Me Again (29 page)

As was my custom, I ended the evening by reading until I was sleepy. Tonight’s fare was a detective novel with a protagonist whose endless smart-aleck remarks were beginning to wear on me; I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with this one. After finally putting the book down, I logged in to check my email one last time before going to bed and found a new incoming message. And this time it was from Rebecca.

It was just a short note, focused mostly on her having successfully eaten solid food for the first time since she was hospitalized. But her closing line addressed a different topic.

as for the thing we talked about, im working on it. but its not easy and its weird.

I was wide awake now. I wrote back immediately:

So glad to hear you’re feeling better!

I’m online now, if you want to talk – er, write – about anything.

- Jonathan

I waited for quite a while, but she didn’t reply, which I suppose was not surprising, given the late hour. Finally I went to bed, but I laid awake for a long time, remembering the sound of her voice back in the hospital, tired and scratchy and weak.

I don’t think that I can be married to Bob anymore.

Chapter 34

I
HAD JUST FINISHED MY MORNING WORKOUT and was helping myself to some orange juice from the refrigerator when the doorbell rang.

“Jonathan, honey, could you get that?” My mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper open in front of her, caught up in completing the crossword puzzles that typically consumed this portion of her mornings.

“Sure,” I said. I took another swallow, then headed out to the foyer, glass of orange juice in hand.

I opened the front door to reveal Rebecca, looking at me through the screen door with a shy smile on her face.

“You’re all sweaty,” she said, her smile disappearing.

“Rebecca! Er, um, hi,” I managed with typical James Bond-like smoothness.

“Are you okay?” she asked, seeing the dark stains on my shirt.

“Me? Oh, yeah – I’m fine,” I said. “I was just working out. Dad found an old set of weights Teddy used to have, so we set up a place to exercise down in the basement.”

Rebecca took a step backward. “Oh. Do you need to get back to that?”

“No, no. I just finished.”

“Oh.”

At this point some of the blood I’d just pumped into my muscles managed to find its way back to my brain, and I said, “I’m sorry – would you like to come in?”

Rebecca shook her head. “Actually, I wondered if you wanted to go for a drive.”

“A drive?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I just go for a drive. I don’t know why, but it seems to help me think. So that’s what I was doing, and then I realized I was in your neighborhood. So then I thought maybe you’d like to come with me.”

We were still talking through the screen, I realized. “Okay,” I said. “Can I maybe change clothes first?”

“Yeah, you probably should,” she said, again eyeing my shirt.

I suddenly became very worried about what I smelled like. “Why don’t you come in for a second while I take a quick shower?”

“Okay,” she said, and stepped back, allowing me to open the door for her.

“Rebecca!” My mother’s hostess radar had apparently drawn her into the living room. “Isn’t this a nice surprise!” Mom quickly set about making Rebecca comfortable while I scurried off for some hasty hygienics.

I took possibly the world’s fastest shower, wary of leaving Rebecca stranded with my mother for too long. A few minutes later, sporting what might have been an overly enthusiastic application of my dad’s cologne, I was strapping myself into the passenger seat of Rebecca’s SUV.

“So, where are we going?” I asked.

“Nowhere,” said Rebecca. “Anywhere. I just realized a while back that I seem to do some of my clearest thinking when I’m driving, so now sometimes I just get in my car and drive. Without paying attention to where I’m going.”

Rebecca backed her car out of the driveway as she spoke. Soon we were headed up the street, to parts unknown.

I said, “You do pay attention to things like red lights, I hope.”

“Well, yeah. I’m not talking about not paying attention to
how
I drive. Just
where
I drive. Don’t you ever just get in the car and drive?”

“Unfortunately, no,” I said.

“God, I forgot,” Rebecca said, turning to look at me. “You can’t drive.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, eager to change the subject. “So, what were you thinking about?”

Her eyes back on the road, Rebecca said, “You know, the stuff we were talking about in the hospital. I asked Bob for a divorce.”

It was a good thing I wasn’t driving – I’d have probably wrecked the car upon hearing this offhand remark.

“You... you did?” I stammered.

“Last night,” she said. “Just before I emailed you.”

I was still struggling for words. “You did?” I repeated stupidly. “I mean, I had no idea... you just... what did he say?”

“He kind of freaked out a little.”

“Yeah, I could see how he might,” I said. As I regained my composure, I added, “I thought Catholics couldn’t divorce each other.”

“They’ve got a kind of weird way to handle it. They won’t grant you a divorce, but they will annul a marriage.”

“What’s the difference?”

Rebecca wrinkled her nose. “It gets pretty confusing. I’ve been researching it on the Internet, and it turns out there’s legal annulment and church annulment, but they’re two different things. The rules for a legal annulment are really strict – you’ve got to meet some really specific conditions, like marrying somebody who turns out to be using a phony identity. Bob and I wouldn’t qualify for that. So we’d have to get a divorce.”

“But I thought you couldn’t—"

“The way it works is, the church can annul your marriage, but only after you get a legal divorce.”

“Even though they don’t recognize divorce.”

Rebecca nodded. “I guess in their eyes, the annulment erases the divorce. Like I said, it’s weird. I mean, they supposedly don’t recognize divorce, but you can’t get an annulment without one.”

Trying to process all this, I said, “So you’d need to get a divorce
and
an annulment?”

“Yep. Start out with a legal divorce, you know, in court and everything. And then once the divorce is final, you apply for a church annulment.”

I frowned, absorbing this. “I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did Bob, it turns out. I think most Catholics don’t, unless their marriage ends up failing. I found out stuff over the last couple days that I knew nothing about, and I’ve been Catholic my whole life. Same for him – I had to explain it all to him a couple of times.”

“Well, I’m glad there’s at least some way to work it,” I said, “so that people don’t have to be stuck together forever if they’re not happy.”

“Yeah, but the trick is getting both people to agree to it,” she said, frowning as she drove. “You know, to going through with the divorce and then with the annulment.”

My stomach lurched. “So what did Bob say?”

We had come to a red light. Rebecca slowed the car, pulling up to the intersection and stopping the car before turning to look at me.

“He said no.”

I think my response was something insightful, like “Oh.”

The light turned green, and we resumed our journey in silence.

Finally Rebecca said, “But I think he was still kind of in shock. I mean, first of all he didn’t really know anything about how Catholics can, you now, end their marriages. And I think he was also shocked that I’d taken the time to find out all this stuff.”

She sighed. “This is hard to say – I don’t know if I’m getting this across well. Up until last night, I think he’s just looked at me as a problem that he’s stuck having to deal with. First I have my stroke, and I can’t walk, and my personality is all different. Then I have to go through all this rehab and PT. Then, like an idiot, I try to kill myself. It’s like I’m this series of problems, of stuff that’s broken, that he needs to try to fix.”

We came to a T intersection, and Rebecca chose to turn left.

“But this is the first time that I was the one who tried to come up with the solution. I mean, we’re not happy. Our marriage isn’t good – it’s broken. We both know it. But this time I’m the one trying to come up with a way to try to fix things, and I think that kind of threw him.”

I said, “So is he opposing the divorce just because it wasn’t his idea?”

Rebecca shook her head, checking her rear-view mirror before changing lanes.

“No, I don’t think that’s it. I mean, he can be stubborn and all, but I think this is more a combination of him being caught by surprise by this new information. I mean, first, that there is a way to get a divorce, and second, that I want one.” She scowled. “But there’s something else, too.”

We were entering Washington Park, a hilly expanse of land wooded with massive trees. The road wound around the landscape in leisurely curves, revealing a deep green lagoon, a picnic area, and a large brightly colored rose garden overlooked by a massive bell tower I’d learned was called a
carillon
, whose bells could be heard all the way over in my neighborhood.

“Any idea what that something else is?” I asked.

Rebecca was silent for a moment, framing her response. “I think it comes down to him being worried about appearances.”

I turned to look at her. “Is there really that much of a... a stigma about divorce anymore?”

“I don’t think so,” Rebecca said. “I mean, it’s not as common in the Catholic Church, but when I stopped to think about it, I realized I know a few people at our church who have remarried. I mean, that’s really the whole point of an annulment. It erases your previous marriage, which in turn allows you to marry within the church and have it treated like it’s your one and only marriage.”

She frowned. “But that’s not so much what I mean. Sure, there’s some stigma to getting a divorce, but to be honest, I think he’s really into how our current situation makes him look.”

“Your current situation?”

“Him taking care of me. People in our church make a big deal about what a saint he is for dealing with the burden of taking care of me.”

Again she turned to look at me, her face tightened in anger. “I actually heard somebody use those exact words. We were at church, and I stopped to use the ladies room. When I came back, Bob was talking to some woman, and she was making this huge fuss over him.
Oh, you’re such a saint, the way you’re taking care of that poor girl
.” Rebecca had gone into that unnerving, edgy voice she used when she would mimic Big Bob.

“
That poor girl
,” she repeated. “I’m twenty-nine years old and have a goddamn college degree. And she’s talking about me like I’m some helpless invalid. But the worst was seeing the way Bob was lapping up all that attention, nodding his head, looking all serious, and saying stuff in this super-sincere tone of voice about how this was apparently
what
the Lord had called him to do
.”

Rebecca turned to look at me again. “I think there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to give that up. I mean, he draws so much of his... his sense of who he is from how other people perceive him. That’s why it’s important to him to be Big Bob, not just regular old Bob. Only now he wants to aim higher. He wants to be...”

“Saint Bob,” I said, finishing her sentence.

“Exactly.”

We drove on, not speaking, eventually ending up on a busy divided street lined with restaurants, strip malls and automotive service centers. In front of one building, a giant painted statue of a lumberjack in a stocking cap loomed over the parking lot, inexplicably holding what appeared to be an old tractor tire in his outstretched hand. As we drove past, some long-inactive neurons helpfully retrieved the name
Paul Bunyan
, but they didn’t offer me any other useful information.

Finally Rebecca spoke.

“Anyway, I think he’s worried that all the red tape we’d have to go through with the church would make him look like less of a saint. You know, like he’s a quitter or something, that he’s giving up on me. Even though it’s really what I want.”

She sighed. “I swear, if there was a way for him to divorce me that made him look
good
, he’d do it in a heartbeat.”

She let out a bitter laugh.

“Maybe if I became an axe murderer or something.”

Making a show of shifting uneasily in my seat, I said, “Listen, I’m not sure where you’re taking me, but you don’t by any chance have any axes in the car, do you?”

“Just the one,” Rebecca said, not looking at me. “It’s behind your seat – do you mind reaching back there and getting it for me?”

For some reason her deadpan little voice made her rare jokes even more amusing to me, but I’ll admit I might be slightly prejudiced.

We hit a bump, interrupting the conversation and injecting a new thought into my brain.

“Go back to what you said before,” I said. “Before the axe murder stuff.”

Rebecca glanced my way. “About Bob?”

“Yes.”

She frowned, then said, “I was saying how if divorcing me made make him look good, he’d do it.”

“In the eyes of the church, you mean?”

“Yes.” Another frown. “Why? What are you getting at?”

“Keep driving,” I said. “It seems to work. I think I might be getting an idea.”