A Good Divorce

by John E. Keegan

  I’d always dreamt of Justine getting into ball sports but instead she tried out for a seat in an eight-woman novice shell for her age group on the Green Lake Rowing Club. I’d get up at five, bike over to Green Lake, and watch her skim across the mist against an Orange Julius sunrise. She was developing callouses on her hands and muscles in her shoulders. One night she left a folded note on my pillow.

  Dad, I’m finally into respect for the body.

  I never thought I’d enjoy the company of just girls.

  Love, Justine.

  It was remarkable that she could say it and that I could hear it without panicking.

  Just when she’d been promoted to a paying position at the ACLU, Jude announced that she was quitting and going to law school. I knew exactly what was happening. The law represented power and she wanted a piece of it. I didn’t know why she felt she had to, though; she could already out-lawyer me. The only problem was money. She didn’t have any and neither did I because, on Memorial Day, I took a leave of absence from the firm. It wasn’t the law I was leaving as much as the institution of the law. I wanted a break from the whispering and tittering at the office and a reprieve from the purgatory of tracking my life in tenth-of-an-hour billable increments. It made it easier to tell everyone that the leave was temporary so that I could teach at Seattle Central Community College in the fall. Meantime, however, it was June and I was unemployed for the first summer since sixth grade.

  At bottom though, I was no different than every other child born. I needed to know what my parents thought, which now was only half-possible because Dad had passed away before I could tell him how I’d finally taken the bat off my shoulder. I wasn’t sure how pleased he’d be but I wished I had him back for another try at it.

  He would have certainly despaired if he knew what I really wanted to do: open my own coffee house, a place with daily newspapers and literary journals on a rack where people lingered to play cards and chess or just drink coffee and shoot the breeze. There would be New York cheesecake and bagels and an open mike in the evenings for folksongs or readings. Justine and Derek would work there washing dishes and waiting tables. I’d always regretted that I had no place to employ them the way Dad had done for us at the Thriftway. When things were slow, I figured I could sit in the corner and read or write in my journal.

  I covered the Plymouth with a tarp to protect it from the weather and bird droppings, and to save money. When I had to go anywhere, I rode the bus or used the Raleigh ten-speed that I’d pulled out of the storage locker and chained to a pipe in the laundry room. It was surprising, though, how few places I needed to go, especially when the kids weren’t with me. There was no one asking me to meet them at construction sites or fancy restaurants anymore. I’d strike up conversations with other unemployed people in the donut shop and we’d bitch about the Mariners, maybe even talk about religion and politics. I was Billy Bigelow, the irresolute carousel barker who couldn’t hold a job. But at least my life wasn’t linear anymore. I could skip the newspaper whenever I wanted to and it no longer made me uneasy to use a pants hanger for a shirt.

  Warren was still disturbed at the results of the hearing. He accused me of taking a dive and, for a while, whenever I asked him to play handball he said he was busy. I finally realized that, for him, the two of us were twins who were supposed to speak with the same voice on the big issues. When I spoke up for Jude, I’d changed course without warning, leaving him running hell-bent in support of a charge that had been called off. Most of all, he was hurt because he wasn’t in on it. But his turn was coming. Mandy took him back and her due date was less than a month away. One evening they came over and we propped Mandy up sideways on the couch with pillows under her stomach and between her legs and talked about the child birthing classes they’d been taking at Group Health. Warren went around my apartment child-proofing everything within three feet of the floor. When Mandy had to go to the bathroom for the third time that evening, he pulled me aside in the kitchen.

  “She’s going to be a good mother, isn’t she?”

  “Salt of the earth.”

  “We’re gonna get married too,” he said, and for a moment I thought my little brother had finally undergone the sea change we’d been hoping for. Then, with a perfectly straight face, he asked me if I could co-sign a loan for a station wagon. “Something big enough for the three of us.”

  By mutual agreement with Jude, the kids rotated every other month between us. Finally, there was a chance to share a life with the kids that had weekdays as well as weekends and disappointments that didn’t have to be purged by Sunday night before they returned to their mom’s. I found Derek a summer job at St. Joseph’s cutting the grass and walking the pastor’s arthritic Irish wolfhound. He put half of his proceeds into the peanut butter jar for my movie money.

  “Till you’re working again,” he said.

  Derek’s soccer coach quit and Derek recruited me to replace him.

  “They just need someone’s name on the form,” he said. My son, the lawyer. “We’re old enough to coach ourselves.”

  Wrong. When I arrived at the first practice, they were shaking bottles of soda and spraying each other with fizz. I made them run laps around the perimeter of the playground, something Derek said their real coach would have never made them do. At the first game, I didn’t let him start and he was flummoxed.

  “You don’t want people to think I put you in ’cause you’re the coach’s son, do you?”

  Even the characters in my dreams changed. No more Leo Pescaras who belched and bragged like they owned the town, and me. I’d regressed to earlier periods in my life, beer keggers at the river with guys standing on rocks and howling like wolves, asking Dad if I could borrow the Buick for an outdoor movie or a golf game. Old girlfriends showed up in my dreams, but they were always with other guys. Someone walked by with Margaret Miller on his arm and gave me an upside-down finger from behind her bum. I started writing my dreams down in a stenographer’s tablet that I kept under the bed with a pen in the spiral. In case the kids found it, I named all the girls Jude. It wasn’t a lie. I was physically, if not whimsically, celibate, still building up steam to find the new Jude in my life.

  The months off without the kids were a little depressing. When I walked by Boondock’s in the evening and saw men in pinstriped suits and loosened ties leaning over their tables in spirited conversation I experienced a fleeting grief. That used to be me in the candlelight with something or other on the rocks, still fired up with the adrenaline of a day in court or a settlement I’d just inked, needing someone to pat me on the back and admire my work. I was in the appetizers-with-dinner-and-a-bottle-of-Bordeaux lane then. But the world I didn’t think could survive without me had already forgotten me. I was just a guy in a pair of jeans and a baseball cap who passed unnoticed outside their window. And I was grateful that the law forbade the poor as well as the rich from sleeping under bridges.

  The most frequently asked questions from the few friends I’d held onto were why did I quit my job and when was I getting married again. For those who knew Jude, but had lost touch with her, they also asked if she’d remarried. That was still her mother’s hope, who told me she’d offered to pay for Jude’s therapy to get her over this condition. Jude refused and her mom went instead.

  Whenever I ran into Lill while we were handing off the kids, I tried to act as if nothing had happened between the two of us, which was hard because she was still the only woman beside Jude who held any interest for me. But now she was the boat fender that kept me and Jude from bumping into each other when the water got choppy. On one of our handoffs, she whispered that she and Jude were intimate again, a concept I still hadn’t fully digested.

  Jude’s and my lives were back on parallel tracks. We didn’t see that much of each other and the kids gave me periodic reports of what was happening on the other rail. Neither of us had exactly melted our swords into plowshares but we engaged in certain forms of cultural and economic assistance. Jude p
assed along joint custody articles from Ms. with notes in the margin that said, Thought you’d be interested. She’d still never said anything to me about my testimony in the hearing. For a while, I looked for a note in the mail from her and left spaces in our telephone conversations hoping she’d say something.

  For Justine’s birthday, Lill wanted to organize a surprise party at the Alhambra. She’d make all the arrangements. “All you have to do is pick up an apple-shaped cake with a 16 on it,” she told me. “Chocolate with cherry frosting.”

  I walked over to Pacific Desert and had coffee and a croissant while they finished the decorating. It was amazing how many other people were sipping refills at one-thirty in the afternoon. Justine thought the party was going to be a dinner for her, Derek, and me followed by a movie (I let her choose Grease over a Woody Allen film). Dinner with her dad and brother was no big deal; she’d already planned the real birthday party with friends.

  The night of the dinner I picked the kids up at their mom’s and stopped by the Safeway for some Haagen-Dazs on the way back to kill time. Justine blushed as pink as the streamers when she stepped into my apartment.

  “Dad, you did this?”

  Derek and I played our parts right to the end. While I was putting the dinner on for the three of us, I asked her if she’d get the candles out of my closet. That was supposed to be the trigger. I’d thought about how stubborn she could be and decided it had to be something innocuous enough not to raise suspicion yet important enough to warrant the energy of a sixteen-year old.

  Derek smirked.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  We tip-toed behind her as she walked down the hall and into my room. The paneled door coasters rolled in their trough. Then Justine screamed as Jude emerged from the closet in her peasant dress, and Lill, barefoot, in a lime-green jumpsuit. Finally, a third person came out with a paper sack on his head, groping toward Justine.

  “That’s Warren,” she said, and she was right.

  Derek looked at me as if to see if I was okay with all of this. I wasn’t sure. When Lill first mentioned a family get-together, I was skeptical: it would either be total silence or a name-calling donnybrook. The six of us, including the wife who’d left me and the woman who’d refused me for my wife, stood there in the narrow space between the end of the bed and the closet. Jude and I shook hands.

  The dinner conversation was surprisingly animated. It was like we’d been lost and suddenly came upon each other in a glade, everyone trying to talk louder than the next person. I watched the kids’ faces as Jude told the latest story about Mr. Sweet.

  “They wouldn’t dare try that kind of crap if Dad lived there,” Derek said. I looked at Jude to see if she was going to correct this residue of sexism.

  She swigged another gulp of the zinfandel before commenting, her voice starting to get a little sloppy. “Don’t expect him to join us soon. Your dad’s not so keen on communes.”

  “That’s old news, Jude. Unemployment has changed my perspective.”

  When we finished eating, Lill volunteered to take lead on the dishes while Warren and I walked the dog. We took the route toward Volunteer Park, Magpie working both sides of the sidewalk. When she found a smell she wanted to study, she spread her legs and became as immovable as a butcher block, an annoying habit that had often irritated me. I figured if we were going for a walk, let’s cover the allotted distance and get back home. It was the same thing I’d been doing for the past year—trying to change everyone’s shape to fit the pigeonholes I’d created for them. Tonight, the rubber was starting to resume its natural shape and it made me giddy.

  “You know something, Warren? I could actually live with Jude in the same house. I mean I wouldn’t do it, but it means I’m not scared of her anymore.”

  “I didn’t know you ever were.”

  I slipped my arm around his shoulder and pulled him next to me so I could feel the rhythm of his step. “You know how you don’t know how hungry you are till you sit down to eat? Well, I didn’t know how much I was trying to pull away from her until I felt it was safe to be in the same room together.”

  “One piece of advice and then I’ll butt out,” Warren said. “Don’t move in with your ex-wife. It’ll be death to dating.”

  When we got back to the apartment, Lill was playing scrabble with the kids on the floor, the three of them lying on different sides of the board. Magpie waded into the formation to get some recognition and Derek had to hold her back by the collar. Justine tried to cover the tiles with her hands when she saw me studying the words. Crap and dammit shared an a and tush built off the t.

  “Cuss scrabble,” Lill said sheepishly. “Sorry, Cyrus. I just wanted to see what words they knew.”

  I smiled to myself, the kind of hidden crack in the heart that makes you feel momentarily lighter. “Where’s Jude?”

  “Stomach cramps,” Lill said. “She’s in the kids’ room.”

  “Too much vino.”

  “I think she’s just tired. I hope it’s okay she’s using their bedroom.”

  I hung up my coat and draped the dog leash over its hook in the closet. A headache was advancing from the horizon of my skull toward the crown. The cheaper the wine, the bigger and quicker the hangover. I heard Warren asking if he could join the scrabble game as I walked down the hall toward the kids’ room. I didn’t even know why I was doing it. Jude was Lill’s to administer to now. I guessed it was curiosity, wanting to know what she thought of the evening. The door was ajar and the room pitch dark. If she was asleep, I’d just leave her be. I made a warning tap on the door with the pads of my fingers as I went in. There was no answer. The light from the living room provided enough candlepower to see the lump under the covers. I knelt down next to the kids’ twin bed, my knee resting on what must have been one of Jude’s shoes. The room smelled of dirty clothes and sheets that needed laundering. As my pupils dilated, I could make out the hair on the back of her head. Judging from the shape of the lump, she must have pulled her knees up to her chest.

  “Jude, it’s me.”

  She drew her head further under the sheets like a turtle, then the fingers of one hand reached up and combed the hair back over one ear. The box springs creaked as she stretched her legs toward the footboard. An elbow emerged and pushed the bedspread and blankets away from her head. She rolled onto her back and looked straight up at the ceiling. I studied her familiar profile, the generous eyebrows, the Roman arch in the bridge of the nose, and the parted lips that were dry from breathing through her mouth.

  “Can I get you something?”

  “I feel sick,” she whispered, still not looking at me. “Maybe you better get me a pan.”

  I almost put my palm on her forehead to check her temperature. “Sure, just a minute.”

  I went to the bathroom and checked the wastebasket, which had a flattened toothpaste box and some crumpled toilet paper on the bottom and a used string of dental floss caught on the rim. With my bare hands and bar soap, I scrubbed the drinking glass that we kept our toothbrushes in, rinsed it, and filled it with cold water. I rolled up the bath mat, grabbed the wastebasket and water, and reentered the hallway. There was laughter and clapping at the scrabble board. Somebody yelled, “‘Caca’s’ cussing,” and I turned into the bedroom and pushed the door shut far enough to muffle the noise.

  When I’d finished setting up the vomit basket in the center of the mat, Jude had turned herself over and was facing me. “They’re having a good time,” she said.

  “Yeah, do you believe it?”

  Her face glistened with sweat. “Not much has changed, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re still taking care of me.”

  “I don’t ever remember you sick. I kind of like you this way.”

  She started to laugh, then grimaced as she pushed a fist toward her abdomen and doubled up. I resisted the temptation to give her a pat on the shoulder. She looked the way I
felt the night I had appendicitis in college, when I played shuffleboard at the Century Tavern and thought it was just gas pains from the beer and pepperoni sticks until the pain localized to where it felt like someone had left a jack-knife open inside me. “Maybe I’ve got a bleeding ulcer.”

  “That’s doesn’t come until law school.”

  She grimaced again. “Maybe I’m not as tough as I thought.”

  I didn’t want to say anything else that would make her laugh, which was a new idea, worrying that she’d laugh too much. “I can’t believe I ever seriously considered the kids living without you.”

  The side of her head sunk into the pillow so that her lips rubbed against the pillowcase as she spoke. “I did. Remember when Justine was a baby and I set her down behind the wheel of that car in the parking lot and she was almost killed? For years, I couldn’t tell anyone about it, not even my mom. I thought it meant I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. I never understood why you didn’t just yell and scream at me.” She licked her lips. “When the kids acted up this year, that whole incident came back to me and I lost my confidence. I knew I was a mediocre wife but I was scared to death I was going to turn out to be a crappy mother too. That’s why I couldn’t believe what you did.”

  “You mean …”

  “Testify for me. You had me by the balls, Cyrus.”

  She was drained of the bravado I’d come to fear, and it felt as if she’d hear me if I answered in my own voice. No more spitting into the wind. “You’d have won without me.”

  “I’m so tired of wasting energy changing pronouns to hide the fact that I’m living with a woman and worrying about whether my mother will approve.”

  I remembered the vet putting my dog to sleep when I was a kid and holding her until she went still in my arms. Something was expiring between Jude and me and I wanted to hold on to her until it was gone.

  “You’re a scrapper, Jude.”