Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(26)
We had finalized our divorce after a short court appearance at City Hall. Delmonico’s was nearby and seemed a fair setting for discussing final details—mostly having to do with our son, Johnny, then thirteen—and for saying good-bye.
I was conscious of making this decision—to go to the restaurant—but then somehow shocked to actually find myself there, amid the soft bustle of the noonday crowd. It was as if the span between the notion and the action had simply vanished, like events follow each other in dreams—an experience that I had often in those days, I’m afraid.
Walking into Delmonico’s on Max’s arm felt like a ride in an ambulance, or the moments just after a car crash: an overwhelming rush of detail diamond-etched itself into my brain, as if I’d remember the scene forever, though of course I forgot almost everything right away.
“Those columns at the entrance,” I said as the ma?tre d’h?tel seated us, just for the sake of saying something. “They look freshly dropped off by Caesar Augustus himself.”
“Indeed, madam,” he said. “The lady has a discerning eye. They were imported in the 1830s, from the ruins of Pompeii.”
At the mention of Pompeii, my scant appetite shaded quickly toward nausea. “Oh my,” I said. “How unusual.”
“We’ve been to Pompeii,” said Max. “We saw columns just like those, all covered in ash.”
Max was referring to our honeymoon trip to Italy in 1935: our purest moment of wedded bliss, now disfigured by our unhappy end. If he detected any irony in the advent of this reminder, today of all days, then he didn’t show it. I suspect it never occurred to him. Max had no sense of irony. Most hypocrites haven’t.
The ma?tre d’ evinced the appropriate degree of regard for our worldliness. He and Max—who was always brutally casual, without even realizing the brutality part—chatted in affable generality on the subject of Italy, Max’s parents’ homeland, the place where Max had been stationed during the war. Watching him speak with this stranger made me think of my own first impressions of him—before I’d learned what did and didn’t lie behind his brassy vitality—and envy how little he’d changed: hardly thicker at the middle, wavy hair still black.
As for me, I felt like a ruin. Still extant but not intact. A plaster effigy cast in the shape of my old incinerated self. A wreck one could contemplate as an object lesson in one’s own potential to become a ruin one day. It could happen to anyone. It could happen when one expected it, or when one did not.
I placed my napkin in my lap and accepted the menu from the hands of the ma?tre d’. His were steady, mine shaking, I hoped not perceptibly.
Back then, in the divorce’s immediate aftermath, my mind briefly became even more bent and misshapen than it already had been, circling around revenge, wearing a track in the carpet to the alla breve march-beat of “retaliate, retaliate.” But I didn’t really want to. I was more hurt. More sad. I still loved Max, though he had proven himself by that point to be quite an ass, and callous.
His birthday—the last one he’d have while we were still married—had passed while I was in the hospital. We likely would not have celebrated anyway, but I’d made him a card, original, hand-crafted, and self-composed, with what I hoped was recognizable—no Helen McGoldrick, I—as a pink tropical bird on the front. I handed it to him.
“Lillian,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.” He sounded sincere, like I really shouldn’t.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Read it out loud. It’s the first new poem I’ve shown anyone in a while.”
“All right,” he said. “Here she goes: ‘By jingo The flamingo Joins our fandango / For your birthday slambango.’”
Our waiter arrived to take our drink order, saving Max from having to comment further. I asked for a glass of Amarone. Max did the same, then said to me:
“Vino, eh? You sure Dr. R would think that’s a wise idea?”
“I can’t very well toast to your birthday with water, now can I?” I said. “That would be unlucky, and I think we’ve already enjoyed enough bad luck.”
“Fair enough,” he said, setting the card aside and opening the menu.
The slight lowering of his head as he perused his choices afforded me the opportunity to see again what I already knew: His thick black hair was still truly black, almost no gray. I wanted to reach across and run my fingers through it one more time.
What else can be said about Max? I loved him so much, even though doing so had become stupid and pointless.
He had a hoarse laugh, but not a horse laugh. Had sex appeal. Most men I’d met would clearly have starved me emotionally, but Max was a feast. Max was too much. After I met him, all other men came to seem plug-ugly. He was dominant, but never a bully. A courtly salesman. How did that happen to attract me? When we met, way back in 1934, I was tall and graceful, but I willingly became his Little Woman. Proverbially: We were the same height, he said—and I let him—but in fact he was at least a full inch shorter than I. But he was as dashing in his daytime suit of blue serge as in his broadcloth evening clothes, when we still went out evenings.
He rarely played in a minor key—not until these past few years. Back when we lived in the now-foreign land of our happiness, he would give the bottle to the baby and wash dishes with agility, if only occasionally. Change some diapers. Spend some evenings at the club and some Saturday afternoons in golf foursomes. No college reunions because he went to college in Switzerland. Rarely in his cups. Unlike—I know he would say, and justly so—me.