The Divorce Party

It was her father who washed Gwyn’s hair out in the kitchen sink—using a mix of ketchup and vinegar—while Gwyn screamed from the burning and the tearing, more strands coming out than staying in. Even then—in the face of his daughter’s hysterics—her father was unflappable.

“Gwyn, love,” he said. “Mia is a work in progress. She is just learning how to be.”

“How to be? How to be what? A bitch!”

Her father slapped her. Not exactly hard, but there it was. A slap across the bottom of her face, across her jawline. This was one of only two times he was physical with her during her childhood—the other was when she got into her mother’s makeup bag and almost cut her thumb off with a pair of scissors she found in there. He had hit her hand where she cut herself. To warn her away from hurting herself. Being angry at others, apparently, not offering them constant compassion, was equally injurious.

This was a lesson she relearned every time a church congregant would come by the house with pain, or with a grievance. It didn’t seem to matter what the specifics were. They blur together now: the man hysterical about his pregnant wife leaving him; the woman whose dying mother refused to talk to her; the husband whose ex-wife lost their life savings in a pyramid scheme. The worst stories anyone could imagine. And always her father’s voice rang out with its same, gentle mantra: We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job.

She wonders if this is why her father never focused too much on the things she did well, the ways she succeeded. Because it might make her feel entitled to be treated a certain way, make her feel like she should be angry if someone wasn’t honoring her.

Let go. This is the job.

Gwyn circles back around the airport, back past the LOW FLYING PLANES sign, to find Thomas by the curb in a white crew-neck sweater and khaki pants, his bags by his feet, his eyes fixed on the digital clock by the airport entrance.

He looks angry. He is angry with her, she imagines, because she wasn’t here when he arrived, a little angry that she hasn’t been picking up her cell phone, telling him what it is that he is supposed to do. But his face seems to relax as she gets closer, as he realizes she hasn’t abandoned him. He breaks into a smile, waves. He is like her father this way, unflappable. Or mostly unflappable. Like her father. Like Buddha.

She can’t help but smile back. She loves his face. Even now. People say you get over that with time. If you stay married long enough, you get over someone’s face. You stop noticing. But Gwyn never has. Even if they are apart for only a few days, when she sees him again, she is surprised by how his face affects her, makes her think, Hey, I get this person. Hey, this face is mine. There are wrinkles now, too, of course, but in Gwyn’s opinion they just help carve out the parts of him that looked a little too boyish before. Now he looks confident. Like more good days than bad have brought him here. To his current moment on this earth. It is enough, in its complacency, to make someone cringe—to make Gwyn, in her current moment on this earth, come close.

“There you are,” he says. And he puts his bags in the backseat. He doesn’t seem to notice the briefcase. He reaches over and touches the tip of her nose with his index finger as he gets into the passenger side. It is the strange and sweet way he often used to greet her. He hasn’t done it in a while, which makes Gwyn think it means something. And maybe it does. But probably not what Gwyn wants it to.

“I was about to give up on you,” he says.

“That makes two of us,” she says.

She pulls the car out of the airport, heading away from the potentially crowded main road, opting to wind them around toward the side roads that will lead them back to Montauk, that will lead them the long way home. She stays focused on looking out the windshield, on her hands on the steering wheel, on avoiding Thomas’s gaze.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as he unbuckles his sandals, putting his left foot up on the dashboard. His bad foot, as he says. The foot missing the third toe, since a surfing accident where it got chopped straight off. Fifteen years ago now. Truth be told, it’s one of Gwyn’s favorite parts of her husband—that bad foot. When things were better between them, she would stare at it, at the small opening, liking that she was the only one in his adult life to be there on both sides of it. The before and after.

“So,” he says. “What’s been going on around here?”

She shakes her head. “Not too much, really. I’m having trouble getting in touch with the caterer about tonight, which is making me a little tense. And your daughter—”

He smiles. “My daughter today?”

“Your daughter, yes,” she says. When Georgia graduated from UCLA’s photography program, when she made the masthead at Rolling Stone (Asst. Photo Ed.: Georgia G. Huntington), she was Gwyn’s daughter. Even when she started dyeing her hair pink earlier this year (wasn’t she supposed to be interested in that ten years ago?), but today she belongs to Thomas.

“She’s a little prickly because Denis ran into some trouble with a corkscrew. She wants you to call her to talk about it. Or call him in Omaha.”

Thomas rolls down the window, and she can see him thinking. “So Denis isn’t here yet?” he says. “But I thought he was flying in last night. I thought he promised her that.”

This is news to Gwyn, but she has no reason to doubt it. Georgia tends to discuss things with her father that she doesn’t tell Gwyn. She may feel judged by Gwyn, or maybe she just knows that even if Thomas is judging her, she won’t have to hear about it. That’s probably closer to it. Thomas is too nonconfrontational. He never says critical words, especially to their kids. So when she and Thomas had a bad feeling about the decisions Nate was making for himself after high school, or when Georgia dropped out of college for a while, it was up to Gwyn to do something about it. To talk to their children, or not. To be the bad guy, or not. Should she be mad at Thomas about this? She knew it going into their marriage, so it feels beside the point to hold it against him now. She has plenty of other things to hold against him.

“What can I do from here anyway?” Thomas asks.

“Tell him to get on the plane.”

He nods, agreeing. And he starts to say something else, but stops himself. They are both avoiding the temptation to address the topic of tonight in too much detail. But she can see—visibly see in his eyes—Thomas remind himself what he does think he should bring up: information about his trip, and, more specifically, what he did during his trip that pertains to Buddhism. As if Gwyn has forgotten that Thomas’s newfound spirituality is the reason they are here in the first place, as if she needs proof that it still matters to him.

The part of her that is still her husband’s friend wants to remind him that he shouldn’t try this hard, that trying this hard is a dead giveaway that you are up to something. But he is already talking, and no one, least of all Gwyn, has the energy to stop him.

“So I had a little time off Thursday, and headed to this incredible temple out in Orange County. It is the second oldest Buddhist temple in the United States.”

“No kidding?”

He nods, not sensing her sarcasm—not sensing that she couldn’t care less about all of it, everything he is going to say next.

“One of the best parts is that every spiritual director there comes from the same bloodline.” He is quiet for a minute, as if thinking about it. “Isn’t that amazing? I really was inspired, just being there. It was, far and away, the most beautiful temple I’ve ever seen.”