A Good Divorce (7 page)

If her father were alive, he'd blame me for the fact that our kids were upstairs deciding where they'd live. He'd remind me of what I'd said to him in their den when I pulled him aside and asked for Jude's hand. I'd done it that way because that's what I thought he'd probably done and I wanted him to know that I honored those same values. I told him I'd protect Jude and raise kids he'd be proud of.

But Jude didn't need my protection. We didn't have Sunday afternoon roast beef and mashed potato dinners. Every other Sunday was her day off from the kids and dinner was something frozen we ate off aluminum trays. The kids preferred the TV and cassette tapes to conversation. Jude's father would have asked me who was the head of this family anyway, and chased the divorce lawyer out of our living room.

We heard the kids whispering on their way down the stairs. They walked straight over to the coffee table. There was a sobriety about them that made me think that neither Jude or I had passed their rigorous standards and they'd decided to live on their own. Derek stood behind Justine with his lips sealed the way I was sure she'd directed him. This was an announcement the oldest child had to make.

“We've made our decision,” she said.

Everyone put down their cups. Charlie tucked in his shirt. Derek poked his sister, telling her to say it, and she brushed his hand away. Her face was grim. She was going to wait until she had everyone's attention. Her feet were together and she stood as prim and straight as the night she came out from behind the curtain in the Seward School gym and announced the name of the Christmas program, “Peace on Earth.”

I could tell by the way she began, complimenting me in words that sounded like a Hallmark Father's Day card, how this was going to come out. Judges did the same thing at the end of a trial. Such praise meant one thing.

“We're going to live with Mom,” she said.

The instant she said it a pestilence raced through me, weakening my limbs, muting my hearing. I'd never lost one this big. All my hopes of doing it better than my dad were obliterated. I'd been rejected. They apparently saw something safe in Jude they didn't see in me.

Derek started to cry and I wondered if this was really his choice or if Justine had leaned on him. There was so much unfinished business between us. I'd never taken him horseback riding or taught him how to handle a rifle. He always said he wanted to be a pitcher and begged me to teach him the knuckleball and I put him off, saying to wait until his arm matured. I knelt down and he rushed into my arms and squeezed me around the neck, smearing the side of my face with his tears. Through the blur, I watched Justine. She was trying to stand tall the way Jude had worked with her. I couldn't tell if she was still talking or not. I wanted her to let go and come to me. It's not your fault, Justine. I shouldn't have let you do this.

Out of respect, I suppose, Charlie picked up the dishes and disappeared into the kitchen. This was the end of the line, time for a transfer. Jude gave me a crestfallen look as she put her arm around Justine. She'd lost the guy who used to tickle her under the sheets and read Robert Frost to make her sleepy. But she had her kids.

4.

As I sped north up I–5, the wind rushing through the windows drowned out the Bob Dylan tape I'd turned to high volume. I changed lanes without signaling, passed randomly on the left and the right. Drivers blinked their lights at me. If someone boxed me in, I honked and gave them the finger as I passed. Between sixty and sixty-five, the Plymouth shimmied like it was going to throw a wheel. Over seventy, it smoothed out and the ashtray in the dash stopped vibrating. I stuck my head out the window like a dog, trying to open my eyes as far as I could, challenging the wind to rip them out. The air whipped across my face like a high-speed shoe rag taking tears with it. “God dammit!” I yelled in the general direction of Canada. My words probably didn't make it to the rearview mirror.

Past Marysville, traffic was scarce and I could drive any lane I wanted or straddle two of them. When I let go of the wheel, I could pound it with the palms of my hands or slap one hand on the outside of my door and the other one on the seat. “Damn, damn, damn!”

When I was six, Dad had taken my older brother Carl and me tobogganing at Mission Ridge. I remembered how the rain against the windshield had turned to applesauce when we exited the main highway and headed into the mountains. The petroleum smell from the grease Dad had wiped on his logging boots filled the inside of the car. We followed the tracks of another car that had climbed the same hill earlier, bouncing so hard in and out of ruts that I had to sit on the edge of my seat and grip my elbows over the front seat between Dad and Carl. When I told Dad I didn't think we'd make it, he cursed and whacked his hand against the dashboard so hard it made the radio stutter. Carl was ten and slapped the dash with him.

The snow kept falling, the windows fogged up, and we couldn't see the tracks of the other car anymore. The snow tires spun and the rear end fishtailed each time we came out of a turn. Dad started laughing and Carl copied him even though I knew he was as scared as I was. The engine raced and the tires whined like a wounded animal as we crept closer to the top of the rise. When we neared the summit, the car gained momentum as we flattened out and then plunged down again into a blizzard. Dad whooped and hollered and his eyes got bigger as he leaned into the wheel and let the car hurtle forward blindly. Carl pumped his shoulders up and down in rhythm as if to help us go faster.

The next thing I remembered was tumbling against the insides of the car like a tennis shoe in the clothes dryer. There were breaking glass and screams. Suddenly, the car stopped rolling and there was a pure, otherworldly silence. When I opened my eyes, I thought the dust from the seat cushions hovering in the air was the smoke of the afterlife.

I remembered Dad feeding Carl's limp body out the crumpled window opening. There was some shuffling outside, then both of them disappeared and I was alone. Dad had taken Carl and forgotten me. Maybe he thought I was dead. The only sound was the slow gurgle of gasoline like juice escaping from a thermos bottle. It seemed like hours before a state patrol officer arrived and pulled me out. I had to have my arm in a cast that Dad never got around to signing. Nor did he ever apologize for the wreck or explain why he took Carl out and never came back for me.

As I whistled past the sign to Mount Vernon, I decided I was hungry and found a place to make a U-turn in the median. I realized the highways were utterly unsafe if people could act like me, but I welcomed someone pulling me over just for the chance to bitch at them. Now I was sorry I hadn't yelled back at the house. Jude was right; I stored things up. That's probably what Dad had done that day. Mom probably made him take us out so we could use the toboggan they'd given us for Christmas.

In a mall near Bellingham, I bought rum-soaked cigars, a family-size bag of Doritos, squeeze cheese, and a jar of jalapeños that I could spread out on the newspaper in the passenger seat to make nachos. The liquor store had six-packs of airline cocktails and I picked out a pack of margaritas and another one of manhattans. I went back to the Deli for a bag of ice, scooped some off the top, and scattered it across the parking lot. One at a time, I separated the miniature cans from their plastic halter and buried them in the ice on the floor next to me. Then I was back on the road again.

My fear of arrest returned and I held the speedometer to five or six miles over the fifty-five-mile-per-hour limit as I sipped a drink and licked cheese off my fingers. I imagined that the jalapeños were neutralizing the alcohol as I plucked them whole from the stem and flicked the stems and empty cans out the window to destroy the evidence.

When I reached Blaine, the Canadian border, I turned around to avoid Customs and headed south. I finished the margaritas by Everett and opened my first manhattan. I kept thinking of those cultists in Guyana who'd put cyanide in their Kool-Aid and drank themselves to death. At least they weren't alone. Isolation was a form of execution. It shut down all the systems. Jude and the kids were my systems. They're what had justified the deal I'd made with the devil to work my guts out at the law firm. I couldn't imagine quite what the point would be of taking that next step in the morning if Jude and the kids would rather live without me. I felt cheated because the kids didn't even know who I was and now they never would. They'd interpreted my overtime at the office as disinterest. They saw only the remnants of my day, as I hurried to get out the door in the morning and stumbled home spent and grumpy in the evenings.

As I crossed the ship canal, the glow of downtown Seattle swayed and liquefied. The red aviation lights on the Queen Anne transmission towers shimmered like the prongs of an electrified pitchfork. I took the next exit and parked under the freeway where Boylston swerved to connect with Lakeview. Eight lanes of freeway were supported by rows of concrete cylindrical columns on a sloping hillside. The kids and I went down there once and found a camp where transients had left old blankets, cardboard mattresses, Thunderbird bottles, and burned cans with teeth marks on the rim where they'd been opened with wedge keys. We sat there and made up names for each other, pretending we'd just blown into town. Outlaws on the lam. I let them spit and cuss as we sat around a make-believe Sterno fire and cursed our fate. It was the right place for cursing, a kind of Hades where the living roared over your head on the way to ball games and operas, leaving leadened exhaust fumes behind.

I could feel the ground tremble as I unzipped and peed off some of the alcohol. The tires made a rhythmic bump as they sped over the steel expansion joint above me. An ambulance passed with its siren screaming, the beacon light momentarily flaring slices against the high ends of the columns. I zipped up and found a flattened Kotex carton to sit on. Then I placed a dirty corduroy shirt with one arm chewed off and a garbage can lid into the circle to represent the kids. We were going to talk. One of them was going to tell me what went down in Justine's room, why they'd gone with their mom when she was the one who wanted to shitcan them.

I looked at the corduroy shirt. Derek just sat there staring between his knees. “Cat got your tongue?”

There was a manhattan in the pocket of my suitcoat and I popped it open. I didn't even like manhattans. They were Carl's drink. He made them by the pitcher when we went to his house. I could taste the maraschino and wondered why Carl had turned out so different, why he never seemed to mind how sporadic Dad was, why Dad was always his hero. He'd defended Dad's driving. “Anyone else would have gotten us killed,” he said. “Dad saved your ass.”

I turned to the galvanized garbage can lid with the flattened handle. “Just don't turn out prickly like your mother. You can be such a beauty. And don't be afraid to be wrong sometimes, huh?”

The empty can I threw at the column missed. Through the booziness and cigar nausea, I couldn't help thinking I was a failure. The kid who'd left Quincy to become a big-city lawyer and live in a larger house than his parents had flopped. My parents had hosted my college graduation party at the Grange. Mom's church friends put out trays of wrapped cold cuts, a variety of crackers, and warm miniature meatballs. The mayor and most of the City Council were there as well as some of my high school teachers. The police chief, whose house I'd painted one summer and whose kids were named Jake, Jack, and Jake Jr., made a toast with cheap champagne. “This young man'll graduate from law school and replace Scoop Jackson in the United States Senate,” he said. What a joke. I couldn't even keep my marriage together. And worse, I'd turn out to be an absentee father.

It was still dark when I woke up the next morning, and I felt like a boneless chicken breast that had been splatted on a piece of wax paper and left on the drainboard. I was dehydrated and my head throbbed. As I folded a piece of toast around fried Spam with mayonnaise and grape jam to cut the grease, I realized that cooking was one of the reasons the kids had chosen Jude.

I welcomed the distraction of work that morning. The law didn't fuss over my desirability as a father or a husband. One of the senior partners at the firm had been hospitalized with a fluttering heart and I had to help out on his embezzlement case. They thought he might have had a mild stroke. Bob was my assigned mentor when I was an associate, the person who was supposed to mold and inspire me. We went to his house for dinner once and Jude thought he was a howling bore. He was so frugal that he'd shut his car off at red lights and only make long distance calls to his kids after ten p.m. When he got home, he'd shut off the engine, open the garage door, and push his car in the rest of the way by hand. After our dinner, I saw him take his empty milk glass to the kitchen tap, swish a mouthful of water around to get the residue off the sides, and drink it. Bob was the kind of citizen that gave Jude the shivers—Eagle Scout, Symphony Board of Trustees, and Treasurer of the King County Republicans. On the way home, she said, “He probably rinses out and reuses his condoms.” We got the giggles.

The day Nixon resigned, Jude called me at the office to play a tape of his goodbye speech to the White House staff. She was giddy. Nixon's troubles had been better than a marriage counselor. After he fired Archibald Cox, even I got suspicious. Nixon had briefly made us allies. After the resignation, I traded my marble-brown plastic frames for gold wire rims and stopped parting my hair. One of my partners joked that I looked like Dagwood but Jude thought it was an encouraging sign.

Our office devoted an entire conference room and two paralegals to the embezzlement documents. One of my jobs was to distill the contents of the stacks of file cartons that circled the table into a persuasive legal brief. At breakfast and lunch meetings, I'd go over testimony with nervous witnesses. Worrying about the embezzlement trial and the kids, my own heart was beginning to flutter.