“I think I understand all this,” I said instead, in a convinced voice, as I poured myself a convincing amount of gin, bypassing the vermouth. “And I love you, by the way.”
“Please,” Ann said. “Just please. You love me? What difference does that make? I’m finished with what I had to tell you, anyway.” She was and is the kind of bedrock literalist who takes no interest in the far-fetched (the things I sometimes feel I’m only interested in), which is I’m sure why she married Charley.
“To say that some important truths are founded on flimsy evidence really isn’t saying much.” I voiced this view meekly.
“That’s your philosophy, Frank, not mine. I’ve heard it for years. It only matters to you how long some improbable thing holds up, right?”
I took my first sip of just-cold-enough gin. I could feel the slow exhilaration of a long, honing talk coming. There aren’t very many better feelings. “For some people the improbable can last long enough to become true,” I said.
“And for other people it can’t. And if you were about to ask me to marry you instead of Charley, don’t. I won’t. I don’t want to.”
“I was just trying to speak to an ephemeral truth at a moment of transition and trudge on beyond it.”
“Trudge on, then,” Ann said. “I’ve got to cook dinner for the children. I do want to admit this, though: I thought that it’d be you who’d get married again after we got divorced. To some bimbo. I admit I was wrong.”
“Maybe you don’t know me very well.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks for calling me,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Sure. It was nothing.” Then she said good-bye and hung up.
But … nothing? It was nothing?
It was something!
I bolted my gin in one shuddering, breathless gulp, to wash down frothing bitterness. Nothing? It was epochal. And I didn’t care if it was blue-blood Charley from Deep River, pencil-neck, breastpocket-penholder Waldo from Bell Labs or tattooed Lonnie down at the car wash: I’d have felt the same. Like shit!
Up to that moment, Ann and I had had a nice, cozy-efficient system worked out, one by which we lived separate lives in separate houses in one small, tidy, peril-free town. We had flings, woes, despairs, joys, a whole gearbox full of life’s meshings and unmeshings, on and on, but fundamentally we were the same two people who’d gotten married and divorced, only set in different equipoise: same planets, different orbits, same solar system. But in a pinch, a real pinch, say a head-on car crash requiring extended life support or a prolonged bout of chemo, no one but the other would’ve been in attendance, buttonholing the doctors, chatting up the nurses, judiciously closing and opening heavy curtains, monitoring the game shows through the long, silent afternoons, shooing away prying neighbors and long-ignored relatives, former boyfriends, girlfriends, old nemeses come to make up — shepherding them all back down the long hallways, speaking in confidential whispers, saying “She had a good night,” or “He’s resting now.” All this while the patient dozed, and the necessary machines clicked and whirred and sighed. And all just so we could be alone. Which is to say we had standing in the other’s dire moments, even if not in the happy ones.
Eventually, after a long recovery during which one or the other would have had to relearn some basic human life functions up to now taken for granted (walking, breathing, pissing), certain key conversations would’ve taken place, certain dour admissions been offered if not already offered in moments of extremis, and important truths reconciled so that a new and (this time) binding union could be forged.
Or maybe not. Maybe we would simply have parted again, though with new strengths and insights and respects achieved through the fragile life experiences of the other.
But all of that was gone like a fart in a skillet. And jeez Louise! If I’d thought back in ’81 that Ann would get remarried, I’d have fought it like a Viking instead of giving in to divorce like a queasy, uninspired saint. And I’d have fought it for a damn good reason: because no matter where she held the mortgage papers, she completely supposed my existence. My life was (and to some vague extent still is) played out on a stage in which she’s continually in the audience (whether she’s paying attention or not). All my decent, reasonable, patient, loving components were developed in the experimental theater of our old life together, and I realized that by moving house up to Deep River she was striking most of the components, dismembering the entire illusion, intending to hook up with another, leaving me with only faint, worn-out costumes to play myself with.
Naturally enough, I fell into a deep, sulfurous, unsynchronous gloom, stayed at home, called no one for days, drank a lot more gin, reconsidered heavy-equipment-operator’s class and becoming an unwieldy embarrassment to people who knew me, and overall felt myself becoming significantly less substantial.
I spoke once or twice to my children, who seemed to calculate their mother’s marriage to Charley O’Dell with the alacrity with which a small investor notices a gain in a stock he feels certain he’ll eventually lose money on. Though he’d later change his mind, Paul uncomfortably declared Charley to be an “okay” guy and admitted having gone to a Giants game with him in November (something I hadn’t heard about because I was in Florida and contemplating going to France). Clarissa seemed more interested in the wedding itself than in the conception of remarriage, which didn’t seem to worry her much. She was concerned with what she was going to wear, where everyone would stay (the Griswold Inn in Essex) and if I could be invited (“No”), plus whether she could be a bridesmaid if I got married in the future (which she said she hoped I would). All three of us talked about all these matters for a while via extension phones. I tried to calm fears, sweeten prospects and simplify growing confusions about my own and their possible unhappiness, until there was nothing left to say, after which we parted company, never to speak under those exact circumstances or in those same innocent voices again. Gone. Poof.
The wedding itself was an intimate though elegant “on the grounds” affair at Charley’s house—“The Knoll” (pretentious hand-hewn post-and-beam Nantucket cottage adaptation: giant windows, wood from Norway and Mongolia, everything built-in flush, rabbeted, solar panels, heated floors, Finnish sauna, on and on and on). Ann’s mother flew in from Mission Viejo, Charley’s aged parents somehow motored down from Blue Hill or Northeast Harbor or some such magnate’s enclave, with the happy couple flying off to the Huron Mountain Club, where Ann’s father had left her his membership.
But no sooner had Ann solemnized her retreaded vows than I plunged forward with my own plans (founded on my previously explained sense of practicality, since high-spirited synchronicity hadn’t fared well) to purchase her house on Cleveland Street for four ninety-five, and to get rid of my big old soffit-sagging half-timber on Hoving Road, where I’d lived nearly every minute of my life in Haddam and where I mistakenly thought I could live forever, but which now seemed to be one more commitment holding me back. Houses can have this almost authorial power over us, seeming to ruin or make perfect our lives just by persisting in one place longer than we can. (In either case it’s a power worth defeating.)
Ann’s house was a crisp, well-kept freestanding Greek Revival town house of a style and 1920s vintage typical of the succinct, Nice-but-not-finicky central Jersey architectural temper — a place she’d bought on the cheap (with my help) after our divorce and done some modernizing work on (“opening out” the back, adding skylights and crown moldings, repointing some basement piers, finishing off the third floor to be Paul’s lair, then giving the clapboards a new white paint job and new green shutters).