This is it. Nate has spent several months avoiding this. He would rather be doing anything else at all. He has a brief vision of himself on a balsa raft, floating down the Amazon with malarial steam rising around him. A crocodile, or would it be an alligator, raises its head from the murky green water, stinking like a dead snake, hissing, lunging for him. Deftly he inserts a stick between its open jaws, twists and it’s helpless, it falls astern and he floats serenely on, sunburned and emaciated but not done yet, not by a long shot. He wishes he hadn’t lost his pith helmet in that skirmish. He’s on his way to discover something, or perhaps he’s already discovered it. A lost civilization. In his back pocket is a creased and water-stained map, which will be the only clue if the poisoned arrows get him. Delirious, he’ll be. If he can only reach Lima. He tries vainly to remember which side of South America Lima is really on. A miracle of endurance, they will say.
But the pressure, the unavoidable vortex has him at last and he’s being swept along, out of control, toward some chasm he can dimly perceive. He tries not to panic, though he can feel his eyes jerking, making the room flicker like an old film. He concentrates on his Adam’s apple. He refuses to gulp, she’d spot that in a flash. He uncrosses his legs and crosses them again, left over right, the first step in a Boy Scout reef knot. There’s nothing to drink but bloody tea, there isn’t even a beer, and he knows for absolute goddamn certain that this is deliberate on Elizabeth’s part. She thought it would unsettle him and she’s right, right, right.
It’s the mention of lawyers that’s confused him. At the first words, “my lawyer,” she said, and “your lawyer,” he started shallow breathing. He knows he used to be a lawyer himself. Who should know better than he does that there’s no mystery, no occult power? It’s all paper and verbiage. But fake though the structure is, it could wreck his life.
“Couldn’t we do it without lawyers?” he asks, and Elizabeth smiles.
She’s placed herself on the sofa, where she’s curled with every show of comfort. He, on the other hand, is sitting on a pine pressback chair, from which, he notes, the cushion has been removed since the last time he was here. His ass hurts, bone against wood, his spine hurts, this chair was always too low for him.
“You can’t have a divorce without lawyers,” she says.
Nate begins to explain that there is in fact a way of doing it, but she stops him. “That would hardly be fair,” she says. “You know the law, I don’t. I feel I need protection.”
Nate is hurt. Protection from him? It’s a question of support for the children. She ought to know he will do anything he can.
She has a piece of paper, which she passes over to him. She hopes he will realize she’s tried to be more than fair. She talks about dentists’ bills while Nate focuses with an effort on the black marks in front of him. The children are upstairs watching television in their room, where Elizabeth has sent them. For several weeks she hasn’t let him come into the house when he’s arrived to pick them up for the weekend. He’s had to lurk outside, once in the rain, like some pervert or magazine salesman, waiting for them to emerge from the front door with their pathetic little overnight cases. It was part of her campaign, part of the squeeze to get him into this corner where he now crouches. When he walked through the door today, Nancy thought at first that he was moving in again. Home.
He must make it clear to Elizabeth that he will not tolerate having the children used as weapons against him. (Make it clear, a joke. What power does he have, how does he know what she says to them when he isn’t there?)
“Mummy says single-parent families have to work harder and pull together,” Nancy told him last week.
“You aren’t a single-parent family,” Nate said. Elizabeth was behaving as if he were dead. But he wasn’t dead yet and he wasn’t going to die to oblige her. Unlike Chris. In the past few weeks he’s felt a growing kinship with Chris, with that fatal desperation. “You have two parents and you always will have.”
“Not if Mummy dies,” Nancy said. Nate wants to talk to Elizabeth about this, this theme which has come up more than once. Has she been taking pills, has she been slashing her wrists where the children can see? Nate doesn’t think so, doesn’t think she’d go that far to spite him. She isn’t looking well, she’s puffy and white but she’s neatly dressed and, though he looks, he can see no bandages or scars.
He knows what will happen if he tries to discuss the children’s state of mind. He can foresee the scorn: What right does he have to comment? He’s opted out. She acts as if he’s gone off to loll in flowers and roll around on carpets of naked women, when the fact is he spends most of his life scrabbling for money. The recession hasn’t ended. Maybe, he thinks, peering at Elizabeth’s neatly typed list, he should point this out. For the first few years of it people believed it would, but now they’ve buckled themselves in for the long siege. They’re no longer willing to pay eighty dollars for Jerome Giraffe and Horace Horse, no matter how lovingly hand-crafted. As for naked women, Lesje is hardly speaking to him. She claims he’s deliberately trying to postpone the divorce.
“It’s just a formality,” he told her. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It may not mean anything to you,” she said, “but Elizabeth thinks she’s still married to you. Which she is.”
“Only on paper,” Nate said.
“If it doesn’t mean anything to you, why not do it and get it over with?” Lesje said. Nate feels she is unhealthily obsessed with this question. A minor question, he tells her. He’s tried to explain to her several times that relationships of ten years’ standing (eleven? twelve?) don’t just come to a dead stop. Elizabeth is the mother of his children. It’s true she asked him to come over and help hang the new curtains in the children’s room and it’s also true he went; perhaps he shouldn’t have. But that was a month and a half ago; he doesn’t see why Lesje keeps bringing it up. They love each other, he tells her; who cares what’s on file in the Registry Office? But Lesje turns away from him in bed, curling in on herself. Or she stays late at the Museum, or she brings home thick books filled with diagrams of fossil teeth and reads them at the kitchen table until she thinks he’ll be asleep.
“Dinosaurs are dead,” he said to her one day, trying to lighten things up. “But I’m still alive.”
“Are you sure?” she said, with one of those ball-shriveling looks. As if he was a teeny little dog turd.
It’s this, this desert, this growing fiasco, that has driven him finally into Elizabeth’s mushroom-colored parlor. Her net.
He has a swift desire to stand up, lean over her, put his hands around her neck and squeeze. There would be some satisfaction in that. His mother has taken to saying that men should be protective of the rights of women; Nate can see this in the abstract. He knows about seamstresses, cookie workers, female university teachers, rape. But in concrete cases like his he sees no need for it. He is the one, surely it’s obvious, who needs protection.
He resorts to an amusement of his high-school days, when he would practice silent metamorphoses on his teachers. Hocus pocus, and Elizabeth is a giant white sponge. Presto change-o, she’s a big vanilla pudding. Abracadabra, a set of mammoth false teeth. Kapow, and she has bubonic plague. The mother of his children gasps, turns mottled and purpled, swells and bursts. He’ll have the carpet cleaned, her carpet, and that will be that.
“Don’t you agree?” Elizabeth says.
His eyes jerk from the page; he forces himself to look at her. Eye contact with the jury, so they were taught, always a good thing. He knows it will be dangerous to say, “Of course,” so he’ll have to admit he hasn’t been listening.
“About the dentists’ bills?” he asks hopefully.
Elizabeth gives him again her tolerant smile. “No,” she says. “About the correspondents. I was saying it would be better if I divorce you rather than the other way around, since it wouldn’t be very good to use Chris as a correspondent.”
Nate wants to ask why not, since Chris is unlikely to be bothered by it. Whereas he can foresee certain difficulties with Lesje. But he knows this would be a tactless question. Also, the point in law is dubious. Though Elizabeth could swear she committed adultery, there’s nothing but hearsay to back her up.
She says it would be bad for the children to drag the whole thing up again. She’s right, of course she’s right; everything these days, it seems, is bad for the children.
“I don’t know,” Nate says slowly. “Maybe we shouldn’t use those grounds at all. Maybe we should go for marriage breakdown. That’s a little more accurate, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, if you want to wait three years . . . ” Elizabeth shrugs. “It’s all the same to me, as long as I get the support payments.” She says something about postdated checks and Nate nods vaguely. He’s caught in a vise, the handle is turning, slowly, inexorably. What will squirt out of him? Turkey juice, nickels and dimes. No matter what he does he’s screwed. Opt for a quick adultery case and Lesje will resent being dragged into it. “I didn’t break up your marriage, remember?” she’s said at least once too often. But wait three years and she’ll resent that, too.
Nate fervently wishes he lived in California, Nevada, anywhere but this tight-assed churchified country. It’s all the fault of Québec. Marriage, which ought to be a sieve, is a lobster trap, baited with flesh. How did he get into it? He can’t remember. He scrabbles vainly, groping for a way out.
Can he, might he, ask Elizabeth whether she’s slept with anyone else recently? Anyone, as it were, still alive? How to phrase it? He can’t, he doesn’t dare.