had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even buried in an excellent suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date.
Why not complete the symmetry?
he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and inkeeping generally with the principles of space alien culture. The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if it were the more formal versions of themselves who were divorcing—their birth certificates were divorcing!—and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not told her yet he’d bought a new one. “Honey,” she said trembling, “something very interesting came in the mail today.”
Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat. At two different funerals of elderly people she hardly knew she went in and wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe—or rather, Raphael—again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation, so what could they do. This at last was what all those high school drama classes had been for: acting. She once had played the queen in
The Winter’s Tale
and once a changeling child in a play called
Love Me Right Now
, written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these she learned that time was essentially a comic thing—only constraints upon it forced it to tragedy, or at least to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde—if only they’d had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.
Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in order to persuade her not to join them on this vacation. “I don’t think you should go,” he announced.
“I’m going,” she said.
“We’ll be giving the children false hope.”
“Hope is never false. Or it’s always false. Whatever. It’s just hope,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“I just don’t think you should go.” Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab, as in who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?
What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to? (Only later would she find out. “As a feminist you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor told her. “As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit replied.)
And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage “irretrievably broken.” What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why “irretrievably broken” like a songbird’s wing? Why not “Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?” That would suffice, and be more accurate. The term “irretrievably broken” sent one off into an eternity of wondering. Whereas the other did not.
She and Rafe had not yet, however, signed the papers. And there was the matter of
Why not complete the symmetry?
he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and inkeeping generally with the principles of space alien culture. The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if it were the more formal versions of themselves who were divorcing—their birth certificates were divorcing!—and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not told her yet he’d bought a new one. “Honey,” she said trembling, “something very interesting came in the mail today.”
Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat. At two different funerals of elderly people she hardly knew she went in and wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe—or rather, Raphael—again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation, so what could they do. This at last was what all those high school drama classes had been for: acting. She once had played the queen in
The Winter’s Tale
and once a changeling child in a play called
Love Me Right Now
, written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these she learned that time was essentially a comic thing—only constraints upon it forced it to tragedy, or at least to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde—if only they’d had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.
Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in order to persuade her not to join them on this vacation. “I don’t think you should go,” he announced.
“I’m going,” she said.
“We’ll be giving the children false hope.”
“Hope is never false. Or it’s always false. Whatever. It’s just hope,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“I just don’t think you should go.” Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab, as in who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?
What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to? (Only later would she find out. “As a feminist you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor told her. “As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit replied.)
And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage “irretrievably broken.” What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why “irretrievably broken” like a songbird’s wing? Why not “Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?” That would suffice, and be more accurate. The term “irretrievably broken” sent one off into an eternity of wondering. Whereas the other did not.
She and Rafe had not yet, however, signed the papers. And there was the matter of
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