A Good Divorce (10 page)

“Weeping willows.”

“The street where I passed was lined with them, so many that it was always dark. They had to keep the streetlights on during the day.” Justine caught my eye and smirked. I reached up and turned off the three-way bulb in the lamp. Derek pulled the sleeping bag up around his chin. “Well, one day when I came by, a kid jumped out from behind a tree with a big stick in his hand. It was the kid I hated most in the whole school. Big Ricky.” Derek snapped his head to look me in the eye. His current nemesis was Ricky Sampson, the kid who'd rubbed snot on Buster's baseball cards. “Okay, Justine, you tell us what happened next.”

“Does it have to be Ricky?” she said.

“That's who it was,” I said.

“Okay, okay. Let's see.” She closed her fists and massaged her jaws. “It scared Dad so much he almost wet his pants right there under the willow trees.”

Derek giggled.

“Ricky slapped his stick against the trunk of the tree and said, ‘I told you not to come through here!' His voice was gruff. He had a big cut on his forehead from a fight he'd been in that day. The blood from the cut had dried up and caked on his face.”

“Ugh,” Derek said.

“‘Why are you coming to school so early?' Ricky said to Dad.” Justine had come a long way since the last time we did this. She wasn't going to pass up the chance to get her licks in. “‘Only the dinks come early enough to suck up to the teachers.' Ricky whacked his stick against the tree again and the streetlights flickered out. Your turn, Derek.”

“No!”

“You can do it,” I said softly.

He crammed his eyes shut. “When Ricky looked up to see what happened to the streetlights, Dad ducked into a driveway where someone had left their gate open. Ricky started yelling, ‘I'm going to kill you, Stapleton.'” I couldn't help but laugh, and Derek frowned at me. “Dad had one trick that Ricky didn't know about. His uncle was a ventriloquist and he'd taught Dad to throw his voice.” Derek cupped his hands, “‘I'm over here, you little twerp!'” I guessed that Derek had softened the language for my benefit. “Ricky heard Dad's voice coming out of the hedge across the street and picked up a rock and heaved it at the hedge but it missed and landed on the sidewalk. ‘I'm going to bash your brains in, Stapleton!' When Dad heard Ricky whacking his stick against the hedge, he ducked back out of the driveway and ran faster than he'd ever run in his life until he was clear to the other end of the Glen.”

“That was good,” I said.

“Shh, I'm not done.” Derek sat up in his sleeping bag. “When Ricky swung into the hedge, he hit a hornet's nest and a thousand bees came swarming out. Ricky took off down the street with the bees buzz-bombing him. By the time he got to school, Ricky's face was so swollen he looked like Frankenstein. And he never bothered Dad again for the rest of his life.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I knew Derek would get you out of it,” Justine said. “He thinks you can do anything.”

I tucked the kids in, turned the hall lights off, and went to my room. When I climbed into bed, the water in the mattress moved like a tidal wave to the other side, bounced off the sideboard, and returned to jostle me. Up, pause, down, pause. Each wave more gentle than the last one. I'd bought the waterbed to show Jude I wasn't such a tight-ass. She thought everyone in big law firms golfed at Broadmoor and slept in a four-poster.

Someday Derek would know the truth about his dad. How he'd kept his waterbed but couldn't keep his wife.

I took the kids to Jude's the next afternoon so they could go ice-skating with friends at the arena. On the way back to the Alhambra, before the postpartum depression set in, I drove by Lill's apartment, a mid-rise with dark brick and a wrought iron gate next to the entry-way that opened into a courtyard. On the second pass, I drove to the end of the block and parked. I could taste the squirts of adrenalin beginning to irrigate the inside of my mouth, a flavor remarkably similar to the ginger of Lill's tongue.

The heat of my breath turned to steam as I walked back to her building, stepped into the alcove, and searched for her name next to the intercom. What if she walked out the door just then? Should I lie and say I was looking for someone else? “Epstein, L.” was on the fourth floor. My finger circled the rim of her button. She'd probably seen Jude since our evening together and I wondered how much Lill had told her. The sun must have set while I stood there with my finger poised over her buzzer because the alcove and garden lights came on simultaneously. They say you can tell a lot about a person from the way they keep their house. I pictured Lill's furniture draped with the skirts, blouses, and lingerie she stripped off as she returned from her library job.

I backed out onto the sidewalk and looked up to see if I could see her apartment. We hadn't talked about other relationships; maybe she had a harem of guys like me. I crossed the street to get a better angle of the two units on her floor with lights on and watched for someone to walk in front of one of the windows. Nothing.

I returned to the entryway and pushed the buzzer. If it was ringing, I couldn't hear it so I pushed it again and held it for a two-count. I stared at the intercom speaker. Say something to me, Lill. There's no reason we can't just be friends. We can keep the lights bright. I'm not ready for anything serious either. Jude doesn't have to know. I swallowed my juices and took a deep breath.

One more short buzz. No answer.

I got back into the car and debated whether to go home and read
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
or go to Warren's. I decided I didn't have the energy for Warren.

There was a sign taped to my door that said the furnace was out and heat would be restored tomorrow. It was clammy in the apartment and I opened the oven door and turned it to about two hundred and fifty. President Carter had called the energy crisis the moral equivalent of war but I figured I had some heat coming; I hadn't baked anything since I moved in. I'd resume the war when the furnace was fixed.

I'd let the food supply dwindle. There wasn't even any tomato paste to make a pasta sauce with. I found some freezer-burned burritos under the ice cube trays and put them in the oven. I'd make the British thermal units work twice.

While I was changing clothes and putting on wool socks, ski pants, and my bathrobe, Warren called. I warned him there was no heat and no food but he wanted to come anyway. I turned on the tube and half-watched
M*A*S*H*
while I opened junk mail and bills and ate my burritos.

Warren sounded like a man being chased when he answered on the intercom. He blew through the door to my apartment without knocking. “Jesus, it's freezing in here.”

“Depends if you're dressed for it,” I said.

He looked me up and down while he zipped his warm-up jacket to his chin and hugged himself. “You look terrible. Like some shut-in. Are you still going to therapy?”

“Yeah, do you want something to drink?”

“Jesus, we should have met in a food locker. What do you have?”

“There's a Zinfandel open in the cupboard. If you want something warmer, pour a couple of brandies and I'll get you another coat.”

When I returned with an overcoat and a scarf, Warren was holding up two socks that were as stiff as fan blades. “What in hell are these?”

I laughed. “That's my laundry. I sometimes do my socks and underwear with the dishes. They must have frozen.”

“You wash your underwear with your plates?”

“I do the plates first.”

He grabbed the glasses off the table with two fingers of brandy in each. “Here.”

We clinked our glasses and downed them.

“What kind of stuff are you doing in therapy?”

“A little of everything, even bioenergetics.”

Warren set his glass down and stepped into the middle of the living room with his hands on his hips, leaning backwards. “Come on, men, make your body into a bow,” he said, doing a pretty good imitation of the Group Health therapist. “Like you're trying to shoot an arrow right out of your navel. Come on, boys, arch it.” He thrust his pubes.

“You got it.”

“Give in to the shaking, boys. Tremble with me.” And he was.

“I didn't know you knew this stuff.”

Warren bent over and let his arms droop like an ape. “Let go now. Open your orifices.”

The truth was the bioenergetics had made it easier to talk in the group. Maybe it was my conditioning through team sports. The closest I'd ever felt to other men were those times in the huddle between plays when everyone was panting and bumping shoulder pads and we'd slap each other on the butt as we broke. “We're also doing psychodrama.”

Warren popped up and ruffled his hair. Then he ran around the apartment until he found a dishtowel and stuffed it under his shirt to make breasts. He came at me with his hands on his hips and his eyes squinting. “Come on, Cyrus,” he said in a falsetto voice. “You think your law job is a meal ticket? I'm supposed to punch your ticket and feed you? I've got news, Bub.”

There was a creepy resemblance.

7.

On my twelfth birthday, Dad took his dinner hour from the Thriftway to celebrate with us at home. I remembered him grabbing my new Louisville Slugger bat and Mickey Mantle baseball and taking us to the backyard. He pushed aside a wheelbarrow full of potted plants, pulled a loose shingle off the eave of the garage, and stepped it into the grass.

“This is home plate!” he said, shoving me into the batter's box. Then he paced off to the edge of the holly bushes and spit on the grass to mark the pitcher's mound. I stood there with the bat on my shoulder while Dad loosened his tie and rolled up his pitching sleeve. The first one came at me sidearm.

Slam!
The ball exploded into the chalky white siding of the garage behind me and bounced back to Dad. Hidden like a double exposure in the reflection of the garage against the dining room window, I could see Mom and Warren watching us. This was another one of Dad's games where no one explained the rules and there were no practices.

“What's the matter?” he asked, rubbing his palms into the ball.

“I don't …”

Slam!
The ball crashed into the garage again, this time ricocheting off my leg. I wanted to join the audience and eat Mom's angel food cake with orange frosting.

“One more chance,” he said, squinting at an imaginary spot somewhere in the strike zone.

I readjusted my grip on the bat, remembering how you were supposed to line up the knuckles, and looked down to see where my feet were in relation to the shingle.

Slam!
The ball flew by before I had a chance to look up.

“You're out!” Dad said gleefully as he walked toward the plate. I didn't know if he was going to start telling stories about his old high school baseball team or slam me into the garage. “See this?” Dad held the ball so close to my face the strings were blurry. “This is life! You stand flat-footed with the bat on your shoulder, it'll go right by.”

At twelve, I'd already heard most of his platitudes. The guy who sits on his butt draws flies. Sheep are for eating. Most of them relied on a single theme: do something even if it's wrong. I stared at Dad's eyes, which were dry as marbles, and tried to invent a winning excuse. “I'm only swinging at strikes.”

Dad grabbed the bat like he wanted his ups and carried it into the house. He had to go back to work and the rest of us ate angel food cake without him.

Because Justine was at a girlfriend's slumber party, it was just me, Derek, and Magpie at the Alhambra on the last Friday in January. I was beginning to worry that Derek was living under too much female influence, that he'd be the only feminist in his class. I didn't want him to relive the embarrassment he'd felt the day Jude let him wear one of Justine's culottes to school. Derek had gotten into a fight over it in the boy's restroom and needed stitches where someone had pushed his chin against the radiator. I concocted opportunities to let him be a man. At dinner, we agreed to trade places. That meant he had to cook dinner, which consisted of wieners sticky with age that he sliced into the Kraft macaroni and cheese mix.

“Well, son,” Derek said in his deepest voice, when we'd sat down to eat, “how are things at the office?”

“Do we always have to talk about the office?”

Derek stabbed two slices of wiener with his fork and looked at me sternly. “Maybe you can explain that last report your boss sent home. That sure wasn't a Stapleton report.”

“Geez, my boss has it out for me.”

Derek pointed his fork at me and furrowed his brow. “I don't care if your boss is Dracula, I want an explanation.”

I wondered if I should play around his question or give him a real answer. “I guess I've been upset by things at home,” I said. “My wife and I have separated, you know. It's been hard on us. Most of all, I'm worried about the kids.”

He let go of his fake frown and looked down at his plate, where he was pushing a lone piece of macaroni around like it was a shopping cart in the Safeway parking lot. I'd miscalculated.

“You want me to be the kid again, don't you?”

“If it's causing so much trouble”—his voice was on the verge of breaking—“why don't you and Mom get back together?”

I suddenly felt vastly underequipped. Derek stuffed his palms into his eye sockets to stop the tears, his fork pointed aimlessly into the air. With his older sister gone, he could be an eight-year-old again. When I scooted my chair over next to his, he broke into a sob and I pulled him against me. His head was hot against my face. He tried to set his fork next to his plate but it teetered over the edge and fell to the floor.

“I miss Mom when I'm with you.”

I patted him on the back, “I miss her too.”

He looked up at me, trying his hardest to be big in his rainbow Mork suspenders. His face was puffy and his temples were wet where he'd smeared the tears. “Then when I'm with her, I miss you.”