Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [54]
“Considering you just nearly died from an asthma attack, is it really such a hot idea for her to smoke in your apartment?” I asked.
“I hadn’t thought of that. You might have a point.”
I headed downstairs and mooched a True Blue from Mom.
“Honestly.” She took a puff and watched a large gay man move past us with his Lhasa apso. “A birthday cake with a piece missing? I could kill him.”
“Or you could stay somewhere else . . .” I offered up.
“Yeah, Mom, you don’t have to put up with his shit. Men are ridiculous,” Julia said.
“Right, and, well, you don’t have to put up with anything you don’t want to because you are, in fact, no longer married,” I said, trying once more to convey the basic concept of divorce to these two, who seemed not to understand that a significant part of divorce entailed not seeing each other. They were like slaves who didn’t know where to go once they had been set free.
“The man bought a cake with a piece missing for his daughter’s birthday, Jeanne. Now, I ask you, is that normal?”
“No, Mom, it’s not but the thing is . . . you don’t have to eat the cake or look at the cake or anything. Unlike the four of us, you can just walk away.”
“It just irritates the hell out of me is all.”
And then my mother revealed that she had signed a lease on an apartment on Greenwich Street a few weeks earlier. She could have moved into her own apartment weeks before Eleanor’s birthday, weeks before she put Dad in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s.
“I can’t possibly stay here one more minute.” She lit a new cigarette and exhaled defensively. “I’m not married to the man, you know.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”
I squished my cigarette on the step and looked out at West Fourth Street. The guy who owned the bookstore across the street was throwing some boxes onto the curb. It was past ten and he was still open. The place was totally disorganized and dusty and small. It had no regular hours. The neighborhood had so many guys like this one. People who seemed like they had fascinating lives, a lot whose best moments seemed behind them. Gays whose ’70s were over, models whose Hep C was what remained from the ’80s, elderly actors who spent their days on the phone with Equity, trying to get a little assistance.
Once my mother was finally settled in her new apartment she and my father still liked to hang around the neighborhood together, go to the Biography Bookshop, people-watch on his stoop.
“YOUR MOTHER AND I have a failed divorce,” my father said to me over greasy eggs a few days later at La Bonbonniere on Eighth Avenue. “We gave it our best shot. We really did. It just didn’t work out.” The waitress, a character-actress brunette in her early thirties, parked her cigarette in an ashtray and came over and filled our cheap porcelain coffee cups with more coffee.
“My God, what timing! Terrific. Thank you very much,” Dad said to the waitress.
As she walked away he leaned in ever so slightly and said, “Now, there’s a stunner, huh?”
I AM NOT AN IDIOTE!
I HAVE BAD JUDGMENT, or no judgment. Like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, I pet things too hard and then hide the evidence. Around the time my parents were dating in the West Village, Katharine and I got an apartment together in Brooklyn and I got my first post-college job. I was temping at a law firm, a white-shoe law firm. (I have no idea why people still use this expression—it should just be called a white-people law firm.) A group of about twenty of us “coders” sat in a large room, jacked up on terrible free coffee, coding documents. “Coding” meant that we marked documents containing any mention of this one particular case. It was really just high-level word jumbles. “I see the plaintiff from the case’s name, okay, circle that, move on to next document.” I got fired because after about four months the firm calculated that I was finishing something like 1.2 docs an hour when most people were doing