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“These are cultural differences,” Doug said. “If you’re dating somebody from Paraguay—Paraguay is a factor in the relationship.”

“Models, Doug!” Jeannie said, coming over to them. “Have you met anybody?”

Doug looked across the room at several glamorous women in studied poses.

“Do you have any idea of the vastness of my inexperience? I have never made love to a model or to a black woman, no Russians, Eskimos.”

“There’s a Hawaiian model here. I’ll introduce you.”

“Hawaii sounds good. The drinks are a little sweet, but I’m interested.”

“What’s on their minds?” Sarah Kleinman asked, referring to the models sprinkled through the room like confetti.

“Looking perfect,” Jeannie said.

She located the Hawaiian model, a tall dark-haired woman in her 20s promoting her ethnicity by wearing a floral top and a sarong. Her first words privately to Doug were, “You think I can score some coke here?” and Doug, laughing at the impossibility of the matchup, said, “I don’t even think you can get a Mai Tai.”

When the party ended, Doug, Bob, Sarah, and Jeannie remained drinking tea and coffee.

“I wonder what those models do when their looks start to go,” Sarah said.

“They get a few good years,” Jeannie answered. “By then they should be married to someone successful and get taken care of.”

“That is definitely a pre-women’s lib idea,” Doug teased.

“Frankly, I’m getting a little shaky on the subject as I get older.”

“From what I see, women’s lib is dead,” Bob announced.

“In your case it was never alive,” Jeannie countered.

“I can tell in business,” Bob said. “Women are confused. The pendulum is swinging back.”

“We’d be right where we were before the arguments,” Doug said. “Then what did we get?”

“What we got was divorced,” Jeannie answered.

What we got was divorced. At home after the party, he thought about that time, the 1970s, the rhetoric, the media attention women were getting, the articles, the books, and then the articles and books about the articles and books.

They were at a dinner party; Bob Kleinman, the host, had cooked and served the meal while his first wife, Helena, sat in triumph and self-contentment smoking a cigarillo, looking like Wyatt Earp. The men were in disarray. All five present had risen and bumped into each other in an effort to briskly clear the dishes and prove, There are no pigs here. It was a historic period, the Time When the Men Cleared.

Every Wednesday night Susan went to a consciousness-raising group. She had a secret world. Her expectations about going, the afterglow, seemed to Doug what it must be like to watch as your wife left for assignations. One night she returned from the group and did not acknowledge him. She sat in the living room, thoughtful.

“How did it go?”

“It was extraordinary.”

“In what way?”

“I can’t even begin to describe it.”

“What do you mean?”

She did not answer.

“Susan—”

Wearily she tried. “The emotions. The currents in the room.”

“For instance?”

She just shrugged. It was not describable. It would be trivializing to tell him.

Susan announced she and her sisters were going to make serious changes in their personal lives, with fixed schedules outlining new, equal divisions of labor in their relationships. Doug would have to agree to a specific schedule which covered shopping for meals, cooking meals, doing dishes, bathing children, straightening the house. He was against the idea of legislating this. He spent more time on household and children than any man they knew.

“It’s so trivial. I can’t believe that after a year of sessions, this is what you women have come to.”

“Don’t say ‘you women.’ And it isn’t trivial. It’s fundamental, the way we conduct our lives. And it’s non-negotiable.”

To keep peace in the marriage and out of what he regarded as his libertarian sense, he maintained the schedule. He detested it, the watchfulness required to administer it. He didn’t need a schedule to tell him his role. He knew the role. He was there for the viruses and the conjunctivitis and the hacking coughs in the early hours and the dead goldfish and the hamsters, the hamster he nursed back to life after it was stepped on and which then turned around and bit him. Was that Andy’s hamster or Karen’s? Their viruses and their hamsters had begun to merge.

Eventually Susan went back to work. She had been a sportswear buyer before the children were born and the new job was with a buying office whose accounts were out-of-town stores. They hired a part-time housekeeper and the schedule became irrelevant. Doug was involved in the household as he was before, and when Susan left this job because she wasn’t “happy,” Doug was responsible for the bills as he was before. When she left her next job because of “personalities,” the myth of equality in their roles was over. The financial burden of the family was his as it had always been. She slept nights and he was up at 1:36, 2:49, worrying about money.

“If the bills are keeping you awake, earn more money. Who says you have to work at the
Post?
You didn’t come into the world employed by the
New York Post.
John McCarthy walked away from it and does fabulously. You could do what he does.”

“ ‘As Told To’ books?”

“Books, PR for a ball club, I don’t know. I didn’t tell you to do this kind of work, you picked it. If you’re so worried about money, make more money. Don’t look at me.

“I find this extraordinary from a feminist. Make more money. Scratch the surface and what you really want is a sugar daddy.”

“And wouldn’t you like a sweet little wifey who waits for you at night and wiggles her tush and fetches whatever lambie pie wants?”

“Look at us. Right out on the ramparts of modern marriage and I don’t think we could do five cogent minutes on the Donahue Show.”

Their styles were different. When he was in charge of the children he let them take care of their own schoolwork, bedtimes sometimes became extended. Susan felt that by being too relaxed they were not teaching them responsibility.

“I don’t like always being the bad guy around here.”

“Susan, this is not network TV. It doesn’t matter if they run a little over.”

She began to freelance as a consultant for a fashion-merchandising service. Her hours and pay were erratic. Their arguments about money, life-style, the children were repeated so often they could phone them in, and with Susan visiting department stores in other cities and Doug on the road at times covering ball games, they
were
phoning them in. He sometimes thought their marriage was like an urban area that reaches a tip point before which there is hope, after which nothing can salvage it from blight. They drifted in the marriage, a momentum provided by details, the overseeing of school-age children, buying the clothes, the bicycles, the shoes. Doug resented the time she spent away from the household, trips, Saturdays and Sundays she was out researching retail stores, business dinners and after-work drinks she said were necessary for her work. He believed she was using work to place distance between them, she argued her hours would be acceptable if she were a man. And the relationship tipped. As she became more involved in her work, she became less involved in his work and in him, and he became less involved in her work and in her. They were carried along by random reminders of what attracted them originally, flashes of warmth, of humor, of sex, a marriage running on a minimum energy level.

He remembered their wedding, when he got up with the band and sang “I Married an Angel.” And his 35th birthday when he was feeling glum. Imagine feeling glum at 35. 35 is a laugher. Susan walked into a record store and pulled out every Frank Sinatra album in the rack and gave it to him on the spot for a present. What a great thing to do, Susan.

And a crisp day in October, the leaves in Central Park tinged with near-reds and near-yellows, city trees trying to be autumnal. It was late in the afternoon, the sun was low, long shadows. Susan was wearing an Irish sweater and dungarees. He was in chinos, a flannel shirt and a Shetland sweater. They were walking back toward the apartment from the playground. She had her arm across his back and around his shoulder and he had his arm around her waist, their sides lightly touching as they walked. The children—God, were they ever that little?—were trailing behind like loose wash. And he thought that anything in the world he could conceivably want was contained in that moment.

When they were first married they were like a great balloon in bright colors floating over the city. Every year a little leaked out, small amounts one would hardly notice, until, at the end, there was nothing left.

On a weekday night when the children were with him, Doug was reading in the living room, Andy doing homework in his bedroom, and Karen came and snuggled next to him on the couch.

“How’s dear old Dad?”

“I’m good.”

“Seeing anyone lately?”

“Nobody in particular.”

“I used to think you and Mom would get married again. That was my fantasy in the beginning. Now I know you won’t.”

“We can’t. We grew away from each other.”

“I know. But you’re both so nice.”

It still hurts you. And I can’t fix it. I’m so sorry.

The children looked weary to him. He didn’t know if it was because of the demands of their schedules or the custody arrangement. They had been living under joint custody for over two years, going between apartments, coping with the system, the transience, the oversights, the articles of clothing and the books suddenly needed that were left in the other apartment. There wasn’t a previous generation who had lived through joint custody. These children were the first. Was it trendy, like “in” food? Doug wondered. Was joint custody the pesto of divorce?

He wanted to discuss this with Susan. Their usual coffee-shop meeting place didn’t feel appropriate and he suggested they get together at the Hyatt Hotel for a drink after work. In the morning he selected his best shirt, tie and jacket combination, annoyed with himself for doing it, doing it anyway, thinking he would finally be free of her when he could arrange to see her and not spend any time worrying about what he was wearing.

Over drinks he asked if she had noticed signs of weariness in the children or if they had complained about the living arrangements. Susan said she thought they had a difficult schedule, but they hadn’t complained to her.

“In my darkest moments,” Doug said, “I wonder if they’d have a better life just being with you.”

“I say we let it all be. I don’t want to give them any choices. Because if we did—” her voice faltered and she looked more vulnerable than he had seen her in a long time—“they might choose you over me. And that would break my heart.”

“I wasn’t looking for that. Just what’s best for them.”

“To have part of each of us. And we’ll all muddle through.”

For a moment it looked as if the grocery-store correctness between them was changing, then Susan gathered herself and became formal and businesslike and so did he. Doug went home speculating about the corrosive nature of badwill. If goodwill between people can carry a relationship through troubled times, then badwill, once established, becomes impenetrable. Neither his doubts about the children nor her vulnerability were going to soften the atmosphere between them. Once we were Mama Bear and Papa Bear. Now we’re the Badwill Bears. That isn’t so amusing.

A few weeks later he received in the mail an announcement that was astonishing to him. Susan was opening her own company for the creation of store promotions. She had been working for the previous company only a few months. He was certain the move would cut into her share of the expenses, that much was inevitable. She’s out there expressing herself, and I’m stuck with the bill again.

Doug was summoned to Houston for a meeting with Reynolds. He would have to put in an eight-hour day flying down and returning to accommodate Reynolds’s needs. The office was immense, white throughout, the artwork consisting of color blowups of Houston Enterprises holdings. Reynolds sat behind a large white desk. He was wearing a double-breasted tan linen suit and snakeskin boots.

“Doug, boy. Good to see you here.”

“Quite a space you have. I don’t know why I landed at the airport. They could have gotten a plane right in here.”

Reynolds buzzed his secretary on the intercom.

“Send Bill in.”

A stocky crew-cutted man in his 30s appeared. His name was Bill Wall, and his face was without a trace of warmth when he was introduced to Doug, who thought he looked like an FBI agent.

“Bill is our new resident genius. Market researcher extraordinaire and vice-president in charge of operations.”

“We’re installing state-of-the-art research, Doug, in all aspects of the
Sports Day
operation,” Wall said. “Within a year, through the proper research and marketing techniques we can revolutionize the newspaper business.”

Wall made a detailed presentation of circulation projections for the newspaper and marketing strategies for sales to consumers and advertisers.

“At four hundred thousand we’re sitting right behind the
Houston Chronicle
and
Newark Star Ledger
if you compare us to conventional newspapers,” Wall said. “We can pass them both within a few months and move up on the list.”

“And now for you, Doug,” Reynolds said. “This should make you real pleased.”

Wall placed a graph in front of Doug.

“You have the highest percentage of readers of any of our five columnists. And the highest percentage of ‘finishing the article, once begun,’” Wall said.

“As our main all-around columnist, you can help bring us even bigger numbers,” Reynolds told him.

“Each week we’ll be surveying our readers on the sports and sports personalities they’re following,” Wall continued. “We’ll send you computer printouts by geographic region, by age, by sex, telling you what our readers want to read about next. We expect you to use this as a guide in deciding the columns you write.”

“Computerized journalism?” Doug said.

“It’s for your guidance, Doug. You have a responsibility to your readers and to the newspaper to reach as many people as you can,” Reynolds said.