The Divorce Party

“Georgia.”

“Did Dad’s plane land yet? I need to talk to him. Denis cut his hand on a corkscrew and he doesn’t want to get on a plane to come here if there is something really wrong with it. If he needs to go to a hospital in Omaha or something. It’s his left hand. He needs it to work properly. He is the bass player.”

“What if he was the drummer? Would it not matter then?”

“Mom, please be serious. I need Daddy to tell Denis what to do.”

Daddy. Georgia still looks to him to tell her what to do, still finds it easy to be his child. Will it be the same with Denis and Georgia’s kid—the love with the father easier, longer? Why does it always seem to go that way? The love going to the one who is around a little less, and therefore seems to deserve it a little more?

“I’ll have him call you.”

“Thank you,” she says. And then, as if something occurred to her, her voice gets louder. “Oh, and will you also tell him that that woman from the meditation center called the house again? I couldn’t understand exactly what she was saying, but she wants Dad to call her. She said his cell phone isn’t working. She said that he would know what she was calling about.”

Gwyn feels her heart seize. Another call for Thomas. From the meditation center. How on earth did they get here? Gwyn is the daughter of a southern minister—a southern minister who heads a congregation near Savannah, Georgia, of twenty-five hundred people. And for the first several years of their marriage she could barely get Thomas to go home with her for Easter, for Christmas. He would agree, grudgingly, only after saying that it made him feel like a hypocrite. To pretend to believe. He is a doctor, a man of science. This is where he is placing his bets. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, she used to tell him.

Yes, he would say. It does.

But then, nine months ago, he came home from teaching his weekly seminar on health care reform at Southampton College and told Gwyn that he was thinking more about spirituality. Eastern spirituality. He told her that he would be staying at the college late on Mondays to take a class in Buddhist Thought, that he would be driving down to Oyster Bay to attend meditation classes on Thursday mornings. That he would be driving all the way into Manhattan for weekend-long retreats at the Chakrasambara Buddhist Center. Where he couldn’t be reached for three days at a time.

I just want to see, he said.

Until he wanted to do more than just see, which was when the real problems started.

I think my life is going in a different direction, he said, almost casually, over dinner one night—over sautéed bluefish; a small lentil salad—as if he had changed his mind about wanting these things for dinner, as if it were of no real consequence either way.

It feels unclear to me right now where it fits into that, he said. You know . . .

No, Thomas, she said. I don’t know.

Our marriage.

Gwyn looks at herself in the rearview mirror, the phone still against her ear. She is symmetrical. This is the nicest thing she can think about herself right now. The rest of it—the long, blond hair, matching long legs; her cool blue eyes and still fairly lovely skin; her beauty—it has deceived her. In its own way, it has made her feel secure. For fifty-eight years, her beauty has made her feel safe. In her marriage, in her family, in her own skin. But she hasn’t been. Her husband is acting like someone she doesn’t know. Her son never wants to come home. Her daughter never wants to leave.

She is the opposite of safe. And this is the secret she wants to tell, if anyone wants to hear, this is what she wants to warn people of: Beauty won’t protect you. Not in the end. What will is the one thing you can’t plan for. The one thing you can’t save for or search for or even find. It has to find you and decide to stay. Time. More of it. More of it to try and make things right. As of today, Gwyn is just about out.

“Mom,” Georgia says. “Are you listening to me? Who is Eve?”

“What?”

“Eve? You asked me when I got on the phone if I was Eve. Who is she?”

Gwyn looks toward the landing strip in the distance, as if she were about to get caught. For what, and by whom, she can’t say. But a plane has landed in the time since Georgia called, a small jet plane hitting the tarmac, coming to a complete stop. This too she has missed.

“Eve is the caterer,” she tells Georgia. “She is catering tonight’s party for us. She hasn’t called the house, has she?”

“No, what do you need from her if she does?”

“Everything,” Gwyn says.

Georgia laughs. This is funny? Apparently this is funny. Apparently, Gwyn has made a joke.

“Sweetheart, I’ll call when Dad gets here, okay? I’ll ask him about Denis’s hand and I’ll have him call you. But I’ve got to jump off now.”

"Why?”

How can she answer? She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to go into any of it with Georgia, not now, not without telling her the whole story. But what is the whole story? Part of it, at least, starts to tell itself: because there is a knock on the window, a loud knock, which Georgia surely hears through the phone. And Gwyn looks out to see a young guy, standing there—post-college, clean shaven, a little too tan. Her guy. The messenger. And he is carrying a briefcase, a metal briefcase, the temperature inside regulated, controlled.

Gwyn’s briefcase.