Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (12 page)

He never told us (never told me) where he had gone or with whom. Luckily my sister, who called me almost daily by reversing the charges from Boston (where she’d gone to live and from where she returned with halting English, determined to study something related to the arrangement of furniture), clarified the matter:

“Dad is a selfish pig. And if you don’t see that it’s because you’re nothing more than his lapdog who obeys after the first smack. Children are supposed to rebel against their parents, yell at them, reject their world to establish their own, storm out of the house, and slam the door behind them. But you, you still get choked up if he gives you a present, even if it’s your birthday, even if it’s the same thing he gave you last year. You’re like an appendix, a great big appendix, and you’ll only ever be independent if you actually manage to kill him with all your fussing.”

I tend to picture myself listening to my sister’s monologues (the stream of abuse barely let me get a few emphatic sighs in) in the Turret, but in those days I must have still been living in Madrid. Moving away from home made me feel rebellious—it was like being left alone in the dining room and sucking out a shrimp head filled with the juices of adult life. My spirit was too overstimulated for me to reproach Dad for anything. Months later, as I flew home from Madrid, soaring over stratonimbus clouds through which I could see the dense blue of the ocean, it would have been good to toy with the marble of the letter opener. Instead, my sweaty fingers clutched the leather handle of the briefcase where I’d stashed the innocuous-looking reports disclosing the waning profits of my first business. Which was really just ridiculous. I’d been educated so that things would go relatively well for us. I was going through a patch of human turbulence, and my parents’ separation made me feel less dense, as if the atoms that held molecules and cells and tissues together without ever touching each other had moved apart a few degrees in space: I was dematerializing. The anxiety had begun to manifest in a series of physical outrages: red spots, an itchy neck, a mocking wart on my shoulder blade. My parents’ love, the energy it had engendered, wasn’t enough to last an entire lifetime. Nor was it foreseeable that I would take the split so personally. Supposedly I was cutting the apron strings—what did I care whether they lived together or apart? As the sturdy plane moved onward over a narrower and narrower sliver of ocean, the outline of the Catalan coast began to show in relief, dominated by barrels, dry docks, containers, and those gangways of rock and mortar that bend into the water like insect legs. The plane turned inland on its route toward the runway, as if nothing were so important it couldn’t be left behind.

Dad only summoned me to “ask forgiveness” once there was no more hiding the separation. After that he started rationing himself, and I always had to be the one to chase him down with a barrage of phone calls. We stopped seeing him at Christmas and during Holy Week (which we used to celebrate properly, taking after the Mallorcan branch of Mother’s family). The real disappointment came when he didn’t bother calling on my birthday, an occasion that, more than twenty years before, had been one of the high points of his life: full of nerves, intensity, and expectations for a Joan-Marc who would be his and Mother’s almost completely.

Dad looked worse every time I saw him. I even flirted with the possibility that the reason behind his decline was that he missed us (missed me). He didn’t even have to act aloof: he was shielded by our good manners. During the years we’d lived together and I’d been his responsibility, Dad and I had developed a language that served well to communicate basic instructions, comment on current events, and cheer on Espanyol. But those conversational skills were no good for delving into each other’s “emotional makeup” (I got that phrase from your brother); the words became too quickly steeped in shame.

Again and again we would return to our traditional conversational territory and, a table always between us, he would update me on his health issues and digestive rhythms, on the stomach cramps that tightened the skin of his belly and left him with a residual pain he imagined as damp, like the trail of a slug. Sometimes I managed to forget that after talking and eating and paying (and after interrogating the waiter about the laxative or restrictive effects of the blue fruits peeking out between the layers of a puff pastry), Dad wouldn’t be walking back to the apartment. Instead, he’d head off in some unknown direction, to join other people who knew my name and other things about me, but who could never love me. If I didn’t try my hardest, Dad would become more and more distant, until he disappeared entirely. His paternity over me could not be taken for granted—if I didn’t work to keep his interest in me alive, I’d end up an orphan in all but name.

There were signs that made me suspect he’d moved in with someone younger, but over time I’ve developed serious doubts about my detective skills. The fine woven bracelet could have been a gift from one of his girlfriend’s adult daughters (my stepsisters—oh, what new and repugnant vistas familial upheaval opens up); nor could I know to what point the idea of the greedy young gold digger was clouding my vision and leading me astray. When all is said and done, Dad had spent two decades as a young man who didn’t know a thing about me or my sister, and now he was entering the next phase, when men who can’t bring themselves to believe in anything supernatural start to get a whiff of their mortality. Maybe he wanted to forget his kids a while, graft himself onto a different person, take a dip into novelty, adrenaline, rekindled emotion.

Dad had enough perspective to understand the contradictions of reinventing life in his fifties, but whatever my sister might say, it wasn’t his style to leave those clothes behind as an insurance policy to facilitate his eventual return. I like to think that Dad didn’t take his shoes, the Australian clotheshorse, or his favorite ties because he never really managed to leave—that given Mother’s “situation,” his ventricles would’ve gotten all twisted up if he’d ever truly abandoned her.

“John.”

Helen’s voice, skillfully negotiating the bend in the hallway, carried with it a sweet reproach. I’d left the water running too long; the sink was filling up. I opened the three mirrored cabinet doors in the bathroom; ever since I was a child I’d liked to focus them to reflect my image in an apparently infinite series. My face hadn’t changed much since I’d left home—it still wouldn’t have occurred to me to move the mirrors and make sure no areas of my skull were shedding any hair. I’d been married almost half a year (months during which I’d managed to shield my family from Helen’s social voracity), and the changes had all been on the inside. Our cohabitation was taking root in me: a common nervous system was forming that fed me with a different kind of energy, sweeping away the last residue of insecurity, strengthening me. But if I lay there at night and imagined something happening to Helen, someone hurting her, I would never get to sleep. I was implicated in her future, and I wasn’t sure that if the time ever came I’d be able to extract myself from the web of capillaries that emerged from one of us and spilled into the other.

“I’m coming! I saw something weird in the bathroom.”

“Cockroaches?”

“I’ll tell you in a second.”

Helen was obsessed with cockroaches. She fell back on all sorts of questionable statistics to warn me that Barcelona’s underground spaces were overflowing with the creatures, swarming in hordes like crunchy sheets, in search of cracks in pipes and kitchen walls where they could employ their astonishing reproductive abilities. I never saw any in my parents’ apartment, or at school or at any of my friends’ houses. I lived convinced that they’d been wiped out in Europe, but Helen’s eye was alert and terrified by the possibility of making contact with her first living specimen.

I ran some more water.

“Mother’s situation,” as it was called in our family shorthand, wasn’t ever even correctly diagnosed. One day, Mother rose decisively from the sofa and then collapsed with a violent pain in her ear. It didn’t go away after she fell, or once she was sitting, or standing, or when she covered her ears, not to mention the meager results from my father’s home remedies (lemon juice, or camomile and olive oil, or a mixture of chopped garlic and lavender). For half a week she couldn’t sleep, and she sobbed in exhaustion. The specialists we consulted ruled things out one by one: poor drainage in her Eustachian tubes, sinus infections, referred pain (which could originate in the teeth, the throat, or the tongue); they finally convinced themselves it was a problem with her inner ear. After all those examinations we still had no clear idea of what was going on inside Mother’s head. As the uncertainty grew, though, so did my conviction that the inner ear’s design is astonishingly exquisite—a membranous maze within a bony maze that with the help of cochlear fluid somehow transforms sonic waves into nerve signals. Something had gone wrong in those cartilaginous depths and was bathing my mother’s life in pain.

My father managed to divert a Chicago-based specialist from his conference for a few hours. He was forty years old with elegant, hairy hands, and he was delighted at having chosen a profession that enabled him to glide successfully around the world. His treacle-colored eyes gave off a cold boldness; in sum, he was the kind of Anglo-Saxon from whom you can expect nothing but the truth. I even liked how he received us in his shirtsleeves.

“There’s no damage to the organ. I suspect we’re dealing with imaginary pain.”

“When will it go away?”

“We don’t know why the brain imagines pain behind the ear, nor when it will stop. We don’t understand this behavior, and we can’t fix it. We cannot cure imaginary illness, you see? But patients can benefit from what we’ve learned about the brain’s geography to make the area emitting the commands go to sleep.”

“Will it stop hurting her?”

“She’ll stop believing she’s in pain.”

“Well then…?”

“You don’t need me for that, Mr. Miró-Puig. You can consult any general practitioner.”

The result of all those excuses and medical obscenities was some pills: white, blue, and red, a French flag. Three tablets that offset each other’s negative side effects, and kept the patient (my mother!) within the fairly unambitious bounds of what those people consider “healthy.” I don’t really know how it all happened because I had play-offs (thirty-six points and we crushed the Marista team on their own court, three socks supporting the swelling left ankle I twisted in the first quarter). Also because I’d spent a week sweating in fear, convinced I’d be the next one to have some hidden element of my body give out.

“She hardly ever complains. She smiles, but it looks painted on.”

“The doctor says there’s pressure on the nerves that feed her brain.”

“She stayed under the sheets like she was waiting for something.”

Though she recovered from the pain in her ear (or at least stopped complaining about it), the pills dulled her spirits into hibernation. She didn’t care if it was one thing or the other, and she dwindled away so much she seemed incapable of tending to her own basic needs. And that was how a diluted version of my mother settled unannounced into the landscape of our family life. Equidistant from health and sickness, from affection and indifference toward her children, from independence and dependence, she was the woman whose husband both abandoned and did not abandon the home they shared.

The first thing we thought when Dad took off was that, with a son in Madrid and a daughter in Boston, she was going to starve to death. What no one saw coming was that my father would travel from wherever the new center of his activity was, to bring her food and cigarettes (which my mother still had not learned to do without), to clean the apartment (we now have a very Peruvian cleaning lady) and prepare plates of food that could be reheated in the microwave. He was also the one to scour the pharmacies for her tricolored chemical fix. When my sister and I forgot to replenish Mother’s pills she would start humming, writhing like a cat in a bag and scratching herself (one Tuesday I was impressed to see red marks crisscrossing her neck), but we never thought it was anything terribly urgent. Until one afternoon something scared her, and she started talking in a voice borrowed from the little girl in
The Exorcist
about how much better off the rest of the Miró-Puig family would be if she just kicked the bucket. According to Dr. Strangelove (I’ve lost track of all the doctors we visited), the center governing her consciousness (as if those idiots knew where that is, or what the hell they were talking about) switched off when its demand for lithium went unsatisfied. Then her lips just started moving independently, uninhibited by affection, to transmit the viscous poison that stirred in the secret depths of my mother’s brain—a woman who, two years earlier, could justify spending an entire day sweetly sewing on a button. Dr. Death’s proposed solution wasn’t bad: make her dependence chronic. And we were so frightened, so naive, that we received the proposal like good news. We were a hair’s breadth away from throwing a welcome party for the zombie state that lasted for the next fifteen years. Anyway, after that my father also took care of organizing the capsules into a pillbox that distributed doses by days. Then he’d help her fix her hair, and then he’d leave.

“I guess he couldn’t afford full-time help anymore.”

And there you have the oh-so-nuanced version that my sister gave, sitting there on the sofa in the little house Dad had rented for her, with its views of the Charles River. There may have been a twelve-digit number between us, but how easy it was to imagine her moving that big mouth of hers, right above the frog-like double chin she gets whenever she tries to pass for a rational person.

“Just tell me why else he’d sink so low.”

But it didn’t seem to me like Dad was lowering himself. I figured he felt an intermediate kind of love for Mother: not ample enough to deprive himself of the transfusion of new life he was enjoying (or so we suspected), nor so exhausted he could just throw his old life overboard. Regardless, if God decides to remake the earth one day with a little more intelligence and forethought, we’ll all be better off if he opts to use my father’s tender patience as a model.