A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  “Trash my car.”

  “You need to get out of that hole in the basement. Get a place with a fenced yard for the dog, flowers you can pick for a centerpiece on the table. Give the kids their own rooms. Find a new wife. They’d come running back to you in a minute.”

  We pulled up at a light behind a station wagon stuffed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes, table lamps, blankets, and grocery bags. Pressed flat against the rear window was one of those souvenir plastic ukuleles from Hawaii with a broken string. Someone had used yellow water ski rope to lash a mattress, box springs, and an upside-down kitchen table to the top. Ever since my own separation, I shivered each time I saw a car flattened on its springs with household goods because I knew it meant broken promises. I wanted to see the driver’s eyes. If they were beady and riveted, I’d know the anthill had been kicked open and it was everyone for himself. Carry what you can on your back and find cover.

  “What’s happening with you and Mandy?”

  “I’m not the kind of guy to rush a relationship,” he said. “And don’t give me that biological clock business. I’ve read the magazines. I’m the kind of guy liberated women seek out. I just don’t think a woman should club a man into marriage with her ovaries.”

  “Are you sure she even wants to marry you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean has she said, ‘I’m pregnant, will you marry me’?”

  “What else would she do?”

  “I thought you said you’ve been reading the magazines. Women are learning to live without men. They’re going to sperm banks, they’re adopting. Mandy may want to do this without you.”

  “That’d be a shitty thing to do,” he said. “The kid’s as much mine as hers.”

  We stopped at another light and I caught the eye of a panting dog with its head out the window. “I think if she wants to have the kid, you should encourage her.”

  “Hah, look at you talk! The guy who’s crying in his beer over support payments. I don’t make a third of what you do, how am I supposed to pay for it?” He rolled the window up and down.

  “What happened to less is more?” I’d saved the sermons Warren used to send me from Turkey in a file cabinet with my tax returns.

  “My infatuation with poverty.” He put his hands up like it was a stick-up. “Live and learn. Hey, I have a new philosophy.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Parenthood should be a voluntary institution.”

  “Does that mean you won’t charge it on my credit card?”

  “You keep reducing everything to money, Cyrus. I’m talking about something spiritual.”

  “As usual. Money doesn’t matter as long as it’s someone else’s.”

  “Ouch, my brother the moneylender. Are you pissed because my loan payments fell behind?”

  “‘Behind’ implies they were once current.”

  “That’s another reason why she can’t have the kid. I’ve got to pay you back.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. You can’t blame this one on me. Your girlfriend’s going to have a baby. You better start figuring out what that means and come to a meeting of the minds.” I was hitting the steering wheel with karate chops as I spoke.

  He snapped the cardboard deodorizer tree hanging from the rearview mirror and it spun in a pirouette. “Okay, okay, you don’t need to get pissed.” He straightened up in his seat and peered out the passenger window for help. “You sound like Dad.”

  “Dad would have busted you in the chops.”

  Despite Jude’s belief that Warren was a spoiled kid who would someday get his comeuppance, and despite Warren’s conviction that Jude had gone over the falls, they embraced on the porch like long-lost siblings. Jude’s fist grabbed so much of his shirt that there was skin showing above Warren’s belt. She was on her toes and, for a moment, there was airspace between her bare feet and the porch. The kids, who’d stood back in admiration, hand-slapped and hugged Warren on his way into the house. It was the return of the prodigal son.

  I peeked into the kitchen on the way by and noticed that the nook table was strewn with dirty dishes and open jars of peanut butter and jelly. Jude offered us coffee in the dining room, where pieces of leftover red and black crepe paper streamers were still connected to the chandelier and the walls. They’d used adhesive tape that I was sure would tear the wallpaper. Instead of the pictures of the four of us that used to hang over the buffet, there was an abstract painting that looked like a vagina with a white lily growing out of it. Also missing was Jude’s poster of the first Ms. cover with Wonder Woman, in skin-tight red boots, white-starred shorts, and an eagle breastplate, bestriding the earth.

  Justine broke the awkwardness. “Before Lill moved in, Mom was letting me practice driving in the Kingdome parking lot,” she said. “She used to let me start the car for her.”

  I felt left out. I’d always pictured the kids’ driving as something that was my responsibility.

  If I’d been a door-to-door salesman, I would have thought everything was normal here, that Jude and Lill were making a nice home. Then Lill suddenly appeared in the doorway in her artist’s smock and I felt a charge surge through me that probably colored my complexion. The kids started fidgeting.

  “I have to go to Brian’s,” Derek said.

  “I’ve got some stuff to do too,” Justine said. The two of them exited without saying a word to Lill.

  Lill had dyed her hair a flaxen blonde and it was uncombed as if to remind me that she slept there now, but her eyes were soft and full of mercy. None of the gloating I’d expected, and I wished that it was just Lill and me so we could talk about what had happened.

  “Hi, Cyrus.” A bead of sweat glistened over her upper lip, and she ran her hand inside the neck of her smock to unstick it from her skin. Warren’s mouth hung open and his eyes followed her. “You must be here for that chest,” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s a sentimental piece.”

  She smiled, brushed her hair back and went into the kitchen to join Jude. Warren followed.

  I finished my coffee and went upstairs to use the bathroom and scope out the move. Nobody seemed to notice me leave. There was a roll of toilet paper and shampoo on the bottom step waiting to go up and dirty dishes at the top waiting to be hauled down. The sink and the back of the toilet seat were covered with women’s things—hair sprays, plastic bottles with white lotion congealed at the spouts, Tampax sticking out of their box like filter cigarettes, a hair dryer with the cord snaking through the basin of the sink, gauze pads, used cotton balls, and tubes of open lipstick. So much for boycotting the cosmetics industry. This had to be Lill’s influence, I thought. In a cleansing frenzy one Saturday while we were still living together, Jude had flung her bubblebath, Nair, flimsy nighties, high heels, and Lawrence Welk, Percy Faith, and Man of La Mancha records into a garbage can she’d stationed half-way between the bathroom and her closet.

  I lifted the seat, flushed someone’s unfinished business, and sat down. At first, I couldn’t relax but as the seat warmed and I remembered that my support payments still paid the water bill here I was able to loosen up. I swung open the cabinet door to find some reading material and spied a water-stained How Babies Are Made that we’d given to Derek. It reminded me of the debate Jude and I had over whether he should be circumcised.

  “It’s mutilation,” she’d said.

  “There’s no feeling in the outer skin.”

  “How do you know? Yours was cut off.”

  “Kids will tease him if we don’t.”

  “I thought guys just worried about length.”

  “Aesthetics count too. Even a ball-peen hammer has beauty.”

  When Derek was circumcised I remembered Jude smiling victoriously when the doctor explained that his foreskin circumference put him in the ninetieth percentile.

  The master bedroom door was open and I couldn’t resist my curiosity to see what changes had been wrought in there. The blankets had slid like a waterfall over o
ne side of the bed. Hardwood floor showed through the legholes of a pair of jeans and panties that someone had stepped out of. But there were no rubber dildos, no tub of Vaseline on the nightstand, no mirrors on the ceilings, and no roach clips. A Cosmopolitan on the dresser had a cover story entitled, “Is it Different with a Younger Man?” In the corner, a potted plant was supported from a ceiling hook by Jude’s jump rope. There was a faint aroma of incense. I was about to go into the walk-in closet when I heard voices at the bottom of the stairs. I met Jude on the landing where the stairwell turned.

  “The downstair’s was busy. I hope you don’t mind.”

  She was wearing her brown cobbler’s pants and a loose-fitting blouse. She’d lost some weight. “You didn’t forget where things were, I hope.”

  “Somebody left the cap off the toothpaste.” I meant it to be funny but it came out critical.

  Jude smiled politely. “Some things never change, I guess.”

  I tapped my hands on the railing. “Sorry I jumped on you the other night about Lill.”

  “Your reception was a standing ovation compared to my mother’s.”

  “Martha knows?”

  “She came by here on the way to somewhere and, you know me, I thought it would be a good opportunity to get it out on the table, so we took a ride to Nordstrom’s together.”

  “What happened?”

  “She flipped. Slapped me in the face and carried on about how sick it was. Her daughter shaming her dead father’s name and all that.” There was a tremor in Jude’s voice. She was one step below me and I stepped down so she didn’t have to crane her neck. “I told her I’d rather boff a woman than sneak into bedrooms and finger-fuck little girls like her brother did.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I made her stop the car and walked home.”

  I almost put my arms around her, something I probably should have done the first time she’d mentioned her Uncle Edgar. But I was more afraid now than I was then that she would rebuff me because I was a man and, therefore, partially responsible. “Your dad wouldn’t have let her do that to you, Jude.”

  She turned and hurried up the stairs.

  12.

  I was cross-examining the owner’s structural engineer when my secretary came into the courtroom. She had a frightened look like she’d been running from someone, and she was choking a pink slip in her hand. It was completely out of context—she’d never come to court—but everyone in the courtroom noticed her. By the third day of trial you knew who was connected to whom and Paula was a stranger.

  “Your honor, may I have a moment, please?”

  “We can take the afternoon recess now, counsel.”

  I checked the clock behind the judge’s bench. We were twenty minutes ahead of the usual three o’clock break, and I didn’t want to use up any of my chits if I didn’t have to. “That won’t be necessary, your honor.”

  As she came closer, I could see she’d been crying. “It’s Justine,” she whispered. “She’s at Virginia Mason. They found her in the garage with the motor running.” It was as if she’d pulled one of those big levers in the service box. I was suddenly shivering. She shoved the pink slip into my hand. “The doctor’s phone number.”

  When I turned, I felt dizzy. Pasty white faces hung in the room like paper lanterns I wanted to swat away so I could get to Justine. I heard my client calling me from the distance. I didn’t want to even utter Justine’s name in this room, which had suddenly been reduced to a pit of vipers hissing over money. “I have to go, your honor.”

  I must have communicated something dreadful by my demeanor because, without a single question, the judge slammed his gavel down in his most decisive ruling of the day. “This case is recessed until nine-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  I left my secretary to make the explanation to my client and pack up my briefcase while I ran out the door. It was like there’d been an evacuation order and I was the only one who’d heard it. The elevator stopped on every floor. Men stepped back to let ladies enter first. A woman with one baby in a sling and another in the stroller got on at the third floor, where the district courts heard traffic tickets and domestic harassment cases. With my back, I pushed a heavyset man against the wall to make room. The door caught on the handles of the stroller and automatically re-opened. The woman was as oblivious to the door as she was to her baby fussing in the sling. I wedged my heel into the rubber bumper and pulled the stroller all the way into the car.

  At the Fourth Avenue entrance, I stood in the street and hailed a Far West taxi. My heart was bumping and heaving. Taxi drivers knew what a fire was. He grunted something in Indian or Pakistani and made a diagonal from one side of the street to the other, crossing four lanes as I looked out the back window with him. We raced up James. When the yellow light at Sixth changed to red, he held his horn and blasted through the intersection. As he pulled into the ambulance entrance to the Emergency Room, the meter said two dollars and sixty cents. I dropped a five over the back of the front seat and bolted.

  Justine was in a glass and steel hyperbaric chamber that looked like an iron lung. The nurse said they were saturating her with oxygen, trying to loosen the carbon monoxide that had attached to the hemoglobin in her blood and been absorbed by her tissue. She was unconscious when the ambulance brought her in, with a carboxyhe-moglobin level of forty-seven percent. They let me stand next to the chamber. Her face was a cadaverous white and she was stock-still. Children were supposed to bury their parents, not the reverse.

  “Are you sure she’s breathing?”

  An Asian nurse in a green gown pointed to a gauge on top of the chamber where a black needle stuttered between the green and yellow zones. Each time it fell into the yellow I thought it was going to plummet to zero. There was another gauge which measured atmospheric pressure.

  “We have her at sixty-six feet below sea level,” she said.

  I hadn’t even noticed Jude in the flock of green gowns working the room. She was pale and bit her lip as she spoke. Her voice was on the edge of crumbling.

  “When I went down to leave … the car was running. She must have taken the keys from my purse.”

  I put my arm around her and she leaned into me, like the first time we’d commiserated over Justine when the car backed onto her port-a-bed. I shuddered, picturing Justine in the darkness of our garage, which was a concrete tomb burrowed into the hillside below the house.

  “Was there a note or anything?”

  “I don’t know. I came straight here in the ambulance.”

  With my arm still around Jude’s shoulder, we watched our Justine swimming for her life under sixty-six feet of water. They said there was no way to know how much had been absorbed by her tissue. The nervous system and heart had the highest metabolic rate and were the most susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning. The sheet that covered her had been tucked under at the sides and made her look like a mummy. I prayed an Our Father and asked forgiveness for the divorce and for being so blind as to have not seen this coming. The needle kept losing power. Stay in the green, Justine. I’ll be a better parent. We’ll talk about it. You don’t have to resort to blackness.

  After the second hyperbaric treatment, they transported her in a gurney with a lumpy wheel that bumped as we followed her through the hallways to her room. Once in her bed, she crept out of unconsciousness long enough to see us standing over her. She didn’t say anything but her eyes moved from me to Jude and back again. Her eyelids opened and closed slowly, like she was pulling a weighted theater curtain up and down. Her eyes locked on mine with an openness I’d never felt between us before. If there was any shame for what she’d done, the purity of the oxygen had diluted it. Then she dropped off again.

  Jude’s mother, Martha, came by later in a red evening gown with a fox pelt over the shoulders and her face tanned from a Caribbean cruise. Her gentleman friend in a white tux carried his hat in his hand. They looked like they were on the way to a charity auction, where everyone got boozed up and bid for
weekend trips to San Francisco and Acapulco. Her hibiscus perfume dueled with his lemon after-shave bracer. Martha broke into tears when she saw Justine, and her friend helped her into the chair next to the bed.

  “I’m sorry, Pudding. You don’t need your grandmother doing this on you.” Justine hated to be called pudding.

  Jude disappeared for her dinner break in the hospital cafeteria as soon as her mom showed up, so I had to make my own conversation with her. I hadn’t seen Martha since the separation, an event that was already a defining milestone in my life. Justine’s attempt on her life in the driver’s seat of Jude’s car would be another.

  “You’re looking pretty chipper, kid,” Martha’s beau said, as he stepped up to the bed and rested his hat on the bedding somewhere over Justine’s left knee. I didn’t even know if he’d met her before.

  Martha stopped sniveling and escorted me by the elbow over to the doorway and into the bright hollowness of the hallway. Her fingers dug into the flesh on the inside of my elbow joint. “This is Jude’s fault, you know.”

  “I don’t think …”

  “I’m against the whole divorce idea.” She snapped her head as she said it. “Leaving someone with a good job for a woman?” The implication was that if it had been a man it might have made sense. “Now she’s neglecting the kids.”

  “They aren’t neglected, Martha.”

  She looked mystified.

  I nodded toward Justine. “She’s a complex kid. There’s millions of pent-up fears in someone her age. Any one of them could have set this off.”

  “You’re being soft on Jude,” she said. “You were always too soft on her.”

  “The world’s changing, Martha. We can’t bully and bark our way to the top anymore.” I remembered all the times Jude had complained of her mom’s bitching about her weight, and Jude telling her she didn’t want to look like a model, and she wasn’t going to starve herself for someone else’s stereotype. Of course, Jude burned more calories worrying about her mom than she ever could have lost with a diet.