That night was the final grace note of the marriage. It was three months before the divorce papers were filed (on the afternoon of the morning their daughter left for college). She had more money than he did, though not all that much more, and as an ardent feminist who took care of herself wonderfully she wanted nothing from him. He insisted for selfish reasons on paying the college bills (a fear of losing contact with his daughter) and they agreed to split the sale of the house down the middle. Certain necessary tortures were performed to insure the permanence of the divorce. Nordstrom was the simpleminded victim of these emotional barrages that accompany separation, the hacking of all the knots and threads that held the lovers together. He was told he was selfish, cold, calculating, intoxicated with his business success, with the toys that later decorated his life. During many wine-soaked summer evenings he heard ruminations about his midwestern infantilism, his self-satisfied ignorance of the real world, his insensitivity to the arts. Sometimes the ardor of the spleen was tempered by laughter or her ready admission that on a comparative basis it hadn't been all that bad a marriage. Unfortunately his potency waned as she drew away from him. He sought out wrongs, even imagined ones that he could present, but came up with nothing of substance. He loved her and had always been utterly uncritical of her often sloppy nature. He only felt anger when she told him about her lovers, and not that he was a bad lover, only that she saw life as too exasperatingly short to know only one man. He felt flashes of the cuckold's rage but his spirit had become too fatigued with sorrow to express himself. He invented a few infidelities but sensed she didn't believe him and was being kind to his inventions. It was their daughter who kept them totally civiclass="underline" she loved them both for childlike reasons but questioned their sanity when they proposed only a tentative separation. She understood her father's nature, how while he could be lovable, he was also an introverted ignoramus, lacking even a touch of ease and spontaneity. She had known of her mother's lovers since fourteen and was only mildly embarrassed, owning a woman's matter-of-factness in sexual matters.
So a nearly twenty-year period of Nordstrom's life was over. After Christmas that year when he had tied up what he thought of as loose ends he moved to Boston where he had arranged a vice-presidency for another large book wholesaler. He was so dead to himself that the move actually constituted a way to keep at least cautiously near his daughter two hundred miles to the south. She even stayed with him for two months one year when she attended Harvard summer school. And that prolonged visit was what led to Nordstrom dancing alone. She had spent the two previous summers in Europe and now had a boyfriend at Harvard. They shared a mutually intense interest in art history and contemporary music, two subjects that seemed pleasantly impractical to Nordstrom. The young man was Jewish and this distressed him a little too until he spent an evening brooding about it and came up with nothing decisive one way or another. Laura had remarried and to a Jew; she was apparently quite happy, so perhaps it wasn't surprising that her daughter picked a Jew. Brookline was full of Jews and though Nordstrom didn't know any on a personal basis he rather liked them from a distance. He didn't know that he was somewhat an object of comedy in the delicatessen where he took his morning breakfast. He mentioned one morning to the owner that his Formosa oolong tea had said on the packet "this rare brown leaf tea from the island of Formosa has the exquisite odor of ripe peaches" but he hadn't smelled any peaches. This laconic form of midwestern humor escaped the delicatessen owner who sniffed the tea and said "so whadda I'm supposed to do." Then several weeks later the short-order cook didn't show up and Nordstrom called his office telling the secretary he'd be late. He looked a little absurd in the white apron with a J. Press shirt peeking out the top with a silk tie in a Windsor knot tightly in place. He cooked through the two-hour breakfast rush preparing basically simple orders—scrambled eggs with lox and onions, toasted bagels with cream cheese, a variety of omelettes, fried potatoes. When it was over and Nordstrom took off the apron and the owner wondered aloud what Nordstrom might like in return he said jauntily "just put something on a horse for me," having seen the owner study the Racing Form. Later when his daughter had been in the delicatessen with him the owner had complimented him on the "beautiful piece of ass." Nordstrom hadn't had the heart to admit it was his daughter.
Nor would Nordstrom admit that he was lonely. If the idea had arisen, which it didn't, he would have insisted to himself that he was alone most of the time only so he could figure things out. At work he was cold and efficient, only perfunctorily social. In the three years in Boston he had quickly renewed his reputation as a hatchet man by firing ten percent of the firm's two hundred employees and increasing efficiency and volume by more than twenty percent. There was a lot of muttering among the shanty Irish and the lower level Italian workers but never in Nordstrom's presence. The fact of it was that Nordstrom was powerful to no particular purpose. If he were to walk into a bar and say "it's raining" all the drinkers would nod attentively even though they could clearly see the sun shining through the windows. Perhaps, though, his preparations for his daughter's summer arrival painted his solitary life accurately. The gestures weren't at all conscious but more like an animal preparing for spring or winter, not really knowing which. He had the large master bedroom repainted a pale blue, bookshelves installed and filled with art books; he shopped for a stereo set and ended up buying two combination stereos that included tape decks. Her frugality at college had always depressed him, reminding him of his own bleak years. When he first met her young man in New York they were both wearing blue jeans, not even particularly clean ones, so Nordstrom had to cancel reservations at La Caravelle and they had ended up in the Village. He had noted to himself to return there at a future date because a particular waitress had caught his eye.
At the beginning of the summer of 1977 Nordstrom wanted sex to go away. In the three years since the divorce he had proven himself in a few encounters to be utterly without versatility. Desire went away for a long while and he was relieved but recently it had surfaced again at odd moments: a photo in a magazine, the rare movie (the nurse in Cuckoo's Nest, Louise Fletcher, gave him a momentary hard-on), an overweight waitress at the delicatessen, and most reprehensibly in his view, a girl across the courtyard from his apartment. She had just moved in and was in the habit of turning out all the lights and watching TV in the dark presuming herself invisible. But the blue light on her body was startlingly sexual and one evening her hand had moved down as if to massage herself and Nordstrom rushed from the apartment to find a prostitute. There were none to be had in the neighborhood bars and he ended up watching a Red Sox game on television, baseball being an effective nationwide soporific. But he brooded about his sexual failures, the dead feeling in his body as he watched the future disappear in nightly units full of odd dreams; dreams that brought the strange glandular rapacity of his marriage back so strongly that he half-expected Laura to be beside him when he awoke exhausted in the morning. He read widely on the subject but the reading was like trying to translate a foreign language after one year's study: his sexuality had been wonderful for eighteen years and then vanished. The books weren't any good on the vanishing act as if it were an example of antimagic and too subtle to describe. Nordstrom didn't know that he longed to fall in love. In his rage for order he began to keep a diary and the simple act of writing calmed him a great deal.