Scenes From a Divorce #11: The Children's Hour

“That’s it. I’ve had it,” Lisa said into my ear: no greeting, no pretence of civility. I had knocked over a glass of water, grabbing for the phone. It was six thirty in the morning. “You can flaunt your sex life all over town if you feel you have to, but not in front of my children.”

I sat up in bed. “What?”

“There are laws against this shit. We’re still married, technically. You’re traumatizing my children and I won’t stand for it.”

I was waking up now. “Your children? You have kids you never told me about?”

“You can turn your life into a porn movie, you can do whatever you like now, but I won’t have them exposed to it.”

“But exposing them to you and Ned is fine.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is about. If you’re just trying to get revenge on me for Ned, you’re deluded. I couldn’t care less what you do with that disgusting pig. Just don’t tell me she’s the love of your life because we both know that’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t do that ‘love of my life’ stuff any more, Lisa. It gives man-hating tyrannical bitches too much power.”

“And that’s supposed to be me? Because if it is, you should take a good long look at yourself. Ned would laugh at that comment. I don’t hate him. I don’t tyrannize him. We have a real relationship. We have mutual respect and passion and -- ”

“And I’m sure the kids find it very uplifting when they catch you smooching in the kitchen.”

“How did you know -- ?”

“Just a guess. But obviously a good one. You know, Lisa, you really are the queen of the double standard. Nothing applies to you, nothing sticks to you. Nothing counts when you do it. You make the rules and you’re above the rules. Well, not any more. You don’t scare me any more. There’s nothing you can do to me, so stop dancing around making scary faces. You just look like an idiot.”

“I certainly can do something to you, Steven. I can take the kids away from you. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m suing for full custody and no visitation rights.”

“Good luck then, because you won’t get it and you don’t even want it. You’re the one who calls me up screaming when you have to have them for one extra night, or I screw up your love nest by having to work through the weekend. In case you’ve forgotten that was three weeks ago when I was finishing a job before the floor guys showed up.”

“Fine. I admit it will make things harder for me. There’ll be some sacrifices, but I don’t care.”

“Oh really? When was the last time you made a sacrifice? When you waited three weeks to get the sale price on a new couch?”

“At least my house is furnished properly.”

“I have to go.”

“Fine. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

A lovely way to start the morning -- better than two cups of coffee; and no less grating for being so predictable.. But the pressure was coming from both sides at once. Sasha had to weigh in on my post-divorce relationship with Lisa, also. It was her business because my “total abdication” affected her life-style.

We were eating dinner a few nights later – over-cooked pork chops with some sort of honey glaze, served with bottled apple sauce; some kind of sticky German white wine. I had just told her I couldn’t afford to go to Boston for a concert.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “We never have any money to do anything, we’ve never been off-island, not even to see a movie in Hyannis, and you’re paying almost three hundred dollars a week in child support! You have those kids half the time! You feed them, they’re sleeping under your roof and Lisa makes more money than you anyway! She should be paying you child support!”

“Actually, she’s kind of strapped right now, and -- ”

“That is such bullshit! She’s just playing poor like every other rich bitch in the world! Ooo, I’m so broke! But I can afford an iPhone and a trip to Hawaii for February vacation! During which you’ll have the kids and her stupid dogs will be kenneled here, turning your house into a war zone while you buy the dog food and clean up after them. She rules you like a Roman Emperor and she can’t even house-train two dogs! She doesn’t need to! She took you to obedience school a long time ago. And you don’t even get a milk bone for your trouble! It makes me sick.”

A deep breath; I blow it out slowly. “I think it would be better for everyone if we tried to separate these areas -- ”

“But they’re not separate! She gets everything and I’m living on table scraps! Listen to me. No, no, I mean it. Just listen for a second. I went over to Ned’s house to pick up the kids and there was a vase on the dining room table with about two hundred dollars worth of Oriental Lillies sitting there. Who do you think bought him those? Some work buddy?”

“Maybe … his parents?”

“His Dad is dead and his mom is in a home with Alzheimer’s. Anyway – Jesus! Nobody buys fancy flowers for their kids. Who would do that? I’ll tell you something, I’d love to see your ex-wife’s credit card bills. She probably has a gold American Express card with tons of restaurant dinners on there. Cosy little dinners for two. Wait till, summer, when the really expensive places open. But it’s nice to know you’re paying your share. The least you should get is a doggie bag with the left-overs. That would be so perfect.”

I was getting a little tired of the canine metaphors. Maybe I was a dog, but I prided myself on being a good dog. Man’s best friend. Loyal and faithful. Maybe a Saint Bernard; I could definitely see bringing brandy to freezing people in a little barrel around my neck. Nice work if you can get it.

Arguments like that could frustrate us but they couldn’t break us up. I could let them roll over me like white water from a breaking wave – duck under and keep swimming. It was the argument over the kids that I couldn’t dismiss or ignore. I think of the old proverb “The straw the broke the camel’s back”; in fact that rarely happens, or at least it doesn’t feel that way. This was more like the hay-bale that crushed the camel – or the grain shipment that buried him.

Here’s what happened:

It was a Sunday night and the kids were officially with their mother. Sasha’s kids were with Ned. The elaborate configurations of child custody aligned this way just once a week and Sundays were precious. We were having some stupid argument when the phone rang – I was trying to explain why I didn’t like sugar in salad dressing and fruit served with real food. She had prepared a side dish of mashed potatoes and grapes: whole green grapes nestled into the lumpy white mass. I was trying to be reasonable, holding back my initial gag response, but this was pretty much a culinary deal breaker. I forget how we had gotten onto the sugar issue – though I hadn’t been able to eat the salad, either. I remember saying “There are places where sugar does not belong. Would you put sugar on a steak?”

“What’s wrong with that? That sounds delicious!”

Then the phone rang. It was Tommy and he was crying. I talked him down to the hiccup stage and got the full story -- his first romantic catastrophe. Welcome to the club, kid.

Susie Cummings had told him Caitlin Joyce didn’t want to eat lunch with him anymore; Caitlin herself wouldn’t even answer the phone. But he still had to sit next to her in English class on Monday. You couldn’t change the seat assignments. The school board Nazis had actually drawn a line down the center of the school’s main corridor to make sure everyone walked in the proper direction – toward the library on the right, toward the front doors on the left. They were tired of the “anarchy” and “uncontrolled jostling” between classes. So shifting seats was out of the question. It was cruel and horrible and most of all it wasn’t the kind of thing you could discuss with your mother. I told Tommy I’d be there soon, hung up, explained the situation briefly to Sasha -- and left. She was icy and restrained.

It took her about sixteen hours to get angry.

I heard all about it the next day, at lunch. She had carefully organized her grievances: I was just making excuses to get away from her (Of course, I denied this but I had to silently acknowledge the gust of relief I’d felt as I pulled out of her driveway), she was always my last priority. She gave everything and got nothing in return. Tommy had me wrapped around his little finger. He was out of control. He was a brat. I was spoiling him.

I said, “You spoil kids with things, not attention.”

“Tell yourself whatever you like. You’re turning that child into a monster.”

I was stunned. Was this the same woman who had gassed on about what a great dad I was and how wonderful it was that I made time for my kids, that I was always “There” for them?

Apparently, “there” meant anywhere but here.

And my commitment to them was fine, as long as it didn’t cut against the grain of her plans and desires in any way, because at that moment the hero of paternal devotion suddenly became a spineless reactive wimp, the puny nutless Dagwood Dad who let his kids tyrannize him at every opportunity, who couldn’t say no or structure their lives with rules. Talk about anarchy! The lunatics had taken over the asylum.

Quite an assault in response to one lonely night. But of course it had all been building up for a while. Maybe she was right. But it was not the best tactic to use if she wanted to keep me around.

I said, “You have children. I can’t believe you don’t get this. I’d kill for that kid. So standing you up for a night isn’t even an issue. You know, if your friend Carla called you up because her boyfriend had just dumped her and she was miserable and she needed to talk, you’d have been over there instantly. You’d have run out of here without your coat. But if it’s a kid who’s crying, then it’s manipulation and bullshit. My kids deserve better than that. So do yours.”

“So I’m a bad mother? That’s how you’re twisting this?”

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to. If you feel that way about me maybe we shouldn’t be together at all..”

“Maybe we shouldn’t.”

“I think you should go.”

So I did.

I went back to my little apartment and sat in the silence with phone unplugged and the door locked and breathed the dusty air and listened to the cars droning by on Bartlett road and the occasional deeper note of a plane engine above me and the soft rumble of the surf – when it was high you could hear it this far inland as a sort of low grumble like distant thunder. I closed my eyes. This felt right. Maybe I was meant to be alone.

I had the kids that night. I started thinking about what I was going to make them for dinner. Maybe I’d try them out with some arugula in the salad, with a nice olilve oil and red wine vinegar dressing. Maybe a dash of celery salt whisked into it, a little dry mustard. But no sugar, and best of all, no fighting about the ingredients. That chapter was over.

What the next one would be, I had no idea..

Scenes From a Divorce #10: Gossip and TV Dinners

I was driving a new car and no one recognized me. In this claustrophobic small town ant farm that was an unexpected luxury and a relief. It wouldn’t last, of course. Soon people would see me with my new Escape, and start to identify me with it as they had identified me for years with my battered old Aspire . Then the drive-by socializing would resume. People would wave as their cars approached mine on Milestone Road. If I failed to see them (and I often did; I was in my own world when I drove, most of the time -- looking out for deer crossing in front of me or cops in my rear-view mirror, but pretty much oblivious to the faces behind the oncoming windshields), I would inevitably have to explain the lapse a day or two later, in the canned soup aisle of the Stop & Shop or the Fast Forward parking lot. People actually got insulted. It was like ‘cutting them dead’ on the street in some nineteenth century English village.

But that was only the most superficial level of the ritual. You adjusted your responses according to how you felt about the other driver. There was the full wave, lifting the arm and flopping it around. That was reserved for your real friends. Acquaintances got a descending scale of gestures: the raised arm, the partial raise; the fingers extended from the steering wheel, the nod and finally the most minimal of all, reserved for people you really didn’t like but couldn’t afford to ignore – the chin lift. You could start a round of gossip just by stretching your neck a little when the wrong car was going by on the way into town. It was a finely calibrated machine.

“You having problems with Bob Liddell?,” someone might ask. “He says you gave him the chin on Polpis Road last week.”

I had actually lost a customer that way the winter before.. The guy had been truly offended. And on top of that, a few days later I had failed to stop my car in the middle of Broad Street and have a brief chat with him while traffic piled up both ways. That was a serious lapse; almost as bad as refusing to flash your headlights when a cop was giving out speeding tickets. It was an exhaustingly complex web of courtesies and protocols and I was glad to be out of it for a while.

Anonymity was precious. I cherished what privacy I could scavenge. When I hear all the panicky talk about the coming surveillance state, I have to smile: there’s no surveillance state as omniscient and merciless as a small town. Anything you do or say will be passed along the web of social relations, the crude social internet, with strands connecting your kids to their kids and their parents, your neighbors and co-workers with their friends and yours.

Gossip had almost wrecked my life twice during my marriage, and I had been startled each time at how little traction the banal truth had against a juicy lie. No one cared that Lisa had been doing part-time caretaking for an elderly friend of her mother's, delivering soup and old videos and chatting for an hour or two, when her car was noticed parked in front of Ted Larner's house.

Ted was technically an ‘old boyfriend' since the regrettable weekend they had spent together more than twenty years ago. But she barely spoke to him any more and Edna Greenhouse just happened to be renting the garage apartment in the back. The talk intensified when Cindy's car was there all night during a slow week in February. I had picked Lisa up because she wanted Edna to have a car to use when we went off-island for the weekend. By the time the situation emerged from the rumor mill, it had been scrambled into Lisa using my trip to Boston for a week-end of illicit fun with her old flame. Ted, who enjoyed burnishing his reputation as a smooth and irresistible sexual predator, never denied the story and it went around the island like a bacterial infection, worsening and mutating as it passed from person to person. By the timemy friend Roy Haffner took me aside for ‘a little talk' during the big push on a job in 'Sconset, Lisa was not only leaving him for Ted Larner, she was carrying the other man's child and had taken up most of his bad habits including snorting heroin and jacking deer out of season. The general feeling around the island was that a woman who would have a baby with her lover was a scandal; a pregnant woman doing drugs was beyond redemption; but one who wouldn't share the illegal venison was just plain selfish.



Then Roy added a few twists of his own. One of his friends (he never mentioned which one) had seen Ted and Lisa having lunch together at the Brotherhood; other people had spied them walking Ted's dogs at Ram's Pasture and driving in his F-150 on Milestone Road. All this took place during the day, when Lisa was supposed to be working at the boutique. But Ted had apparently been sighted there, too, lingering next to the racks of exquisitely ugly clothes and scaring away the customers.

It all made sense to me.Lisa had been distant lately. She had been unwilling to talk about her job. Sex had dried up. My marriage was drifting the way marriages do when one of the parties has something more interesting to think about. 'Parties' -- it was as if I was already reading from the divorce papers.So I confronted Lisa, we fought about it; one of those ricocheting battles that kept coming back at us. The first round was about Lisa’s infidelity, but that was just the beginning. When it rebounded at them, it was about my distrust. The third bounce had to do with our marriage itself, which was so flimsy and corrupted that any lie seemed plausible and any attack seemed fair. She slapped me. I punched the wall. She cried. I left the house and drove off fuming. Ten minutes later I skidded across a patch of black ice and skated off the road into a tree. The truck was drivable and I drove it home. We both apologized in the morning. We stitched the wound to the marriage and it healed with only a faint scar.

But the accident started the other rumor, and that one turned out to be much more serious.

I had wrecked the hand carved quarter board (It said Cutting Edge Painters) I had attached to the driver's side door of the truck. It took several weeks to get a new one made, which seemed like nothing more than a minor inconvenience. But I didn't know a small crucial fact: according to Massachusetts state law, you had to remove all commercial identification from your vehicle when you filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Several contractors and other acquaintances saw me driving around without the sign on the door and "did the math".

The word was out: I was bankrupt.

I lost jobs, crew members quit on me. Soon I actually would have been broke and the lie would have been true. Pat Folger was the one who told me what was going on, and he was just in time. A makeshift quarterboard and a few phone calls had cleared up the misunderstanding, but people seemed disappointed by the news. It wasn't just the delicious tale of financial ruin they had to abandon, but all the theories about what had brought it on: binge drinking, blackmail, too much gambling at Mohegan Sun; a terminal illness not covered by my insurance; a secret child from a teen-age liaison going to college. A whole rowdy world of conflicting stories was collapsing into the sink hole of ordinary life, and it depressed people, especially in February.



The surveillance state might be an improvement; if the NSA was actually tapping your phone and reading your- e-mail, at least they’d get the facts straight.

When I was a kid, I loved TV dinners because the serving tray partitioned the food. Those low aluminum retaining walls meant that the turkey would never touch the peas, and the peas could never foul the apple crisp. Finally – a solution to the appalling anarchy of ordinary dinner plates, where the gravy contaminated the string beans with impunity, or worse yet, mingled with the salad dressing creating an inedible mess that filled me with a childish despair that no parent could even pretend to understand. As an adult, I use salad plates.

But I still like boundaries, and I was living in a world with none. While I was with Sasha, Lisa seemed to know my every move; when we broke up I became the town pariah. No one really knew why it happened. I wonder what they would have thought if they realized the truth. Sasha broke it off because she was jealous. That sounds normal, but the big trifecta of emotional resentment wasn’t involved at all: I wasn’t seeing any other women, I wasn’t ditching her to be with my friends, she didn’t resent my work. I could have understood all that. This was different: A whole new phenomenon that I would get to know all too well, with other women, as time went on. And it was the least likely women you could imagine playing this strident, unbecoming role: feminists and single moms, battling for child support, gradually giving up hope on their hustling, distracted ex-husbands.

Sasha Wilhite was the first of them, my earliest exposure to this bizarre new grievance. She was jealous of my kids.

Details next time.

Scenes From a Divorce #9: The First Pancake Theory

Maybe newly divorced men should be quarantined for eight months, as if they were carrying diphtheria or the plague. In my case it would have made everyone’s life easier, even mine. The only women I would have seen would have been nurses in white uniforms bringing me chilled juice in the morning and checking my temperature. Of course, I probably would have fallen in love with all of them, too -- but they’d have been ready for that: just another occupational hazard on the Newly Divorced ward. To ensure their emotional neutrality, they’d have to take the Drexel-Blenheim romantic infatuation blood test weekly, just to be safe. No, no, I know – that test doesn’t exist, and neither do Drexel and Blenheim, which is a good thing because if they had a breathalyzer for this form of impairment, half the non-alcohol related car crashes could end up in court fighting a new category of felony conviction: DUH: Driving Under The Influence of Heartbreak. The acronym is almost too perfect, as you invariably wind up feeling like a complete idiot most of the time.

Which brings me to Sasha.Wilhite. We never should have gotten involved. I had never found her attractive and I didn’t even like her that much. But I had felt like a court eunuch for years and months of being summarily rejected by every woman I approached had left me feeling puny and demoralized. I’m thinking of one woman in particular who allowed me to come over one night then deftly stayed at least three feet away from me for the whole evening, even when she walked me to the door, stepping back as I opened it inward, a sprightly choreography of physical suspicion; or the Irish girl who quite literally drank me under the table when I tried to ply her with Bushmill’s one night. I woke up on the floor the next morning with her note beside my throbbing temple: “Nice try. Thanks for a lovely evening.” Or the woman who asked my advice about about another guy-friend: “I’m not sure what to do … I want to tell him I’m not interested, you know, that way … but I don’t want to hurt his feelings or get him mad or start some weird starker scene … so I need a way to be clear but kind of … indirect? I could say ‘you’re like brother to me’ but it sounds so trite. I need a technique.”

I said, “The one you’re using right now is working fine.”

My friend Roy said to me: “Try being their father next time. It works wonders.”

So the fact that Sasha actually showed even the slightest interest in me pretty much guaranteed a response. It’s a rotten situation for a woman, though. You’re like the geek who befriends the new kid at school, and everything seems great until it turns out they’re really funny, or can play football or something and they get really popular and drop you like a dog-slobbered tennis ball. I’ve been that geek so I know. There was no way this was going to last. There were too many wrong notes: the awful ham dinner she cooked with a sad scorched pieces of pineapple, her anger at me for not being ‘touch enough; with Lisa, her dismissive “Who cares? It’s only a movie,” when I was ranting about Hollywood trashing one of my favorite novels; and the whole Catholic thing. After one ragged late night argument about faith, I quoted Ambrose Bierce’s brutal definition from The Devil’s Dictionary: “Belief without evidence, in one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, that’s it exactly!”

And I’m the guy who thought Brideshead Revisited was anti-Catholic propaganda.

I shouldn’t have been there. I wasn’t ready to be there. That’s why I advocate the quarantine. The quarantine is good. Women should always try to avoid that first relationship after a toxic marriage: you wind up dealing with all the left-over garbage, with very little to show for it. That first relationship is like the first pancake – the one you test the griddle with, the one that never cooks right, and gets thrown away before you make the first real batch.

For instance: though I had masturbated dutifully for more than a decade, more or less the same way I would start up an antique car and drive it around the block every couple of weeks, to preserve the tires and keep the battery from dying, the plan didn’t seem to be working out very well when it came to actual sex with an actual person. During the first few times with Sasha, the hydraulics of my desire seemed to be rusted beyond repair. Or maybe it was the electronics: all the plugs and jacks had corroded. Nothing connected properly. Or maybe I had actually had turned into a eunuch, after all. It was demoralizing for both of us.

Sasha was a good Catholic girl, the more obvious erotic encouragements were out of the question. She didn’t want to put anything strange or unusual in her mouth.

“I don’t even eat sushi,” she told me.

We both laughed. Then we got up and made tea. It was just nice to be alone together.

Except we weren’t. This is a small town and it’s hard to shake the crowd. You’re never quite as alone as you think you are. For instance: Sasha belonged to a women’s talking group and I knew some of the other women. One of them was my landlord; another one used to work with my ex-wife. I hadn’t spoken to this woman in years, and we’d never been particularly friendly. But when I ran into her at the Stop&Shop one day, she gave me an effusive hug in the cereal aisle. “I’m so happy for you” she said. “You deserve this.” I just stared at her blankly. I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. I had asked Sasha to keep things quiet. Lisa was sleeping with her ex husband and I didn’t want the kids to know what was going on. Sasha hadn’t actually told anyone in the normal gossipy way, but she had talked in her group about the tall, clumsy, verbose sandy-haired recently divorced house-painter she was seeing, and they had probably been able to narrow it down without too much trouble. They all adored me now, but I knew they’d have the knives out for me if I failed to live up to their expectations.

And that wasn’t the only crowd scene.The other one happened in bed.

Once the plumbing was back in working order, I discovered a new problem. Starting was easy; finishing was almost impossible. Sasha couldn’t quite inspire an orgasm in me; or perhaps I just couldn’t summon the necessary focus. Anyway, my mind wandered. I could go an go and go; but she wanted me to come. In fact it was essential for her that I she was able to make that happen. Her sense of herself as a woman seemed to be at stake. In desperation, looking for some erotic traction, something to keep me from sliding away into a chafed detumesence, the image of Ned unhooking Lisa’s bra slithered into my mind. It was like watching a movie; my own private porn film. It pushed me over the edge. I was done and Sasha was delighted. But I didn’t like being in bed with four people.

Especially when one of them was Ned Wilhite.

I was out of control, I was letting things happen to me, weirdly detached even as I was being drawn deeper into a complex arrangement I didn’t really understand. Sasha brought lunch to my job-site one day and Roy said later, “That’s it, dude. You’re really a couple now.”

His words sent a chill through me. Were we really a couple? When had that happened? How had it happened? I knew this much: I was sleepwalking. And if I didn’t wake up soon, I was going to walk myself right off a cliff. It was time to nail the “Quarantine” sign back up on the door and lock myself inside.

But I didn’t know how to do it.

Scenes From a Divorce #8: The Woman Problem

Yes, the real problem with the post divorce life was women. I had thought for years that it would be the easy part – all those unattached beautiful girls flooding the island every summer, looking for fun. I watched them with a bittersweet longing, knowing I was unavailable in a particularly frustrating way. I actually coined a much-needed new word for it back then,: nonogomy.

Every married man knows what nonogomy means: being sexually faithful to a women who’s not fucking you.

But now I was free. There were women I’d been flirting with literally for years, I had a list. What I didn’t realize was that they only flirted because I was safe, because I was married. It was the wedding ring that protected them, but I’d already gotten rid of mine. Once divorced, I stopped being the charming and unattainable family guy (what adorable kids!) and became something else – the creepy, desperate middle aged stalker guy. Well – they were assuming the worst. I was mostly just shy and lonely, but let’s face it, those qualities do about as much for you as a lip sore or a death’s head tattoo. Mostly they just wanted to be “Platonic” friends. After hearing that line once too often, I finally lost it.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,“ I shouted. “What makes you think that Plato was such a good friend, anyway? Socrates didn’t think so. Beware of guys whose ‘friends’ wind up drinking hemlock in prison! Besides -- Plato was a horny little bastard who’d screw anything with a pulse. You think just because his books are boring he never got laid! Wrong again! The guy made out like a bandit.”

She just gaped at me. Women did that a lot lately. Got to hone those social skills. Still, I have to say, I picked up the code pretty quickly. When women weren’t interested, they managed to work their boyfriend into every sentence. Seriously: every sentence, just to be sure you knew the score.

For instance:

Me: It’s a great year for scalloping.

Her: I know! My boyfriend? Tad? He loves scalloping. He lets me go out on the boat sometimes. It’s so incredibly fun!

Or –

Me: Wow, the rain is blowing horizontal out there. Must be a fifty knot wind.

Her. It’s horrible! My boyfriend says the wind brings out the worst in the other elements. You know – it makes snow into blizzards and stuff. He’s so funny.

Or, finally … as a perverse, fatalistic experiment –

Me: I just inherited ten million dollars.

Her: Really? My boyfriend says money is the root of all evil.

I learned one truth quickly. If you think a woman may be interested in you – she isn’t. If there’s any question, the answer is no. When they really are interested, there’s no room for doubt. They come after you. They pounce.

That’s what Ned’s wife did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It had been a lonely time but a comfortable one. The days were simple and orderly. The ugliness and strife had been removed. Only the framework of my old life remained. It lacked intimacy but that was no change. My nasty little joke -- that I was as horny as a fourteen year old boy, and about as likely to get laid -- still applied, but with less rancor. I had lost an angry female roommate, not a wife. Before the divorce I fully believed that I would never have sex again.

Now at least there was hope.

I had the kids four nights a week. I worked seven days a week, as I had since before they were born. I helped them with their homework, read them to sleep, tidied the squalor they created, made their breakfasts packed their lunches, arbitrated their bickering as best I could. Then I went to work, reading blue-prints, estimating jobs, writing up bids, cajoling customers, humoring decorators, negotiating with territorial carpenters. And occasionally, on good days, doing something fun like cutting sash or hanging wallpaper.

I had given up paying for cable television, so at night I read or rented a film, or played games with the kids. They were becoming frighteningly adept at Scrabble (Caroline had shocked me recently by putting ‘quartz’ on a triple word score); they loved Monopoly and had grasped instantly the joys of predatory capitalism.

“You’re bankrupt!,” one or the other of them would shout as the game finally ground to a close, while the other one sobbed. The hysteria always dispersed and they were eager to start all over again.

When I was alone I worked on my book and listened to music. I could play whatever I liked now -- Brazilian sambas and Jackson Browne, Ellington and Carl Orff -- all the music Lisa hated. That was one of the many small privileges of my new life. I could do other forbidden things as well -- write early in the morning, whistle while I cleaned my house, talk to my friends on the telephone.

But I knew my life was working so well because I didn’t have one. Once I began a full existence the machinery would start to break down. Gossip would fly. The kids would resent any change, anyone new in my life. Lisa might be jealous -- that was often the last, irrational residue of love. Until the divorce was final involvements with other women were actually illegal in the state of Massachusetts and could compromise my claim to shared custody.

I had never been a subject for gossip, even in this small town panopticon. The kids were the real scandal-mongers: who had said mean things in gym class, who had fallen from first best friend to third best friend, who was ‘dating’ whom, though how eleven year olds managed to date, or what they even thought a date was, eluded me. As far as I could tell, it was just something you talked about. It meant sitting together at lunch or walking home from school slightly apart from the rest of the crowd. I wished it could stay that way. But they were drifting toward the dreaded adolescence, I could feel it. Things got more serious then. They were floating downstream dangling their fingers in the slow moving water; but I could hear the faint rumble in the distance, and it was getting louder all the time.

They were heading for the whitewater section of the trip.

These rapids didn’t picturesque names like Dead Man’s Chute or The Howler. More like, Tommy Buys Drugs From the Sleazy Narc and Caroline’s Pregnant.

For the moment, though, my son Tommy and Ned’s daughter Ingrid were just pals – not even ‘dating’. The cataract was still a few years away. I was grateful for that.

But dealing with Ingrid’s parents was a different story. Ned was sleeping with my ex-wife. His ex-wife Sasha was chasing me. And when she finally snagged me? It turned into a classic small town nightmare.

But I’ll save that for next time.

Scenes From a Divorce #7: Home Alone

The thing they don’t tell you about divorce, the secret benefit that no one likes to discuss, is the time off. When you’re married you’re locked into the situation relentlessly, day after day, week after week. That may be why men invented business trips. But that was over at last. Now I only had to deal with Lisa occasionally, generally by telephone, and the kids were gone three or four days a week. I could walk into my tiny house on a Tuesday afternoon and feel the resonant silence of their absence – no music playing, no TV, no shouts and arguments, no chaos and squalor. Just the silence, and the residual mess of their last visit. A few minutes to pick up and vacuum and the place was my own again. Sometimes I would just sit there, listening to the wheeze of the north wind against the eaves, watching the blank television screen, letting the stillness smooth the pelt of my nerves, stroking it with the nap, and I knew I’d be fresh and rested the next time I saw the kids, ready for the next onslaught of cell phones and ipods and bickering friends, the next outbreak of sibling civil war.

Sometimes I didn’t even do the dishes. I’d leave them there in the sudsy water, just because I could, because there was no one to comment on them, or judge them. They weren’t a statement of any kind now, they weren’t a “passive-aggressive” attack or a symptom of dysfunction and co-dependence. They were just dishes. It was wonderful.

When my friends squinted at this claustrophobic little garage apartment, I just shrugged. They didn’t understand: it was a life-boat. All it had to do was float. It didn’t feel like home but the big house with the harbor view never had, either. The only sanctuary I had ever been able to construct for myself there was the bathroom: for a few minutes each day, alone with the door locked against screaming children and attention hungry dogs and my exigent wife, I could actually hear myself think. The phrase was frighteningly accurate. I could no more pay attention to the workings of my own mind in that jangled chaotic house than I could carry on a normal conversation at a dance club. When I was younger, and still went out dancing occasionally, I had understood that those ear bruising baselines were at least partly intended to make conversation impossible. Maybe the nerve-scraping anarchy of a house full of children, animals and marital discord served the same function. Anyone who could put a coherent thought together would be gone the next minute. It was almost funny; a cartoon of desperation: nothing left behind but a me-shaped hole in the wall and a puff of smoke.

But of course the fact is I never left until I was kicked out, and if I hadn’t been kicked out I’d still be there.

Lisa thrived in the jumble of personalities and animals, though. She had recently added another stray cat to her collection. I said to the teller at the bank one day, when I had to sign a check under Lisa’s endorsement, “How could two people with such radically different handwritings ever get married?” The teller didn’t get it, wasn’t even looking at the signatures, couldn’t have cared less. But the thought persists. Her legible tight round vertical letters were from a different universe than my slanting unreadable scrawl. Her signature could have looked at mine once and told her the obvious: that I might eventually learn to clean off the kitchen counter when I was finished doing the dishes -- but I’d never get all the crumbs, and I’d leave it wet. Or mine could have looked at hers and told me, that’s the kind of crap she cares about.

But we weren’t paying attention. I remember thinking her handwriting was cute.I remember thinking that the differences between us made us interesting and strong. Differences nourish people! That’s what I thought at twenty.

Now I know better.

Differences metastasize. Each unusual and exotic and eccentric thing that made the person so desirable the first week you knew them will render them hideous and loathsome and nerve-peelingly annoying a few years down the road.

Sorry, but it’s true.

A perfect example: the day her parents came to visit us on Nantucket. One of many visits, all of them horrible in their own ways. But on this occasion, Lisa had been staying with them in Los Angeles; they were all coming back east together. It was a kind of sick game – whenever Lisa came back from a trip she would find something to complain about, some proof of my inadequacies. The house wasn’t clean enough; or I’d cleaned up and neglected to make her dinner (After she’d been travelling all day it was the least I could have done); or if I made dinner it was overcooked. Or something.

On this occasion it was that much worse, the stakes were that much higher, because she would have her mother in tow. Without going into detail I think we can safely say that she inherited many of her mother’s less appealing traits. They hold on to grudges the way some girls hang onto horse-show ribbons and old love letters. Separately they’re bad enough, but together they become some kind of mythical two-headed blame monster. On her death bed Lisa will croak out a reminder of the little pile of dirt from a tipped geranium plant that I neglected to vacuum in our first apartment, the very first time we were ever apart.

Anyway. Expecting the worst, I spent two days cleaning the house, ticking off every detail because I knew that any detail I neglected would be the one thing she would pounce on. I scrubbed, dusted, vacuumed, mopped, disinfected, even painted the door she’d been complaining about – plus doing the kids homework with them and getting them and the dog spit shined for the big arrival.

So she walks through the house, which actually may have never been in such good shape the whole time we lived there, and she mentions just one thing. I have to explain this. She bought (Yes, she bought some unnecessary crap for the house, what a shock) little white ceramic baskets with cross hatched lattice lids. She asked me to pick flowers and put them in these baskets. The baskets were supposed to sit on the bedside tables in the guest room. So I did it. But, here it comes, I failed to stick the flower stems through the spaces in the lattice lids. Can you believe that? I just kinda jammed them in there! What a clod. And that is the one detail in the whole house she chose to mention. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

I remember thinking – I should be glad. It could have been much worse. What if she had noticed the half-assed job I did on the tub? A great way to live: avoiding abrasive nasty bullshit. Have a good day? Oh yeah, sure – I avoided a whole lot of abrasive nasty bullshit today. Gee, when I think of all the abrasive nasty bullshit I almost had to deal with and just barely avoided, I feel like singing in the fucking rain!

Well, what can I say? Marriages die slowly, like any other diseased living thing. There are periods of remission but they don’t last. They’re just … I don’t know; life commenting on itself. It could have been this but it isn’t; or it was and it never will be again. Take a good look before it goes for good.

And the worst part is it turns out that we are the kids’ first evidence that life isn’t perfect and no one except possibly the little mermaid lives happily ever after and most of all that things don’t turn out the way you want them to. The world does not cooperate. God is not on your side. And the kid with the “Look Mom, no cavities!” grin often winds up with gum disease.

No one wants to be the bearer of that particular piece of bad news. To embody it, to be its living symbol and standard bearer for a pair of innocent children learning life sucks at their father’s knee, is infinitely worse.

A sink full of non-subtextual dishes, an empty apartment and a few nights off a week don’t make up for that one. The only thing that might ever truly make up for it would be finding a way to be happy, constructing a life that made sense with a woman they liked, living a sustainable definition of true love in front of them every day.

But right now, that seemed like the most impossible goal of all.

Scenes From a Divorce #6: The Second Epiphany

I had just walked away from the most significant opportunity of my writing life. I had written a spec script for my favorite sit-com. Through a lucky set of circumstances, my script wound up on the desk of possibly the most prominent and successful television writers’ talent agent in Hollywood. Just getting my work to such a person, from three thousand miles away, from Nantucket, from another world, was like winning the lottery; more precisely, it was like discovering that your ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes represented one of the horses in the race.

The horse still had to win.

And this agent, let’s call him Barry, still had to like my script.

Well, he did. He said it was the best spec script he’d read in ten years, and lots of other nice things. He wanted to sign me. The timing was perfect – pilot season was just beginning. He was sure he could get me on staff at any one of a dozen shows.

He had only one question: when would I be arriving in L.A.?

This stopped me cold, stupidly, like walking into a chair in your dark living room, banging your shins, shouting in pain and surprise but mainly in annoyance: how could you have not known it was there? What was I thinking? I guess I hadn’t been thinking. I wrote the spec for fun, and when the chance for Barry to read it came up, I was curious. When he liked it I was pleased. It was nice rush for the ego, a moment of vindication, nothing more.

But this guy was serious. He wanted my new contact information.

And I knew in that instant, as I had known in the instant that we found out Lisa was pregnant that we were absolutely going to have the baby, that I couldn’t leave. That was my Dad’s move -- walking out on his family on Christmas eve, leaving nothing behind but a present for my mother picked out by his new girlfriend.

There’s a photograph of the two of us on one of his movie locations. They were shooting in Brooklyn and I’d been let out of school for the day to watch. I was my son’s age in that picture. Dad was my age now. I’m looking up at him adoringly; he’s smiling down on me. He was the King of Hollywood then -- one of the kings, anyway, at the pinnacle of his success. I remember the story in Life magazine about the making of that film, and the pull quote from him about the unknown Italian bomb-shell who played the female lead: “She’s a star because I say she’s a star.”

That’s where he was at that moment in his life. Where was I? Struggling to make ends meet, giving up on them ever over-lapping even for a moment, painting houses on Nantucket, writing reduced to a hobby, living in a converted garage apartment so small my landlord called it ‘skylab’ with three hundred dollars in the bank, owing more in back taxes than I could make in a year.

But my son had a father.

Not a super-star who blew into my life the way Sinatra came to Las Vegas, for lavish two week engagements, but a real father. My daughter was going to be one of the only women I ‘d ever met who didn’t have some kind of screwed up relationship with her father – at least that was my goal, and I was working on it every day. I was proud of it. Those kids needed me. And I needed them.

I read an article when Lisa was pregnant with Caroline – one of a fashionable stream of father’s point-of-view essays. The man described a day at the playground with his wife and daughter. The little girl fell off the jungle-jim and ran for past him screaming “Mommy!Mommy! Mommy!” He might as well have been a fireplug. It broke his heart.

I knew even then, before my daughter was born, when she was just a speck on the ultrasound screen, that I never wanted that to happen to me.

And that’s what was going through my mind while Barry waited on the other end of the line.

I told him I wasn’t moving.

He said, “I can’t be your agent if you won’t be my client.”

And that was that.

The moment seemed to sum up my life perfectly: an endless set of self-extinguishing sacrifices for the sake of my children, the two of them presiding over the center of my life with my own ambitions and desires and needs exiled to the outskirts, junked and forgotten. Sacrifice is supposed to be noble. You’re supposed to feel good about it, pure and strong and righteous. I felt bad and puny and resentful. I was in a funk for weeks.

And then Caroline got sick.

I had the kids that February night – we split the child-rearing duties with rigorous precision.

Caroline felt queasy at dinner, but she woke up at two in the morning with the bug raging.

“Daddy” she cried out, thrashing out of sleep. “Daddy!”

I rolled out of bed and ran to the room she shared with Tommy charged with adrenaline but still thinking somewhere: “She called for me, not her Mom.” It made sense, she was at my house not her mother’s, but she could have called for Lisa anyway. And I would have called Lisa and awakened her and she would have come over, driving through the thin spitting snow, over the black ice, in her nightgown. But that wasn’t going to be necessary.

Because Caroline called for me.

I got her downstairs and into the narrow little bathroom, and she projectile vomited all over the walls before I could guide her to the toilet. I held her hair back, talked her through it, gave her a cool glass of water, helped her navigate her way back upstairs, put a lobster pot near the bed in case there was another emergency and read her to sleep (The Catcher in The Rye; she loved Holden’s little sister Phoebe).

Then I went downstairs and started cleaning up.

And that’s where it happened. I was on my knees, scrubbing my daughter’s puke off the bathroom walls at three in the morning and I realized: I would much rather be doing this than writing some sit com. in Los Angeles.

This was where I belonged. I was in the right place, doing the right thing.

I finished up and went to bed, feeling a satisfied exhaustion, a quiet, resonant bliss and something else, something more; gratitude, perhaps.

The resentment was gone, banished forever in the space of an hour.

And it’s never come back

Scenes From a Divorce #5: The First Epiphany

For years before the divorce the choice seemed impossibly cruel: I would have no life because of my kids; or they would have no life because of me. It was an un-escapable trap, a knot I couldn’t untie: I remember writing in my journal “This is the trick where Houdini drowns.”

Then the marriage ended and we were all struggling to get to the surface.

But the bitterness and regret remained. I had given up all hopes for a writing career by moving to Nantucket (occasional articles for the now-defunct Beacon, didn’t count).

Climbing a thirty foot ladder in a twenty mile North East wind, on a ten degree day in February, with a fifty pound pallet of roof shingles slung over my back, I actually believed for a moment that the plane which had taken us from Los Angeles had crashed and I was literally in Hell. Angry wife, screaming child, frozen weather and a job that left me sobbing with fatigue and unable to make a fist at he end of the day – it would take a very inventive Devil to make things any worse. Or so I felt at the time.

I blamed myself for failing as a writer; I blamed my wife for enforcing the deal we made, uprooting us back to this barren sandspit full of haughty rich people and trogloddye carpenters if I failed to meet the deadline for success. Perhaps I would have welshed on the deal, broken up with her, stayed on in the sunshine taking meetings and trying to put a screenwriting career together, but by the time we left she was pregnant. She had a hostage so I gave in to her demands and we headed east.

Soon we had two kinds and the paradox grew with them: they were the only light in the darkness, but I was in the darkness because of them. My marriage continued to crumble and I started to regret everything. Bitterness took over.

Regret and bitterness. Each one feeding off the other, accumulating like mildew on a damp wall and yet miraculously banished, bleached and rinsed away, by two moments of simple clarity.

This was the first one:

They had been visiting her parents in Los Angeles for a few weeks, as they did every summer. I met them at the airport. The NTSA had tripled the security and there were National Guard soldiers, armed and in full uniform, patrolling the terminal.

“Well, this is going to wreck the rental season,” Lisa said, giving me a brief hug as we waited for the luggage. The kids grabbed my legs.

No matter what subject Lisa was talking about, she wound up talking about real estate. I can laugh about it now. Someone was dying of cancer? Were they selling the house? 9/11? Oh, it was devastating for the real estate market. Chernobyl? You can pick up a nice three bedroom ranch style next to the reactor for a song these days.

Lisa was in her element on Nantucket. She was fascinated with the wealthy people she worked for. She told me one day after a parent teacher conference, that the man to whom she'd just sold a house made -- she had actually figured it out with a calculator -- he made my yearly salary every fourteen and a half minutes. Of course that was before my dollar an hour raise.

I looked down at the kids, Tommy in shorts and a t-shirt, Caroline in a summer shift that Lisa must have paid a small fortune for. I couldn’t begrudge her the expense, though I knew Caroline would grow out of the dress in a month or two. Buying kid’s clothes was one of life’s great pleasures, fleeting as a four-star restaurant dinner, doomed as a sandcastle. Tommy’s brown hair was wind scattered, Caroline’s red hair was tied into a pair of perfect braids. But they were a matched set of smiling round faces. You could almost forget they were at war with each other.

“Did you get us something?” Tommy asked.

“Hey – you went off-island. You’re supposed to bring me something.”

That gave him pause.

“How about a hug?”

“Sounds good.” I lifted him up, thinking, whoa, he’s getting big. He was a sturdy little nine year old, but he’d been a baby last week. Time was going by so fast it felt like a wind, blowing hard out of the north, pulling the air out of your chest.

“I got you something,” Caroline said. Tommy writhed in my arms to stare at her, outraged at this bit of sibling one-upmanship. “When we were at Trader Joe’s.” She wrestled her back pack off and rummaged inside. After a few seconds she pulled out a bag of unsulfured dried apricots.

“Your favorite!” she crowed. It was true. She was learning my vices.

“I saw the new Ian McEwan novel at Borders,” Tommy said. “”I wanted to buy it for you. But I didn’t have any money.”

“You spent your allowance,” Lisa pointed out.

“I saved mine,” Caroline said smugly.

Tommy thrashed for a second, trying to get loose. I knew he wanted to pounce.

“I didn’t even know there was a new Ian McEwan novel,” I lied. “So that’s a great present. We’ll go to Mitchell’s tomorrow and pick it up. Maybe we can find you a book, too.”

“What about me?” Caroline demanded.

“Both of you. We’ll have our own private book fair.”

“You spoil them,” Lisa said, grabbing the first of the suitcases.

“Oh yeah. Books. The scourge of today’s youth.”

I grabbed the other suitcases and we started out through the terminal toward the parking lot, the kids dancing in front of us, the squabble forgotten. They stopped to pet a pair of Bearnese Mountain Dogs. We paused and watched them charming the harried woman holding the leashes. Tommy said something and she laughed, while the dogs licked both sides of Caroline’s face.

Standing there, it occurred to me in a sudden absolute irrefutable bolt of awareness -- that having children made regret impossible - at least for all the time up until the exact moment of their conception. It was so obvious: if you had done anything different, or even done the same things in different order, your children might not exist. Certainly, given the way you rolled the genetic dice every time sperm met egg, they wouldn't be the same people. Looked at that way, not even a disastrous marriage could be considered a waste. I glanced over at Lisa, seething with impatience, worried about dog germs, distrusting strangers, eager to get back to the office and check the new listings. Across the floor, Caroline was teaching the dogs to give their paws, shaking them solemnly as if the dogs were graduating from high school and she was handing out diplomas.

I slung a duffel bag over my shoulder, took Lisa’s arm and guided her toward the kids.

I was thinking: an ordeal, and a tragedy, but not a waste

And I’ve never felt a moment of regret since – at least not for the time before Tommy’s birth. Since then – there’s been plenty. But it’s a lighter load.

The other moment? The one that scrubbed the bitterness out of my life?

I’ll save it for next time.

Scenes From a Divorce #4: Trimming the Hedge

My grandmother used to say :”Don’t eavesdrop. You’ll never hear anything that makes you happy.”

Good advice.

So why stalk my ex-wife? Why would I do something so alienating and disturbing and off-putting? Because I needed to feel connected. That’s the absurd paradox of it. You need to touch that severed life. It’s like a phantom limb after an amputation. In your dreams you’re still clutching a baseball bat, playing piano, dancing. Awake, it torments you with impossible flicker of sensation.

I wanted information, that was all. Just to know what she was doing, and eventually, what she was thinking. To be fully included in my utter exclusion, a voting member of my own disenfranchisement, in complete control of my helpessness.

It wasn’t strictly stalking at first. It began with drive-bys. I would check her house or Ned’s when they were supposed to be working and the kids were in school. At night when I really needed to know what was happening, I had the kids with me and they shackled me to the house. I had thought of hiring a baby-sitter while I spied on Lisa, but she would have found out about it eventually. Everyone talked to everyone else about everything. Some stray comment from the baby-sitter’s mother and I’d have to deal with the inevitable self-righteous interrogation from Lisa: where was I on a school night? Why did I leave my children eating pizza with some teen-ager when they needed a good dinner and help with their homework?

Etcetera.

No, I was virtually under house arrest and Lisa could do as she pleased.

Still I checked on her whenever I could. Opportunities came up. The kids had sleep-overs, sometimes both of them on the same night, and I got a free evening to snoop. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care. People paid detectives to do this kind of thing. The police even did it, when they had a potential suspect. It was like a stakeout. That sounded good; all I needed was the coffee and the doughnuts. As a rationale, it worked pretty well until I progressed to the next stage. This one was somewhat harder to justify. Even naming it made me a little queasy. Was it “On-site surveillance”? Or perhaps “Illegal search and seizure”? But I wasn’t seizing anything and how could it be illegal to visit your own house? Even if you did have to break in, because your wife had changed the locks? And it wasn’t much of a break in, anyway: Lisa still hid the key under a shingle, the classic Nantucket security procedure, roughly analogous to hiding your money inside your shoes at the beach.

But I didn’t kid myself. Breaking and entering was what the police would call it. Criminal trespass, at least. Which was appropriate: I felt like a trespassing criminal when I sneaked into the Polpis house one clear windy December afternoon, looking for evidence of Ned. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find--- an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, Ned’s brand of beer (Stella Artois) in the fridge; perhaps a bottle of unfamiliar aftershave in the bathroom, perhaps a Yanni CD on the coffee table. Something that would connect me to her life now, let me into it, if only as a voyeur.

I found Lisa’s diary in her underwear drawer, during a quick furtive check for new racy lingerie. But she was still wearing the same old plain cotton panties. The diary was tucked under them, the pink and gray flowered cover held shut with some sort of elastic ribbon. I picked it up gingerly, memorizing its exact position in the corner of the drawer, careful not to disturb the tidy pile of clothes above it.

Whatever Lisa was thinking about me, whatever she was feeling about Ned, whatever was really going on in her life now, it would be described in this book. With one bold gesture, I could find out everything I needed to know. I looked down at the small hard-covered volume, turning it over in my hand, simultaneously knowing I could never violate my ex-wife’s privacy by reading it; and studying the elastic ribbon to be sure I could replace it exactly, if necessary.

I stood suspended there for more than a minute; then I heard someone at the door. I flinched as my mind starting running the numbers, calculating the magnitude of my catastrophe. My car was in the driveway, there was no hiding that. I needed a good excuse. Was there anything of mine here I could have come to pick up? No, I’d cleared out of the house weeks ago. Something for the kids? But they’d have to lie to back me up and that wasn’t happening, that was a line I wouldn’t approach, much less cross.

My mind was a blank.

I stood still, not breathing, listening hard.

There were no other sounds, just the wind pushing at the north side of the house. After another minute I slipped out of the room and walked to the head of the stairs. I could see down to the front door. Envelopes were scattered in front of it.

The mailman. Of course.

I let out a long breath. I was safe for the moment.

But it was dangerous to be here. I should put the diary back and get out while I still could. Lisa was probably on her way home right now. She had only gone to pick up the kids at the Boy’s and Girl’s club. Even with the usual traffic jam on Sparks Avenue and a stop for hot chocolate at Fast Forward, they couldn’t be much longer. I didn’t want to be caught here and I didn’t want to be caught leaving. It would be best to go back the long way, and loop around through ‘Sconset; even seeing me on the Polpis Road would arouse Lisa’s suspicions.

I went back into the bedroom, but I paused at the dresser, listening to the low whimper of wind in the eaves. I stared down at the book in my hand. I couldn’t seem to put it back. I studied the way the elastic ribbon was looped around the cover, hooked over the top right and the bottom left corner: easy to replace. If I was actually going to do this thing.

The silence goaded me. I could feel time pushing past me like a crowd on a train platform. It was now or never, because I knew I would never be able to summon the nerve to do this again.

I took a quick breath, opened my ex-wife’s diary and started reading.

I can’t go into the details, but it was bad. It made me think of the new Krav Maga classHes they’re offering on the island. It’s a close-quarters Israeli martial art. I had watched the teacher pull a student to him by the back of neck and pantomime a series of blows, from the knee to the groin from the forehead to the nose, from the elbow to the throat. That was what this felt like: being yanked into some brutal parody of an intimate embrace, trapped there and beaten.

I read a description and thought, had I been cruising Ned’s house at that moment? Or helping the kids with their math homework? Or possibly - and this would be perfect sick irony - lying in bed, draining off the fluid pressure of my own longing with the image of my ex-wife’s breasts which, I knew now, I would never see or touch again.

There were a few sentences that I’d never be able to forget, images that would permanently mark and disfigure me, like scar tissue.

And somewhere in Heaven, my grandmother was shaking her head sadly, too kind to say “I told you so.”

But reading the diary had at least one good result. It disinfected me of any further interest in Lisa’s activities. Some critical portion of the love I felt for her had been replaced by a cold, glinting hatred. You really think I’m going to have a meltdown over you?, I thought as I drove away from the house that afternoon. Don’t hold your breath. And don’t bother dangling the chance that we might get back together in front of me to get me to do you any more bullshit favors, you manipulative bitch.

I’m over it.

The resolves came quickly after that. The stalking was over. I had more important things to do than scratch that itch. I would do my work, take care of my kids, leave my ex-wife alone.

I would trim the complications out of my life, prune it like a hedge and let it grow back full.

It was time to start living again.

Scenes From a Divorce #3

How did I figure out that Ned was sleeping with my ex-wife?

It started with the wedding ring.

I had wanted to sell my ring back to Kim England’s jewelry store where I’d bought it in the first place. Getting rid of the thing felt like an essential act: I needed to purge the totems of my marriage. The white circle on my finger was bad enough, but it was already disappearing. Soon there would be no physical evidence of my previous condition.

Tommy and I had run into Kim England at the Stop & Shop one afternoon. I stood chatting with her in the dairy aisle while Tommy investigated the gaudy packages of kids’ yogurt. Kim chatted about various things: some crazy billionaire wanted two hundred of her little golden lightship baskets for a wedding on Saturday. He couldn’t seem to grasp the idea that it would take months to make that many baskets. He just offered her double the price. When she still had to refuse, he tripled his offer. Finally he stormed out in a rage. I smiled – this was probably one of the guys who threw tantrums at the airport because they took fog personally.

The conversation ambled on. I told her I was baffled by many things, even in the diary aisle. What was the difference between one and two percent milk? Why were yogurt containers getting so tiny? Why would anyone actually buy margarine? Was “Cheese food” really cheese? Was it really food? Were brown eggs better than white eggs? Did that prejudice bode well for a diversified society? Kim shrugged; maybe it just meant that tans were fashionable. I mentioned the ring of pale flesh on my ring finger and the conversation went on from there. Kim offered to buy the wedding band back.

I had no idea that Tommy was even listening.

But he was. He had taken the divorce much harder than his sister, who seemed to cruise through life’s entanglements like a yacht through kelp. Tommy was the opposite: he got caught in the sea-weed, it wrapped around him and immobilized him and even if he made it out of the water he was picking the stuff out of his hair for days afterward. The thought that his father might sell the sacred symbol of his parents’ marriage, of their family, of his home, just for money, for forty pieces of silver, horrified him. It turned my wedding ring into some piece of junk you’d unload at a yard sale. The things that mattered most to him meant nothing to his father, that was the worst part. He was alone. He felt like an orphan. He couldn’t say all this of course. He was seven years old. So instead he stood in front of the Sponge Bob yogurt boxes and started sobbing.

I got the message.

I apologized to Kim England and hustled Tommy out of the store as fast as I could. We spent the better part of two hours, first in the car driving around the island and then at home, talking about it. I apologized a couple of dozen times. The crying chugged to a halt. Finally we compromised. I didn’t want the ring and Tommy did, so I’d just give it to him. Tommy liked that idea, but when I described the incident to Lisa a few days later, she said Tommy might lose it, as he lost everything else from his band trumpet to his math homework to his left sneaker.

“I’ll hold it for him,” she said. “Until he’s old enough to take care of it himself.”

That had seemed like a reasonable solution.

Everything had seemed startlingly reasonable, in fact -- until the evening when the actual hand-off occurred. It was after the Christmas band-chorus concert. Jenny was in the chorus and Tommy was in the band, so I had to be there for the duration. These concerts were unavoidable. As the ordeals of parenthood went, they fell somewhere between orientation night and Little League games. On this occasion though, the chorus sounded pretty good, running through the usual selection of carols. The band was excruciating as usual, every instrument playing in its own key. Though the school administration was courteous enough to keep the house lights on during the performance, I couldn’t even read any more; Jenny had actually caught me at it last year, all the way from the back of the stage to the back of the auditorium. She had her mother’s sharp vision; and her temper.

I found Lisa in the lobby outside after the concert. She was chatting with her yoga teacher and some dowdy woman from the Land Bank. Ned was hovering nearby. There was a break in the conversation and it seemed like a perfect opportunity. I dug into my pocket as I approached.

“Hey, Lisa – before I forget.” I handed her the ring. “I figure you could put it on the mantel or something, where he could see it but not actually put his hands on it. Or whatever. It’s up to you.”

“Okay” she said. She seemed off balance, tricked into silence.

I dove through the gap. “Well, okay then … see you around. Ladies,” I nodded to the two women. I ignored Ned. Twenty seconds later I was outside in the clean, biting cold of the December night, congratulating myself on handling a potentially awkward situation with skill and grace.

I should have known better.

The phone was ringing when I got home. I picked it up and Lisa started in before I could say a word.“I can’t believe you did that.”

“Excuse me?”

“How could you?”

“I’m not sue what-- ”

“In public that way? In front of my friends? That is so sick.”

“Lisa -- ”

“Was it just to humiliate me? Well it worked. Congratulations. Throwing your wedding ring at me as if it was a piece of trash, as if our whole marriage was nothing but some -- ”

“Wait a second. I didn’t throw it at you. I just -- ”

“Ned thought it was childish. That’s what he said. Pathetic and childish.”

“Ned?”

“He saw the whole thing.”

“What the hell does he have to do with -- ”

“He happens to be a very shrewd judge of character.”

I sighed. She was using the ‘happens to’ formulation: it was a sarcastic invocation of coincidence that she lapsed into when she was most outraged. As if to say, “Fine, I’ll pretend that this self-evident truth is random, if you’re too stupid to see the obvious.”

I took a breath. “Look, that ring means nothing to me. I didn’t want to do the whole ring thing in the first place. That was your idea, remember? I’ve been meaning to give the ring to you and this was the first chance I got. Period.”

“Fine. Whatever. I have to go.”

She hung up.

Thinking about it later, the thing that struck me most about the conversation was Ned’s comment. It was overly emphatic, strangely partisan. In my experience there was only one reason why a man would adopt a woman’s point of view so eagerly. It wasn’t because he had suddenly discovered a mutual interest the bizarre protocols of divorce. It wasn’t because he was a chivalrous debater who liked standing up for over-matched losers, or because he believed what she was saying and felt a moral obligation to fight for the truth.

No, sorry. It was because he was fucking her. It was the only sensible explanation.

Ned was fucking my wife.

Ex-wife, sorry. I still couldn’t get my head around that one.

The breath caught in my throat like a piece of food. I forced some air down. Maybe I was wrong. Lisa always said I was impossibly cynical, so cynical I was like a credulous child. “A kid takes everything at face value,” she had explained to me once. “You always see some creepy agenda. But it all comes out to the same thing. Neither of you can deal with the real world at all. Maybe you were that kid once. Maybe that explains it.”

Maybe she was right.

Maybe Ned was just being nice.

Maybe.

But I had to know for sure.

That’s why I sneaked into her house and read her journal.

But that’s another story. We’ll save it for next time.

Scenes From a Divorce #2

It was normal, that was the strangest part.

As usual I was puttering around the house while everyone else slept, taking the refrigerator dough out, rolling it flat, dusting it with cinnamon sugar, curling it up like a rug, cutting it into disks and setting each one on a pat of butter and some crumbled pecans in the muffin tins. They’d have to rise again, for another two or three hours.

The kids got up just as I was finishing, same as always. And, also as always, my job changed at that point: now I had to keep the noise level down so that Lisa could sleep. Perversely, she loved sleeping in on Christmas morning. Perhaps because it enforced a level of consideration she didn’t feel she got under normal conditions.

It was quite a challenge. Keeping eight and nine year olds from charging up and down the halls, playing with noisy toys and fighting with each other at the top of their voices was exhausting and futile. It was like trying to keep the dog from barking when she rode in the car. Short of a sedative dart or a roll of duct-tape, it wasn’t going to happen.

So the morning was stressful, as usual. Everything happened in proper order – the stocking gifts unwrapped, while Lisa took endless pictures and we drank coffee and ate the sticky buns. Of course the difference was that this year I could escape. I would take the kids for the rest of the morning so she could have her private Christmas with Ned; but by the late afternoon I would be alone.

I watched my wife, she still felt like my wife. This cosy fake domesticity was unraveling my tenuous sense of perspective. Lisa moved around the room in her casually sexy thermal underwear pajamas. I could only glance at her, the nipples pushing against the soft cotton of the ribbed top; a furtive sighting into the drooping V neck when she leaned over to pick up her coffee cup. In an hour another man, someone we had laughed at together, would be lifting that shirt over her head, easy and proprietary after how many years of mute envy and longing? Ned had circled our dying marriage like a vulture and now it was time to feast on the carrion.

Driving back into town with the kids squabbling in the back seat, drunk on chocolate santas and cinnamon sugar, I saw Ned’s truck heading the other direction. He would be unwrapping his own Christmas gift in a few minutes.

The kids didn’t like my silence. It was unnatural and they sensed something was wrong. I started singing “Deck The Halls” and they joined in happily.

We were almost a family again while the song lasted.

Scenes From a Divorce #1

It was finally over.

I stumbled through the darkness in the brittle November air. I could hear the wind chattering in the trees, and distant surf on the south shore. There was the sound of a car engine in the distance, faint and growing fainter.

She had finally said it.

“I don’t love you any more.”

I banged my fists on my thighs, throttled and gasping. I hadn’t even grabbed my coat. But I couldn’t be in the house with her for one more second.

And this was how pitifully little she knew me – she couldn’t understand why those words would stop a conversation. Didn’t I know it already? Wasn’t it obvious?

She was right, too – I had no business being surprised. We had been in the middle of the unspoken knowledge for years. It was like living in Chernobyl as desperate Russians were starting to do again now: ignoring the obvious and waiting for the symptoms to show.

Someone in a Ford ranger offered me a ride. I shook my head, waved them on.

I was talking to myself and I didn‘t want anyone else to hear. Only crazy people talk to themselves. Fine. I felt crazy tonight. I spoke to the black asphalt under my feet:

If there’s no love, what’s the point? It’s waiting in a movie line in front of a closed theatre. It’s soggy cereal, it’s tepid coffee, it’s cold toast and hard butter. It’s corrupted computer files and broken shoelaces and the look on the doctor’s face when he brings you the biopsy report. It’s dread and boredom, fear and guilt, it’s every putrid emotion. It’s years and years of more of the same. It’s waste. It’s not even tragedy. There are no heroes. It’s smaller than life. It’s the tea scum that won’t come off the inside of your cup, it’s the glare of sunlight on chrome in your eyes. It’s skidmarks in your underwear and nail clippings in the carpet. It’s the juice at the bottom of the garbage bag.

Shit, in other words.

Without love it’s nothing but shit.

I ran out of breath. I found I was crying. It was a physical response, like a cramp. I walked and walked until I realized I had no destination. I was just stalling. I couldn’t stay out much longer in the cold. There was no one I could stay with in this alien place, no one I could trust to hear my story.

There was nowhere to go but home.

So I went there.

Mad Men, Mad Money: An Open Letter to Matthew Weiner

The negotiations for the third season of Mad Men continue this morning, and you must have more leverage now, after winning a second Golden Globe award, despite the corrupt, debased and laughable nature of that prize, awarded by a 'foreign press corps' that ignores most of the actual foreign press and whose benediction can be purchased, in the immortal words of George Orwell, "over the counter, like so many pounds of cheese."

I know you're angry, Mr. Weiner. After all, you wrote the pilot of Mad Men more than a decade ago, only to have it rejected by everyone --including, most recently and scandalously -- HBO. I mean -- you were working for them, writing classic Sopranos episodes, and the script was virtually hand delivered to the bosses there by David Chase, the most significant creative figure in the cable channel's history. And they still rejected it!

Maybe you felt it was a come-down to broadcast the show on AMC; after all, they'd never done a dramatic program before and practically defined the two-bit, small-time identity of basic cable. Now the show's a hit and they won't give you the contract you want -- which really means the vindication, the acceptance and the love you want. So you're getting tough with them. It's understandable on one level -- we live in a free agency world where a Matt Cassell, who hadn't started as quarterback since high school, can come off a rookie season and demand whatever he wants as a free agent.

But there's a crucial difference. Lots of people watch football. Very few people watch Mad Men. We're talking fifty million people versus maybe a million, tops. AMC doesn't generate that much money from your show; even the lowest rated newtwork sit com gets more viewers. So this really shouldn't be about money. You make enough. It's a fact. Most of your elite, highly educated, fiercely loyal audience are wondering how they're going to make their mortgages next month and whether they'll even have a job next year. You can imagine how little sympathy they have for you. Many of them are creative, and the idea of actually getting their dream project on the air, with an audience of a million people and the creative freedom to realize it properly, is a fantasy they don't even dare to consider. You've been given this extraordinary opportunity, and made a masterpiece. A million bright, loyal, discerning people wait for the next installment like the crowds on the docks in Manhattan waiting for the next chapter of Little Dorrit. Some gratitude is in order. Maybe even a sense of obligation, to them and to yourself, to continue doing your best work, to maintain that unique relationship with so many perceptive, admiring strangers, and bring Mad Men to it's ultimate conclusion.

So, for everyone's sake -- yes even AMC's and Lionsgate's -- put your anger aside. Your grudges are childish. Your bitterness is unbecoming. Your work has a spark of genius. Get out of your own way and do it.

Everyone will thank you. Even your own characters. Even Ken Cosvgrove, who would kill for an audience the size of yours; or Harry Crane who would die for the kind of respect you command; or Freddy Rumsen, who frankly could just use a job right now.

Even Pete Campbel would thank you, whatever angle he was playing and however ulterior his motives. He might even blackmail you to take the deal. Don't let it come to that. Just do what you're good at and ignore the rest. That's what Don Draper does. He made partner. You're making something much better. You're making Don himself, and Betty and Sterling Cooper and everyone in it. You're making art.

If you stop for all the wrong reasons, you'll regret it forever.

Campaign '08:The Unspoken Issue

Watching the network and cable news discussion of the election has left me with a queasy sense of dislocation. They talk about Ayers amd Palin, they discuss duelling tax plans and insurance benefits, ACORN and the Hanoi Hilton; Reverent Wright and wolf hunting from helicopters. But no one seems willing to come out and discuss what may very well be the deciding factor in this Presidential race.

That's the word, I just said it, I guess it just popped out:

Race.

Most people refuse to mention it. Pundits don't say it on the air and 'Joe Six-Pack" certainly doesn't say it to the person from Gallup or Pew who calls asking questions. It's like the race of the black husband in the new Jonathan Demme movie. Rachel Getting Married: elaborately, conscientously, surreally ignored.

But this is a racist country. A shocking -- and at this terrifying, teetering point in the history of our Democracy, an unguessable -- number of people are going to step into that voting booth on November 4th and in that Constitutionally mandated solitude and privacy, cast their ballot in favor of the nutty old white guy, no matter how creepy he seems, no matter how ugly his campaign or how schitzophrenic his political history.

Why? Because he's white.

I'm sorry. I wish it wasn't true. But the fact is, people are talking about this, in a slimy set of code words: Obama is a 'terrorist' and 'arab', 'unamerican' ... alien ... in other words: black. All the hard core racists I know self-righteously deny it, and this elaborate counter-language allows them to have it both ways. But it doesn't fool me. And because McCain is such an appallingly bad candidate, mindlessly lockstepping to the catastrophic policies of the people who tried to destroy him eight years ago ... because he is so erratic, so bankrupt of ideas, so angry, so unscrupulous, this election becomes a classic controlled scientific experiment, a 'litmus test' for the American public. I mean, let's face it: there is NO OTHER REASON to vote against Barrack Obama. He's calm in the face of violent aggression, measured in thought, shrewd in policy-making, a stirring orator with real ideas and a history of consistent political action, a man with no demons or scandals in his past (Ayers was the best they could come up with), a shrewd passionate leader with a new agenda for a country that's just about to adjourn. He's running against a senile, amoral, war-mongering buffoon. Which adds up to one unavoidable fact: this election is going to be nothing less than a referendum on American racism: a civics test for the class of '08, a final examination in tolerance and the American ability to see beyond our personal prejudices to the greater good.

I hope we pass it. We can't afford to fail.