"If it doesn't work out," I kept assuring myself right up to the day of the ceremony, "I can always get a divorce."
I can't always get a divorce.
I don't know how it's done.
Maybe I attach too much importance to a shirt.
I'll have undershorts at the laundry. Will she let me come for them? Or will she burn them, hide them? Will she tell me my little boy is upset when he isn't? That she cannot live without me when she can? I know she'll tell me she's thinking of killing herself. The obstacles appear insurmountable. In the summer my winter clothes are in mothballs; in the winter, my summer suits are hanging somewhere else and my sneakers are packed away. How will I ever get them all together? I'd need weeks. I don't have time to get a divorce. There's so much packing to be done (she won't help), so much talk to go through. (How does anyone ever get it finished?) There'll be fights, discussions, more fights. (Will it never end?) Bank statements will already be in the mail. A letter will be due any day, a pinstripe suit I like has just been sent to the cleaner's. There'll be books to be boxed in corrugated food cartons from the supermarket, the smaller the lighter, the lighter the better. No wonder I keep finding reasons for postponing the action: the welfare of the children (a fat lot of good it's done any of them to have us stick together so long), the money, the office, my wife's health, a dinner party for the following week or a date for the theater with another couple that will have to be broken. Neither one of us will want to call; we'd rather stay married. It's so much easier to ride things out until my mood changes and I kid myself into thinking I will never really want to leave her.
I just don't know how it's done.
Weaklings do it. Will she forward my mail? Or will I have to telephone and talk to her about that and other things. I guess it helps to have a wife who falls in love with another man and wants a divorce first. But mine is so lacking in initiative of that kind she might never come around to it. I would still have all that packing to do. I have shelves of books from college days with handwritten notes I scribbled in the margins. I probably will never look at them again. Yet I would want to take them with me. I would have to find an apartment, furnish the apartment, make my own dinner most evenings or eat out, get some girl friends I could stand, and sooner or later get married to one of them so that I could start looking forward to a divorce again.
I wish there were someone I could hire by the hour to go through the whole wearying procedure for me from beginning to end, even to experiencing those ritualistic qualms of guilt, concern, and remorse without which a conscience can never feel antiseptically pure again.
I remember a pledge: when Derek reached five, I promised myself, I would go. What irony! (All I did was fuck her once, and now I am saddled with him.) It isn't his fault. Even without him, I'd still be unable to go; and even if he were normal, I would want to. I will always want to.
I yearn to.
I do have dreams about divorce. I want to leave my home but I'm unable to. Even when they let me. (They always let me. I don't go. I don't want them to let me.) I'm unable to get anywhere. I want to speak but I'm unable to. People leave messages for me and I am unable to get back to them. I have to take a test and I am unprepared. All term long I have been unable to find my way into the correct classroom. The lessons have proceeded without me. The term is ending. I have trouble finding my way to the correct examination room. Every building I enter is wrong. Time is passing. I will fail.
I would not even know how to begin if I had to begin with a straight face. I don't think I'd be able to make all those necessary pompous statements without cracking a smile. I think I might actually burst out laughing. I think a man like me would have to fly way off the handle into the wildest emotional state to get it done, go mad, utterly berserk, for an hour or two and give no thought at all to mail, children, books, underwear, and pinstripe suits. Man can live without a pinstripe suit, if he has to. All it would take is enough rage to throw together a small suitcase, checkbook, passport, credit cards. Even then, there would be no guarantee.
Not for me.
Suppose, for example, one of the children, even Derek (perhaps especially Derek), came to the doorway to watch while I was packing. How could I go on?
Or suppose my wife, whom I've known so many years now, simply walked into the room when I was almost finished and said:
"Please don't go."
I don't think I could (I would probably miss her.) She wants me to tell her I love her. I won't. A reason I won't is that I know she wants me to. This is one advantage I have over her that I am still able to hang onto.
She used to make me say it. It seems a silly, awkward thing for a sapient human being to have to say — especially if it's true. It might make some sense on occasion when it's a lie. Now she cannot make me say it, and I have my revenge. She doesn't ask me to anymore. And between us now there is this continual underground struggle over something trivial and nebulous that won't abate and has lasted nearly as long as the two of us have known each other.
"I love you."
What funny words ever to have to say. (They become more flexible if you're allowed to add a couple of others fore and aft to round them off with some frills of humor or sarcasm that pervert the meaning. Something like:
"Gee, baby, I sure do love you a lot whe______________"
Complete the above statement in fifteen words or less.)
I have not told my wife I love her, I think, since shortly after Arthur Baron first proposed Andy Kagle's job for me, and that was at night in bed and the meaning was sexual (which is not what she means. My wife does not know yet that it will be Andy Kagle's job I'm taking). It gnaws at my wife's self-esteem, tears at her pride and vanity that I do not say:
"I love you."
I relish that. I have it on her. It has nothing at all to do with love. It has more to do with hate. We hoard pillows. We have big, fluffy, soft ones now, and she steals mine when I'm asleep. Also, she sleeps better than I do, which arouses so much wrath in me that I can hardly sleep at all, and then she maintains she's been awake all night with heartburn, headache, and humanitarian concern over the well-being of others. (I'm the one who's been awake. She won't stay in her part of the house, as my son and daughter prefer to do now. She won't answer the telephone, even though the calls are mostly for her. When one does come for me, she'll wait until I've been talking for thirty seconds and then pick up the extension breathlessly to shout: "Hello?" We run out of light bulbs.) There is face to be saved in this tug-of-war, and I want to save mine. This is one victory she cannot pluck away from me. I have the advantage, because I don't care if she never says it to me (although I might begin to care if I felt she didn't).
She wants me to say it precisely that way:
"I love you."
I prefer to sidle into it through methods of my own.
"Oh, Mom!" my daughter exclaimed in the car, pulling close to her in a hug. "I just love her when she kids around this way."
"So do I," I said, edging it in.
There it was. But that isn't good enough. It doesn't do the trick.
(I meant it when I did.)
I've said it to her also the way she wants me to and will again; but I refuse to say it when she is trying to make me. I balk. I have my masculinity and self-esteem to protect against this indecent attack. I resist.
Call it spite. Call it petty spite. But call it highly sensual and gratifying spite.
"Would I be here with you if I didn't?" I have answered.
"Then why don't you ever say so?"
"I love you — there! I did."
"You never tell me."
"I just did."
"But I had to ask you — no, don't smile, don't say anything, don't make a joke out of it," she laments (just as I am about to make a joke out of it). "I guess I expect too much."
My wife not only wants me to say:
"I love you."
She wants me to want to say it!
"I love you."
"Do you?"
"I just said so, didn't I?"
"I had to ask you. I always have to make you say it."
And I might consent to let her make me, out of the hospitable goodness of my heart, if I did not know there was this contest between us that I don't want to lose. I might make a deal with her on it anyway if she'd get me the pillows I want and stop snoring or breathing away indifferently in such slumbering, nasal contentment while I'm still lying awake trying to sleep.