A Likely Story

Sunday, February 13th

One of the reasons people are always more complicated than you expect them to be is that they are always sillier than you expect them to be. Take holidays, anniversaries, birthdays and special occasions in general. In the course of any given year, each of us has to remember and deal appropriately with not only all the great public occasions — Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, my current meal ticket, Christmas, and all the rest — but with the proliferating private events as well. As families separate and reshuffle themselves and regroup in new combinations, there are more and more birthdays to remember, more and more anniversaries to acknowledge, more and more special occasions to commemorate.

But separation itself? Isn’t that going too far? Now I have found out why Mary was so bad-tempered last week and why she put those two irritating messages on the answering machine while Ginger and I were away. It was because I was in Puerto Rico on February third.

February third? What, you wonder, is February third, that it should have such importance, that it we were Hispanic we would name a plaza for it? It is the date, last year, that I packed two suitcases and a liquor store carton and moved from downtown to uptown, thus ending my marriage and going public with Ginger. My crime this year is that I did not acknowledge the first anniversary of that momentous occasion, was not even present with Mary to — celebrate? mourn? remember? reaffirm? — and therefore she got mad.

It took her a while to say so; until today, in fact, when I brought the kids back from their weekend with Daddy. She had still been cold and rather nasty yesterday morning when I picked them up — rather like the weather — but today she had changed back to her normal self, which is both patient and insidious. As the kids went off to their room to unbundle, Mary said, “Have a cup of coffee, you look cold.”

I was, but I said, “I ought to get back uptown.”

“It’s already made,” she said, and because I could see the irritability had departed (a trend I want to encourage) I said fine, and we sat together in the kitchen over coffee and Entenmann’s pound cake. We talked about the kids for a while — it turns out Jennifer doesn’t have to involve herself with the police any more, after all — and then Mary said, “Why did you choose that particular time to go to Puerto Rico?”

“You mean winter?”

“I mean that week.”

“That was when Ginger could get off from work,” I said. I hadn’t the slightest idea where the conversation was going.

“No other reason?”

“What other reason is there?”

“February third?”

I looked at her, shaking my head, waiting for her to go on, while she leaned forward slightly, gazing at me in an expectant testing kind of way. Then she leaned back, relaxing, shaking her head, saying, “You don’t remember.”

“February third.” I frowned, casting my mind back. “Good God, is that when— Let’s see, the third was a Thursday this year, so it would have been Wednesday last—”

Then it came to me. That was the date all right, that was the moment when seven months of distress and trouble and finagling and sneaking around had finally come to a head and I had at last broken out of this cocoon, or egg, or whatever it was.

It all began the summer before last, part of which we spent in a rented house on Fire Island, where I was one of the few males who didn’t commute daily or weekly to a job in the city. Mary and I had been drifting apart — at any rate, I had been drifting apart — and either there were more targets of opportunity among the solitary daytime wives that summer or I was in a mood to be more aware of them; whatever the reason, I took my opportunities where I found them, feeling both pleased with myself and guilty, until I realized Mary knew what was going on and did not ever plan to say a word about it.

That was the finish. Of everything, ultimately, but initially it was the finish of both the pleasure and the guilt. I think I could have stood anything else from Mary: raging arguments, brokenhearted pleas, stern admonitions, her own revenge infidelities, you name it. But to be humored, to matter that little, took the starch out of more than my sails. There was no more catting around that summer, but one evening when we were alone for dinner — both kids “eating over” with friends, as the local argot had it — I broke a buzzing long silence by saying, “Mary, this marriage is over.”

She looked at me calmly. “No, it isn’t, Tom,” she said.

“Oh, yes, it is.”

“You’re just resisting being a grown-up,” she said. “You want one more round before the bars close.”

One last fling. The seven year itch. The last hurrah. All that easy dismissal. “Mary,” I said, “you are reducing me to Dagwood Bumstead, and that’s why this marriage is over.”

But it wasn’t over that moment, or that easily. We continued to live together, and in the fall I started up with Ginger, who over the summer had broken up with Lance. (We’d met the Patchetts several years before, and had become friends.) Maybe in my summertime flings I’d been trying to attract Mary’s attention, I’m not sure about that, but when I took up with Ginger I made damn sure there’d be no chance for Mary to do her shrinking head act again. I was sly, I was slippery, I was plausible, and I was not found out. Ginger and I originally got together in October, and by late November we both knew we could have a long-term thing together if we wanted. But families don’t break up before Christmas, so we waited.

Pre-Christmas shopping is, of course, the perfect cover for the adulterer. We’re all off on mysterious errands all the time anyway. But then Christmas itself is a downer, if you know you’re about to pack up and leave this crowd gathered happily around this tree, which may be why I stalled and dawdled all the way through January, until Ginger asked me straight out whether I was going to leave my wife, “because if you aren’t, you’re going to leave me. I won’t play Back Street, Tom.”

So that’s when I did it. February third, the anniversary of which I had been so unfeeling as to forget. Nodding at Mary, in her kitchen, I said, “That’s when I left.”

She offered a sad smile and said, “I had been hoping it was when you would come back.”

“Mary,” I said.

She raised her hand to stop me. “I know, we just keep saying the same things over and over again. I hope you’ll come back, you hope you won’t.”

“I know I won’t.”

“I’ll wait,” she said.

“I wish you wouldn’t. And there’s no point remembering that date any more, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’ll remember it anyway,” she said, and smiled.