The Divorce Party (6 page)

“Nate . . .”

“What?”

“You’re lying to me now?”

“No, I’m not.”

But she knows he is. She knows it, in her gut. And yet she is too tired to guess why. It’s still the morning. They still have the entire day ahead of them. She’d rather just believe him.

“You know what?” she says. “Let’s just not talk about it right now. Let’s listen to some music for a while, okay? I can get some sleep, maybe.”

He smiles, relieved, which has the opposite effect on Maggie. “Okay.”

He pulls out the iPod. They have a splitter, so they can listen to the same song. And when she guesses which song he is going to pick, that feels like something too. “Moving Pictures, Silent Films,” by Great Lake Swimmers. He played it for her, for the first time, a month after they started dating, when they took a weekend road trip to Wyoming. They were driving the back roads into Cody—through all of that gorgeous orange rock, more like outer space than anything she’d ever encountered on this earth—and Nate put on this song.
I think you’ll like this,
he said. And she fell in love with it. And with him.

“Pause it for just a sec,” she says now. And she squeezes his shoulder, walks over him to the bathroom, to splash some water on her face, hoping to feel better, shake off the malaise settling over her.

But there, as if waiting for her—and not just waiting for the bathroom also—is Murph.

“We meet again.”

Maggie tries to smile. “We do.”

“Have you used one of these jitney bathrooms before? If not, I should warn you. It’s complicated.”

“Is it?”

Murph nods. “You need to angle yourself in there just right, or the door slams on your cold, bare ass just as your hand gets stuck in the toilet. Whatever you do, angle left.”

“Good tip,” Maggie says.

“You will see just how good, especially if you don’t follow it. Trust me on that . . .”

Maggie laughs. Maybe Murph isn’t the enemy here. Or, really, who cares? Murph, or no Murph. Isn’t it beside the point? Maggie is just tired, too tired to be rational. But here is her attempt: she is just going to calm down, to stop thinking about Nate’s confession this morning, to stop worrying about the details of his past he left out, to stop letting their immediate future—this divorce party weirdness—stand for more than it is worth.

“Nate is a great guy. You know that, right? Probably better than me. You don’t need me to tell you. But everyone’s always thought that. He was always the most popular guy in school.”

“The most popular out of eleven?”

“Exactly.” She pushes her hair out of her face, smiles at Maggie. “Anyway, I’m just really excited for you. It’s a nightmare to try to find a good guy. Most guys today, they think if they show up, that’s enough. They think if they put a hand on the small of your back, they deserve some sort of award. You know what I mean?”

Maggie smiles. “Kind of,” she says.

“We used to always have sex in my parents’ bathroom. Nate and I. They have this enormous bathtub with this crazy padding. God, we had no idea what we were doing. Like the first fifty times, we just had
no idea.
”

Maggie falls silent.

She almost falls.

“But whatever. Practice makes perfect, right? You can thank me later that he is such a good kisser.”

This is when the bathroom door opens, an old guy steps out, zipping his fly, and Murph steps inside, left side first.

Then Murph winks at Maggie, closes the door, and is gone.

Gwyn

It comes from being a minister’s daughter, she thinks. She’s not good at anger. Not built to hold a grudge. From the time she was old enough to remember, she was taught again and again that anger—or giving in to it, at least—was wrong. Whenever anyone was cruel to her, she was told to forgive. As if it were that easy. In her house, it was supposed to be.

There was that time when Gwyn was eight, and Mia Robin-sky from her second-grade class announced that cool girls had curly hair, and the best way to get it was to use peanut butter. She handed Gwyn a jar of peanut butter. And Gwyn used the entire thing, covering her clean blond locks from top to bottom with curlerlike knots of the chunky, sticky mess. Until it hardened. Like Mia directed.

It was her father who washed Gwyn’s hair out in the kitchen sink—using a mix of ketchup and vinegar—while Gwyn screamed from the burning and the tearing, more strands coming out than staying in. Even then—in the face of his daughter’s hysterics—her father was unflappable.

“Gwyn, love,” he said. “Mia is a work in progress. She is just learning how to be.”

“How to be? How to be what? A bitch!”

Her father slapped her. Not exactly hard, but there it was. A slap across the bottom of her face, across her jawline. This was one of only two times he was physical with her during her childhood—the other was when she got into her mother’s makeup bag and almost cut her thumb off with a pair of scissors she found in there. He had hit her hand where she cut herself. To warn her away from hurting herself. Being angry at others, apparently, not offering them constant compassion, was equally injurious.

This was a lesson she relearned every time a church congregant would come by the house with pain, or with a grievance. It didn’t seem to matter what the specifics were. They blur together now: the man hysterical about his pregnant wife leaving him; the woman whose dying mother refused to talk to her; the husband whose ex-wife lost their life savings in a pyramid scheme. The worst stories anyone could imagine. And always her father’s voice rang out with its same, gentle mantra:
We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job.

She wonders if this is why her father never focused too much on the things she did well, the ways she succeeded. Because it might make her feel entitled to be treated a certain way, make her feel like she
should
be angry if someone wasn’t honoring her.

Let go. This is the job.

Gwyn circles back around the airport, back past the LOW FLYING PLANES sign, to find Thomas by the curb in a white crew-neck sweater and khaki pants, his bags by his feet, his eyes fixed on the digital clock by the airport entrance.

He
looks angry. He is angry with her, she imagines, because she wasn’t here when he arrived, a little angry that she hasn’t been picking up her cell phone, telling him what it is that he is supposed to do. But his face seems to relax as she gets closer, as he realizes she hasn’t abandoned him. He breaks into a smile, waves. He is like her father this way, unflappable. Or mostly unflappable. Like her father. Like Buddha.

She can’t help but smile back. She loves his face. Even now. People say you get over that with time. If you stay married long enough, you get over someone’s face. You stop noticing. But Gwyn never has. Even if they are apart for only a few days, when she sees him again, she is surprised by how his face affects her, makes her think,
Hey, I get this person. Hey, this face is mine.
There are wrinkles now, too, of course, but in Gwyn’s opinion they just help carve out the parts of him that looked a little too boyish before. Now he looks confident. Like more good days than bad have brought him here. To his current moment on this earth. It is enough, in its complacency, to make someone cringe—to make Gwyn, in her current moment on this earth, come close.

“There you are,” he says. And he puts his bags in the backseat. He doesn’t seem to notice the briefcase. He reaches over and touches the tip of her nose with his index finger as he gets into the passenger side. It is the strange and sweet way he often used to greet her. He hasn’t done it in a while, which makes Gwyn think it means something. And maybe it does. But probably not what Gwyn wants it to.

“I was about to give up on you,” he says.

“That makes two of us,” she says.

She pulls the car out of the airport, heading away from the potentially crowded main road, opting to wind them around toward the side roads that will lead them back to Montauk, that will lead them the long way home. She stays focused on looking out the windshield, on her hands on the steering wheel, on avoiding Thomas’s gaze.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as he unbuckles his sandals, putting his left foot up on the dashboard. His bad foot, as he says. The foot missing the third toe, since a surfing accident where it got chopped straight off. Fifteen years ago now. Truth be told, it’s one of Gwyn’s favorite parts of her husband—that bad foot. When things were better between them, she would stare at it, at the small opening, liking that she was the only one in his adult life to be there on both sides of it. The before and after.

“So,” he says. “What’s been going on around here?”

She shakes her head. “Not too much, really. I’m having trouble getting in touch with the caterer about tonight, which is making me a little tense. And your daughter—”

He smiles. “
My
daughter today?”

“Your daughter, yes,” she says. When Georgia graduated from UCLA’s photography program, when she made the masthead at
Rolling Stone
(Asst. Photo Ed.: Georgia G. Huntington), she was Gwyn’s daughter. Even when she started dyeing her hair pink earlier this year (wasn’t she supposed to be interested in that ten years ago?), but today she belongs to Thomas.

“She’s a little prickly because Denis ran into some trouble with a corkscrew. She wants you to call her to talk about it. Or call him in Omaha.”

Thomas rolls down the window, and she can see him thinking. “So Denis isn’t here yet?” he says. “But I thought he was flying in last night. I thought he promised her that.”

This is news to Gwyn, but she has no reason to doubt it. Georgia tends to discuss things with her father that she doesn’t tell Gwyn. She may feel judged by Gwyn, or maybe she just knows that even if Thomas is judging her, she won’t have to hear about it. That’s probably closer to it. Thomas is too nonconfrontational. He never says critical words, especially to their kids. So when she and Thomas had a bad feeling about the decisions Nate was making for himself after high school, or when Georgia dropped out of college for a while, it was up to Gwyn to do something about it. To talk to their children, or not. To be the bad guy, or not. Should she be mad at Thomas about this? She knew it going into their marriage, so it feels beside the point to hold it against him now. She has plenty of other things to hold against him.

“What can I do from here anyway?” Thomas asks.

“Tell him to get on the plane.”

He nods, agreeing. And he starts to say something else, but stops himself. They are both avoiding the temptation to address the topic of tonight in too much detail. But she can see—visibly see in his eyes—Thomas remind himself what he does think he should bring up: information about his trip, and, more specifically, what he did during his trip that pertains to Buddhism. As if Gwyn has forgotten that Thomas’s newfound spirituality is the reason they are here in the first place, as if she needs proof that it still matters to him.

The part of her that is still her husband’s friend wants to remind him that he shouldn’t try this hard, that trying this hard is a dead giveaway that you are up to something. But he is already talking, and no one, least of all Gwyn, has the energy to stop him.

“So I had a little time off Thursday, and headed to this incredible temple out in Orange County. It is the second oldest Buddhist temple in the United States.”

“No kidding?”

He nods, not sensing her sarcasm—not sensing that she couldn’t care less about all of it, everything he is going to say next.

“One of the best parts is that every spiritual director there comes from the same bloodline.” He is quiet for a minute, as if thinking about it. “Isn’t that amazing? I really was inspired, just being there. It was, far and away, the most beautiful temple I’ve ever seen.”

She nods her head, too, hoping that is enough affirmation so he shuts up.

“I’m thinking about going back out there,” he continues.

Apparently not.

“They are sponsoring a silent meditation retreat in November out in the Santa Ynez Valley. Two weeks.”

She decides she has done her part, and doesn’t say anything else, focuses on the road. The morning is slipping away, the day carving out ahead of them: sunshine and warm air, blue skies as far as the eyes can see. This is why she was excited to move out here, originally. Days like this. Drives like this. Instead of spending Saturday afternoons the terrible ways that people in a city can spend Saturdays—shopping, eating too much brunch, seeing friends they half wish they weren’t seeing—she and Thomas would be out here together. Taking long car rides, the radio playing some forgotten song, watching the world around them. Gwyn would make sandwiches for lunch. And they would stop in a quiet restaurant for a fried fish dinner or a decent steak, good cheap wine.

She had this pair of cut-off jean shorts she liked to wear for these rides. They were white and tiny, crawling only to the top of her thighs, cutting her in just the right way so that her thighs looked brown and round and endless. Thomas used to hold her there, at the short’s edges, most of the day, his hands between her bare thighs.

The last time she put those shorts on must be eight years ago now, those Saturday afternoon rides a thing of the past. Thomas had been traveling to a lot of conferences that fall, and Georgia had just left for her freshman year of college, and Gwyn started spending her newfound free time with Moses Wilder, a dentist in town. (A divorced dentist! Could there be anything less sexy? Maybe only one named Moses.)

Moses Wilder.

It was all innocent enough at first. Moses had two big sheep-dogs, and she would go with him when he’d walk them in the morning. She would go for walks with him, and those dogs, and let him pay attention to her. It got less innocent, she guesses, when she began going on the evening walks as well, and let them end with a glass of bourbon on Moses’s porch, and a different kind of attention. But one evening, she wore the shorts to meet him. And after he handed her the bourbon and sat down beside her, he reached for her, the same way Thomas used to, and it could have been Thomas’s hand on her thighs, it could have been Thomas, and that was too much.