I HEAR THEM BEFORE THEY COME in, all thumps and frantic whispers in the hall outside my bedroom. Then the door opens just enough for their shoulders and elbows to jostle through as they compete to be first, followed by the melody of my own personal alarm clock: “Daddy, it’s seven o’clock.”
That’s my daughter, who’s six. She climbs onto the bed and presses her face next to mine.
I open one eye and see hers, huge. Then my son climbs onto the bed and across the landscape of the comforter, hammering my shins with his knobby little knees. “Daddy, it’s seven o’clock,” he parrots. He’s three and a half.
And just like that, most every morning for the three years since my wife moved out, my big bed’s emptiness is full again.
My bed is a vast California king made of Swedish memory foam developed by NASA. Both my son and daughter were conceived on this space-age polymer, and their first pushes from the womb took place here before the urgency of the situation hurried us to the hospital.
But only seven months after my son was born, I found myself alone on the springy expanse. My son was sleeping in his crib. My daughter was in her toddler bed. And my wife was in her bohemian studio on Venice Beach.
She wanted her freedom. I wanted stability for our kids. So she left, and I stayed, but I was a mess. Shocked and needy, I was desperate for solace.
Most of my male friends and all of my female ones cautioned me against rushing into another relationship, but I was convinced that what I most needed to help heal my heart was the smell of new skin. I threw myself into every singles bar in my area code, but always left as alone as I’d entered, and for months my personal real estate languished on the market.
Finally a veteran divorcé gave me this advice: “Think about all the women you wanted to sleep with when you were married, and call them.”
A few days later I was driving home, top down, wind blowing the tears straight back to my ears, when I shouted to myself the name of a girl I’d always liked, a thirtysomething Nigerian who’d come by way of Liverpool.
When I got home I scavenged my oldest address books, found a number, dialed it, and amazingly, she answered. Sputtering, I told her my wife and I had divorced and I was calling to ask her out.
After a long silence she said, “I don’t think so. You’re still married.”
True, the Dissolution of Marriage paperwork had been filed with the court only recently, and it would take another six months to be finalized. Luckily my soon-to-be ex-wife happened to be in the house at the time, watching the kids. We had always shared parenting duties, and our hours didn’t change much after she moved out.
“Look, I’ll put her on the phone, and you can ask her yourself.”
I held my hand over the receiver and briefed my soon-to-be ex on the problem at hand. She took the phone into the other room.
What an odd life mine has become, I remember thinking.
Finally she returned and handed me the phone.
“Well, that’s a first, Ellis,” the Nigerian purred. “You must really want to go out with me.”
Going out was one thing, but introducing new women to my kids was another. I was determined not to be one of those fathers who presented his kids with a new potential stepmother every few months. My ex and I even codified a waiting period into our Dissolution of Marriage agreement requiring us to wait six months before introducing to the children anyone we’d gotten serious about.
Since I’m the one still living with the kids, that deal is a whole lot easier for her than for me. It’s a good plan, and it’s been my fervent intention to abide by it. But navigating a new girlfriend into and out of my California king without my son or daughter noticing is sometimes a nerve-racking exercise in intrafamilial spycraft.
On my third date with the Nigerian, we’d gone back to my house after dinner. It was getting late, and hope was rising in me almost as quickly as terror. Would I break down and sob in the middle of it all? During those twelve years with the same woman had all my techniques become as clunky and unfashionable as Phil Collins and boxy suits?
But the next morning, I awoke alongside her in my bed both amazed and relieved—then terrified. My clock said 6:59. I jumped into my sweatpants, intercepted the kids on the stairs, and deftly steered them downstairs with a bribe: “French toast! Who wants French toast?”
I stuffed them with half a loaf and flooded each piece with syrup, hoping they’d pass out from the sugar buzz so I could sneak the Nigerian out of my house. Alternately, I was praying she would somehow take it upon herself to climb out the window and scale down the bougainvillea. Instead she flounced down the stairs and joined us in the breakfast nook—wearing my robe. My heart convulsed, but luckily the kids, who were only four years and eighteen months at the time, just giggled.
After that experience, during those agonizingly rare yet wonderful moments when a woman did find her way into my bed, I would have to explain to her up front that in my house checkout was sometime before dawn.
And then came the French woman. (I know—I go for international types. I can’t help it.) She was twenty-seven. I was forty-one. Of course it was a cliché. Of course my friends threatened to schedule an intervention. And of course I didn’t listen.
She and I had known each other for a year, e-mailing sporadically. Then one weekend, in Paris, we fell in love. Two weeks later, I was meeting her at LAX with a rose, so nervous I could hardly stand.
I explained to my ex that our six-month rule couldn’t possibly apply to overseas lovers, could it? Who could afford three weeks in a Los Angeles hotel? So Frenchie stayed with me and the kids, but we didn’t kiss in front of them, determined to take it slow. Then, somehow, our jokes about marriage became more serious. Less than two months after that first weekend, we were engaged. Instead of being petrified or repulsed by the idea of becoming an instant mother, she said she craved it. She loved my kids, photographing them incessantly, teaching them to bake fondant au chocolat.
When my little boy claimed he was too tired to walk to the car, and I declined to carry him, it was she who hauled him up against her chest, where he clung like a contented monkey. She even said she wanted us to start trying for our own child in the fall. I’d thought I was done with diapers, and yet the idea of having a child with her made me smile.
We planned a midsummer civil ceremony, to be held at her parents’ fairy-tale village in Bordeaux. We pictured our families settled around one of those impossibly long tables in the middle of a golden field, a band of old French drunkards crooning with accordions and such. Then in January she returned to Paris for a month and only sent an e-mail back. A long one.
I made the mistake of opening it in the middle of a typical morning of crazed parenting. My son was not quite out of diapers, and I found myself changing him on the washing machine while my heart battered my insides like an unbalanced load. I swallowed hard and explained to my kids that plans had changed and that Frenchie wasn’t coming back. Ever. It’s been over a year and a half, and sometimes my son still says he misses her.
Over the following months I finally came to peace with my fate, and I told myself I didn’t need to look any further for love than the little ones I had helped create. I figured if I was kind to them and didn’t damage them with scolding or indifference, their love for me wouldn’t dissolve like the two great romances of my life. I decided that even if the rest of my life did proceed without a mate, I’d already been served a greedy helping of love.
And once I came to that conclusion, of course, I met a woman, Cris, an Italian who’s not just lovely but closer to my age. It’s now been five months, and she’s flown in three times, and the kids haven’t even seen us hold hands. During each of her visits she’s stayed in a hotel down the street, and I’ve been setting the alarm for six to sneak her out. We want to be sure. We want to be surer than sure. But how can you ever be sure enough?
She arrives again in three weeks, our six-month anniversary, and we’ve decided it’s time she be allowed to stay in my bed past the bewitching hour. We know each other well, though she can’t yet really comprehend the entire package. She also has survived divorce but has no children of her own, so we’ll see how she accepts my extremely cute and talkative baggage.
I was prepping the kids for this great shift when my son gave me a troubled look. “Will we still be able to cuddle in the morning?”
I cuddled him right then and said, “Of course, it’s a California king. There’s room for everyone.”
And it’s true: there is room for everyone in that big, comfy bed.
If only it were that simple.
Trey Ellis is a writer and professor living in Connecticut. This essay, which inspired his memoir, Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single Fatherhood, appeared in June 2005.