Yes, quite a comedown for old Bill Wyeth, someone who'd slept in twenty or thirty of the world's swankiest hotels (the Conrad in Hong Kong, the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, etc.), yes sir, a fellow who'd even been to a White House dinner during the Clinton administration. (The forty-second president himself had come over to me, looming and squinty-eyed, red-nosed, and shaken my hand and said something in his moist, scratchy voice, Good to see you, we 'preciate your support, or some such as the White House staff photographers clicked away, but that was enough for me- as he knew. When the president shook Judith's hand, her ability to speak devolved into breathy, near-coital word-bits: "Yes, oh, I-! Thank you! Yes!" The cameras clicked, as they did with everyone whose hand he shook. The pictures of both of us with the president, grinning like maniacs, arrived in a large, crisp, unsmudged envelope exactly two days later, having been borne aloft on some special private presidential postal service, the return address on the envelope simply THE WHITE HOUSE in raised gray letters. Judith spent $600 having the photos framed and she took the one of her with Bill C. with her to San Francisco, and what happened to the other one, with me, was anyone's guess.)
I don't remember much from my first few weeks in the walk-up on Thirty-sixth Street, and the reason is simple: I discovered a bottle of Judith's old sleeping pills tucked into my running shoes and swallowed three or four of them a day. You don't kill yourself on that, not even close, not that I actually wanted to. The changes are subtle. You float as you sink. You watch television while sleeping. You actually feel your eyes roll back into your head and it is in no way objectionable. You forget to take off your socks before stepping into the bath. At some point I bought a mattress, a table, and a chair from a guy on the street. I ordered Chinese food every twenty hours or so. I didn't mind the cold ginger chicken, the ants. I shaved irregularly, I used a T-shirt as a pillowcase, I read the news backward.
In time the divorce papers came; I signed the red-flagged pages without reading them. No custody, arranged visitation. Our old apartment sold quickly, the money went straight to her lawyer. I didn't care. I thought Judith and Timothy should get every cent possible. My retirement savings, so carefully tended and weeded and worshipped, were subject to the division of property, and perhaps already knowing that I was incapable of labor, I agreed to the complete liquidation of all my accounts, subject, of course, to the resulting penalties and retroactive taxes. And after the division of this sum, I was left with enough money to squeak along for a while, a few years anyway.
This noble destruction of wealth soon proved to have been unnecessary; Judith's sudden and rather expeditious remarriage to a young technology entrepreneur relieved me (sadly, for it might have been a source of dignity) of the obligation of child support. I was left to live off my future. I preferred not to know anything about the new husband, but one day, while flipping through the financial-celebrity magazines at a newsstand, I came upon a portrait of him. It was a shock. The article, titled "Young Wizards on the Verge," explained why his new company was so sought after. It held the patent to some laser-data storage technology I didn't understand. Data storage, the country was obsessed with it, a new way to avoid death. The article included a glossy photo of the new husband. He was young. Surprisingly dopey-looking, even, neck too long, eyes too close together, maybe even a little cross-eyed, but decked out in a good suit that I'm sure Judith selected. The text said he was twenty-eight years old, had three advanced computer engineering degrees. Stanford, Caltech. A kid, almost. Another picture: wide-hipped and duck-footed. If I was a wrecked minivan, then he was a new laundry truck. Somehow Judith had smelled him out from across the country, and teased him with some of the good stuff. A wink and a wet smile and he's stump-staggering toward her on his knees. I hated his youth, his brain that understood obscure, fantastically valuable things. Did she suckle him, I wondered miserably, did she press that geeky, appreciative face into her buoyant breasts knowing that the rest of things would take care of themselves? Knowing he didn't have a hundredth of the danger or poisonous power of Wilson Doan, but not caring, and, for his part, did he feel that deep, peaceful slowing of the pulse, as I had once felt, Judith's large soft nipples touching the roof of my/his mouth, and did he then know, know, that he was home again, parked, garage door down, safe as he had not been since he was two years old, and that this woman, this mother-woman, would take care of him, force these lovely soft things against his face, for him to suck, if only he did what she wished, which was to hand over the money? Well, maybe. Or maybe Judith really loved him.
The joke had one more gruesome laugh. When Judith's new husband took his company public a week later, he was suddenly worth some $852 million, and my obliteration was complete. My knees actually buckledever so subtly- as I read the newspaper article on the way up the stairs to my apartment. You had to shake your head, even smile at the thing! I had been well paid, had worked like a sled dog for that pay, but the pile of security I had amassed for my family had been rendered meaningless, reduced to a rounding error in the new husband's countinghouse.
That Timothy now lacked for nothing- except for his father- and never would, was bitter solace. He was still young enough that he'd be blinded by his new stepfather's supernova of wealth- the nineteen-thousand-square-foot house in Marin County, the skybox seats to the '49ers, the beach house in Hawaii. I, his father, who issued the seed of him from my loins, was reduced to a dead moon in a lost galaxy, a small voice of a shrinking, uncle-like presence. For a time, I wrote him letters and sent him e-mail and small gifts. But these activities seemed to make me cry. Yes, I wept at the loss of my son. My wife, too. Oh, I missed Judith, too, everything about her. Would have taken her back, in a minute, forgiven all. I tried to keep up my end. But Timothy's letters and calls became less frequent. We didn't have much to talk about. I didn't know anything about his school or friends. I think he and his mother were happy. She was successful, Judith. She made the transition. She saved her son, she saved him from me, from what I had done.
Days flicked by, months drifted along. I was silting my way to the bottom. One could rightly ask how it was that I failed to find another job or rebuild my life to some minimal degree. Or even talk to someone. What friends remained suggested that I should move to Seattle or gobble antidepressants or practice exercise regimes banned in China. And as for my loneliness, certainly Manhattan is filled with an abundance of intelligent, forbearing women, some of whom might have been patient with my despair, but I was unequal to the task of finding one. Surely a better man would have resisted, argued, fought, asserted his rights and achievements and responsibilities. But as we always learn too late, the world doesn't care who we used to be, not particularly. My identity proved as removable as one of the tailored suits I used to wear, and I must confess that as I witnessed each piece of my life flutter away- job, marriage, child, home, money, friends, I entertained a perverse curiosity as to what might remain. Certain small lifelong habits, such as cracking my knuckles and double-knotting my shoelaces, gave me unnatural satisfaction, and seemed increasingly important proof that I had in fact come from somewhere and not plummeted out of the sky, wet and blinking and alone, a newborn forty-year-old man.