A Good Divorce Read Online Free PDF Page A

chairs against the door jamb. Maybe Jude was the one who needed the therapy, to rid herself of the notion that everyone who peed standing up was a Neanderthal. If she could only get a glimpse of this group, she’d grab onto me and never let go.
    It was tempting to blame my predicament on the Sunday night meetings at Lill’s when Jude came home supercharged with reformist ardor. Women had a way of reaching out and taking care of each other while men egged each other on, always trying to compete. Men would rather have a good job than a good friend. At first I’d thought I could get in on the new religion, but whenever I asked her how the meetings went, she just talked about the problems everyone was having with their husbands. What emerged was a picture of women continuing to live in the same house with husbands they’d given up on emotionally. They were living with men they refused to collaborate with. These weren’t guys who were sleeping around; they were just guys like me who didn’t get it. For a while I figured the women’s group was a salutary thing. The more shit that other husbands pulled, the better I looked, but that had turned out to be wishful thinking.
    On the way out of the therapy session, I ended up at the urinal next to the diddling Jesus. “This Jude must be some package,” he said. Close up I noticed that his face was pockmarked and he looked more like Judas Iscariot. He was doing it no hands with his pants belted. I always unzipped, loosened my belt, and took it over the top of my underpants. The public urinal was another test of manhood. When he peered over the divider, I let go, a rebel gesture to show Jude that she wasn’t the only one who could ride the roller coaster, scream on the steep drops, and go bug-eyed on the corners. Somehow I was going to get even with her and Gloria Steinem.
    The Alhambra was located near the Broadway District within a triangle formed by the kids’ schools and the house, as near the geographic center of Justine’s and Derek’s world as I could find. The Safeway, Deluxe Bar & Grill, and Harvard Exit Theater provided all of my basic needs. We’d shopped there as a family when Derek was young enough to ride in the shopping cart with his bare legs hanging out of the legholes. The Broadway District was a village where the checkout clerks still chatted with the kids while they punched prices into the cash register and emptied the buggy onto the counter.
    I hated to be the one who had to move out. I loved the old place, which was an oversized two-story house with an attic, a partially-finished basement, and a long flight of painted red cement steps from the street to the porch. The front lawn was so steep that I had to wear my high school track shoes to push the mower back and forth. We’d made the fourth bedroom upstairs into a family room and taped blown-up photos of the kids and their finger paintings, and recycled John Travolta and Shaun Cassidy posters to the veneer oak walls. Jude had said if she moved out, she wanted something in Madison Park, maybe the Edgewater. That would have meant more than twice the rent of the Alhambra. Since I paid the rent no matter who moved, I traded elegance for price, hoping it was only temporary. The Alhambra was also an opportunity to show Jude and the kids that our standard of living was going to take a nosedive with a divorce. No more Gloria Vanderbilt jeans for Justine.
    I looked forward to the kids’ first weekend with me since the separation and wanted the new apartment to feel like a home. We still hadn’t settled temporary custody for the kids. Jude, or maybe it was her attorney, was dragging her feet. I figured I had no chance if it was left up to Jude and her attorney, so I was still lobbying for letting the kids decide. At neighborhood garage sales, I’d found a five-drawer unfinished dresser, a striped couch with a small tear across the back, and a barely dented