CHAPTER 54
You don’t quite realize how busy a family keeps you until you don’t have one any more. On the day of my release, I visit with Bentley for a couple of hours, playing in the back yard of the house on Hobby Hill while Kimmer works at the kitchen table. My bags are neatly packed in the front hall: Kimmer and Mariah did it together, a rare moment of truce as each eagerly anticipated getting what she wanted. The Felsenfelds drop by to say hello, but also, I am sure, to keep things calm. When our neighbors have gone, my wife and I have one last argument, for old times’ sake. I probably start it, but Kimmer certainly finishes it.
We are in the kitchen, chatting, as though this is any other day, when we run out of conversation, and I finally say what every spouse in my position finally must: “I just don’t get it, Kimmer. I really don’t.”
“What don’t you get?” I sense her simmering hostility, which has grown since the first day she visited me in the hospital, perhaps because my approaching departure makes all our decisions suddenly real.
“What you see in him. In Lionel.”
“For one thing,” she says calmly, “he has me doing things that would never even occur to you.”
“Like what?” I ask, stupidly, the wrong answer, blowing my last chance, my very last chance to win her back, but it is probably way too late anyway. Besides, my mind is too busy for caution. I am thinking: Bizarre sexual practices. Barefoot walks in the snow. Drugs.
“Like reading!” she spits out, to my astonishment. “Nellie isn’t like you, Misha. He doesn’t think he’s twice as smart as I am!”
I almost ask her-it is a very near thing, but I restrain myself-why, if I am twice as smart as she is, she earns twice as much money as I do. The truth is, I have never thought I was smarter than Kimmer; but Kimmer has always thought I do. When she first fell in love with me (or whatever it was she fell in), she told me that she admired what she called my brilliance. When I told her that I am not particularly brilliant, she grew irritated and accused me of false modesty.
Besides, she was smart enough to realize that she couldn’t quite hide her affair, and smart enough to fool me into thinking that her paramour was Jerry Nathanson.
“And you really think this, um, relationship is… uh, serious?”
“It’s not a relationship,” Kimmer corrects me with the connoisseur’s precision. “It’s just something that happened. One of those things. He says he loves me, but I think it’s probably over.” Her voice is soft again, complacent, and I have the sense that she does not quite love him back, but sees Nellie instead as a conquest. The great Lionel Eldridge, who can have half the women in the city, winds up with a woman nearly a decade his senior. Yet I know even this is not the entire story. I envision Lionel, smoldering with anger against me for what he perceived as mistreatment in the seminar last year, working at Kimmer’s firm, seeing her every day in her snazzy pinstriped suits, watching her stride confidently through the world where she is the superstar and he is the rookie, the world he is unlikely ever to master, the world Kimmer and I have already conquered. How could he resist the temptation to try? Here is Professor Garland, infuriatingly strict, pointedly unimpressed by Sweet Nellie’s celebrity, and there is Professor Garland’s wife, Kimberly, tall and sexy and seemingly unattainable. I see Lionel brooding at his desk in some quiet cubbyhole, turning the idea over and over in his mind, speculating, plotting, wondering whether my wife might not be the tool through which he could gain a measure of revenge. I imagine his initial overtures, most likely rebuffed, but perhaps not all that forcefully, because Kimmer, as she warned me back when we were courting, is always on the lookout for something new.
Or maybe my theory is too self-centered. Maybe my wife was the aggressor. Maybe there is no theory. Maybe, as Kimmer says, it was just one of those things.
“He’s a married man,” I point out.
“He doesn’t love her,” Kimmer sniffs, her being Lionel’s wife, Pony, formerly a model or an actress or something, and the mother of his two children.
“So, is he leaving her, too?”
“Who knows? It’ll work itself out.”
The argument is inconclusive, because there is no point to concluding it. I return to the yard to play catch with Bentley, and my wife returns to the work she has spread over the kitchen table. In the early evening, my sister arrives in the Navigator to pick me up. Me and my bags. In the hallway, I say goodbye to Bentley. To my surprise, he does not cry, little Garland man that he is, and I wonder what, precisely, his mother told him. He is not pretending to be brave: he seems genuinely unconcerned.
Kimmer does not kiss me or hug me or smile. Standing in the foyer in her blue jeans and dark sweater, not far from the threshold over which I laughingly carried her on the day we moved in, she reminds me calmly that I can see my son any time I like, I only need to call-the real message being that she is in charge of my contact with him and wants me to know it. She has yet to forgive me, although it is not clear precisely for what. Kimmer has not had her hair cut in several weeks, and her Afro has grown in a bit, so that now, a sturdy blockade to any further penetration of the house, anger beaming from her dark, sensual face, she reminds me of one of the black militants from the old days. She should have a fist raised in the air, a placard, a chant: Sufficient power to the appropriate people! Not what any of the marchers ever said, but certainly what most of them actually meant. Or so the Judge used to proclaim, in his furious dismissals of the steaming rhetoric of the radicals of my youth. They don’t really know what they want, he would accuse. They only know they want it now, and they’re willing to use “any means necessary” to get it.
Well, Kimmer certainly knows what she wants, and she is willing to destroy her family to get it. She would probably answer that staying in this marriage a moment longer would have killed her, and, given my antics in recent months, I could scarcely blame her. Perhaps we were ill-matched from the start, just as my family always suspected. The marriage was my idea to begin with: having made so bad a fit with her first husband, Kimmer wanted less, not more. She argued at the time that ours was a “transitional relationship,” a cruel yet convenient phrase left over from the self-indulgent sixties. She insisted that we were not right for each other, that each of us would, in time, meet somebody better. Even when I finally persuaded her to be my wife, she remained pessimistic. “Now you’re stuck with me,” she whispered after the ceremony as we snuggled together in the white limousine. “This was a big mistake,” she told me dozens of times over the years, meaning our decision to marry-usually in the middle of a fight. Yet, whatever might be the virtues of choosing not to marry because you know you and your partner are a poor fit, it is not obvious that they transfer automatically to a marriage almost a decade old, with a child in the middle of it.
We should have tried harder, I realize as my stomach churns. My failings are surely as great as Kimmer’s-but we should have tried harder. I consider saying this, even suggesting that we try again, but the hard set of my wife’s lovely face tells me that she has already locked that proposition out of her mind.
Our marriage is truly over.
“We’d better go,” Mariah whispers, tugging at my arm, when I just stand there staring at my wife, who returns the stare unflinchingly.
“Okay,” I say softly, tearing my gaze away, fighting the hot mist on my eyes, willing myself to act as the Judge would have acted, even though the Judge would never have been in this predicament in the first place.
Wait.
I sense the edge of something: the Judge, who would never have been in this mess, and my wife, defiant in the hall, the images running together, fitting in with that last conversation with Alma, as the final, astonishing piece of the puzzle clicks into place.
Mariah and I drive down Hobby Road, away from the elegant old house where, until the night I was shot, I lived with my family. I do not look into the rearview mirror, because my father would not have done it. I am trying, already, to draw the line he always preached. The process will be as much fun as having an organ removed, but it is never too early to start planning. Yet, through it all, buried in the deepest crevice of my mind, is a tiny exaltation.
