A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  The crows were making a horrible racket, arguing with each other in the top of a pine tree by the path, as I watched Lill cross the meadow toward my bench. She was wearing a cossack blouse that was gathered at the wrists and hung loose outside her jeans. Her hair caught the gold in the autumn sunset as she moved across the grass with the lightness of a ballet dancer, rising up on her toes with each step. My pulse quickened and I had to remind myself that this was strictly a matter of diplomacy. When she crossed under the pine trees, she shielded her eyes and looked up to see where the noise was coming from.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said, and there was that bumbling moment of silence when your mind is all thumbs and you don’t know who the two of you are to each other anymore. Then Lill lifted her arms and I rushed in. The strength of our grip obliterated the necessity for footnotes. “How are you doing?”

  “Idle pleasantries or the truth?” Her voice was next to my ear and she gave me a last quick compression that signaled the end of our hug. “I’m worried about Jude. She’d never admit it to you, but she’s beginning to wonder if we’ve bitten off more than we can chew.” Lill sat down on the bench, kicked off her shoes, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Has she told you any of the crap that’s been going on?”

  I shook my head.

  “Remember your next door neighbors, the Sweets?”

  “Sure, they used to bake for us. Treated us like we didn’t own an oven.”

  “Jude thinks he’s the one who’s been making the phone calls. She recognizes his voice.”

  “What phone calls?”

  “His standard line is something about Sodom and Gomorrah. He’ll call in the middle of the night. Last time he called, she blew a bike horn into the receiver and hung up. She won’t call the police. Two weeks ago someone put a dead cat on our porch with a Tampax sticking out its ass.” The fists she made with her toes squeezed the blood out of the knuckles. “I keep expecting rocks through the windows.”

  “No wonder the kids are freaked out.”

  “We’ve kept most of it from them. Not a very good advertisement for living with their mother, is it?”

  “How are you handling it?”

  “Better than Jude. Something in my checkered past must have calloused me to this kind of crap. But it’s been ages since we were intimate.”

  “Whoa. That’s more than I need to know.”

  “She acts like I’ve been seeing someone on the side.” Maybe that was the genesis of Jude’s question to me on the phone about Lill. “I’ve been canned goods. Honest. She found a wine glass on the nightstand and thought it was suspicious. I told her it was poltergeist.”

  I cut her off. “Lill, I think the kids should live with me. I don’t want another suicide attempt.”

  “You must think I’m a witch. First I eat your wife, now I screw up your kids. Cyrus, if she loses one of the kids, our relationship is history.”

  “Just talk to her, okay?”

  “What makes you think she’ll listen?”

  “Make it sound like a way to get back at me.”

  Lill shook her head. “It’s like you two had never met. You’re not exactly Attila the Hun. You’re actually fairly well evolved. Considering.” She squinted into the sun. “I’ll talk to her.” She shook her head and started to water up. “Dammit, I don’t want anything to happen to the kids either.” She shook her hair and sniffed to clear away the sentiment. “God, look at me.”

  There was one more thing I was dying to ask her and something told me she’d be willing to talk. “How did it happen, Lill?”

  She knew exactly what I meant. “Jude and me?”

  “Yeah.”

  She cupped my hands together, then cracked them slightly open. “Whitman said sexuality is like the clef of a symphony. A signature.”

  I stared at the gap between my two thumbs. “That’s it? Just sex?”

  She smiled. “Don’t ever say just sex. You can’t separate sexuality from humanity.” She said it softly and squeezed my hands back together. “Personally, I’ve always considered it an extension of our appetite for intimacy.”

  “Did it have anything to do with her Uncle Edgar?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “If every little girl who got molested turned gay, we’d outnumber the Democrats.”

  “So how could you two … have husbands?”

  “There’s no big line in the sand, Cyrus. We all have the capacity to be intimate with the right person.” She rubbed my hands. “You remember Isolde?”

  “Sure, your German friend.”

  “She said it was a matter of not being able to read the music. When I married, I was still trying to figure out the music. Still am.”

  “But Jude …”

  “Relax.” The lilliputian laugh lines running from the corners of her eyes and mouth disappeared. “Think of yourself as a midwife. You helped deliver Jude into the place where she belongs.”

  “Its a nice thought, but I feel cheated at the thought that our marriage was just some rite of passage. If that’s what it was, we shouldn’t have brought kids into it.”

  “Life toys with us,” she said.

  As Lill and I walked out together, I puzzled over the idea of Jude as a prisoner. She must have been miserable pretending to be the good heterosexual mate, attending firm socials, talking wife-to-wife with my mom on family visits, trying to generate the affection in bed she knew was expected. I was tempted to take Lill’s hand. It had been so long since I felt the softness of someone else’s palm, and each time I saw her she seemed less the idealogue and more the pulsing, stumbling human being. The noise intensified as we came closer to the birds. There were crows in the two tallest trees taking turns swooping into the middle tree, going as deep as the trunk, then emerging into the open air and attacking again.

  “My God, there’s an owl up there.” I stood behind her and pointed with her arm. “See him?”

  She moved her head against mine and I could smell cream soda in her hair. “Why are they doing that?”

  “The owl is the predator.”

  “But she’s minding her own business.”

  “They want her out of the park.”

  Derek was supposed to be at the main entrance of Seward after the last bell for a show and dinner with Jude, but he never showed. It was part of her campaign for more one-on-one time with the kids. She told me she waited a half hour, walked the hallways, then went home and started calling his friends. Finally, she called the Seward principal, who summoned me and Jude to his office.

  Mr. Washington stood about six foot three, spoke in a deep plantation-owner voice, and had the physique of the linebacker he used to be when he played for the Huskies. I wondered why the School District would waste such brawn in an elementary school where the kids still queued for lunch and fire drills. He’d already loosened his tie and collar.

  “Shouldn’t we be calling the police, Mrs. Stapleton?”

  Jude wisely let the mistaken title pass. There was no sense confusing the school district with the intricacies of our domestic situation. “I think he’ll show up. There’ll be some simple explanation.”

  “You’re the lawyer, Mr. Stapleton, what’s the standard operating procedure here?”

  I imagined Jude bristling the way she used to when my dad directed political questions to me. She was chewing the insides of her cheeks. Derek had seemed fine last time we talked on the phone. We’d joked about Jim Zorn, the pass-crazy quarterback of the Seahawks. Derek said he was afraid they were going to lose to the Raiders on Sunday. Pessimistic but not suicidal. “I think we should report him missing.”

  Mr. Washington sat on the edge of his desk. “That all right with you, Ma’am?”

  “Sure.”

  “Use my phone,” he said, tugging on his tie. “I’ve already left word with his teacher in case she hears anything. She said he’s been a little quiet lately. I understand he’s usually quite the comedian.”

  Jude gave me a knowing look, and I wondered if
we should have mentioned what happened with Justine. We’d been faithful, at Justine’s request, in keeping it a secret. Mr. Washington stepped out of the office while Jude called nine-one-one. She gave her home phone number and mine. The emergency operator probably figured another broken home, no wonder the kid was missing.

  “Why don’t we do some looking around on our own, Jude? Maybe he’s back home by now.”

  Mr. Washington re-entered the office with a short stack of file folders. “I’ll be here a while. Give me a call when you hear something.”

  “We really appreciate your help,” I said.

  “You attorneys must get cases like this all the time,” he said.

  We shook hands. His felt as big as a baseball glove.

  I stopped by to pick up Justine and Magpie at the house and we drove the Seward neighborhood, determined to do every alley and street between I-5 and Lake Union. Jude took the Roanoke Park area. I tried to visualize all the possible harmless explanations for his disappearance, but Justine’s anxiety was contagious. As we crept down bumpy alleys between garbage cans and heaps of grass clippings and hedge trimmings, I kept expecting to find him slumped against someone’s garage door, crippled from a hit-and-run.

  “I knew he was upset,” Justine said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The way he’s just shut down. He used to defend Mom. Now he’s given up.”

  Justine had my full attention. She knew about giving up. I watched her as she rubbed her thumbs hard against her index fingers and rotated her head trying to see both sides of the street. Derek was always so positive. Maybe I hadn’t given him enough credit, ignoring the possibility that he’d inherited my own ability to dissemble and rationalize. We passed sailboats drydocked on blocks along the waterfront with extension cords and tarps draped over the gunnels and guys with face masks sanding keels that rested inches off the ground. We drove every street between Seward School and the Alhambra, and then I called the desk officer to see if the police had found him. No luck.

  Justine and Magpie came back with me to the Alhambra. Neither Justine or I were hungry, so we fed Magpie and then just lay on the floor petting her, waiting for the phone to ring. At a few minutes after nine, there were footsteps coming down the stairs. Ka, bum. Ka, bum. It was the syncopation of dejection. We herded to the door and swung it open.

  “Where have you been? The police have been looking all over for you.” Now that he was apparently safe, Justine reverted to her role of Derek’s guardian.

  Derek just stood there in the doorway, shivering in his short-sleeve shirt, his pants wet half-way up the calves, and his tennis shoes caked with clay. There were blotches of grime around his eyes where he’d been rubbing them. He ignored Justine.

  “We’ve been worried about you, partner.” His school book with the Rolling Stones cover dropped open-faced onto the floor, spilling note papers. Magpie sniffed the mud on his pants.

  “Are you going to ground him, Dad?”

  “I need to find out what happened first.”

  “It looks like he’s been goofing off in some swamp.”

  I wished Justine could back off and show her little brother a portion of the compassion I knew was inside her. I patted him on the shoulder and stroked his hair the same way I used to when he woke up with a bad dream and crawled into the waterbed with Jude and me. It always mystified me what a three-year-old had to worry about.

  “I wasn’t goofing around.” Derek’s words were muffled by my stomach.

  “Then what were you doing?”

  I frowned at Justine. “Get some dry clothes on,” I said. “Then we can talk.” The kids kept spare clothes at the Alhambra so they wouldn’t have so much to carry back and forth.

  Magpie, the most non-judgmental member of the household, followed Derek into the bedroom.

  “You better call the police,” Justine said, unable to resist organizing me.

  I called Jude to tell her that Derek was safe and that the kids were going to stay with me overnight. The Alhambra had become the kids’ half-way house, the place they came to when things flared up at their mom’s.

  While we ate toast and sipped hot chocolate at the kitchen table, Derek, in his print guitar and harmonica pajamas, told us how he’d left school and hiked through Interlaken, a steep, forested ravine that cut pie-shaped wedges into the north end of Capitol Hill, and then into the Arboretum. He pulled up his sleeves and showed us the rash from the nettles he’d encountered while hiding under the 520 bridge. Once it got dark, he heard two men shouting at each other.

  “One of them kept saying he’d cut the other guy’s balls off.” His story sounded like one of his childhood nightmares.

  “Why didn’t you just come home?” Justine asked.

  His cheeks bulged with a bite of toast. “Didn’t feel like it.”

  “Are you still pissed at Mom?”

  “Justine, watch your language.”

  Derek gulped a lump down his throat and answered. “Yeah, kind of.”

  That seemed to satisfy Justine because she got up, took a spoon out of the drawer, and reached into the bottom of the Nestle’s carton. Her spoon tapped the metal bottom, scraped against the sides, and emerged with a heaping scoop of cocoa crystals that she dumped onto a saucer. She rejoined us at the table and begin dipping her licked finger into the chocolate.

  After they’d brushed their teeth, I tucked Justine into the hide-abed in the living room. Even though it was for only one night, she’d made the room look like an estate sale, with clothes draped on the furniture and hangers suspended from the candelabra in the floor lamp. She also stationed two folding chairs next to the bed for her lotions, Kleenex, brushes, and magazines.

  “I’m glad he’s home, Dad, but you have to talk to him about Mom’s thing.” Alone with me, she was soft and worried again.

  Derek was under the covers flat on his back and his eyes wide open when I came into his room. He’d made a bed on the floor out of pillows and blankets for Magpie, who lay there gazing adoringly at Derek. I took a seat on the edge of the bed and wedged my cold toes under Magpie’s belly.

  “Okay, why’d you skip out on your mom?”

  He twisted his head sideways and pulled his knees up as if to protect his balls and mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want anyone to see her.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’d know I lied.”

  “About what?”

  He forced his eyes shut so tight they made creases like cat whiskers from the corners. “I told everyone she was dead.”

  I waited for him to elaborate, but he was more comfortable taking questions. Magpie, whose back legs scissor-kicked in little jerks, had already fallen asleep and was in her first dream. Derek leaned off the bed and put his hand on her side until she stopped kicking.

  “Did you consider telling them the truth?”

  “They’d think she’s a freak.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I know she’s not normal.”

  It would have been easier for me to argue Derek’s side of the allegation, but I knew he wanted to be proven wrong. I remembered when I was young my grandpa on Mom’s side making me read G. K. Chesterton’s The Defendant, which had essays on the defense of nonsense, the defense of rash vows, and the defense of ugly things. Reading that book was as much as anything else I could point to the reason I became a lawyer. “Mediocre people are normal,” I said. “You know Albert Einstein?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wasn’t normal. He invented the theory of relativity and helped develop the atomic bomb even though he was a pacifist. Einstein was a genius.”

  Derek stared at the ceiling. “Name someone else.”

  I had to think for a minute. “Stevie Wonder.”

  “He’s blind.”

  “Has to read with his ears. What’s normal about that?”

  “Who else?”

  I was on a roll. “Did your mom ever tell yo
u about the time she and Justine camped out on the federal courthouse lawn?”

  “No.”

  “Justine was seven. She and your mom chanted and waved banners protesting the war in Viet Nam and slept overnight in Army tents with a bunch of strangers.”

  “Really?”

  “You were there too, inside your mom. She was eight months pregnant. Does that sound normal?”

  He raised up on his elbows. “I know Viet Nam was bad.”

  “Everyone says that now, but not the night your mom slept downtown.”

  “Why didn’t you go with us?”

  That was the same thing Jude had asked me, but there was no way I was going to join a bunch of street protestors when I was in my first job in a downtown law firm and hoping to someday make partner. “I was embarrassed someone I knew would see me,” I said.

  His eyebrows registered surprise. “You mean Mom had more guts than you did?”

  “Pretty bad, huh? Let me tell you something else about your mom. I think she’s in love.” His blink popped his stare like a soap bubble. “That’s normal as water. Parents love kids even when they screw up. You love Magpie when she chews up your hardball. Your mom loves Lill.” Derek fell back and wrapped his hands underneath the pillow, sifting it all to make sure there weren’t any clinkers. I put my hand on his head. The pulse of a million nine-year-old molecules warmed my palm.

  “Why do people call them queers?”

  “The same people said Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth.”

  “That’s how I felt under the freeway. Like I’d fallen off the edge of the earth.”

  14.

  Rush hour traffic on Interstate 90 was bumper-to-bumper across the floating bridge, but I let people cut in front of me with a wave of my hand. Warren and I were on the way to Quincy, and I was hoping homecooking and twenty laps around the track at the high school would help me get my bearings. At Factoria, the logjam loosened and pavement started to reappear between cars like a murky river as the aggressive ones blinkered their way into the passing lane. We gassed at the Shell station in North Bend and bought snacks at the mini-mart. With each odd mile on the odometer we earned a stale pretzel ring. On the even ones we got to swig from the Gatorade wedged between my gym bag and the back of the passenger seat.