A year after his rancorous divorce from Louise, Royce called his ex-wife and argued it should be considered an anniversary of sorts, to be celebrated open-heartedly, and she agreed but not without some grumbling and head-shaking hesitation to meet him for dinner, his treat, the finest wine.
“I think you’re experiencing a new form of perverse sentimentality,” she said after agreeing to the dinner date.
“I don’t know if it has anything to do with sentimentality, but I want to untarnish the past.” He had recently written in his therapy journal that his life felt horribly tarnished and he wanted to untarnish the past.
“Only the deities of discord know what that might mean,” she said, with an acerbity that often infused comments to her ex-husband, both before and after their divorce.
“Some of the things you say to me make me want to cry,” he admitted.
“Maybe if you were able to cry, even a few tears, you could deal with the past a little better,” she said, ending their phone conversation. She could not recall him crying even once during all their years of marriage, and found this an emotional deficiency of his.
A week later, wearing a new blue suit and an old tie that he had worn during one of their last times out together, Royce arrives a few minutes late at the Italian restaurant she suggested, and after a slight stumble, he awkwardly sits down, a darkened corner table. Louise, casually dressed in jeans and a sweater she bought after they first separated, greets her ex-husband with, “Stumbling as an art form,” her words as an accusation of his life; she once told him that she liked words more than his height and weight and less than desirable temperament. Actually, she had been working on a poem about when their marriage disintegrated, and “Stumbling as an art form” was one of the lines to describe her ex-husband’s life. They were both high-school English teachers, at different schools, though. She had published two chapbooks of what she considered acerbic poetry, knowing all too well that quality was in her poetry along with her words to her ex-husband, and was hoping to publish her first full-length collection before taking early retirement, at sixty, next year. He had been working on a science-fiction novel on and off throughout his teaching career and hoped to finish it soon, but was not looking forward to his retirement, at sixty-five, in less than two months. Somehow meeting with his ex-wife, he believed, would help him to deal with the end of his teaching career and the prospect of finally completing his science-fiction novel.
During the last years of their marriage, she always seemed to outdo him in exchanges of wittiness or insults, but he attempts to salvage something, self-respect or dignity, he’s not sure, by saying, “Do we create ourselves? We uncreated our marriage, after thirty years together,” she responding that perhaps they should have gone their separate ways earlier, after twenty or twenty-five years, perhaps. “Still, it was a marriage, and it did clock in quite a few good years,” he tells his ex-wife, sounding as though he was a debater overwhelmed by the complexity of his topic.
“Our marriage, regardless of its duration, was a cosmic joke,” she says acerbically, thinking of the power outage during their tenth anniversary party. “What the hell is a cosmic joke?” he asks, apologizing for his angry tone, the wine, of course. “I’m a much calmer person now,” he explains, but is reluctant to tell her he has been seeing a therapist and keeping a daily journal since their divorce. Calmer than what, she thinks, and recalls a few of his profanity-laced outbursts during their last year of marriage.
“Thank God the children were grown,” he says, yet again, the smallest of small talk. “Grown into what?” she asks, the acerbity accompany each word. Neither of their children was academically inclined or cared the least about creative writing despite their parents’ encouragement growing up, the son now selling cars and the daughter working in a day-care center.
Louise eases away from talk about their children by asking how his little space creatures were doing, and Royce surprised her by saying he had nearly finished the novel and had a literary agent interested. She thought he would never complete his novel, let alone make a serious attempt to publish it. He had once thought of dedicating the book to her, but she had disparaged his attempts at describing other worlds and life forms over the years with a few too many “little space creatures” remarks. “I have a scene in which my main character offers one of the space aliens an imported beer, not knowing he was having a conversation in a bar with someone from another galaxy.” She asks, “Is your beer-drinking scene humorous or serious?” and he says, “You’ll have to read the book when it sees the literary light of day.” The wine was indeed fine, they both agree, glass after glass. And they are both pleased with their meal, a vegetarian pizza for him and a meat-filled lasagna for her. Louise asks if he has become a vegetarian in his approaching dotage and he explains that it was a new year’s resolution that he was managing to keep, while she reminds him that she had been a vegetarian during most of their marriage, but now likes to indulge herself with a good steak or other meaty meal once or twice a week. Another bottle of wine is ordered, the restaurant’s most expensive. He mentions that he went alone to a musical in town last night, admitting he really doesn’t like seeing plays or films on his own, but there hasn’t been anyone in his life. She is romantically involved with man going through a divorce, a professor she met at a poetry reading at the nearby university, but does not see any point in telling her ex-husband. “The first play we saw together was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, front row center,” she says, catching the irony, not he, and they both laugh, the textures as different as highbrow and low brow, her assessment, acerbic as ever.
Then, another thrust at their discordant past together, telling him that she had rented the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition DVD, the day their divorce was finalized. “Finalized,” he echoes, anger unabated.
Catching himself again and attempting to firm his emotional footing, he says, “The sex was grand after we got home from the play,” allowing a smile of lustful recollection to appear. “Who were you with?” she asked, acerbic as ever, pouring another glass of wine of wine. She jots down the words on a napkin, hoping they might later turn into a poem.
“I’ve made so many damn blunders and mistakes in my life, and now I can’t seem to make any sense out of anything anymore,” he says, looking sadder than she can ever recall.
“One more go at your guilt, mortality strangling you and your life’s work,” she says, and he cried, finally, she’s almost willing to forgive him.