Supermarket Sweep

Super Market Sweep
Saturday was the day Julie came to the upstate house, which will be mine once I buy out her share, to verify that she did not leave anything of hers behind and that I was not engaged in any malfeisance (like hiding important belongings from her). Happily, the boys were there, as was one of her nicer friends, so it was difficult for this to spin out of control. Still, the general tone was less Hans Blix than Supermarket Sweep 60 seconds only to fill her shopping cart with all the goodies she can wheel out of the store (well, not actually take today, is it OK if I leave them here a while longer?). It’s very easy to say, “Oh, that’s mine, that’s mine, too, I wanna, I want that, I wanna” when you didn’t pay for it the first time and have no intention of paying for it now. But since Julie generally has such horrid taste, the few things she wanted, with one or two exceptions which I think best to just let go for the sake of my sanity, will not be missed. She obsessed particularly on a book on the history of the Hudson River, brought it up three times Saturday, and in a follow-up email cc’d to her attorney today; I looked on abe.com and a new copy can be had for $1.97. I’m sure cc’ing her lawyer will cost at least 10 and probably 100 times that amount. But it’s not as much fun buying an old book on abe as insinuating that your effing ex carefully buried her most prized possessions in the crawl space under the house.
Take a good look around, baby, if everything goes well, it’s the last time you’ll ever visit this house.

Plot twist

Following the death of her sister and keeper, an elderly recluse, frail from a years-long battle with cancer, lives alone in her ancestral townhouse in the Bronx, an almost shut-in existence. A scheming niece convinces her to take out a half-million dollar reverse mortgage on the townhouse, ostensibly to help cover medical and living expenses, and offers to harbor the money in her checking account to pay the bills, being careful to conceal the money from sisters who feel entitled to a share in the family’s real-estate legacy and other belongings, and, most of all, her estranged husband, lest he find out about it and make a claim on it while she is simultaneously busy trying to shake him down for even more money. The stuff of a cheap film-noir or bad dime-store detective novel? No, the stuff of real life, my life, take it please. The only plot twist missing: using some of the money to hire a hit-man to do away with the husband, whose bullying nastiness makes the thought seem almost justifiable. But no need, his health is not good, maybe the problem will be solved neatly for you.

Don’t get well soon
The turn in my condition from a benign brain tumor to a malignant brain cancer was the best piece of news I could deliver Julie and her attorney: in the one and only meeting where we sat down with our respective attornies, they could hardly refrain from high-fiving each other over this unanticipated gift, and quickly tried to turn it to their advantage. “Surely you’ll agree,” they said to me, “that it would be too much to ask Julie and the boys to move out of the apartment on top of your death, the trauma of both would be too much for them?” So ownership of the apartment, solved. “And how much is that life insurance policy again? Nah, that’s not really enough, didn’t you use to have more? Can’t get more now with a cancer spreading through your brain? Really, we find that hard to believe. So what more can you give up to make up for this?” And so on, and so on. Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery, or not, whichever comes first.

How embarrassing
I see that the only follower of this blog is one devoted to making good marriages, Marriage: the Easy Way. I imagine my angry rants here are the counter example, marriage the effed up way, what can happen when everything just goes wrong, especially between the wrong people. Next time I'll do better, I promise.

Emotional Autism

So now you tell me: Julie recently told me that her last boyfriend, presumably the one she dated before we got married, broke up with her because he said she “wasn’t there.” As if, he said, she were watching their relationship on television. This echoed what another friend of hers told me, “Oh yeah, Julie is emotionally autistic.” Indeed, she gives new meaning to the put-down “emotionally unavailable.” More like “emotionally unlisted.”
Most absent when present, as Deb Unferth writes in her extraordinary new novel, Vacation, a book worth reading both for its minimalist prose and for its portrait of two people who are married but find themselves living with strangers, uncomfortable roommates at best (and the stranger in their life dying of brain cancer, another eerie echo).
You get the point: just not there, particularly when needed most. Which is why the idea that some how I left her is completely ridiculous: You can’t leave something or someone who isn’t there. Julie left years ago, it just took me a long time to figure this out and understand why I could be so lonely in a house where another body seemed to be moving about, usually annoyed by my own movements. Felt like a presence, but was really an absence. You can’t absent an absence, I just turned off the lights on my way out when the darkness in the room became too oppressive. I wish she’d told me the old boyfriend anecdote 16 years ago and saved us both a lot of grief, time, and money.
If Julie had her emotional bags packed and sitting next to the door early on in our relationship—indeed, I try to remember when, or if, she really was there, really was present and engaged, but can’t summon such a time—then she checked out for real when I got sick in 2003. She told me of that period, “I really freaked out, I can only imagine how you must’ve felt.” Of course she can only imagine, she never asked. That line was down, had been cut, or was never open in the first place.

On the playground

The volume on the playground, where I’d come to pick up my youngest son on the final day of school, was amped, definitely turned up to 11, in eager anticipation of the summer ahead and, before that, the annual last-day water fight at a nearby park. A mother of one my son’s classmates came up to me. “Is it true,” she asked, “that Julie kicked you out of your own apartment because she didn’t want to live with somebody who has a brain tumor?” The directness of her question took me aback, I knew her only casually and not as a close friend, and her knowledge of my situation and boldness in asking about it surprised me, as somebody who was essentially a stranger with a familiar face.
“Well, um,” I started to say, and the answer “the real answer is quite a bit more complicated than that” took shape in my mind. But then the thought occurred to me, what if the same woman asked Julie, “Is it true that Kevin left you for another woman?” how would Julie, who prefers this 'I am the victim, and not to blame' shorthand version of our story reply? “Well, um, the real answer is, um, more…” But my hesitation and stammering had gone on for too long, and she interpreted this as a positive reply to her question. “That’s what I thought, and it’s not really a surprise. Everybody knows she’s a bitch.” That was a statement I couldn’t disagree with, so I bade her a good summer and let her go off with this juicy new bit of half-confirmed half-true gossip.