We Are Still Married

THE MAN THEY ONCE CALLED The Mayor of South Roxy was Jabbo O’Brien, who ran a news shop in a storefront on Eleanor Avenue, which the O’Briens had run since back when T. B. (Sweet Tommy) O’Brien stepped off the boat from Tooralooraloora in 1892. But then Coronet magazine died and Collier’s and Look, and all the great columnists, like Hector Timmy, and Jabbo lost interest in journalism. One day in 1982 he missed winning a million dollars in the lottery by one numeral, a six instead of a seven. He sold the storefront to his nephew Butch for $75,000, and he and Maggie split for Parma, Florida—a studio apartment only two miles from the beach—to collect shells and sharks’ teeth.

The next year Butch sold the building to a developer named Rob Niles for $630,000. Jabbo’s younger brother Francis called him up at 11:00 P.M. and told him. “Franny,” Jabbo replied, “you’re drunk. Go to bed. That whole street isn’t worth the powder to blow it to hell. It’s nothing but heartache. We got out in the nick of time.”

The false-aluminum front of O’Brien News was ripped off and the underlying brick was tuck-pointed and natural wood window frames installed. The downstairs became a yarn shop called The Yarn-ery. Upstairs were The Candlery, The Bookery, and The Pottery-Wottery. B&B Plumbing Supply next door in the Trischka Building was bought by the law firm of Payne, Batten & Noyes, and Mickey’s Last Call Lounge, on the other side, became the office of Robert Niles Ltd.

Together with Payne, Batten & Noyes, Rob Niles formed the Market Square Corporation. The neighborhood had always been known as South Roxy, or Luigitown, and there was no square anywhere in it, but six months later St. Jude’s Church was designated a National Architectural Wonder, and Market Square was named a National Living Cultural Resource Neighborhood and a Genuine Treat. Within weeks, old dark apartment houses with purple acrylic carpeting in the halls were selling for fabulous sums of money. The carpeting was ripped up and the floors sanded and lightly varnished, walls were painted white. Boxes of bright-red crockery were brought in, and pale pastel drapery, Hockney prints, steel-tube chairs, and slender cats.

Rob Niles and his wife, Nancy, a therapist at a center for men in life-change situations, and their children Randy, fifteen, and Sue, fourteen, moved into a gorgeous three-bedroom loft with white walls and gray carpeting and new Swedish furniture, on the fourth floor of what used to be South High School, approximately where the home-ec classrooms had been. The building, on Eleanor at Willow Street, had been restored to its early-1920s neo-Castilian splendor; the parking lot became a cooperative garden. The new high school was located off to the east, somewhere beyond the Interstate.

The handsome old South High was named Market Square South, with twelve shops on the ground floor (The Cat’s Pajamas, Wines’n Stuff, Big Boy’s Toys, Liz Johnson, Frank’s Fruit Pudding, The Shirtery, The Phonery, The Fudgery, The Wrappery, The Toolery, The Suitery, The Computery) and sixteen spacious condominiums above.

Randy and Sue complained that there was nobody their age in the building or anywhere around the neighborhood, and they were right—the old South gymnasium, now the Market South Athletic Club, rang with the voices of men and women in their late twenties and early thirties, who jogged counterclockwise around the gym and conversed without panting about the rapid upward fluctuations of the real-estate market in the Market Square area. It was going gangbusters:

“I hate you,” Sue Niles told her parents one evening at the dinner table. “I absolutely hate both of you, you’re the most boring odious disgusting people I ever saw. You think you’re cool, but you’re not, you’re just ridiculous.”

“It’s taken us a long time to face up to this, but you two are just not the right children for us. It’s not your fault, any more than it is ours. Please try to understand. You’re a constant source of aggravation—the mess, the endless clutter and noise and confusion and hostility. It makes for a stifling atmosphere for mine and Rob’s relationship. We’re all the time being parents, we don’t have time to grow. I choose not to accept that.”

Rob took Nancy’s hand. “I don’t know if our marriage can survive your adolescence,” he said. “We’ve come to a decision. We have to do what’s best for us. We’re going to sell you.”

They decided to work out this change in the family through The Family Place, a private agency upstairs from Wings ’n Things. “Our society still attaches some guilt to the idea of selling kids, but not so much as in the past,” said Bart, the counselor at TFP. “There’s been this gradual demystification of blood relationships, which is allowing people to admit openly what was known all along, that some work and some don’t.”

“We’re finding more and more that an outright cash sale actually boosts a child’s self-esteem. I mean, for a lot of kids, this is exactly what they need—we handled a fat boy last week who went for almost $300,000. Eight years old. That really changed that kid’s whole . . .”

TFP placed the children with a younger couple named Scott and Lainie for $185,000. (Randy and Sue were a little older than what the market wanted, and Randy had bad skin.) Scott was the heir to an insect-repellent fortune, and he and Lainie owned a big ranch, La Bamba, in the Crisco Mountains a hundred miles from the city, where the kids would have horses, a Porsche, their own bunkhouse.

Saying goodbye wasn’t easy. Sue asked, “Can we come and visit on weekends?” as the cab honked, and Rob and Nancy cried and promised to feed Gipper the guppy, and Randy said, “Take care of yourselves, you two. Have a good life.” Rob and Nancy both felt an incredible emptiness for days afterward.

But slowly they rediscovered some basic values from earlier in their marriage, such as self-expression and having fun. The childless lifestyle made them feel youthful, even giddy, and soon they were spending their evenings at the Amalgamated Trucking and Storage Company, the new bar that opened up where Pripicsh Bros. Transfer used to be, mingling freely with persons half their age.

One spring they went to a little resort in Biafra which nobody had ever been to or heard of, a gorgeous deserted peninsula where they spent three weeks in pure silence eating only bok choy and something like rutabagas, and they came back deeply emerged in selfhood in ways they couldn’t explain. Nancy, tired of listening to weeping men, quit her job at the life-change center, and Rob sold his business to two architects named Sharon and Karen, and Rob and Nancy went into partnership as resource persons.

Their first client was St. Jude’s Church. Father Quinn had retired (he was deaf and stayed in the rectory and was unaware of changes in the parish) and Father Todd, a tall, angular man who dressed in blue jeans, a white shirt, and a tweed jacket, wanted to get a dialogue started between the church and what he called “the development community.”

One night, arriving for dinner at The Buffalo Wingery, Rob and Nancy ran into Randy and Sue sitting at the bar. Rob and Nancy struck up a conversation and talked for forty-five minutes before they identified themselves. Their former children couldn’t believe their eyes! “Mom? Dad?” they cried. “You seem so—so interesting, so alive, so ...”

“Call us Rob and Nancy,” said their ex-parents, hugging them. They ate dinner together, and Rob and Nancy were glad to hear that the children were just as happy with their new lifestyles as they were with theirs. The four of them formed a much stronger bond that evening than they had had as a family, perhaps because it was based on mutual respect and not on the accident of birth. “Let’s get together again, soon,” they promised. Everything was great.

Then came the stock-market crash in October, and though everyone said the next morning that it meant nothing really and was a natural correction and not a crash, nevertheless life seemed shakier around Market Square and South Market. One cool morning a runner was heading south along Eleanor Avenue past all the new little trees in their brick pots on the sidewalk when the Velcro strip on his left shoe caught the Velcro strip on his left wrist. He fell heavily and broke his right leg so badly it almost had to be amputated.

Word got around fast in The Eatery among the breakfast croissant crowd: Marc almost lost his leg. People walked around thinking about it, a wonderful man in his early forties tripped up by himself and almost crippled.

Next afternoon, 2:00 P.M.: a woman, thirty-two, gasped in mid-sentence and pitched forward into her wilted spinach salad at The Coffee & Tea-ery and had to be pounded back to life by the Vietnamese dishwasher. Choking on salad? You think it’s impossible and yet it seems that a leaf of lightly oiled spinach can form a tight seal in your throat, a deadly green diaphragm that hard coughing only makes tighter. People sat down to dinner that evening and thought about her, a beautiful slender woman almost slain by nutritious food.

Father Todd, of St. Jude’s, disappeared one day, gone to Minneapolis to become the head of a conference center, leaving a note: “I hate goodbyes, so simply left last night. Good luck.” And then a masseuse at The House of Touch was loosening up a muscle in Nick’s neck (Nick of Nick’s Book Nook) and accidentally hit a nerve and the plump young entrepreneur stiffened and let out an eek and was paralyzed for two days, hung up in the hospital like a side of beef. People felt stiff just thinking about him. When he got out of the hospital, he and Tad sold their two-bedroom apartment in Market House for $94,000, about half what they had paid for it in 1983. A fifty-percent loss; fifty.

Within minutes, the news spread. Men stood ashen-faced around the deli counter at Barnes & Fields. At The Little People Preschool, children stopped their games and stood gripping the fence and weeping, the bitter wind in their faces. Next day a studio went for $50,000, and then a seven-room apartment with 16-foot ceilings and three WBF’s and an FDR went for $98,500. That night, in The Market Inn, people were getting plastered on a very light, slightly fruity New Zealand pinot noir and singing old Simon and Garfunkel songs and trying to be brave.

The bottom dropped out of the resourcing market. Rob and Nancy lost the St. Jude’s dialogue job when the new priest, Father Quint, arrived and fired them on the grounds they were not Catholic. Unable to keep up mortgage payments on the loft, which had been valued at $528,000 and was now worth approximately squat, they were forced to move to a dumpster behind The Greenery, subletting the loft to a couple named Trish and Nat for $210 a month. Nancy did a nice job paneling the garbage bin with cardboard from Swedish furniture cartons; they had a futon and kept their clothes nice, had nice haircuts, and took showers at the health club; their magazines were forwarded to them; they kept their two cats, F. Cat Fitzgerald and Meow Tse-Tung; and yet: the place was a dump. That was where Randy and Sue found them last Thanksgiving, huddled with the cats in the dumpster, wrapped in down quilts, listening to the Grateful Dead.

Randy said, “We respect you, that’s why.” The kids were great. They talked to their new folks and convinced them to hire their ex-parents as domestic servants. Rob and Nancy came to live at La Bamba in a studio apartment over the garage, and they worked in the kitchen and cleaned the bedrooms. They and Randy and Sue grew even closer to each other, and Scott and Lainie got to be close to them, too. There was no jealousy, no recriminations, just a very good relationship all around.

The only problem was that Rob and Nancy were terrible cooks. After two solid weeks of frozen enchiladas, it was clear they weren’t doing the job they were hired to do. Randy confronted them one morning and told them that because he loved them he expected them to measure up. It wasn’t easy for him or for them either. There was a lot of tension the next two weeks, but soon Rob and Nancy were producing acceptable soups, casseroles, stews, sandwiches, light meals, and that’s where things stand right now. Macaroni and cheese, Sloppy Joes, fish sticks. Not great but okay.