Cathleen Schine: The Three Weissmanns of Westport

The office was small and crowded with piles of bulging folders. It resembled a closet, really-the bulging file closet. The mediator sat on a complicated ergonomic chair and placed her feet on a small stool that was on rockers. So much specialized equipment, Betty thought, just to listen to Joseph and me disagree.

Nina Britsky opened her laptop and began to type and speak.

Betty did not hear much of what she said. The initial barrage of New Age pop-psychological platitudes delivered in a hoarse Bronx accent immediately told Betty that daydreaming would be the most polite response. And Nina Britsky looked so much like a chimpanzee curled on her ergonomic chair: her coarse cap of hair; her lips pursed in contemplation, then opening wide to reveal large teeth. Betty imagined herself in a dark chimpanzee cave, though she did not believe, now that she thought of it, that chimpanzees slept in caves. Surely they slept in trees. But the room was almost as dark as a cave. Perhaps there was a divorce mediation lighting theory: if the two people could no longer see each other, they would leave each other more easily. The woman was probably just trying to keep her electricity bills down, and who could blame her? Betty had just begun changing over to the new energy-saving bulbs herself. They were so pretty, twisting and turning, like old-fashioned filaments…

"It's good there's no child custody involved," the woman was saying. She typed importantly on her laptop. "In these cases, that can get pretty ugly."

"These cases?" Betty said. "In all cases, I would think."

"Well, it can be much worse in same-sex cases."

"But Joseph and I are not the same sex," Betty explained gently.

Joseph was squirming a bit, she noticed.

"Are we, Joseph?"

"I was referring to the third party," Nina Britsky said.

"There is no third party," Joseph said hurriedly.

"And if there were, I don't think it would be a man," Betty said.

"Well, I assumed it was a woman," Nina Britsky said, throwing Betty a pointed look. "A same-sex woman," she added, to Betty's further confusion. "Why else would you come to me?"

It was only after they had been handed pamphlets inviting them to a support group-My Spouse's Closet Anonymous or MYSPCL, pronounced like bicycle-and left the office in a dull daze that Betty asked Joseph exactly who it was who had referred the ergonomic chimpanzee.

"Because, Joseph, she seems a rather specialized mediator."

Joseph said, "That was a disaster. Let's go get dinner."

"Look at her card: For couples seeking divorce when women seek women. It could be a classified ad in The Village Voice, couldn't it? Maybe she'll build us a crooked bookcase."

Joseph couldn't help laughing. Betty had always made him laugh.

"You're so funny," he said.

Betty burst into tears.

It was around this time that Miranda made her infamous appearance on Oprah. It was all a blur at the time-being led from a room full of snacks she was far too nervous to eat, stepping over cables, stepping onto a stage, sitting on a sofa, the sound of applause, the radiance and confidence of the woman across from her, some questions, some answers… How could she have let this happen? Didn't she check up on the stories the writers told her? Couldn't she see? Didn't she care?…

She felt like a corrupt politician stonewalling the press, like a criminal, like one of her disgraced writers. But Miranda knew that what she was saying to this woman, who hardly seemed real she was so very Oprah-like, was not only true, it was profound. Why did no one understand when she tried to explain? When she told them that her writers' stories were real-life stories even when they were lies?

"Because in real life people make things up," she said to Oprah.

But Oprah shook her iconic head, and Miranda was overwhelmed with shame.

She stayed in her loft for weeks after that, not answering the phone, not picking up calls from the clients whom she had tried to defend, ignoring the chorus of pleading voices on her answering machine: her mother, her sister, even the lawyer who was trying to defend her, for several publishers were now coming after her for fraud.

She lay in bed, tangled in her sheets, asking herself and her four walls in a loud keening voice: Why?

And then imagining, in the ironic voice with its Yiddish lilt that she had always playfully bestowed on God, a voice that answered by raising its shoulders and helplessly holding out its hands: Why not?

This is Miranda Weissmann, the answering machine said. This is your lawyer, the answering machine answered, and there is a lien on all your property until the lawsuit is settled, so couldn't you please call me back?

In real life, people don't call back, Miranda explained to the pillow. In real life, people have tantrums.

Annie and Betty both tried to visit her, but even they were left standing in the hallway banging on the door, Annie calling in, "Oh, don't be such an ass."

It wasn't until Annie left a message on the answering machine describing their mother's unhappy state in gruesome detail that Miranda felt she actually had to answer the phone.

"She's really suffering," Annie said when Miranda finally picked up. "She needs you."

Miranda showered and dressed and headed uptown. Though she was acknowledged even by herself to be extraordinarily self-absorbed, no one had ever accused Miranda Weissmann of being selfish.

The apartment was on the tenth floor, just high enough for a spacious view of the park, just low enough for a human one. Central Park was their front yard, Joseph liked to say. Their grounds. He and Betty had tried living in the suburbs when the children were little, in Westport, Connecticut. Dull and lonely there, they agreed, and after only one year, when so many other young couples were leaving the city, they found the big apartment on Central Park West and bought it for a song. That was the word Joseph had used, a "song," and Betty still recalled that day when they signed the papers and went to look at their new home. That sickly ambiance of someone else's old age had surrounded them-the filthy fingerprints around the light switches, the greasy Venetian blinds, the grime of the windows, and an amber spiral of ancient flypaper studded with ancient flies. But all Betty could think of was that they bought it for a song, and she had looked so happy and so beautiful in the weak silver city light that Joseph had not had the heart to explain the expression, to tell her they had paid the song, not received it.

Now they both stalked the premises like irritable old housecats, watching each other, waiting.

"You are leaving me," Betty said late one morning. "Hadn't you better leave, then?"

"Hadn't?"

"I think a certain formality of address is required under the circumstances, don't you? Unless you want to call the calling off off, of course."

There were times when Joe did want to call the calling off off. But that day was not one of them. Betty was being insufferable. She was vamping mercilessly, wearing her bathrobe, speaking in an arch yet melodramatic voice, and, perhaps most alarming of all, drinking shots of single malt in midmorning.

"That's a sipping whiskey. Not a gulping whiskey."

"I'm distraught."

"You're being ridiculous, Betty. You look like something out of The Lost Weekend. This is not healthy, moping around the apartment, drinking."

"My husband of fifty years is leaving me," she said.

Forty-eight, he thought.

As if she'd heard him, she said, "Bastard."

She threw her glass at him.

"All right, Elizabeth Taylor," he said, getting a towel from the bathroom.

"Wrong movie," she screamed.

"It's not a movie, Betty," Joseph said. "That's the point."

"Bastard," she said again. She sat down on the couch.