Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (2 page)

I got over that foolishness when I saw the way her shape (so full of vitality it always seemed the life would just come spilling out of her) climbed the stairs, managing to carry my small suitcase without losing the side-to-side sway of her hips. The whole time we’d been married that shimmy was all it took to make the voices in my head quit their absurd, disjointed chatter and join together in a chorus to demand a single thing: the very thing we were about to spend the next half hour doing.

Helen couldn’t get the door open so I unlocked it, glancing surreptitiously at the surely creaky bed. We left the suitcases on the floor. A joke of a desk, a full-length mirror, a window displaying vistas of fir trees, and a bathroom with a shower stall. Helen started doing Jovanotti-style calisthenics, and the sight of the translucent down sprouting under her arm had me poised and about to dive in, but right then the boy barged into the room blaring like a trumpet, and I plopped down into a chair instead. The kid should have been off playing in the corridor; indignation crept up from my belly.

“You’re sitting down? You’re not going to help me unpack?”

Despite the sharp edges of her shoddy Spanish, I knew she said it with the best of intentions, without a trace of reproach. She must have felt a bit dazed after that two-hour trip cooped up with Daddy; in her voice there was even a hint of tenderness she’d dredged up from who knows where. She was trying her best, for both our sakes.

“Nagging already. We’re off to a bad start.”

Helen slowly turned, and for a split second she froze in a posture and angle that allowed a simultaneous view of her breasts and gluteus, and I caught myself savoring the sight. I knew her too well not to recognize the tide of indignation swelling in her light eyes. She had to choke something thick down her throat before calling her very sweetest vocal cord into action.

“Don’t worry about it, John. I’ll just wash my hands and then unpack.”

She turned her back to me and went into the bathroom.

“You must be exhausted.”

The boy stared at me for a few seconds and then stood on tiptoe to gaze out the window. I could see my legs in the full-length mirror, and I heard the sound of the shower. Helen was hoping to wash away the unexpected sting of my words; she might be a while. The minibar was right there, I took two little bags of nuts.

And I won’t deny that I had already heard Helen turn off the shower and slide open the latch when I bellowed:

“Are you ever coming out of there?”

The last syllables coincided with Helen’s entrance, wrapped in a towel knotted over her breasts, and I watched her face move through a series of furious contortions before it settled on a petulant expression. I tried to get hold of myself. Before we got to the kissing and biting, we’d have to try to heal the wounds of our most recent year of living together. Even a woman like Helen, almost indecently aware of the upper hand her figure gave her, could forget about her body for two hours and focus on fixing her emotional dissatisfaction.

She merely smiled, rubbed her hands together, started humming and removing feminine accessories from her bag, as if she had two children in her care and not one. I refrained from chiding her for the water she was dripping all over the floor. That’s the kind of generosity you get no credit for, since no one ever notices. The boy joined in her song; it was a trick too old to work, but it was friendly, cordial. I decided to speak to her plainly.

“Don’t you think it’s time the boy went to see his grandparents? You and I need a little privacy.”

The sun was falling like a red coin. I squinted, and the fields of mature wheat looked like thousands of anemones waving underwater.

“They’ll be calling us to dinner soon. There’s no time. And his name is Jackson.”

Helen, too, knew how to read the intentions in the whites of my eyes, to interpret the quick changes in my expressions. That’s what living together is all about: you learn to read the other person’s face like a proverbial open book. I started to take clothes out of my suitcase and scatter them around, marking my territory. But I recognized the taunting tone in Helen’s voice: she knew perfectly well what she was doing to me.

“Plus, we came here to feel like a family, not like lovers.”

I suppose she couldn’t help herself. There’s something so entertaining about setting all the wheels in motion and seeing what happens next. I stretched my legs; even though my feet hurt, I wasn’t about to take my shoes off in front of that little envoy from Helen’s other world. But if she thought the kid was going to make me keep my mouth shut, she was wrong.

“Don’t give me that shit. You just won’t take the time.”

They’d turned on the lights out over the terrace. The grass called to mind the hide of a frightened animal, the red dots of the poppies heavy as blood. No getting around it: night was falling.

I don’t remember Helen saying anything in reply. It was the boy who let out a rat-like screech as his mother dragged him from the room by his arm. She had thrown some clothes on, I didn’t notice what. Once I was alone I took off my shoes and even my socks and tossed back a little bottle of gin. The tables on the terrace had emptied. I could hear the faint chugging of a motor. It was all so calm it felt possible to dispel the darkness with a puff of air. The old folks must have scurried inside when it started to drizzle, and the cool was keeping them hidden away in their rooms.

The night was a blue clear enough that I could see the tree branches as they clapped together. The gin burned the walls of my throat but slid through my veins with benign warmth, softening the contours of the absurd scene I’d found myself in. I felt the tingling of a gentle impatience begin to move over my back and hands; really, it wasn’t half bad.

“There. I left him with his grandparents. Happy?”

When I saw the way her wet hair was regaining its golden hue almost strand by strand, when I watched as she turned and dripped (more) water on the floor, wearing those sweat pants and a dizzyingly vulgar top she’d thrown on, the folds of my heart, shriveled and blackened during that damned car ride, flooded with a warmth somehow tied to being married and living together. I was drenched in an excellent mood. I wanted to take her into my arms, taste her right there from her forehead to the pulp of her buttocks, pull her hair and tickle her, all more or less at the same time.

Helen stayed in profile. She was still chewing the remnants of her rage, but finally she choked them down.

“Sometimes I don’t know what to do with Jackson either. Everything will be different once the three of us are living together.”

“That’s if we can fix our relationship first.”

I tried to reel the words back in. It’s a shame that sound waves don’t have a tail I could have grabbed hold of before they crossed the space between us and rearranged themselves into linguistic information inside the prodigious maze of Helen’s inner ear.

The months we’d spent apart had been long. We certainly weren’t starting from scratch, but plenty of our knee-jerk responses had grown stiff from underuse. I know there are people whose moods can change if you just know the right words to use on them. Helen wasn’t like that, though—she was dragged along by her emotions. So I was left openmouthed at her submissive reply, the step she took to get past her grievance.

“Of course, we have to fix things between us first. Sorry, that’s what we’re here for.”

The bathroom mirror answered our silence with a fluorescent shine; it was like a round of applause. She smiled at me before pulling her hair back into a ponytail and wringing it out, drops of water falling to the floor. There’s something funny about sparring against the same lips, jaw, arms, and hips that you’ve caressed as they rocked above you in different beds. Having that body right there when you finally break through the cloud of an argument is one of the true comforts of marriage. I took her by the shoulders, but she pretended a pair of stockings was falling and ducked away. When she stood up she smiled at me again, but it wasn’t a clean smile. I felt privileged to be the only living mammal able to precisely interpret that cooling of her gaze. Her spirit wasn’t calm, the dregs of her anger were still sloshing around inside her. She took a step backward to inspect me.

“You eat too much, John. You’re heavy.”

Helen sank onto the mattress, changing position deftly in mid-air to end up with one leg crossed under her other thigh. I think it speaks well of me that I never confused Helen with a kitten, with some creature bred for confinement. We were in the early stages of something, and it didn’t bode well that neither one of us had any idea how it would end.

“Come again?”

“You’re getting fat. You have to take care of yourself. Tall people don’t wear extra pounds well. Plus, you don’t have the kind of face for a bag of skin at your neck.”

“It’s called a double chin. And why don’t I have the face for a double chin?”

“Because of your eyes, you don’t have clever eyes. Without a well-defined profile your face would look like a balloon, something swollen, an old thing…”

“That’s why I married you, so you’ll take care of me when I’m old.”

I started nonchalantly to undress, going for a purely functional nudity—the air from the radiator was suffocating. I said nothing; when I sucked in my belly, my windpipe was cut off and I started to cough.

“You’re sucking it in. You don’t have a blank check with me, you know. You can forget about me cleaning up your shit if you go and turn into a pig. Spanish women put up with anything: fat guys; bald, hairy, smelly ones….Well, I’m not Spanish.”

“Leave me alone, Freckles. Just try finding someone else you can dump that kid of yours on.”

She jumped up from the bed, evidence that I hadn’t managed to varnish my words with a joking veneer (their doubting undertone probably made things worse). Though I don’t think she entirely understood the Catalan words I used, I know she grasped their general drift. Her eyes darkened, two open holes in pink flesh, and began to dart around the room, scanning the furniture for a hiding place or weapon. She spewed a stream of words, but what she really wanted was to find a way out.

I tried to yell at her to stop, but she charged toward the exit with her hands over her ears, a gesture I’ve always found unbearably childish. In two long strides I was between her and the door. She stopped short of touching me and took two steps backward, her calves tensed. She looked at me, and now there was no hint of circumspection in her eyes; whatever fire had ignited in her wasn’t going to be quenched by talking. It would last all night, and I could forget about touching her now. By some marvel of asymmetry, my head cooled just as Helen was passing the point of no return, a fury mounting in her that couldn’t be stamped out even by apologizing (and I wasn’t about to do that anyway—the final embers of my anger were still smoldering). Helen would only be satisfied once she’d subjected me to a good dose of pain.

“Move.”

“You can’t leave now….”

“Move.”

“I’m not going to let you out.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re going to ruin everything, you’re going to spoil our whole night. Just do me a favor and look at me, listen to me!”

“I don’t want anything to do with you. Let me out or I’ll scream. Move!”

“And what do you think you’re going to do? Hide out in your parents’ room?”

“I’ll leave tomorrow. I can change the plane ticket with Daddy.”

“You’re not serious, you’re talking nonsense. Try to think straight. Don’t be an idiot. You can’t walk out that door.”

“Why are you naked, anyway?”

No matter how intense the argument got, there was always a little light of sanity alive, and now it regained control and the level of rage began to fall. The look in her eyes was, shall we say, tender; she doubled over with laughter. I joined in, and we were on our way out of the mess, taking our first steps through the valley, hand in hand like young lovers.

“You were going to chase me like a naked, stupid balloon all the way down the hall! You wouldn’t get me, I’d never let a dumb bag of nuts catch me.”

Her tone was affectionate enough. Now I only had to absorb the venom; it was nothing I couldn’t bear if I kept my cool. Then we could move on, trusting in the harness of humor. Once we’d shared a smile we would be safe. I could remind her how she always confused
cacahuetes
with
nueces
; I could kiss her, squeeze one of her tits, I had the technique down cold. It was just that combination of “bag” and “balloon,” the clear, lying impertinence of her slapdash attack…I felt my tantrum rearing back up.

“You’ve done it again, Helen. Once again, you are incomprehensible. I can feel the rotten energy you give off when you sink into vulgarity.”

Even though I was down to my boxers, fine drops of sweat began to break out on my forehead. I was euphoric. Helen was a miracle of human strength: in just a few months she’d regained the desire to fight and to reconcile her life with me,
adiós
, pills, good-bye, self-indulgence. She was overflowing with greed, crafty calculation, and the desire for a good time, all the essential components of the human spirit. I convinced myself I had the argument under control, I knew what I had to say to get a smile out of her so we could leap free of that oppressive atmosphere of aggression. But only a saint can listen to his own mollifying voice while his mind spins in a chaos of fierce emotion. Plus, I was teaching her a lesson, and I was enjoying it.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if all that rage has burst a blood vessel. When a doctor cracks open your skull he’ll find that your thoughts have been fermenting in a brain soaked in blood…I don’t care if I’m shouting! I’m not yelling just to yell, I have a good reason! I need to be able to hear myself think when I’m fighting with you.”

I heard the crash, I saw the pieces on the floor, but it took me a second to compose a mental image of what had broken. She still hadn’t slipped from my grasp; it was in her best interests to go on loving me. Sooner or later the terrifying combination of her lack of drive plus Jackson would bring her back to my side, but when I saw how she was writhing like a creature in a trap, the hair along my spine stood on end.