Erich Segal - The Class

“Sara, what’s all this?”

“Listen,” she answered bitterly, “I’ve stood by you for twelve years. Caring for you. Doing half your research. Keeping together the pieces of your fragile confidence. I’ve listened, I’ve sympathized. I’ve practically turned myself into a human handkerchief for you to cry into —”

“Sara —”

“No, dammit, Lambros, let me finish. I didn’t mind any of it, I didn’t even mind having to be both parents to our son — as long as I thought I meant something to you. But then you had to choose Oxford — the biggest small town on earth — to slap me in the face. My God, everybody knows you were screwing that little tramp! And if that wasn’t humiliation enough, you had to flaunt it right in front of my father!”

Ted had never heard her speak with such fury.

“Sara, please don’t blow this out of proportion. Except for this one … indiscretion, I’ve always been completely faithful to you. I mean, that girl didn’t mean a damn thing to me. Look, I was wrong. I made a mistake. It could happen to almost anybody.”

“Ted, I could’ve possibly accepted your ‘indiscretion,’ as you so fastidiously put it, if our marriage were really solid. But you simply don’t love me anymore. Let’s stop pretending. We haven’t had a real marriage for a long time.”

“Are you saying that you want a divorce?”

“Yes. The sooner the better.”

“What about the little guy? We can’t do this to him. It isn’t fair.”

“Look, Ted, he’s not so little anymore. And he can sense what’s happening to us. So don’t give me that old junk about staying together for the children’s sake.”

“Sara,” he replied forcefully, “I refuse to allow you to do this.”

“You refuse?” She looked at him with quiet outrage. “Whatever you may think, I’m neither your puppet nor your pet. So, to put it into the decent obscurity of a learned tongue, apage te, tuas res habeto !”

She knew she had succeeded in bruising him. The crowning blow was her reciting the Roman formula for divorce, which, as they both knew, was what the man should say to the woman .

It was just after teatime when Ted rang the bell on Gresham Road, Felicity was pleased to see him, but somewhat surprised by the suitcases he had brought along.

“You look like you’re packed to leave town. Are you?”

“No,” Ted replied self-consciously. “I’m afraid Sara’s kicked me out. Could you put me up for the night?”

“Yes,” she grinned, “I suppose we have room for you and your books.”

But once he was inside, she quickly spelled out the limits of his tenure.

“Listen, Ted, I’m happy to help you out with your little difficulty. But I hope you don’t plan to stay for any length of time.

“Do you think you can tolerate my presence for, say, a couple of weeks?” he asked, affecting his most charming smile.

“Oh please, Ted,” she replied, “two or three days at the most.”

“That’s fairly cold comfort. I mean, after all, your roommate Janie and her motorcyclist —”

“Yes, but that’s different,” Felicity explained.

“Why?”

“Because I hate messy situations.”

At the hospital the next morning they tried not to say anything that would worry their recuperating son.

But when they left his room at lunchtime Sara said coolly, “Let’s go where we can talk in private.”

Short-sighted despair made him believe that there was still a possibility for reconciliation. He was quickly disabused. She simply wanted to outline the terms of their divorce. It was only his emotional exhaustion — compounded by the fatigue of sleeping on Felicity’s couch — that kept him from protesting that she seemed to be talking at him rather than to him. For she was not negotiating or discussing. She was dictating the conditions.

Sara did not want alimony. She felt that he should pay fair share of child support. Even this would be reasonable, since there was no tuition to pay. She intended to keep Teddie in the same state school next year.

“You want to stay in Oxford?”

“Yes,” she replied coolly. “And anyway, that’s no longer your business.”

“Excuse me, Sara,” he said resentfully. “I’m not going to let you keep my son an ocean away from me. Besides, what the hell are you going to do here?”

“What do most people do at Oxford if they’re not working in the car factories?” she replied sarcastically. “As outrageous as it may seem, I’m going to start a degree. I do have a Radcliffe magna from the Dark Ages, you may recall. You can visit little Ted at Christmas and in the summer.”

“Do you have any idea what a transatlantic ticket costs, Sara?”

“Relax. I’ll be spending Christmas with my family in Connecticut. And before we say another word, let’s get one thing straight. I won’t allow him to become a psychological cripple because of this. I’ll never say a nasty word about you. You have my word of honor. And I’ll see to it that you spend as much time together as possible.”

“And suppose I try to fight you in court?” he asked, trying a bit of poker playing.

“Don’t waste the effort,” she replied unemotionally. “My father’s lawyers will grind you into moussaka meat.”

Ted Lambros drank his way back across the Atlantic. The pretext for his inebriation was intellectually motivated. It was based on the famous line in Virgil, Varium et mutabile semiper femina . Or, as he loosely translated it, “All women are unpredictable bitches.”

Ted called me today with the incredible news that he and Sara are splitting.

God, there’s no future for matrimony if those two can’t make it together, He didn’t offer any details on the phone, but I suppose I’ll hear the blow-by-blow when he comes up here next weekend. (I had to invite the poor guy. He sounded so lonely.)

Ted has no idea what anguish he’s in for. Divorce is bad under any circumstances. Although they say it’s worst for the kids, I personally feel that it’s the fathers who suffer most.

In addition to my weekend rights — which are pretty useless now that both of them are at boarding school — I only really get to spend time with my son and daughter during the summer months.

And parenthood, I’ve discovered, is simply not a part-time job. It’s more like being a trapeze artist. Once you let go of the swing, you fall and there’s no way you can get back up.

I spend the winter months trying to plan each summer day so it will be interesting for Andy and Lizzie. I map out excursions we can take — like trips to Canada — and contact other parents in the area whose kids we can have over. But at best I become a head counselor with the purely honorific title, “Dad.”

Young as he is, Andy already says his generation’s disgusted with our involvement in Vietnam. And for some reason he seems to blame it on me. You’d think I was personally dropping napalm on innocent civilians.

“The guys at school all say it’s Wall Street’s war,” he says. As if I were Wall Street, instead of just a minor bank official.

I try to make him understand that I’m on his side. That I’d actually helped organize an important antiwar march. All he replies is, “That’s a lot of crap.”

When I tell him not to use that sort of language, he retorts that since I do, I’m a hypocrite like my whole generation (now I’m a whole generation!).

I think deep down he misses me and is just playing macho to pretend he doesn’t really need a father.

I try my best to pierce the armor of his hostility, but one summer month in Maine is simply not enough. I can’t convince him that I care.