A Good Divorce

A Good Divorce

John E. Keegan

New York

I thank the many people who helped me—critics, sources and supporters—Dennis Adams, Rebecca Brown, Greg Forge, Sharon and Jim Langus, Neil McCluskey, Diane Norkool, Marty and Judith Shepard, Marlene Stone, Bruce Wexler, all of the Rosses, Figys, Dowlings, Hills, Cawleys, Nealeys, Shanti and Riley, my brothers, my parents who lived a long and loving marriage, and especially Carla and David who have been more than any father deserves.

The triggering event for this book is true. I lost the marriage with the woman who is the mother of our children, she found a wonderful and lasting relationship with another person, and we built a good divorce. The story and the characters, however, are fiction, what Ray Bradbury calls gentle lies wishing to be born, the imagining of how it could have been.

JEK

For Mom,

Betsy Ross Keegan, 1922–2003

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky
.

Rainier Maria Rilke Letters (1910–1926)

1.

On Sunday, I drove home from the ocean, constipated, still holding onto the last meal I'd eaten before Jude broke the news. And I feared what she'd told the kids.

We'd met in a psychology class in our senior year at the University of Washington in the early sixties. I'd taken the course as a lark; she was minoring in psychology. The first time we walked over to the HUB after class I bought her coffee and the people in the next booth asked if we played bridge.

“Why not?” I said. It couldn't be any more perplexing than Jung.

With her textbook Goren and my cow town bluff, we had a little trouble communicating at first but Jude made a small slam in clubs and we won the first rubber. I was in heaven that spring. This sophisticated, big-city woman was interested in a kid who'd worked in the sugar beet plant and played basketball for the Quincy Jackrabbits. She thought there was something trustworthy about a man who grew up in a town with a grid street pattern and lived in a dormitory.

“We're going to have a big family,” she'd told everyone when she found out she was pregnant.

When I reached the front door of our house on Broadway, I didn't know whether to knock or just go in. In the hope that our impasse was temporary, I slipped my key into the door and listened to the tumblers engage, all the while praying she hadn't changed the locks. Derek was on the floor petting Magpie, the kids' Labrador with dalmatian paws, and he looked up at me like I was an apparition. Jude had told them. A column of sunlight teeming with floating dust specks shone from the side window to Derek's rectangle on the rug.

“Hey, buddy, where is everyone?”

He stood up, out of respect it seemed, and brushed the dog hair off the front of his pants. Normally he would have given me a hug, but he seemed uncertain of the rules. “Mom's out in back.”

I was still wearing the same clothes I'd left for work in on Friday, except that now the pants were creaseless and my wingtips were speckled with mud. I was grateful the kids hadn't seen me flattened against the sand in the rain like a page of newsprint. I'd promised to take them to the Bumbershoot Festival at the Seattle Center that weekend, and in my panic to get away it hadn't even occurred to me to bring them to the coast. Unconsciously, I'd already conceded them to Jude.

Derek drifted close and I gathered him in. He buried his head against me the way Magpie did when you snuggled her, and his knuckle-whitened hands clung to my jacket pockets. I had to concentrate to keep from crying.

“I better talk to your mom.”

He let me go out the back door alone.

I'd replayed our last Friday together a thousand times. Everything had seemed normal enough. Jude skipped rope in the middle of the kitchen like a prizefighter while I ate my breakfast. She was training for a half-marathon and, after that, a triathalon.

“Thirty-four,” whap, “thirty-five,” whap, “thirty-six.… Can you take your nose out of that newspaper for half a minute?” Whap, step. Whap, step.

“Sorry. It's just that .…” I was two days behind in the newspapers and trying to finish Thursday's
Times
so that I could see the headlines of Friday's
Post-Intelligencer
before leaving for work. It was a game I played. Jude thought I was too linear.

“Just what?” Whap, step.

“It's hard to talk when you're jumping up and down like that.” I found myself chewing toast to the rhythm of her jump rope. She was a metronome.

“I thought you wanted me to lose weight,” she said.

“That's your mother.”

“You said my butt was getting loose.”

“I said I liked something to grab onto … I was just … it was a compliment.” I sipped my Instant Breakfast to wash the crumbs down.

“You're just more subtle than my mother,” she said. Whap, step. Whap, step.

I shook my head and folded up the paper. She once called me an emotional archive because I revealed nothing unless someone else looked it up. Here we were in the era of alternative lifestyles and movements—everyone wanted to go somewhere else other than where they were, people were Moonies, Hare Krishnas, Zero Population Growthers—and her husband wasn't moving. Jude's movement was the liberation of women. She was passionate on the subject.

“Are you in the office this afternoon?” she said.

Jude thought men were so lucky. It didn't matter what they looked like, because they had the correct anatomical equipment. Two pregnancies had spread things around, but if you'd asked me that morning I'd have said she was still a turn-on. She was tall, with copper-colored hair that she used to blow dry when we were first married so that it crowded her face and framed her full rose lips. I could still remember the first time she let me hold the weight of her hair in my hand.

She did come by the office that afternoon. She never came to the office. She hated the extravagance of the marble, brass, and blown glass in the reception area. She'd had it with the haves. To her, the law had become the playground of the propertied classes, the aristocracy of orthodontia and uplift bras.

“I can't do it anymore, Cy.” She was sitting in my grey overstuffed client chair when she announced it. “Our marriage has become a yoke I have to get off my back.”

I fiddled aimlessly with my ballpoint pen. My throat was as stiff as the leather sandals in the back of my closet that I hadn't worn since law school. I'd need a shoehorn to force words through it. Her leaving was the implied threat of every argument we'd ever had. The prospect of divorce gave power to those encounters. “Why didn't you tell me this last night?”

“You don't like to talk about heavy stuff before going to sleep. Remember?”

She was right. I hated it when she unloaded on me at night and then, unburdened, fell fast asleep while I stared at the ceiling until I had to get up and read a book or do push-ups. “What about the kids?”

“I could use a break from them too.”

“I meant, have you said anything to them?”

“Not yet.”

When I reached the backyard, Jude was kneeling on the grass in her cutoffs, her back to me, stabbing the trowel into the flower beds, pulling the weeds, then shaking the soil off the roots and tossing them into a cardboard box. My shadow reached her before I did. She turned, shading her eyes with a green-gloved hand.

“When did you get home?” She said it like it was still Friday and everything was going to be the same as always. Better. She was wearing one of my old dress shirts, with the sleeves rolled up and the shirttail tied around her middle. There were streaks of mud on the front and a dab like a cat's paw on her cheek.

“Just now,” I said.

“Did the kids see you?”

“Derek. Justine must be in her room.”

She motioned me closer. “I can't see you against the sun.” I squatted on my haunches almost knee-to-knee with her and she lowered her hand. “It's been a little traumatic around here.”

“You told the kids.”

She puckered her lips. “Justine's in a big funk about it. She's hardly spoken to me since.” She shook her head and studied me. “How are you doing with it?”

“Shitty.”

“Me too.” She reached out and I pinched a single finger through the glove. There were little plastic nubs on the material and I could feel the pad of her finger where a hole had worn through. I wanted to launch into the speech about how this was a good wake-up call, how it had forced me to do a lot of thinking about the changes I needed to make, about how I wanted her to forgive my obtuseness. All the stuff I'd imagined at the ocean.

“I missed you, Jude.”

She lowered her head and let her hand fall away to her thigh. I couldn't see her eyes but there was a sadness in the slump of her shoulders and her green-gloved hand was limp. I felt stares in the back of my head and turned around to see Justine watching us from behind the curtain of her bedroom window upstairs. Derek, who must have been sitting on the sink, was watching from the downstairs kitchen window.

When Jude and I announced our engagement, people said it would be the perfect marriage. Our kids would be so smart. We'd breed perfect little Americans, future CEOs and mayors. The kids had turned out fine. Fortunately, neither of them had my big ears. Derek inherited Jude's copper coloring in his hair and his freckles. Justine was darker-complexioned but she had her mother's flair for standing her ground. Both of them had a dash of my clumsiness and crowded teeth. But the bloodlines that coalesced in the offspring had coagulated in the parents.

I stayed for dinner, which consisted of grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato rice soup and potato chips. It was a solemn affair. Everyone seemed to be weighing their words, trying to deal with the reality of it but at the same time not wanting to set anyone off. Between comments, there was nothing but the crunching of potato chips, the chinking of spoons against the bowls, and the slurping of soup.

“Where are you going to live?” Justine asked.

“Probably at Warren's,” I said, knowing that I hadn't even told my brother what had happened yet. As usual, Justine was ahead of me. The kids loved Warren.

After another long pause, Derek spoke. “If Dad's gone, who's going to make up bedtime stories about three-legged dogs?”

“You'll still see your dad,” Jude said.

More spooning and slurping.

“Will we still be able to afford my braces?” Justine asked.

“I thought you didn't want braces,” I said.

“Da-ad,” she said, drawing out the word as if to underscore my thickheadedness.

Jude asked me to stay until the kids were in bed. We took turns tucking them in. I told Derek the thimble version of how Odysseus wandered around after the siege of Troy, escaping the one-eyed Cyclops and Circe, and finally returning to the kingdom of Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope. Justine, who we'd baptized along with Derek just in case heaven was really only open to Catholics, hated going to church, but she told me she'd been praying that her mom would change her mind about our marriage, a definite bright spot in the evening.

Jude poured us each a glass of Chardonnay and we sat at the kitchen table in the nook that was surrounded by single-pane windows on three sides. She took out a manilla folder labeled “Divorce from Cyrus” on the tab, and I was curious why she had added the “from Cyrus” part.

“I don't like this any more than you do,” she said, “but we can't just leave everything up in the air. The kids are starting school in two days. I think we owe them some stability.”

“Isn't it a little sudden?”

“It's not like this is the first time we've talked about it,” she said, biting her lip, and then taking a sip of wine as if to wash something down. She put two fingers on the back of my hand and rubbed the veins that ran like catacombs between the wrist and the first set of knuckles.