BRYAN'S DIVORCE

"How was your day?"

"Hmm?" asked my wife. She was looking out the window of the back door, I thought watching our dog chase squirrels, but on closer inspection she wasn't looking at anything specific. She had what was called, back during the Wars, the "thousand yard stare." She snapped out of it a bit, enough to react to my query. "Oh. Fine, I suppose."

I walked towards her and took a position flanking her, watching Gabbie wag and pant at a treed squirrel. "You OK?"

"Sure," she said. "I saw Florence in the grocery store."

"Oh." There was only one possible Florence, and that was Bryan's ex-wife. Florence is pleasant enough to Bryan, Bryan's friends, and anyone that she knew while she and Bryan were married, but I always get this sinking feeling when I run into her, a sinking feeling that doesn't quite ebb away for two or three days. It's not that she's difficult in any way, or that she's mean, or that she says anything about Bryan, mean, indifferent, or otherwise, it's just that... There's just something...

"Off," said my wife.

"Hmm?" said I.

"I don't know," said my wife, "There's just something... off about her."

I nodded, staring out the window at something about a thousand yards away. I guess that summed it up fairly well, but still. It didn't quite achieve the realm of the mot juste. We stood there, staring out the window, until we became aware of Gabbie scratching to come in, having emptied the yard of squirrels. I opened the door for her, she trotted past us, chuffing at us for not letting her in a millisecond sooner. Just to break the tension, I asked, "What's for dinner?"

"You've got your choice, steaks or pork chops."

"I'll light the grill. Steaks OK?" I said, heading for the garage.

We'd been over to their house a dozen times easy, but we always had the same strange feeling that we weren't quite welcome. The place was furnished just a little too nicely. Nothing in it was patently or obviously expensive; pretty much everything was some sort of knock off, manufactured in a factory & purchased at a discount outlet. The patterns were all tasteful and none of the colors clashed, but it all kind of went together like a kid's jigsaw puzzle, with big, loose joints that didn't quite fit. The colors were all fine, but when they came together they had the effect of being too dark. The sole exception to this was the kitchen, which was, in a word, yellow. (Bryan had the whole thing re-done the summer after he and Florence divorced.)

But I digress. Yes, believe it or not, most of the above was a big digression. I mean, nothing in the house had the look of something you would be invited to sit on, with the single and sole exception of a small table in the front hall. I sat on it once, and when Florence saw me she chided me. No, it was something about Florence that made us feel unwelcome.

No, dammit, that isn't it at all. There isn't anything specific about Florence that would make us feel that way. She's what I sometimes refer to as "sufficiently blonde," which means that she's pretty-just-off-beautiful. Her face is flawless but unremarkable. She always seems to be wearing a few more pounds than she's comfortable with, but never seems to have any kind of conscious weight problem. (Geeze. I think I just described 95% of the women in America.) She always dressed well; my wife liked to call it "banker sexy," meaning she dressed in a manner that showed off her figure but obviously had no real threat of sex behind it. Oh, and she works in banking. Usually that's reason enough for me to be uncomfortable in someone's company, but that's not it either. Maybe... Maybe it was that she's one of those people who's not as funny as she thinks she is. That combined with the fact that she's always talking.

Nah.

I delved into the fridge and drew out a matched pair of New York Strip steaks, one of my favorite cuts. In the veggie crisper I found a bag of new potatoes, a pair of yellow squash, and a red onion. I washed the veggies in the sink, tossed the potatoes into the microwave for a few minutes, chunked up the onion & cut the squash into a pile of thick discs. While the potatoes did their final minutes, I laid the steaks out on a plate. In a small bowl I gathered oregano, basil, cayenne pepper, black pepper, salt, & dill weed. I mixed the stuff with a quick fork, & rubbed it into the beef. The bell rang on the microwave. I washed my hands, got the potatoes out of the microwave, & set to assembling the veggies on skewers. A glance out the window confirmed that the coals were almost, but not quite, ready.

So, that particular night, we went there for a dinner. I suppose at the time we thought there was some occasion, but it was the sort of thing that we did from time to time-- they'd come to our house, we'd go to theirs, dinner, a couple of bottles of wine or a few beers, with any luck some dessert, and once in a while a movie. Once there was a special on PBS about the architects of the pyramids, and Bryan and Florence invited us over for dinner & to watch the show afterwards. It turned out to be bullshit, but we had a good time making fun of it.

But, like I said, we never felt like we were completely welcome. It was like Florence was putting on a show of some sort, like she didn't really live there. Like maybe, after we left, she was going to retreat to the servants' quarters, change from her elegant costume into a drab maid's outfit, & spend the evening quietly staring at the walls...

No. No, dammit, that's ridiculous. That's nothing like it at all.

I can never manage to get all the stuff out to the patio at the same time, so I've given up trying. Shortly after we bought the house, in fact, when we bought the grill, I picked out a huge platter with grooves & nooks for barbecue tools, dishes & so forth, but even then I always managed to leave something behind. So I gave up. For this meal I started by taking the veggies out, lifting off the grill hood & arranging them along the outer edges of the grill, leaving room in the middle for the steaks. Replacing the grill hood-- I've always been slavish to the notion that no heat should be wasted in the grilling process, God knows where I got that-- I went back in for the steaks. Why in the hell do people grill out in the summer? I thought this on entering the kitchen. I mean, here is the hottest season of the year, and this is the time we choose to be standing around an open fire? The same time of year that we employ ingenious devices that exchange hot air for cold, pumping the hot air out of our houses and the cold air in? The proper time to grill is in the winter, when it's 30 degrees out, THAT's the time to be standing around an open fire. Yet here I am, in the middle of August, traipsing out to an open fire, whereupon I will slap steaks. Having put the steaks on, I went back into the kitchen, opened a cold beer, & drank in the air conditioning. Five roughly timed minutes later I trotted out, turned the steaks & the skewers, trotted back in; another five minutes or so, out with a plate, in with two steaks and two skewers. If you eat your steak rare, which we do, that's all it takes. In a way, it's almost a shame: all that fire for ten minutes worth of cooking.

So anyways, we were at Bryan & Florence's, & this time there was something even more off than usual. It was hard to get a grip on it-- or, maybe I should say, harder than usual-- but my wife and I both had that off-kilter feeling, the same kind of feeling you might get riding in a car with a student driver behind the wheel: nothing very serious was likely to go wrong, but there's a feeling that something could go very definitely wrong at any minute. Florence started out by telling my wife, in a very humorous tone, the goings on of the week in her office, where they process mortgages if I understand things correctly. Also, if I understand things correctly, there was nothing particularly humorous in the goings on; my wife, God bless her soul, laughed along heartily while Bryan & I debated over several bottles of wine to go with the prime rib they'd prepared. Like my wife and I, they cooked together, and by all accounts enjoyed it. Bryan and I selected a Shiraz; he uncorked it and poured glasses as Florence, much to my wife's delight, reached Friday. There was additional small talk as they checked to make sure all was ready. We sat down at their dining table. Bryan raised his glass, we raised ours, and Bryan said:

"We're getting divorced."

To which I said, if I am remembering events correctly:

"Oh."

For the balance of the evening, Bryan & Florence explained the reasons for the divorce-- they were growing in different directions, they didn't have as much in common, that sort of thing-- while my wife and I chewed and nodded. There wasn�t much else we could do. In the setting, it would have been impossible to do the kind of intimate interrogation that would produce the truth behind their split. On top of that, we didn�t have the necessary information to begin such an interrogation. On top of that, even though I knew I could interrogate Bryan, I had no idea if my wife would be able, or even willing, to interrogate Florence, or even if such a task would be worth undertaking. On top of that, the prime rib was getting cold.

We stuck around for a reasonable length of time after dinner (no dessert this time). Bryan and I dawdled over brandy while my wife and Florence, amazingly, talked about alimony arrangements. Bryan and I didn�t talk much at all, and when we did it was in the kind of short hand that some friends have after knowing each other twenty years or so. All the while the tingling at the back of my neck was getting hairier and hairier. Nothing was wrong here. Nothing in the slightest. And perhaps that�s why it all felt so wrong. It was that same feeling of riding with a student driver, the fear that the car could go careening out of control at twenty miles per hour.

After while, and taking the cue from my wife, we made our goodbyes and trekked out to the car. On the way my wife asked, �Are you okay to drive?�

I stopped in my tracks. �No,� I said, and tossed her the keys.

She peered at me for a moment, then said, �I didn�t think you�d had that much to drink?�

�I�m not drunk. I�m dazed.�

She nodded two or three times in growing recognition, unlocked the car, and drove us home. Along the way we had exactly one conversation, and it went like this:

�Weird.�

�Yeah.�

Weeks have to pass before you can comfortably see someone after an episode like that. They didn�t. It was almost like witchcraft, almost as if Florence had the power to insert herself in our daily lives at will. I saw her at the grocery store one night after work; my wife ran into her at the farmers� market one day during lunchtime. She was getting coffee at the shop down the street from my office as I was walking back from a client meeting two blocks up; she took a neighbor�s kids to school one morning when the neighbor was down with the flu. The whole time she was smiling, upbeat, friendly, waving away condolences on the split with an oh-these-things-happen wave of the hand. It was actually very eerie. This lasted for about two weeks, and then she was gone.

�Soup�s on!� I bellowed on entering the kitchen, only to find my wife standing by the stove. She was heating up a pair of half-foot lengths of leftover baguette from a previous night�s dinner. I had brought in the food and the tray. I would go out to fetch the cooking tools and other stuff later on. We fetched out plates, dumped the veggies off their skewers onto our plates, negotiated over the steaks as to who would get which cut (I always get the largest, she always takes the smaller one, but we always have to discuss it first), and settled down to eat. Gabbie took up her post by the kitchen table, equidistant between us, waiting to see who would offer the first table scraps. I picked up the remote and clicked on the evening news, most of which was stuff I�d already heard or read about. I was chewing a potato and listening to some idiot analyst talk about the stock market when my wife said, �She said hello, by the way.� After I looked up at her, she said �Florence,� which I�d already gathered.

I blinked at her and said, �Did you have to bring that up?�

After Florence went away was when things started to get really weird. Bryan would go sailing along for days at a time, then suddenly appear in a funk. Where his usual habit was to foist his troubles on me without preamble or excuse, I was now forced to pry the confessions from him like the meat from an oyster. Florence changed lawyers, because the first one wasn�t aggressive enough. Florence told him she had a private investigator following him because she thought he might have committed adultery. (Although he would go on to become a committed and enthusiastic philanderer, while married to Florence, Bryan had been as pure as the driven snow.) Florence thought he should settle with cash because she was pretty sure she�d win the house in court. (Bryan had bought it long before he even met Florence.) Florence had come over to pick up some more of her things and tried to pressure him into having sex. (Bryan never told me if she succeeded, and I never asked.) This went on for most of a year. Then, finally, the separation was complete, the divorce was final, and Bryan sank into a blue funk for a month. When he finally rose up out of it, and after pitiless interrogation on my part, he confessed that he woke up every morning terrified that the phone would ring and it would be Florence wanting to get back together. It was after work on a Thursday, and we were drinking beer at a chain joint a few blocks from his neighborhood. He looked at me over the top of his third mug and said �I hereby, from this point onward, swear off women.�

The news over, our plates clean, we cleaned up sufficiently and retired to the living room. My wife scanned the TV listings while I surfed through the sixty or so channels our cable package provides. Eventually we settled on a program on the Food Network, which is an odd thing to watch on a full stomach. My wife put her head in my lap, and I stroked her hair while we watched Japanese chefs do unspeakable things to eels.

After a while my wife turned her head to look up at me. �Let�s never get divorced.�

I could tell by her eyes that she was getting sleepy, staring to nod off, which she typically does at this time of the evening. �I wasn�t planning on it,� I said plainly, �but why does it come up?�

�Florence,� she mumbled.

�Hmm?� I asked, with genuine concern.

I patted her head. "Florence was weird to begin with, dear.� She closed her eyes and nodded, then turned over in my lap, pressing me back into the couch. After a while her breathing became slower and regular, and I knew she had fallen asleep. I slid out from under her, put a pillow under he head and an afghan over her, turned off the TV, and went out to the kitchen. I poured myself the last glass of wine from the bottle and went out on the porch and lit a cigarette. I sat in a deck chair and propped my feet on the railing and looked out into the dark of the yard, the last light of the day barely, dimly visible in the sky over the horizon. No divorce for us. Divorce makes people get weird. And we couldn�t have that, could we?

If you ask Bryan about his divorce, he�s most likely to wave it off with a sweep of his hand and say �Shit happens,� or words to that effect. I never bring it up, and I listen patiently when he wants to talk about it, which he rarely does. When someone brings up the subject of divorce, whether in reference to themselves or a friend or neighbor or co-worker going through the ordeal, Bryan will fix the speaker with a steely eye and say, �Divorce is for bastards who can�t take the heat.�

Come to think of it, that�s what he used to say before the divorce.

James MacFarlane Williams