Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel Read Free

dispel the darkness with a puff of air. The old folks must have scurried inside when it started to drizzle, and the cool was keeping them hidden away in their rooms.
    The night was a blue clear enough that I could see the tree branches as they clapped together. The gin burned the walls of my throat but slid through my veins with benign warmth, softening the contours of the absurd scene I’d found myself in. I felt the tingling of a gentle impatience begin to move over my back and hands; really, it wasn’t half bad.
    “There. I left him with his grandparents. Happy?”
    When I saw the way her wet hair was regaining its golden hue almost strand by strand, when I watched as she turned and dripped (more) water on the floor, wearing those sweat pants and a dizzyingly vulgar top she’d thrown on, the folds of my heart, shriveled and blackened during that damned car ride, flooded with a warmth somehow tied to being married and living together. I was drenched in an excellent mood. I wanted to take her into my arms, taste her right there from her forehead to the pulp of her buttocks, pull her hair and tickle her, all more or less at the same time.

    Helen stayed in profile. She was still chewing the remnants of her rage, but finally she choked them down.
    “Sometimes I don’t know what to do with Jackson either. Everything will be different once the three of us are living together.”
    “That’s if we can fix our relationship first.”
    I tried to reel the words back in. It’s a shame that sound waves don’t have a tail I could have grabbed hold of before they crossed the space between us and rearranged themselves into linguistic information inside the prodigious maze of Helen’s inner ear.
    The months we’d spent apart had been long. We certainly weren’t starting from scratch, but plenty of our knee-jerk responses had grown stiff from underuse. I know there are people whose moods can change if you just know the right words to use on them. Helen wasn’t like that, though—she was dragged along by her emotions. So I was left openmouthed at her submissive reply, the step she took to get past her grievance.
    “Of course, we have to fix things between us first. Sorry, that’s what we’re here for.”
    The bathroom mirror answered our silence with a fluorescent shine; it was like a round of applause. She smiled at me before pulling her hair back into a ponytail and wringing it out, drops of water falling to the floor. There’s something funny about sparring against the same lips, jaw, arms, and hips that you’ve caressed as they rocked above you in different beds. Having that body right there when you finally break through the cloud of an argument is one of the true comforts of marriage. I took her by the shoulders, but she pretended a pair of stockings was falling and ducked away. When she stood up she smiled at me again, but it wasn’t a clean smile. I felt privileged to be the only living mammal able to precisely interpret that cooling of her gaze. Her spirit wasn’t calm, the dregs of her anger were still sloshing around inside her. She took a step backward to inspect me.
    “You eat too much, John. You’re heavy.”
    Helen sank onto the mattress, changing position deftly in mid-air to end up with one leg crossed under her other thigh. I think it speaks well of me that I never confused Helen with a kitten, with some creature bred for confinement. We were in the early stages of something, and it didn’t bode well that neither one of us had any idea how it would end.

    “Come again?”
    “You’re getting fat. You have to take care of yourself. Tall people don’t wear extra pounds well. Plus, you don’t have the kind of face for a bag of skin at your neck.”
    “It’s called a double chin. And why don’t I have the face for a double chin?”
    “Because of your eyes, you don’t have clever eyes. Without a well-defined profile your face would look like a balloon, something swollen, an old