I HAD NO INKLING, WHEN MY ex-husband invited me to tea at a neighborhood cafe, that anything other than the merest of pleasantries would be exchanged. We had known each other all our adult lives and maintained a friendship that was, if not constantly vibrant, at least episodically so. Though our marriage had ended 21 years ago, we had each stayed single, he by intention, I by happenstance.
After we had picked a table and ordered our lunch, he said in his quietly urgent manner, “I have something important to tell you, but I don’t want to talk about it.”
Last month, he said, he and his longtime girlfriend, Lisa, were married in a small semi-secret ceremony attended only by their parents.
“My life is completely changed,” he went on obliquely, meaning, I guess, that his dashing bachelor-in-demand lady-killing days were now officially over, presumably forever. This was, I should tell you, a man who looked and acted in his prime like Joe Namath, so vows of monotony, er, monogamy were no small sacrifice. But what was truly amazing to me was not that he finally took the plunge again but that he had waited this long to do so.
How remarkable that, despite statistics to the contrary, neither of us had remarried in all that time. We lived in the same city. Our circles overlapped. Occasionally, he would invite me over for dinner. I attended many of his concerts. He ignored most of my poetry readings. Twice he helped me move to different apartments. He gave me the dog when we broke up and gave me a stereo for my new life. Even when he didn’t care, he cared.
Now, oddly enough, though we hadn’t been a couple for four times longer than we had been one, he still seemed concerned about my feelings.
We would always be each other’s museums, repositories of personal stories and histories, storehouses of our shared youth. Really we were just kids when we met in a park, and we were still kids when we split up in the sexually explicit ’70s.
He had fallen for a flamboyantly kittenish coloratura who I imagined had to be his soulmate, since obviously I was not. Fifteen years later, she gave him the gate in Paris, calling me as soon as she hit the States.
“You can have him back,” Sibby said more out of grandiosity than gererosity, as if he were a luscious leftover, a partially uneaten slice of banana-cream pie on her plate that I had been eyeing through an entire meal. Wrong.
He insisted I had never hooked up permanently with anyone deliberately, to make him feel mega-guilty for his not-so-original sin of falling for someone else in an era when, if you had an itch, you scratched it.
To me, this blame-shame game was perverse pretzel logic. Not that I still carried a torch for him. Far from it. I had my share of selective, temporary Mr. Right-Nows, but I had never quite, as a fortuneteller once charmingly put it, “stopped jumping from man to man like a grasshopper.”
And I always wondered if he had stayed single so long because he was a hip bohemian dude truly suspicious of “that little piece of paper.” Or was he a stud afraid of making a commitment? Or a belatedly sweet, nice guy worried he would hurt me? Whatever. We both, I suspect, had trouble letting go.
Anyway, I sincerely congratulated him, then warmly wished them well, then affirmed they were a terrific twosome, and I was blessed to count them as friends. I babbled. I burbled. He glared, embarrassed, not quite sure I wouldn’t punctuate my precious peroration by smashing my teacup against the wall to punish him for having a life momentarily more interesting than mine.
Looking across the table at him, I felt a serrated pang. He was so bright, so handsome, so intense. So what! My heart lurched at the realization I no longer had the slightest shred of an excuse to refer to him as “my husband.” No more could I brazenly invoke the ex-hub to prospective suitors as a badge of my semi-desirability — of validation for not quite going the distance but at least being in the race. Suddenly, irrevocably, I realized I had lost that cherished credential of conventional middle-class respectability I was so desperately clinging to all through adulthood.
And wasn’t he always more evolved and advanced in building separate lives, admonishing me to refrain from mentioning the precise nature of our earlier connection? “Emmy and I, we go way back,” was how he urbanely, maddeningly told a mutual acquaintance.
Forced at last to draw on my own emotional resources, I’ve started thinking of myself as a Wife-Emeritus, worthy of a place of honor at any table. There are benefits, I guess, to such archaic nomenclature. For one, I don’t feel I have to rush competitively into remarriage just for the sake of a snazzy title.
As for my ex, having told me he had committed matrimony, he concluded our chat with one of his standard conversational flourishes.
“But there is something. I need you to do me a big facor,” he says, gripping the edge of the table.
“What?” I reply noncommittally.
“I want you,” he says, leaning forward ever so slightly, “to edit my memoirs.”
Maralyn Lois Polak is a free-lance writer.
