayed in Seaside and played games, in the Arcade, shooting air rifles, knocking over lead milk bottles, playing pinball on machines with pictures of bosomy girls and race cars that lit up as the ball caromed off the posts and tripped triggers in the chutes. They let us parlay all of our winnings into a large brown monkey with a pipe in his mouth that Jude chose.

  “Carry it on your back,” I said.

  “With the others.” She laughed.

  From the bed in our motel room along the promenade, we could see people strolling back and forth, pushing baby buggies, walking poodles. We made love with the curtains open. We were on the same side in those days, us against the world. It felt like we had something that nobody else had, at least until Justine was born and I was still in law school and we were broke and had to mortgage our imaginations.

  Lill cussed when we got stuck behind a hay truck with a kid and his sheepdog sitting on top of the load. The hay swayed one way, then the other, as the truck negotiated the curves. Finally, we got a straightaway and Lill gunned us into the other lane, the kid waving at us as we passed. But our freedom was short-lived because around the next bend there was another farmer on a wheel tractor with his lunch box and silver thermos strapped to the driver’s seat with black inner tube bands and his blades folded up like the legs of a grasshopper. Lill pointed to Isolde in the backseat as we were coming into Reedsport. She’d dozed off and was snoring with her mouth open.

  Our destination was the Oregon Dunes, a vast expanse of sand along the Pacific Ocean about fifty miles long and one to three miles wide. The dunes were formed from the erosion of sandstone that was carried to sea by winter floods and then drifted back to the beaches where it was blown inland in the shape of waves by the prevailing winds. We unloaded in the Honeyman State Park lot which was already active with kids doing bike tricks and bouncing errant frisbees off windshields.

  As a kid, I was always afraid of the ocean. When my dad took us to the Oregon Coast, he made me wade out until a wave knocked me over and scraped my face along the bottom while pictures of starfish and clamshells tumbled inside my head. He was laughing when I got up. In the Navy, they threw everyone overboard who couldn’t swim. This happened to one of his chess buddies, who survived, but a few days later a loose canvas caught against him in a storm and carried him overboard like a kite. Dad taught lessons about life by telling me stories of people who’d died.

  I carried our picnic goods in two shopping bags with paper handles. The surface sand was hot on my bare feet, but as we climbed our steps dug into the cooler sand underneath. By the time we’d crossed over the first row of dunes, we lost the blare of the transistor radios and yelping dogs in the parking lot. Wind patterns were carved into the dunes as if by trowels in the hands of a colossal sculptor. The horizon shimmered from the heat. As Lill gracefully picked her way in a flowing skirt, she looked like the alluring serviceman’s bride who lived in the beach house in Summer of ’42. She’d undone the buttons on her shirt and tied it around her waist so that her midriff was exposed. It was chaste a
nd lithesome. Isolde had changed into a bathing suit with gaudy rhododendrons and wore a faded blue shirt over it. She also kept her socks on to protect the finish on her toenails. When we could see nothing but waves of sand in all directions, we stopped.

  “You guys wait here while I scout ahead,” Lill said, and she took the shopping bags with her.

  Isolde and I tried to patch together another movie conversation, with long silences in between. We were both relieved when Lill’s head appeared again on the horizon. Then Lill shooed us along towards her surprise, which was a sand bowl at the top of a dune with three place settings, stemmed wineglasses, a blue-and-white checkered tablecloth, a loaf of french bread, sliced Jarlsberg, pickles, German sausage, and Greek olives in a dish improvised from the cheese wrapper. A bottle of Korbel and a Perrier were resting on the ice bag. The candles were probably superfluous in the seventy-five degree sun but Lill had thought of everything.

  Isolde put her hands over her face and looked like she was going to cry, muttering something in German that I figured translated to “Wow!”

  Lill showed us how to make chairs by burrowing her butt into the sand, and we copied her, everyone laughing. The champagne cork blew out with a pop that was muffled by the sheer expanse of the dunes. Isolde raised her glass to the sun which was at about two o’clock.

  “Prost!”

  Only Isolde and I ate the sausage, and I wondered how the two of them had ever hit it off so well. Lill abstained from much of what Isolde craved.

  After the meal, Lill scooped some ice cubes out of the bag and chewed on them. Water trickled out of the corners of her mouth and down her chin, the sand absorbing the drops without a trace. Then she uncovered the grocery sacks she’d buried, pulled out a book, and told us to lie back and close our eyes. Once we’d stilled, she read to us in a voice that was tender and full of affection.

  Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round

  in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk

  now drinks wine and honey mixed.

  Isolde jabbed Lill for a translation and Lill motioned for her to wait.

  God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,

  from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.

  As roses, up from ground.

  Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,

  now a cliff covered with vines,

  now a horse being saddled.

  It hides within these,

  till one day it cracks them open.

  Lill closed her book and there was silence until Isolde started rummaging through her bag for cigarettes.

  “Rumi’s a Sufi, one of my confessors.”

  I listened to the wind swirl over the dunes. Sand as fine as you picked out of the corner of your eyes in the morning coated my face. I smelled the burnt sulphur of Isolde’s match, then the weedy smoke of her exhalation. We left each other to our own thoughts. In my fantasy, I was walking barefoot in the dunes with Jude, two ants moving slowly up, then down each mound, but we were lost, and we were looking for Justine and Derek, who were also lost.

  Isolde interrupted my daydream. She shaded her eyes from the sun and asked me something in German. In her fantasy, I’d apparently become fluent.

  On the loop back to the parking lot, we came over the rise of a very large dune and found a small lake on the other side, a mirage of aquamarine broth ladled into a sand crater.

  “Let’s go in,” Lill said, with the exuberance of a kid who’s just found a theater door ajar.

  “Do you have your suit?”

  “Underneath.”

  “Mine’s in the car.”

  “So?” She tried to hold back her smile by biting her lip.

  Isolde didn’t know what was going on, so Lill explained while I turned and stripped down to my boxer shorts. Without a lining, things flopped around a little. Lill’s two-piece orange suit was phosphorescent, and she made no attempt to cover herself or cave in her shoulders to hide the natural thrust of her breasts the way some women did. I tried to mimic her self-assurance and resisted the urge to cross my arms and hide my hairless chest. We ran down the dune, not stopping until the water tackled our legs and we toppled over into a lake that was as warm as baby’s bath. She came up laughing.

  “Now tell me that wasn’t worth the drive,” she said. Her red hair was plastered against her head except for a wild tuft on the crown that seemed to be laughing with us. I opened my arms and she fell against me, making a gentle slap as skin met skin.

  Isolde made us stand for a picture on the shore as I rested my hand on the curve of Lill’s hip and joyed to the touch of her fingers playing on my back.

  “Cheese,” Isolde said.

  Lill’s tapping resumed as we lay on the floor in our clothes at the Waves Motel. Isolde’s rhythmic breathing wheezed from the double bed next to us. She’d dropped off during an Archie Bunker rerun and Lill stripped her down to her underwear and pulled the covers over her. Lill’s finger had the same teasing quality as her voice. She found my hand and carried it to the back of her neck, signaling the need for a rub. The smell of Nag Champa incense filled the room. In the candlelight, I could see a trail of ashen snakeskin where the stick of incense had burned itself out on the desktop.

  “Thanks to Jude and Isolde, you know my story. What about you?”

  “The sordid history of Lillian Roundheels Epstein.” She pulled her hand back and let her head droop. I’d touched a sore spot. I should have waited.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “People I don’t care about anymore know it, so why shouldn’t you?”

  I let the pads of my fingers brush the flaxen hair on her arms. “Hey, things happen. I didn’t think I’d be living in a basement when I was thirty-seven.”

  “You’re right, I do know something about you. You’re a pretty straight arrow.”

  I continued to stroke her arm, combing the hair the way it naturally leaned. If she wanted to tell me, fine. If not, that was all right too. We’d done enough for one weekend.

  “I feel like your big sister and you’ve just asked me how babies are made. I’m a woman with a past, Cyrus.” Her voice was serious. “You asked me why I went in the Army. My parents made me. I was out of high school and starting to sleep around. Walla Walla’s little tramp. That’s when my dad sat me down and introduced me to the alternative of military service. I was thrilled, actually. It was the first non-sexist thing he’d ever done for me. He thought it would make a man out of me. Well, it was more like putting a bumblebee in a cherry orchard. There were twenty hims for every her.”

  “Wasn’t fraternizing against the rules?”

  She grabbed her knees and rolled back. “You slay me. We’re talking about a batallion of horny men and women. This was after the invention of the backseat and the telephone booth.”

  “You did it in a telephone booth?”

  “And broom closets. You probably believe the pros don’t do it on game days.”

  “It saps your strength, doesn’t it?”

  “Or doubles it,” she said. “I started palling around with this woman from Defiance, Ohio who drank like a fish and had a dirty mouth. We were a great match. Anyway, she started inviting me along on some of her dates”—Lill rested her hand on me—“are you sure you’re all right with this?”

  It took me years to get over the idea that I wasn’t the first man Jude had slept with and she’d avoided the details at my request. But with Lill there was such glory in her voice, like she’d walked on the moon. I signaled her to go ahead.

  “We shared her dates, took turns doing her guys. That’s how I met my husband. And the rest is history, as they say.”

  This was a long way from Rumi and should have turned my stomach, but I surprised myself at how protective I felt toward her. “Hey, your dad made you do it.”

  “I don’t believe in all that crap about blaming your parents for everything. Hey, they did their best. One kid’s an engineer, the other’s a nymph
o. I could’ve been a serial killer.”

  I hoped that she was exaggerating. On the other hand, it was better to know everything about each other now so that we could adjust our expectations. That’s what killed relationships, the false expectations. With Lill, there was very little room for that. She came at you in a gallop with her red hair flying.

  10.

  It was hard to keep a poker face at work when people asked me how things were going. I felt light-headed and wanted to tell them how Lill was drawing me in like a moth to lamplight. Something was alive in me again. I’d even started to wonder how she and the kids would get along and decided they’d think their lives had turned to clover to have someone fun like Lill in the family. But I couldn’t rush it. Pace. I had to keep the right pace.

  Out of the blue, the Italian contractor whom I’d beaten in the Monticello case called to fix me up with his second cousin. “She’s built like Sophia Loren,” he said.

  In the interests of someday winning him as a client, I played along. “Can she cook a decent parmigiana?”

  “She’ll cook you all right, counselor,” he said, sinking into a sneer that finally erupted into a belly laugh.

  “Would I be wrong in saying you’re a chauvinist pig?”

  He laughed again. “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  Lill, deliver me from this bondage.

  I called Warren to meet for lunch at Bruno’s pizzeria on Pike Street in the middle of the red light district. It was the same place we’d gone with the kids once after a rerun of West Side Story when the four of us had marched down the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue afterwards, snapping our fingers in unison like the Jets and Warren danced off the sides of light poles and window sills singing Maria at the top of his lungs.

  “So tell me more about this trip to Oregon,” he said. “I have a feeling I got the version you’d tell Mom.” He drummed the table. “You didn’t drive five hundred miles just to clean out the valves in the Plymouth. What’s she look like?”