My mom had been through a messy divorce, too. Her and Dad’s relationship had begun like a 1950s fairy tale, at the Brattle Theater candy counter in Cambridge at a time when American men wore felt hats and skinny black ties and women wore cashmere sweater sets. Mom fell for him, a poor Oklahoma boy from an uneducated Baptist family, and broke off her engagement to her brother’s boarding school roommate. Mom’s salary as a special education teacher paid for Dad to go to Harvard Law School, which led to his long corporate career and judgeship. I’d grown up watching her whitewash Dad’s lack of sophistication by throwing bridge parties for the law firm associates, presenting stunningly at social events as a snappy sexpot in her 1970s halter dresses, and beating the partners at golf and tennis outings, all while raising us unaided while Dad spent twelve-hour days at the office. And we kids had not been easy to civilize.
Then, after thirty-two years together, pretty much as soon as she’d raised us and gone back to being a teacher full-time, their relationship collapsed. My father decided he wanted to start over with a younger woman. I didn’t have a choice when it came to loving Mom. Dad apparently did.
Mom was fifty-five. I was twenty-two. In my mother’s WASP world, gentlemen did not leave their wives. She was the first woman in her family to stare down divorce. I heard her crying behind her bedroom door, stunned and shamed by Dad’s abandonment.
Even worse was something I didn’t know at the time: Dad tried, mightily, to mangle my mother financially, despite her years of support. Dad had a pension and investments. Mom earned less than a tenth of his judicial salary teaching autistic children. Despite her parents’ wealth, she hadn’t inherited enough to live on. I suspect Dad thought he’d get away with landslide penury because he was a judge. Mom fought back. She confronted his fiancée at social events, bringing the woman to tears. She called his former law firm partners at their offices. During billable hours! It got ugly.
I myself, having recently graduated from Harvard, was working at Seventeen magazine in New York and was fiscally responsible for the first time in my life. “Responsible” is a relative term, since I earned only seventeen thousand dollars a year, but still. In my sophomoric flush of independence and feminism, I thought Mom cowardly to ask for alimony, to fight to keep the house she’d raised us in, to beg my father for financial support. Oddly, I thought she’d have been a better heroine by going it alone. Like, I don’t know, Ophelia or Juliet, who, I should note, both killed themselves.
I didn’t realize at the time how important economic independence was, or that she was fighting for respect, not simply a monthly check. At the time, I believed Dad’s version. But eventually, a family court judge awarded Mom a generous settlement. When I was older, I came to despise my father’s choices, and respect Mom for gritting it out in order to take care of herself. It took guts, pragmatism, and self-respect. It was not until I had to face Marty in divorce proceedings that I realized how strong, and alone, my mother had been.
Twenty-five years after my parents split up, as I eyed my soon-to-be ex-husband, I wished I’d had Mom back, to teach me how to muster some of that same grit. I didn’t think my dead mother would understand about Dylan or the lifeguards. I have no evidence she ever experienced an orgasm herself or even enjoyed sex. I’m sure Mom would have cheered me on, regardless. The details were different, but like she had been, I was fighting for my future.
As I stood waiting to go into family court, a woman came out of the bathroom, a gray ghost in the dark hallway. Something about her struck me as familiar. She was tiny, barely five feet in high heels. To my surprise, she walked toward me.
“Leslie, is that you?”
I still couldn’t see her face clearly, but I knew her voice. It was Rebecca, the kids’ former favorite babysitter. Rebecca had recently graduated from Yale and started working at a child protection agency in downtown Philly, which explained why she was in family court. I never imagined seeing her, or anyone I knew, here, much less that she’d be the only other person in court. She probably didn’t know we were getting divorced. How could I explain so many years of disappointment in thirty seconds?
Her smile sank when she saw my face. And then, as if she completely understood, she wrapped her arms around me wordlessly and held me tight, the same way she held the kids when they were afraid of the dark.
“We’re getting divorced,” I whispered in her ear. “Please don’t say hi to Marty. He’s been such a dick.”
She held me at arm’s length, grinning. “Marty who? I don’t even think I’d recognize him. Go get ’em. You got this.”
She gave me a pat on my tush and click-clacked away, not even looking at Marty, who had crept up behind us and was standing near a long wooden bench, looking at his cell phone again. I’m sure he didn’t even know who Rebecca was, even though she’d been in our house a dozen times and slept in our bed when we were out of town together.
After I signed approximately 327 legal documents, I was officially single again. A divorcée. The judge barely acknowledged us. Our paperwork, critical and painful to me, seemed to scarcely register on his daily radar. Marty stuck out his hand to shake mine after we signed the last document, as if we were business associates who’d closed a routine financial transaction. As repulsed as if his hand were a rattlesnake, I shook my head no, unable to speak, and rode the elevator up to the exit alone.
My lawyer had instructed me to dress blandly, so I had on a black blouse, an old flowered skirt, and black heels. Despite my shoes, and the fact that I felt like I’d been run over by a Mack truck, I needed the long walk home in the afternoon sun to put space between the sadness of signing my divorce papers and the house that held my favorite family memories. The summer breeze cooled me off, and although I was still sad, the grief was like watered-down iced tea, weak from ice cubes melting. The melancholy faded away.
A man, about forty, passed me on his bike, heading downtown. He wore a short-sleeved, gray Penn dental school T-shirt and faded jeans. He had strong forearms and windblown brown hair. Something in his face prompted me to smile at him.
A minute later, he circled back. He stopped and leaned his ten-speed bike over on one foot. He had on black Puma sneakers, the kind that cool soccer players wore back in high school.
“I have to tell you,” he said, looking at me with basset hound eyes. “I’m not trying to pick you up. But you look so pretty bopping along in your skirt and heels. I had to stop and tell you,” he repeated. “You look . . . happy inside. Have a wonderful day.”
I stood there holding my purse—as dumbfounded as Dorothy when Glenda tells her to click her heels three times—as he got on his bike and pedaled away.
* * *
“I have someone lovely to set you up with,” a woman’s voice chirped out of my voice mail two days after I officially became a divorcée.
My stomach twisted. This had happened a few times before, as word had trickled out to acquaintances that Marty and I had separated. I knew what was coming. I called her back anyway.
She lived in a large stone house in the Philly suburbs, a stay-at-home mom who had been in my class in college. She’d worked in the mayor’s office for three years in her early twenties, then married, quit work, had four kids, and climbed aboard the school-charity-kids carousel with a simplistic gusto I envied but could never match. Her toenails were always painted the coral shade my grandmother favored. The last time I saw her was in Chico’s before Marty and I separated. I was trying to use a gift card my mother-in-law had given me, but there was not a single hot outfit in the entire color-coordinated nursing home. My neighbor had filled two dressing rooms with clothes. “My favorite store!” she’d exclaimed.
Today she picked up after two rings. After perfunctory pleasantries, she started telling me about a man named Dave.
“He is so sweet. I knew him from the mayor’s office. So sad they split up, but you know how it goes. Of course you do!”
I made a murmur of assent into the mouthpiece.
“H
e’s about your age. Dean of the law school at Widener. He asked if I knew any nice women. You were the first one I thought of!”
She sounded like she was handing me a five-carat diamond. Like she expected me to put out my hand and say, “Thank you so much for this priceless gift,” because of course I must want to get remarried again as soon as possible to avoid the ostracism, loneliness, and financial and social uncertainty of being a single woman, struggling and stigmatized.
I wanted to groan at the barely masked pity. As a gleefully married woman on the other side of the invisible divorce divide, she could not possibly know that the last thing I wanted was another husband.
“Hey, that is so nice of you!” I told her. “I’m not really dating now, but I’ll let you know if I am.”
After I hung up, I went to the kitchen computer to Google this Mr. Perfect to be sure I was right in my assumptions. He looked like a clone of Marty. Bald—which, granted, I like. But he was not sexy bald. On the law school website, he looked embarrassed about having no hair. His pinched mouth and frowning forehead telegraphed arrogance and superiority, probably fine qualities for a legal giant. But to me, he resembled the kid on my block growing up who liked to rip wings off flies. Plus he was at least ten, maybe fifteen, years older than I was.
How was any divorced woman in the fiftyish range supposed to feel when this was the attitude of the sisterhood—that after years of sacrificing our careers and independence for our families, a downgrade in husbands was the best we could hope for? I felt the same way when women told me not to fight Marty over money in the divorce. “It’s not worth it,” almost everyone said, as if imparting great wisdom. But we are worth it, I wanted to protest. Statistics prove that women who don’t fight for their share of marital assets and alimony almost always experience a significant, demoralizing drop in standard of living, which often force us to look for another man to marry for economic stability. Without a fair financial settlement after divorce, it was nearly impossible to recoup decades of lost earnings and career immobility, even for a woman like me who’d kept working part-time in exchange for flexibility so I could be my kids’ primary caregivers. I had no regrets about putting my children first and only a few about supporting Marty’s career moves, weekly travel, and late nights out with clients. But now, what good would it do to have gone silently, to be the smiling, submissive ex-wife, to let Marty take the lion’s share of our assets, future income, financial freedom and security? Instead, I hired a lawyer and fought hard so that I could take care of myself, and my kids, for the rest of my life.
Precisely so I could find someone who treated me better than Marty. And in the meantime, I wasn’t going on a single damn date with a man like the guy on the computer screen. I bet five million dollars no one told Marty standing up for himself wasn’t “worth it.” Or tried to set him up with a woman fifteen years older.
Now, every time a well-meaning but clueless married friend attempted to send me on a blind date, it was as if she assumed there were two options for a fiftyish divorcée: a serious downshift in lifestyle and economic security, or remarriage to another man as similar as possible to the ex-husband I had jettisoned. It was as if, because I was divorced and past my prime by society’s carbon dating, another serious heterosexual relationship was my best (or only) option, and that I was searching the globe to find another Marty, only somehow older and even less attractive. I’ve already had that, I felt like saying. I never, ever want that again Don’t you think I’m worth more than that?
It was sufficiently debilitating that my own husband made me feel worthless for years. But now, to have female friends reiterate my lack of value felt like heavy artillery shelling my self-esteem. How could other women be so unimaginative and uninspiring, to think I still wanted what I’d already rejected, a life of being treated like a maid by someone I’d given my heart and body to for twenty years? Don’t all women have the right to feel beautiful and treasured, at every age?
Maybe they’d accepted a reality I couldn’t stomach. After her divorce, a good friend from Minnesota with an MBA from Harvard Business School considered paying thousands to a high-end matchmaker who worked with men who all made more than $250,000 a year. Trish had long, blonde hair and green eyes, and was a successful management consultant at an international firm. I wanted to date her myself.
“You’re wonderful,” Trish told me the group’s founder announced after her ninety-minute interview. “Exactly the type of woman I’d want as my best friend. But I need to reject you.”
She’d be hard to place, the woman explained.
“Because you’re smart, with an impressive education. Because you’re independent and striking. Because you barefoot water-ski at fifty.”
Trish was stunned. So was I when she told me what the matchmaker said next.
“All my male clients will want to go out on a date with you,” the matchmaker explained. “They’ll love you for about three months, the novelty, your mind, your fire. Then, they’ll come back to me and ask for someone more ‘traditional.’ These types of men say they want a partner. In reality, they don’t. They want someone to make their world prettier, to ride in the backseat of their life.”
Ugh. Were there any men out there who appreciated women as equal partners? Was I insane to think men could play a positive role in my life over the long run? All I knew, for certain, is that rather than sell out again to a man like that, I’d sleep in my California King bed by myself forever. Alone.
* * *
Beams of sunshine spliced through the interior of the empty Starbucks where KC and I sat on polished dark wood stools. KC looked every inch the corporate woman in strappy white sandal heels and a tight white sleeveless BCBG power suit that I could not have fit one leg into even back in third grade. We were sipping iced coffees while I waited for the minivan’s AC to be fixed, finally. I brought her up to speed on the details of Dylan’s abrupt departure, the divorce finalization, and the latest inane blind date offering. Then I plunged into what I’d really been considering. It was so audacious, I wasn’t sure that even KC would understand.
“I can’t go on blind dates with losers and I can’t ever let one man let me down like Dylan did,” I told her. “I am not—”
I paused, keeping my voice low, as if I were plotting a drug deal.
“Not that sad, submissive, sexually cauterized wife. I’m a woman who loves men. The way they smell. The way they talk. The way they fuck.”
KC raised her eyebrows in surprise, and then nodded in agreement, her mouth full of lemon square. She knew I was just gathering steam. Forget about keeping my voice low; we were generals charting life and Starbucks was our war room. “Marty only loved me when I met his needs. Marriage was a gilded jail cell. I need to focus on me for a change.”
“Hold on,” KC said when she was done swallowing. She riffled through her purse for a pad of yellow legal paper and a pen. “I’m going to write this all down.”
“Number one. I can’t look for another husband, or even a serious relationship right now,” I told her. “I’m too fragile. Too pissed off about how Marty treated me. Too hurt and vulnerable and warped inside. But I need men in my life. I can’t figure out what I want from men in some kind of sterile vacuum of self-help books and yoga.”
KC tilted her head at me, scribbling with a black Sharpie.
“Here’s what I want: one year, a bunch of men, no commitments. All guys like Dylan. Sweet, cute, smart, transparent, nice. Just fucked-up enough to be interesting, but not too much. Crazy about me. No affair-seeking sleazebags. Any race, religion, profession, location. Aged . . . hmmmm . . . thirty-five to sixty-five. No assholes. Men who make me feel amazing about myself. I’ll have enough men in my life that I won’t get too attached to one. Then, after a year, I’ll figure out what I want long-term.”
Pondering this, she looked out the Starbucks plate-glass window at a Philly city bus letting off passengers at the corner. She put down the yellow legal pad on the table between our co
ffees.
“So girl, you’re sayin’ the amusement park is open for business.”
I tried not to spit out my coffee, causing a small cold squirt to shoot up my nose. KC’s salty verbal bluntness, delivered in her buttery southern accent, always created a shocking juxtaposition. She handed me a napkin with the green Starbucks mermaid on it. When I recovered, I elaborated.
“I want two boyfriends in Philly,” I explained. “And three in other places. So . . . five. Five seems like the right number. Then I can lose one or two and still have a majority left.”
“All at the same time, right? No monogamy or exclusivity?”
“None of those rules. I want to explore men like I’m Queen Isabella conquering the Americas.”
Channeling her inner Wall Street numbers cruncher, KC probed the weaknesses of my plan. She lectured me about condom usage. We decided to tell my kids that I was dating a bit, not looking for anyone to marry, and to keep it at that.
“We need a title for this project, honey. Hmmm . . . How about the Five Boyfriend Plan?”
“But, they’re not gonna be boyfriends, KC.”
“Well, we have to call them something. Fuck buddies, boyfriends, baby daddies . . .” She was smirking behind her coffee cup.
“Those are all terrible. I don’t know what to call them.”
The Naked Truth Page 7