Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

Some future that boy had waiting for him, with a mother addicted to playing mankind’s defenseless victim. Whatever his mother might say, people never change, for all the promises they make us. I knew that I was going to be the one making Jackson breakfast while she fought off her hangover with a large black coffee. The paperwork for enrolling him at school would fall to me, the figure with nervous eyes waiting for him after practice (did you doubt I would sign him up for basketball?) would be mine. And if Jackson didn’t feel comfortable with me, if he defied me? Children should really evaporate when divorce papers are signed. I’m not saying they should die, just that they should end up in the same limbo as all the other complicated affairs that build up when a couple separates.

“I don’t know if you’re thinking about this the right way, Freckles. You want to stick him with us in a seventy-square-meter apartment?”

“We’ll look for another, a bigger one. I’ll get a job, things will work again. It has to work again.”

And anyone would have believed her, if only we hadn’t been going at each other since the moment we’d been left alone. Jackson wasn’t going to stop us — it was our way of being together.

“What are you thinking about, John? Don’t look at me like that, if you look at me like that I don’t know what you’re thinking! This is about understanding each other!”

“I’m thinking about problems. One after another, in formation. The kind of army that for you and for me is invincible, one that’s going to split our heads right open.”

“Speak clearly. Can you speak clearly? This is an important conversation, the most important one of my life. I have to understand it!”

“I don’t see it clearly, Helen.”

“See what?”

“It’s a crazy idea. Come home, let’s see how it goes, then we can bring the boy.”

“You’d do it if it were your son, he’d be your family then. But he’ll never be your son.”

I understood the thought disguised under her crazy talk. It was a difficult argument to refute (and it worked in my favor), but the truth is that I had started to feel something like complicity with young Jackson, who, six or seven years earlier, wrapped in a clear, damp chrysalis, had come out through the same opening I’d dedicated myself to working so mightily during my marriage, one I’d kissed out of love every day. We shared an inverse experience of the same ruby red that opened between delicate folds under the silky hair (or do they always shave women in labor?). His tiny little nostrils had enjoyed the same aroma. I was moved at the thought of being part of that family circle of intimacy, but I wasn’t sure how to explain it to Helen. I saw her tongue moistening a new dart, and I knew she would have taken even the most innocent carnal reference as an unpardonable obscenity — some people just don’t know how to avoid taking things personally. But I give you my word that I was reaching the most tender heart of what we had gone there to revive. I would give Jackson good advice, he could have me as a role model.

“You’ve convinced me, let’s try.”

“What?”

“Come on, Freckles. Let’s get in bed, let’s fix this, and in a few days you’ll come back to Barcelona with the boy, with Jackson. With our son.”

“He’s not your son. It’ll be a hassle for me, too, you know, to bring him.”

I’m not saying Helen didn’t love her son. I’m just saying it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea if, when they’d checked her into the hospital, they’d taken the opportunity to fit a heart into her chest. I had the impression she was putting out her cigarette on her thigh, but she must have had an ashtray or something.

“I have to get him away from his father. You don’t know what that man is capable of. He can’t get over me. He’s a jealous animal. He wants to use Jackson to hurt me.”

I think Helen did have the makings of a mother. I confirm it every time I see a forty-year-old woman pushing a stroller with a baby inside. They don’t hide their femininity and they get their share of looks, but those looks just slide gently off, deflected by the bond between woman and child. In Helen’s case, though, the child had arrived too early, when she was a young animal with a character that would flatten you like a wave crashing over your life. Jackson was an annoying obstacle, too soft to contain the fire — and the greed and the natural curiosity — of a twenty-year-old woman. Opportunity, timing, occasion: the same mess as always.

“He’s coming with us, that’s that. I’ll protect him.”

And OK, I don’t think it was too much to ask that she get up and thank me with a big kiss. But I really didn’t expect her to just stay sitting there, her furious expression unchanged, with the same goal: shake off male domination. Only the enemy had changed: the presumptuous macho she had to put in his place was me.

“There’s something else.”

“Go for it, Freckles. I’ve still got a little skin left on my heart.”

“I’m sick of the way you talk to me. You act like I’m nothing but a body, you tell me that with my personality I’ll be selling handkerchiefs in the street once my tits are sagging. It’s emotional blackmail. I still have a long time before that happens. Plus, science can stop it.”

“Don’t you believe that. You Teutonic models wear out faster. Ten years and your lovers will be confronted with stretch-marked rashers of skin…I’m just telling you the facts, you can choose whether to listen or not.”

“I’m not Teutonic, I’m an American citizen.”

“Can you tell me what continent Teutonia is on?”

“You’re not going to provoke me. Spanish men are weak and backward. In case you forgot, I certainly didn’t have to make any effort to seduce you. Things are different in America, especially the women.”

“In New York, Freckles, they would take you for a loud-mouthed doorwoman. Here, at least you’re blonde, and once your tits are saggy you can head to Istanbul — the Turks are innocent and impressionable. Too bad you’re not very tall.”

“They’re a bunch of conceited assholes in New York — anemic vegetarians, they all have low-quality semen and dried-up ovaries. Most of them are homos, that’s why they have to import Chinese and blacks.”

“Come on, they shut the door in your face there, too. You’re a product of Montana, and if I get tired of you you’ll go straight back there. How long did you live in New York?”

“Six months. Long enough. I was in training the whole time. You wouldn’t understand because you’ve never done anything that requires discipline, that’s why you’ve lost all your father’s money, that’s why if you can’t feed off my energy you’ll just stay stuck in place.”

“Go back to Montana, Freckles, it’s your natural habitat. The only place in the world you won’t be out of place.”

“We’re talking, now we’re talking, right?”

“Yes, it would seem so.”

“You know why I came to Barcelona? Why I attached myself to you?”

I didn’t bother to reply.

“In Montana there were a lot of high-quality men, but all the women were so sophisticated and beautiful that you had to fight tooth and nail.”

“Right, that’s why you were a virgin when you got to Madrid, a victim of the Darwinian struggle.”

“Next to the big-assed Spanish and the anorexic Catalans, it was easy to seduce you, but in Fuokville it wasn’t enough to have a good body. I had to use my intelligence, I had to use words.”

“You don’t say. Wait, I’ve got to hear this standing up. Just what is the verbal bait one uses to hunt males in Montana?”

“I used to tell them I had a small vagina. Don’t laugh. I don’t know what feeling a tight vagina gives you, and it kills me that I’ll die without knowing, but it was infallible, they melted, they knelt at my feet.”