A Good Divorce (20 page)

She scoffed. “I'm more interested in their rump muscle.”

In the fifth race, with quinella wagering, she put her two dollars on Indian Justice and Suicide Sue. I almost said something—the doctors said it was healthy to talk about what had happened—but I didn't want to put a damper on things. I put five bucks on Shindig across the board on the basis that she was coming down in class, had a five-pound weight advantage, and had recently been claimed by the leading trainer. Justine's two horses thundered past in a photo finish for first, and she whipped me with her form and laughed as Shindig limped over the line second from last. She was so excited she knocked her coke off the bench.

“My horse must've pulled a rump muscle.” I didn't care who won. I just wanted her to smile, to put some experiential distance between the incident and the rest of her life. I just wanted her and Derek to stay with me, to start doing all the stuff we still hadn't done.

I was glad for the distraction of the two black gentlemen who sat on the bench behind us and chattered constantly. From their conversation, I gathered they were machinists at Boeing. They'd bet at the window, and then bet against each other from their seats. The guy in the checkered shirt tapped Justine on the shoulder after she won the quinella.

“Ma'am, do you mind telling me who you're on in the next race?”

Justine was taken aback and looked at me as if to see if it was okay. “I'm on Momma's Boy,” she said. “His jockey's already won two today.” Justine may not have been gleeful, but she was still a quick study. She'd already picked up on the importance of propensities, including gender. The jockey she liked was a her.

“Say, I hadn't noticed that,” the man said, looking down at his program. Then he laughed and nudged his friend, “Whad I tell you?”

We made our bets and squeezed out a place against the cement railing for the last race, watching the wheel-tractor drag a rake-frame around the track to erase the footprints from the last race. Erasure was one of the things I liked about the track. Each race was a new start, independent of whatever confusion and bad luck had preceded it. After the tractor passed, it looked like someone had combed the ground, leaving narrow peaked rows of nutrient-rich topsoil that birds lit on searching for angle worms.

Our friends were still there when we went back to the bench to get my coat and Justine's sweatshirt. The man with the baseball cap, who'd bet against Justine's horses earlier, extended his hand. “Say, young lady, you wouldn't mind telling me where you'll be sitting tomorrow?” Then he broke into a belly laugh and swatted his buddy.

Justine smiled. She was better, but it seemed temporary. What would she feel like on Monday, in school, in her room? On the way home I tallied up in my head how much I'd spent for the day's entertainment, including pretzels, roast beef sandwiches, ice cream, drinks, admission, and bets. It was less than the cost of the eighteen block ride Justine had taken in the Shepard ambulance.

I tried but I couldn't get the image of Justine's pallid face in the hyperbaric chamber out of my mind when they went back to their mom's. I was measuring my life by the number of days it had been since the incident, hoping that each additional day would blur some of the detail in my memory. You didn't have to be a psychiatrist to know that Jude's situation was eating at Justine. She spent a lot more time in her room; she wasn't eating well. She didn't even get on Derek's case as often. Maybe we could excuse the first incident as a surprise, but if it happened again, it would be because of negligence. I needed Jude's help.

I didn't recognize the person who answered the phone at Jude's and thought I might have dialed the wrong number. There was a cackle of voices in the background. Not sure if it was the right house, I asked if Jude Martin was there. I still wasn't used to calling her Martin.

“It's me, Jude.”

“We're having women's group, can I call you back?”

I was still miffed that she hadn't called me back when I'd left a message at her office. “I've been doing some more thinking about our situation.” As I said it, I realized that it sounded like the preface to a request for reconciliation. There was no interruption; she was still on the line. I closed my eyes and just said it. “I think you need to break it off with Lill, Jude. At least, don't live together.”

“Lill's moved in. She doesn't even have a place.”

“That isn't an insurmountable obstacle.”

“It isn't just a matter of leases and legal arrangements.” Her voice sounded tired. “We have a relationship. What have they been saying to you?”

“Nobody's trashing you.”

“They pick up on your silence, Cyrus.”

“Am I supposed to spend my weekends extolling the virtues of this arrangement?”

“You're homophobic.”

“Jude.”

“I need her. I'm not going to let another relationship die.” It was the closest she'd ever come to saying she regretted what had happened to us.

“This isn't a matter of blame.”

“You make it sound criminal.”

“Jude, I think the kids are afraid of you.”

“This doesn't have anything to do with you and Lill, does it?”

The glass panels of the Safeway phone booth, which I'd chosen so the kids wouldn't eavesdrop, were steamed up. The proverb written in ballpoint pen on the aluminum just over the coin slot said:
Marriage is prostitution with one man
. I wiped my elbow against the glass and noticed a little girl standing outside clutching a quarter in her fingers. Her mom had probably told her to call after she'd seen what kind of fish was fresh. The things mothers made their kids do. “What are you going to do, Jude?”

“I'll spend some more one-on-one time with them away from the house. I'm as concerned about them as you are.”

It was a start but it wasn't enough. On the walk back to the apartment, I went over the conversation the way I'd reexamine the argument in a motion I'd lost. I decided that I was the wrong person to carry the message; there was too much clutter between us. We always ragged on each other. She didn't have it in her constitution to give in and I took too much glee in seeing her squirm. We needed someone she trusted. Maybe Warren. She always liked Warren. She said he had inherited all the virtue in my family. But he'd still be perceived as mine. I needed someone who was hers.

13.

Lill agreed to meet me at Volunteer Park on the benches by the cylindrical brick water tower, which looked like an English fortress. From the top of the tower on a clear day, you could move from barred window to barred window and take in a different postcard view of Seattle: sailboats tacking in Lake Washington, the snowcapped Cascades, the site of the 1962 World's Fair, Queen Anne hill, the Olympics. Because I was early, I walked the pathway around the park and gawked at someone throwing a tennis ball to his dog, a man practicing chip shots, and a woman on a camping stool doing a watercolor painting of the greenhouse. In the city, the park served as the surrogate for the deserted roads and coulees that were so plentiful in places like Quincy.

Jude had taken me to Volunteer Park to watch a meteor shower the night we made Justine. She had a blanket in her trunk that her dad made her carry for emergencies, and we laid it on the grass next to the reservoir and talked about the black holes in the universe that sucked light into them like magnets. She unbuttoned her shirt and I tickled her with a long, tasseled weed. When it got cold, we rolled ourselves up like a rug in her blanket.

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.