A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “If she’s lesbian”—Justine looked at Derek as if she wasn’t sure she should be saying this in front of him—“how could you and Mom have kids?”

  She was getting ahead of me. I’d never paid much attention to homosexuality and passed over articles on the subject the same way I skipped the “Food” section of the newspaper. I wasn’t necessarily against it; I just didn’t think it was something I had to know. “When your mom and I were together, we were just like any other man and woman.”

  “Dad,” she used her club president’s voice, “we have to swear that none of us will ever tell about this.” She sounded as if we’d just buried Jude in the basement. “I mean it. This will ruin us if any of our friends find out.”

  I turned on the TV and went to check the refrigerator. The milk was seven days overdue and fell out of the spout in lumps when I poured it into the sink. I told them I’d go to the store and buy the makings for hot chocolate and toasted white bread with butter lathered all the way to the edges. It’s what Mom used to fix us when I came home from a pheasant hunting trip in the rain with Dad. That was back when I thought Dad was weird because he picked wax out of his ears in public with the end of his matches.

  I walked south on Broadway past the Taco Time as the rain peppered my umbrella and the gutters washed candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and plastic eating utensils into the drains. I felt responsible for this turn of events. There was something Jude wanted that I never gave her. All those times she’d discouraged us from having sex I thought it was me; maybe it was my maleness. Jude was tired of blunt. She wanted chamois strokes and soft cheeks.

  She’d told me about her Uncle Edgar, the way he used to coax her up on his lap while he was sitting in the big chair next to the smoke stand when she was little and move her back and forth in his lap. Sometimes, he’d tuck her in at night and slide his hand under the sheets, and she had to cross her legs and squeeze as hard as she could to keep his dirty fingers out. Now I couldn’t remember what I’d ever said to her when she told me these stories. She’d never repeated them and I was afraid to bring them up because of how they obviously upset her.

  The Broadway District was supposed to be safe for gays. I looked at the women going by, trying to see who was and who wasn’t. How could you tell? I always thought lesbians had hair on their upper lip and butch haircuts. The girl walking ahead of me had jeans that were frayed at the cuffs, where they dragged on the wet sidewalk, and there were patches on the buttocks. Her ponytail was tied with a rubber band and swished back and forth as she walked. She looked like she was trying to be noticed. I watched the eyes of the guys coming in the opposite direction, searching her up and down as they passed. Some of them glanced back to get a look at her from behind. I’d done the same thing when a good-looking girl passed me, a last chance before she disappeared forever from your life. This one had a decent figure and a nice sway.

  When she stopped at the flower stand, I slowed down and sidled over to the cans of carnations resting on a bench. I picked up a bunch and put it to my nose, at the same time looking directly at her face.

  She was a man.

  When the kids were in bed, I called Jude.

  “Why didn’t you call me sooner? I thought they’d been kidnapped.” Jude had her way of putting things. Somehow she was going to make this my fault. Before dialing her, I’d decided to be amicable, but I could already feel my blood vessels contracting.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it, Jude?”

  “I thought the kids should know first.”

  “I was devastated. I had no idea.”

  “I’m sorry. One of us should have said something. Lill feels terrible too.” I had the feeling they’d dissected Lill’s and my relationship and probably had a good laugh over it.

  “Can I ask how long this has been going on?”

  “Lill’s been staying with us the last two weeks. She’s given up her apartment.”

  “I mean, how long have you known …”

  “I don’t want to go into all that now. I’m worried about the kids.”

  “Me too.”

  “I need your support.” Her voice was earnest, but not imperative. “Bring them home, Cyrus.”

  “They’re in bed, Jude.”

  “Don’t undermine us.”

  “Hold on. They’ve only been here”—I looked at my watch—“two hours and twenty minutes. I didn’t steal them. They fled, Jude. They’re scared.”

  “You’re projecting.”

  I could feel her paddle down my throat, churning my insides. “You’re out of touch.”

  “We talked. Everything was fine.”

  “Like everything was fine with us?”

  “I never said it was fine,” she said. “You thought it was fine.”

  “Have you considered postponing this until the kids are at least out of high school?”

  “This isn’t a trial, Cyrus. We can’t just postpone it.”

  “This is painful. Justine thinks she’s inherited it. Can you think for a minute how this might feel to a high school kid who’s trying to get a grip on who she is?”

  “I wish my mom had told me there were choices.”

  “Then you could have skipped me and gone direct to Lill. Then you wouldn’t have two kids to worry about. So pretend you skipped our marriage and just leave the kids here for a few days.”

  “I don’t want to acquiesce to their schoolyard prejudices.”

  “Shit,” I said, as I held the mouthpiece against my leg.

  “… is a fact of life and if we hide it from them, we’re only making it worse.” She paused. “Are you still there?”

  “Kind of.”

  “I’ll come get them.”

  “They’re due here this weekend anyway, Jude. Let’s just lengthen my weekend and let this blow over, okay?”

  She didn’t answer right away and I could hear her sniffing. She might have even been crying. I had the strange realization she might be as scared as I was, that she didn’t really want to be doing this. “Okay, but tell them I want to talk to them on the phone tomorrow. Separately. I think Derek could care less about this. Justine is egging him on.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Jude. Not all men are as dense as me.”

  “He’s only eight.”

  “Nine, remember. You gave him Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Cut them a little slack. You and Lill can see each other when they’re with me.”

  I went back to my lasagna and stuck a finger between the layers. It was cool. I turned the oven to four hundred fifty and stuck it back in. The counter was sprinkled with Nestle’s cocoa and toast crumbs. I opened the liquor cabinet in the door over the refrigerator. There was no R&R. I tilted the flat pint of Cutty Sark but there wasn’t enough to fill a jigger so I took the cap off and downed it straight out of the bottle. It clawed against the sides of my throat on the way down and seared the nose hairs as I exhaled. I lit the two candles on the kitchen table and watched them flicker in the breeze that blew in from the window over the table, the flames behaving like two dancers who’d never performed together. When he bent over, she stood on her toes and stretched her arms toward the ceiling; when she leaned left, he shrugged right.

  It felt like there had just been a head-on collision and I knew the people in both cars. I was confused and didn’t know which loss hurt the most or who to blame. I thought of Lill telling me how she’d married in front of a justice-of-the-peace in Lake Tahoe. Their witnesses were another couple waiting in the same line with liquor on their breath, her fourth, his fifth. She said the woman’s makeup was so smeared that she looked like a Sunday paper cartoon character. Lill’s husband had burned her personal belongings when they separated and fed the rest of them out the window of his car while he was crossing the Utah Salt Flats. Then two years later, on what would have been their anniversary, he sent her a package wrapped in want ads from Bakersfield with her wedding dress. Juices had leaked onto the fabric from the d
ead robin roosting in the collar of the dress, and in the beak was his wedding band.

  Lill’s and my courtship was going to be stillborn. It would never feel the lift of an August heat wave or hear the advent of sunrise in birdsong.

  Behind a bottle of dry vermouth, there was a peppermint schnapps, something that Jude must have stuck into my box when we divvied up the everyday dishes. Although I couldn’t remember ever drinking it, the bottle was two-thirds empty. As I screwed the cap off, dried crystals fell to the counter. It smelled medicinal. I took a mouthful, gargled, and spit it into the sink. My tongue felt sweet enough to suck on.

  When the lasagna was hot, I filled a wine glass with the vermouth, lit a candle, and pretended there was something to celebrate.

  11.

  My take on the news fluctuated with my mood. For what it was worth, I finally had an airtight case to prove that the divorce wasn’t my fault. I could stop beating myself up over my awkwardness with intimacy, wondering what I should have done differently. There was, in legal terms, a mutual mistake of fact. We’d formed the marriage contract on the assumption that we were both heterosexual. Now the contract could be rescinded and the parties returned to their original positions. I could finally quash Mom and Dad’s glares of suspicion. It wasn’t my personality, it was Jude’s chemistry. But what was the value of legal certitude if I couldn’t exchange it for what I wanted most?

  I was still mystified as to how this transformation could have escaped my attention. All those heavy petting sessions in the car when Jude and I were trying to stop ourselves in college, those times she nibbled on my ear lobes and sucked on my tongue, was she faking it? She couldn’t have pretended her blood temperature. We’d made children together. And I’d never encountered anyone more heterosexual than Lill. Had I driven both of them to this? Was there something so odious about me that I’d killed the natural attraction between the sexes?

  Reluctantly, and only after some serious persuasion by Jude, the kids returned to their mom’s, on a trial basis. I think they felt guilty about abandoning her. She’d promised that Lill wouldn’t attend parent conferences, plays, or shuttle the kids to practices. Nothing. Lill would be their little secret. I was worried and made a point of calling them every day. I started having flashes of the kids as gay. The mere suggestion of Justine and sex, any kind of sex, made me anxious. I wanted to put Justine in a sexless bubble until she was an adult.

  Our first weekend together again, she balked when I told her she couldn’t go on an overnighter to Sarah Dukelow’s cabin on Whidbey Island. She apparently saw no connection between my caution and her own fears. This wasn’t just teenage insubordination; there was bitterness and self-hatred in her tone.

  “You’re acting like I’m some kind of criminal,” she said, sitting side-saddle on the kitchen chair so she could look at the sink instead of me. “Sarah takes friends there all the time. Her parents trust her.” She dug her index fingernail into the crack between the plastic seat-cover and the chair frame, making flecks of dried food pop out and fall to the floor.

  “Does she take boys along?”

  She snapped her head my way. “Who said there were boys?”

  “Well, are there?”

  The cheek I could see started to pinken as she mined deeper into the seam with her finger. “They’re just friends.”

  This would have been a good time to talk about birth control except that I thought talking about it was tantamount to inviting her to use it. “Are Sarah’s parents going?”

  “She doesn’t have a dad, her mom might go.” She rushed her words, the way a person does when they don’t want you to put each one under a microscope. There was a burr under her skin.

  I’d forgotten. Sarah’s mom was the mother I’d met at parents’ night in an outrageously short mini-skirt and black net nylons. “Who are the boys?”

  She gave a disgusted sigh.

  “Probably Ronnie is going,” Derek said, looking up from the TV.

  “Derek, this is none of your business.”

  “Who’s Ronnie?” I said.

  “That’s her boyfriend,” Derek said. “He’s a dude.”

  Justine shot him poison darts from her eyes.

  “Who else?” I said.

  She slumped like her spine had crumbled, then mumbled something about never getting to do anything with her friends.

  “I’ll call Sarah’s mom.”

  “I won’t go then,” she said. When she lifted her head to look at me, her face was as wet as a fresh finger painting.

  I was softening. “It’s not you, Justine. I don’t trust the situation.”

  She bolted, pushing the chair over, and ran to the bathroom. I thought she said “shit.”

  “Good,” Derek said, “that means we can go to Moonraker! Can I take Ricky?”

  “I thought you hated Ricky.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Your timing is terrible.”

  Justine got stuck in the bathroom when the doorknob came off in her hand and Derek pulled the stem out the other side. I’d left a screwdriver in the bathroom for such emergencies and taught the kids how to stick it in and engage the latch mechanism but one of them had borrowed the screwdriver and not put it back. When I rescued her with a spoon handle, she ran into her room and didn’t speak to me the rest of the night. Derek carried the breadboard to her with a cup of instant tomato soup, a burger on toast with catsup and mayonnaise, and chips. The phone cord was long enough to stretch into the kids’ room and Justine was either making up excuses to Ron and Sarah or they were plotting my assassination. The only thing left on the plate when it returned were the crusts. She’d even eaten a couple of spoons of soup. A harbinger of better times, I hoped.

  While I was watching TV, Justine summoned Derek, who returned with a folded spiral notebook paper.

  Can we go to Annie Hall this weekend?

  JUSTINE

  No Dear Dad, no Love, no frills. It was a test. I wrote Yes under her name and added: You can come out and watch Eight is Enough. And I won’t talk about you-know-what. Love, Dad.

  “What does she want?” Derek said, when the commercial came on.

  “We’re negotiating a truce. Can you take this back to her?”

  “Can I read it?”

  “No.”

  Magpie followed him into the room again, probably thinking that this time Derek really was going to bed.

  Partway through the next segment, Justine appeared in a bedspread wrapped around her like a sari. She walked slowly to the end of the couch, with Magpie watching her suspiciously, and fell backwards into it. We finally made eye contact at the commercial.

  When the kids were in bed, I took Magpie for a walk. There was so much I could learn from Magpie. She knew how to tune out the static. She could fall asleep on top of a pair of shoes. She lived in the moment. Even though I took her on the same sidewalks, she acted each time like it was a new frontier, prancing along ahead of me with her license and shamrock name tag jingling together. She vacuumed the aromas into her nostrils like so much gossip, finding out which dogs were sick and what medications they were on. She was egalitarian too, spending as much time in the unkept flower beds as the kept ones. Social status didn’t impress her. What mattered was the caliber of the odor. When she had to pee, she’d sniff out a used patch, modestly turn her back, and hunker down, leaving something for someone else to read. But she lived for human affection. In Volunteer Park, I’d let her off the leash and she’d saunter shyly up to people sitting on the grass, slowing down as she got closer, waiting for a glance or an attagirl. If nobody acknowledged her, she’d droop her head, gather her tail between her legs, and sidle back to me.

  I squatted down and put my arm around her neck. “What should I do, pal?” She just stared at me with those big brown doe eyes that forgave what humans couldn’t.

  Warren came to the door in his underpants and a T-shirt. His head looked like he’d just taken it out of a suitcase, pressed flat on one side, sagebrus
h growing out of the other. There were creases and buttonholes in his cheeks. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s Saturday, remember? You said you’d help me move the dresser.”

  “Oh shit,” he said, hitting his palm against his forehead. I expected him to invite me in but he guarded the entrance and nodded his head in the direction of somewhere behind the door. “I’m not alone.” He looked down at his bare legs.

  “Get your pants on,” I said, pushing the door open.

  “Come on in.”

  While Warren changed, I looked around. The shades were pulled and I could smell asparagus and garlic, two of the world’s outlaw odors. Garlic kidnapped the breath and asparagus infiltrated the urine. There were wine glasses on the coffee table, one of them half full, and an empty pear-shaped Chianti jug with a bamboo wrap on it. A pair of crumpled jeans was crammed into one end of the couch and a red blouse and black brassiere lay on the floor next to a pair of slippers. I picked up the brassiere and puffed out the cups with my fist. They were good nursing breasts. I could hear voices coming from the bedroom, Warren’s tenor and playful, Mandy’s tender and plaintive. She wanted him to stay.

  Warren emerged, the chaos on top of his head covered with a green, paint-spotted beret. “Let’s go.”

  We picked up breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to get the rental truck. I told him I was buying and Warren ordered six different donuts and a jumbo black coffee.

  “I always thought Jude was kind of sexy,” he said. I glared at him and his donut broke, where the thumb and index finger pinched it, and crumbled onto the seat. “You know what I mean. In a heterosexual way.”

  “You don’t know jack about what you’re talking about.”

  He was unfazed and brushed the crumbs onto the floor. “Don’t you think it’s weird that you slept with both of them?” He looked at me for corroboration, but I kept my eyes on the road, and Warren squirmed in his seat. “Well, I can make my own assumptions on that one. I can kind of see women doing it with each other, but men? Jesus!” He spit a piece of orange frosting onto the dashboard and quickly brushed it with his hand, making an orange smear like a comet. “Sorry.”