While she still thought the matter was under discussion, Jim came home one afternoon and announced a unilateral decision.
“I can’t stall them anymore, Polly,” he explained, sitting down suddenly in the hall in a narrow-backed, hard Art Deco chair that nobody ever sat in. “I heard today that if I don’t take the Denver job they’re going to offer it to Frank Abalone. And hell, he’d really mess it up. He’s got a name in some circles, but essentially he’s a fraud, only nobody can prove it. Nobody even dares to try, after the way he ruined that lab assistant in L.A. I told you about that, you remember?”
“I remember,” Polly said, standing in the kitchen door with a head of half-washed escarole in one hand. “But hell, it’s not your responsibility, you know, what happens in some lab in Denver.”
“Yes it is, though,” Jim said. “It’s my profession.” He swallowed, looked at the new beige twist carpeting for a bit, then up again. “Anyhow, I told Ben I was going to take the job.”
“You told him you were leaving, just like that?” Polly stared at her husband and the chair that nobody ever sat on and thought: It was a sign; I should have known.
“I had to, Polly. They’ll have to start looking for someone to replace me as soon as possible.”
“I can’t believe it.” Polly’s voice rose; she had an impulse to throw the wet soppy head of lettuce at her wet soppy husband’s head. “Oh, shit. I thought you understood how I felt — Goddamn it, you said — I thought you’d do anything for me.”
“I would, honestly,” Jim insisted. “Anything but this.”
The next few weeks were horrible. Slowly but relentlessly, like a dirty oil stain seeping through the back of a badly prepared canvas, the apartment on Central Park West became fouled and darkened with distrust. Polly and Jim began to have long, increasingly exhausting conversations after they were in bed, lying side by side for hours but hardly touching. Finally, at two or three A.M., they would make love in a weary, desperate way. Afterward she would lie as still as possible, not moving, with the sleepy, blurred thought that as long as she held Jim within her body, he couldn’t leave her.
It was at this point that Polly began seeing a therapist. She didn’t know yet that her marriage was breaking up; all she knew was that she and Jim had argued about his going to Denver until both of them were worn out, and now she was angry all the time and Jim was more and more silent and withdrawn. She knew they had to talk to someone else, to ventilate their feelings; that was why she made the appointment for them with Elsa.
The trouble was that when air got into their feelings it turned into a cyclone and blew them apart. Jim was revealed to Polly as a pathetic, selfish windbag, with a mind so closed that he wouldn’t even go back to Elsa after their first three visits; he claimed she wasn’t on his side. But Polly hung in there, and Elsa supported her through the worst months of her life.
Gradually she began to see how she had been deceived. Underneath his friendly, compliant manner, her husband was another MCP like all the rest. Worse, in fact, because at least the others were up front about it. With Jim there were never any remarks about women being weak-minded or unreasonable, there was no bluster or shouting. He was what an article she read later called a “passive-aggressive” male: a twentieth-century husband with the emotional tactics of a Victorian wife. He did exactly what he wanted, and made Polly look terrible at the same time.
Jim wouldn’t, he simply wouldn’t fight. When she shouted and started throwing things he remained infuriatingly sad and silent. He almost never raised his voice, even, so everyone thought of him as terribly good and patient and mature. It was Polly who seemed to be in the wrong, who seemed selfish and childish and unreasonable. It was Polly whom Stevie blamed for his parents’ troubles. (“Why are you always yelling at Dad?”) It was Polly whom her own mother argued against. (“Really, dear, you’re beginning to sound like one of those radical students that have been giving Bob so much trouble lately.”)
Meanwhile Jim went around looking ill and caved-in, begging her to change her mind and come with him, promising her anything else she might want: a separate studio, frequent trips to New York and Europe. The first six months they were apart, for what he told everyone was a “trial separation,” he kept phoning, writing, pleading. He even finally pretended to understand her position. (“I guess you have to do what’s right for you and your art.”)
That first summer alone in New York was terrible for Polly. Rage and depression consumed her. If it hadn’t been for Elsa, she probably would have cracked up, or given in and gone to Colorado. For the first few weeks she didn’t even have Stevie, who had been sent to stay with his grandmother so that he wouldn’t have to witness his father’s departure and the departure of half the furniture.
The apartment was not only empty of furniture that summer; it was empty of friends, because everyone Polly knew, with the single exception of Jeanne, had turned out to be on Jim’s side, and even if they felt like seeing Polly, she didn’t want to see them. They claimed to be neutral, but they all kept telling her what an exceptional person Jim was, and saying that she ought to hang on to him even if it meant leaving the Museum, because good men were scarcer than good jobs. If she really cared for him, they said, she’d reconsider. They told her how much she was hurting him, how much he loved her; they said he’d probably never get over it. (What a laugh. Fourteen months after Jim moved to Denver he was remarried.)
When she talked it over with Elsa she came to realize that in the past thirteen years she’d acquired a new set of friends: better off, more conservative politically, and more apt to be conventionally married. Though she still considered herself a feminist, she’d lost touch with most of the members of her old consciousness-raising group, who didn’t get on with Jim; she saw them only once or twice a year now, and always alone. “I had lunch with Wild Wilhemina today,” she would report disloyally afterward, using the nickname she’d invented to amuse him. “Oh, really?” Jim would reply, grinning in anticipation. “What’s she into these days?”
Without realizing it, Polly had accepted Jim’s mild but persistent idea of who they were; of who she was. She had betrayed her old friends for him; and she had betrayed herself. She herself had become conventional. She hadn’t noticed this because it had happened so slowly, and because she was bamboozled by superficialities. She had thought that she was different from the wives of Jim’s scientific colleagues: she believed her free, sometimes foul language, and her Mexican embroidered smocks and African jewelry and brown-rice casseroles outweighed the fact that she lived on Central Park West and read New York Magazine the day it came, while Mother Jones and Ms slumped unopened for weeks in the wicker basket in the bathroom. Probably Jim’s friends had been quietly laughing at her all those years.
The worst discovery of the summer was that, as if Jim’s parting wish had been a curse, she wasn’t able to paint. Alone in her studio weekend after muggy weekend, with the boxes of toys and winter clothes shoved aside, she stared at canvases that seemed to have dissolved into ugly messes of color like spilt or vomited food: a half-scrambled egg dropped on the floor, or regurgitated pizza. Somehow Jim’s departure had destroyed her creative will. And even if she could have finished something, it wouldn’t have had any future. The loose, painterly style she had developed in college wasn’t fashionable anymore. Unless you were already famous no gallery wanted abstract work now; they were looking for hard-edged color-field painting or photorealism.