My Second Story28

Our thirteen-year marriage was unraveling. It had been for a while. There was no real foundation. We’d married quickly. Under pressure. We never recovered after the exodus of our friends many summers before. Beth’s decision to stay showed me that School was more important to her than I was. And she knew I knew that. Beth had put our marriage second to School. And Sharon’s promotion of Beth to teacher status had placed me as second to Beth. Sharon was an untenable third party in our marriage, making any problem, any issue, a matter for public consumption.

My belief and hope that passion and intimacy would grow in our marriage was a mirage. Beth and I were unhappy, regretful, bitter, and lonely. We were suffering. But despite all that, I viewed divorce as a personal failure and shortcoming, as well as a disappointment to Sharon. I preferred to be in a loveless, sexless marriage than not in one at all.

Sharon suggested that Beth and I start to see a marriage counselor for therapy. She recommended Dr. Frank White who had an office on West Thirteenth Street in the Village. Dr. White saw us weekly for a few months.

Dr. White didn’t seem to be experienced in marriage counseling: he provoked arguments and let them play out. We came out of sessions feeling worse than when we’d entered, and we suspected he and Sharon were talking about us. One time he blurted out to Beth, “Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason your husband and you don’t have sex anymore is because he is a homosexual?” Beth was caught off guard and said no. Dr. White looked at me knowingly, and asked, “How about you, do you think you are a homosexual?” There was nothing in our sessions that could have possibly made him think this. Did Sharon discuss this with him? Did she tell him I “experimented” with my camp counselor? I told Dr. White exactly what had happened to me: that a twenty-year-old man made me touch him when I was fourteen. But I said I was not gay, had no attraction toward men, and yet that this event had left some doubts in my mind about my sexuality.

Dr. White listened carefully, his expression revealing his apparent belief that he had indeed “gotten somewhere.” He looked at us both, took some notes, and said, “Well I think your sexual preference is an issue we can discuss separately” at another time.

Shortly after this session, on a random weekday night in 2009, Beth and I stood in our tiny New York City apartment kitchen. Our backs to each other, she opened the fridge to put away the skim milk, and I was at the sink washing the dishes. Without any prelude, she said, “Oh, I hired a divorce lawyer today. Where do you want him to serve the papers on you?” This was so abrupt and casual: the first time the D word had come up. I smelled a rat, one with red hair. I turned to face her, but she was already walking into the living room to sit at her desk, facing away. “What? Are you joking?” I said. Looking down at her paperwork she said, “I’ll tell him to serve you at the office.”

Early the next morning, my office phone rang. I was expecting her. As usual, Sharon skipped hello: “Spencer, you need to quickly work out the details of your divorce amicably.” I responded obsequiously, “Yes, Sharon, I agree. Beth has hired a lawyer already.” Annoyed because Beth had apparently disobeyed her instructions to work it out without lawyers, Sharon crowed, “That’s ridiculous. No. You two need to work it out without lawyers. Call Beth now and tell her I want you to both come over to my house this afternoon and we can get all the terms resolved in half an hour.”

Danger Will Robinson! For twenty years, I reflexively did almost anything Sharon told me to do. No command was too big to ignore: my work life, who I married, what my thoughts should be, where I should live, my very feelings about myself. But this crossed my Maginot Line.

So, at 9:05 a.m., while sitting in my office on the phone with Sharon, staring out of the window at the courthouses with the weary litigants queued up to enter these sausage factories, I did something else. I calculated. Like a computer. All the hundreds of facts in my brain, my memory, and my consciousness were instantly called up, categorized, sorted, and weighed. Divorce would impact my finances in terms of child support and division of assets. It would involve deciding custody issues. And it would profoundly alter my very day-to-day life. Sharon would side with Beth as she always did, it was clear. I couldn’t have Sharon deciding anything or having a hand in it. If I refused to cooperate, I risked getting kicked out of School. Sharon’s ideas of family matters were warped and in divorces she would counsel extreme positions based upon the spouse she liked the best: full custody to one spouse; limited visitation; the house, the cars, the savings to her favored spouse. People would usually comply.29 My calculation was done in a split second.

I knew that Sharon wanted an out-of-court settlement because she didn’t want to be subpoenaed as a witness and to testify. She did not want to be questioned about School and what she did to people. She knew I would subpoena her too. I said, “Thank you, Sharon. Can you tell me what kind of settlement you would suggest?” She described a one-sided scenario of which no judge would approve, no parent would ever agree, and no child would be able to survive. Having seen Sharon’s sick mind operate like this with so many other students, I was ready for something like this—but it was the first time she ever tried to impose something so wretched on me. So I countered, “Sharon, with all due respect, I cannot agree with that. It’s not fair and it’s also not legal. No judge would ever go along with something like that.” She fell silent. I told her what I wanted and what was fair. She volleyed back, but her position was weak. Over the next couple of months, Beth and I finalized the terms (without any input from Sharon), putting the best interests of our son first. But Sharon’s deplorable interference in this aspect of my life—and my son’s—further cracked my faith in her. Of the final three straws, this was the first.

Now I was a single man at the age of fifty, free from the crushing isolation and loneliness of a School marriage. Couples in arranged School marriages usually have nothing in common except for School. They are married to School with Sharon as a third party, like a throuple. I continued to regularly attend class, but often showed up late. I had no intention to leave School: my biggest client was in School and I couldn’t afford to lose him.

The divorce unshackled me from my insulated marriage––Beth did not like to socialize with any of my old friends or family. The first thing I did was to reconnect with them. I began to spend weekends with Joel in Brooklyn and I would go the east end of Long Island with my old friend Colin and his family. I also rekindled my relationship with Matthew and my mother. They treated me as if I hadn’t been absent all those years.

Colin reintroduced me to one of my old loves: swimming. One summer morning in 2010, Colin drove us to the East Hampton YMCA lap pool to work out—we’d been on the swim team together in high school. I hadn’t swum in years. The pool there is twenty-five yards, has six lanes, and is in a first-floor space with a soaring ceiling and a strip of glass skylights running its length; one wall is glass. That wall faces east, and the sun casts its rays in the pool on clear days, giving the sense of being outside. We changed into our suits in the cramped men’s locker room. Colin removed his shirt, and he still had the same fit body from when we were on the swim team. Me, I was a good thirty pounds overweight. Colin and I walked onto the pool deck. He explained that he had a very specific ritual that he encouraged me to follow. He said, “It’s all about consistency: keeping pace and coming back to the pool on a regular basis.” He swam exactly one mile—no more, no less—seventy-two laps. He would stop after the first thirty-six laps for exactly one minute—no more, no less. I adopted this OCD workout as mine and continued it three times a week, in New York and on Long Island, where I bought a small weekend place. I still went to class twice a week. Other than Podonok, I didn’t see or speak to anyone from School outside class, and that was fine with me.

On Thanksgiving Day morning in 2012 at about 7:00 a.m., I jumped into the warm chlorinated basement pool at the YMCA on West Fourteenth Street. The humid air was about ninety-five degrees and water was kept at eighty-two. I had the middle lane all to myself and I felt strong and fast—my arms cutting through and pulling the cloudy turquoise water under my torso, the whooshing of bubbles and my heart gaining in speed. The pain in my life deadened by the endorphins. Two men about my age asked to share the lane. Friendly, they said they had a workout and they cajoled me to join them. Chet had a chiseled swimmer’s body, swam on his college team, went to cooking school in France, became a corporate lawyer at a big NYC firm, and played harpsichord. He was divorced. Andrew was from Tulsa, was a big shot at an ad agency, walked around the city taking black-and-white photos, and was also divorced. Their workout consisted of swimming forty-eight laps of butterfly, which I could not possibly do, and I told them that I’d rather go through my divorce again than do their workout. They cracked up. That’s when they proffered an invitation to join their Masters swim team, which met every weekday morning at 7:00 a.m. for ninety minutes. I slogged through ten minutes of butterfly and took my leave. There had been no judgment of my performance. I joined the Masters team the next week. There were twenty swimmers on the coed team ranging from their late twenties to their seventies. Andrew and Chet were in the fast lane, but I had to start out in the slow lane, which was fine. I was in that lane with Erma, a pregnant investment banker from China; Maryann, an artist from the Village; Sharona, a midwife who also did stand-up comedy; Francis, a dentist and forensic scientist and rapper; and Frank, a barrel-chested accountant from Illinois. They welcomed me with good spirit. Within a couple of weeks I was moved to the faster lane. The workouts were challenging, and it wasn’t easy for me—especially with being in class until 2:00 a.m. So I scheduled my swims accordingly and I started to show up for class less. Sometimes, after workouts, I joined my fellow swimmers for coffee before heading to work.

 

28 According to School, everyone’s life is a “Three Story House.” The “First Story” is work or money; the “Second Story” is sex or family; the “Third Story” is aspiration or religion. Sharon said it was necessary to develop each story.

29 Sharon’s own custody fight went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, and the case is taught in law schools, a case called Kulko v. Superior Court of California, 436 U.S. 84 (1978). There Justice Thurgood Marshall ruled that Sharon’s attempt to sue her California-based ex-husband (Ezra Kulko) in New York for child support was a violation of Ezra’s due process rights under the United States Constitution. The opinion noted that despite their divorce agreement, Sharon had later convinced her then-teenage children to leave Ezra and move in with her. As a result, her children became estranged from Ezra, although her son reestablished relations with Ezra when he was an adult.