This patience was an act — my hardest, hands down.
March brought a spate of sunshine. I sold two houses. I began having sex with a fellow Realtor at Clebus, a woman you knew and never liked much.
When I told her you and I had separated, she seemed disappointed and instinctively took your side.
AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE, DIGNIFIED
When I first walked into the law offices of Rick Thron, I did not look my best. I was in need of a haircut, and I was freezing cold. I’d left my winter coat behind while showing a house in Delmar and, inexplicably, never went back to get it. Thron’s office was on the upper floors of a building that overlooked Quackenbush Square, where, in the summertime, amphibious trolleys collected Albany’s tourists to carry them back and forth across the Hudson. But it was not yet spring. The world utterly lacked an upshot. March was almost over, but a late winter snowstorm had covered the streets of Albany with slush. My boots squeaked all the way down the hallway to Thron’s office door. When I entered the office, I was dulcified by the pretty secretary, who must have been installed precisely for men like me, desperate men, men who had come at last (too late, way too late) for help.
“Here’s what I hear you saying,” said Thron after listening to my sad tale. “I hear you saying that you love your daughter. I hear you saying that you were a coequal parent, if not a genuine Mr. Mom, before the separation. I mean you were, in fact, a stay-at-home dad for a year — the primary caretaker — when your daughter was three. Am I hearing that correctly?”
“Yes, you are,” I said.
“And I hear you saying that in a gesture of goodwill toward your estranged wife, you got your nuts crunched in mediation, and now you’re left with this sense that — the sense that you feel—”
“Spiritually squandered,” I said. “Without meaning. Void.”
“Bad,” said Thron. “You feel really bad. Your feeling bad is made more bad by the sense that you — out of the goodness of your heart — forfeited your paternal rights — out of — of—”
“Love,” I said.
“Love.” Thron sat back. “Right.”
“I still love my wife,” I said. “My estranged wife.”
Thron, a broad-shouldered man whose generic office lacked a single plant or photograph, made an axing motion with his arm. “Forget. About. That. Your estranged wife does not love you. Someone who is trying to estrange you from her and from your child does not love you. Don’t be like the battered wife, Eric, stabbed fifty-seven times by her own husband. How does a person hang around long enough to get stabbed fifty-seven times by somebody? Because they’re still waiting around for love. Don’t get distracted, Eric. Don’t let your estranged wife stab you fifty-seven times. She stabs you once, that’s it. You stab right back.”
“OK,” I said.
“Do you know, Eric, that spouses who initiate divorce often think of the divorce as a ‘growth experience’? They even show better immune function. But you — the spouse who stuck around, the loyal one, the one who meant his vows — what do you get? You get left holding the bag. Your divorce could make you sick.”
“It has!” I cried. “I’ve had bronchitis for months.”
“If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times, Eric. You should have come to see me a long time ago.” Pertly, Thron stacked some papers. “Now, who filed the petition?”
“Petition?”
“The petition for divorce.”
“We haven’t filed. It’s — we’re separated. It’s a trial separation.”
“Then we’re filing today.” Thron licked his thumb and peeled a form off a thick pad. “We’re going to file today, so we can start litigation. You can’t litigate with no divorce. Otherwise, it’s just a friendly disagreement. And you tried that already, right? You need to sue.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can. File first, Eric. Be the plaintiff. Don’t be the defendant. Don’t spend your life counterpunching.”
“I need a day,” I said.
“One day. One day. Tomorrow you come in and file. Then ASAP we’ll also file a petition in family court for a modification of the custody agreement. If your estranged wife does not agree to it, bam—we go to court.”
“OK,” I said.
“We’re also going to hire — granted, at some expense — a topflight, independent child custody evaluator. This individual will observe you alone, and also you with your daughter — you know, playing checkers, sharing a soda — and he or she will write what I’m sure will be an A-plus report on your skills as a father. This report will be on file to aid the judge’s decision should we go to trial. OK?”
“OK.”
“Because you know what, Eric? You are a good father.”
“Thank you.”
“I can tell you are a good father. I can see it in your eyes.”
They could not help it; those eyes filled with tears. My heart let its ragged doves to the sky. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted someone to say just that to me. You are a good father. I was sweating everywhere, my underarms, my forehead, my back, secretions that seemed born of relief.
At the same time, a different voice inside me said, Don’t. Don’t do this. Trottel. Idiot. Don’t you know a thing?
“Now, Eric,” said Thron. “Let’s go over some basic information. Let’s start with your date of birth.”
“March 12, 1970.”
“Place of birth?”
I looked out Thron’s window. The clouds were easing down the Hudson, as they often did in the afternoons, leaving the sun canting down into the valley in shattered-looking rays.
I came very close to telling Thron the truth in that moment. I am not who I say I am, I almost said. When I was five, I crossed the East German border holding nothing but my father’s hand (I almost said). I spent my shitty adolescence in an immigrants’ ghetto in Dorchester, Mass. And that’s just the beginning (I almost said).
Out Thron’s window, between the buildings on Quackenbush, I stared at the Hudson. How pitiable is a river. Nothing belongs to it, neither its water nor its sediment. This will never be over, I reminded myself. You created it to have no end.
“I was born,” I began, “in Twelve Hills, Massachusetts, not far from Hyannis Port.”
“Sounds nice,” said Thron, taking notes. “A small town?”
“Very small.”
“And you lived in town?”
“Right in the middle of town,” I said. “Our house was a modest saltbox. Sixteen hundred square feet, not counting the finished basement. We weren’t rich, although both of my parents came from money. My paternal grandparents lost their entire fortune when they were betrayed by a trusted business partner in the late fifties. They moved into the Cape house, and my father grew up there. And I grew up there. The property itself was a gem. Oceanfront. Landscaped with beach heather, wild roses—”
“Fine,” said Thron. “And your parents? Alive or deceased?”
“My mother passed away when I was nine. She’s buried right there in the village cemetery. My father, an entrepreneur, now lives overseas. I rarely see him.”