Collage by Denise Emanuel Clemen

Geography of a Divorce

by Denise Emanuel Clemen

 

2008
        It’s fire season in southern California. The hillsides of Los Angeles are tinder, and my marriage is a pile of ashes. I’m a month shy of 56, and regret is a fist in my gut. The imbalance of power between my husband and me is a sick thrill ride, and I don’t know how to get off. Maybe if I vomit someone will pull the lever.
        This morning my husband and I are in court. He is a name partner in a mega law firm with offices all over the world. Fifteen months ago he told me he was in love with someone else. Three weeks ago he wrapped his head in a white turban, mounted a horse (a stand-in for the traditional elephant,) and married his new love in an elaborate Indian ceremony. The purpose of this court appearance is to determine the amount of my alimony, which I have been without for fifteen months.
        We sit in a conference room with our attorneys and a commissioner of the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles. The dark wooden table is too big for the room, and the desk in the corner makes one side of the table inaccessible. The desk chair is as tall as a throne, and the commissioner swivels around to admonish us. We need to resolve this case, he says, or our attorneys will end up with all our money. This is simple, he says, because after 30 years of marriage, I should have confidence my husband will do the right thing and honor his obligation to me. “That’s not my husband,” I say, tilting my head toward the man two feet away from me, a single empty chair a buffer zone between us. I can smell his familiar shampoo and the wool of his suit. “That’s not the man I married,” I say. The commissioner freezes, and my husband stops fidgeting. There are two men in this room barely breathing while I am breathing enough for everyone. In another second I will inflate like a balloon, floating upwards for a buzzard’s eye view of the carnage. I want to point to my husband and say that I’ve never seen this man in my life. But I bolt. My attorney opens the door.
                                                                ***
        I am an awkward person. I blame my lack of physical grace on my crooked and twisted spine. Scoliosis. I’ve had two surgeries—a spinal fusion and a repair of the spinal fusion because of a clumsy accident too embarrassing to describe.
        I don’t know whom or what to blame for my social awkwardness. All I know is that I say things I wish I could un-say. My father was gregarious—a dapper dresser, always with a joke and a story. My mother is a beauty, a lipsticked cocktail drinker everyone wants to dance with. At parties I am the worst dancer in the room, and at the dinner table, I can’t remember anyone’s name. For two decades my husband kept the law firm directory in his glove compartment so I could review the names of his partners and their spouses before every gathering. Knowing the name of the person you are trying to converse with is helpful, but it’s a mere syllable or two out of a conversation.
        I am, or used to be, quite good at conversing with lines someone else has written. Before our daughters were born I was an actress. Small theaters in LA, a couple of tours, minor TV roles, or extra work on films. People who write dialogue are magicians. I might have possessed some of my own magic in those days, but it’s been gone a long while, and I don’t know how to get it back. Once, at a law firm party, a magician was hired to entertain us during the cocktail hour. He removed my husband’s watch from his wrist and presented it to him as a gift before he knew it was missing. Like how my husband’s wedding was planned before I knew our marriage was over.
        I’m awkward at gift giving. I don’t understand why people buy each other gifts when they have everything they need. Gifts made sense when I was a child, and the family budget barely managed school shoes and underwear. Gifts made sense in the early years of marriage when dinner’s main ingredient was Bisquick. A few million dollars later, gifts were superfluous. If I’d followed the magician’s example, I might have wrapped up my husband’s Leica or his Mont Blanc pen, but instead for our 29th anniversary, I bought my husband a plastic travel mug with a Parisian street scene, inscribed with the famous quote from Casablanca, “We’ll always have Paris.”
        We’d reformed our habit of expensive gift giving by then. Small, thoughtful things were our new style. As 20-year-olds we’d been to Paris in blue jeans and backpacks and returned more than once. Our first child was conceived there. I hadn’t thought of the quote as the greatest break-up line of classic filmdom. And the song on the Amy Rigby CD I gave him a couple months later for Valentine’s Day titled “Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again?” was supposed to be funny.
                                                                ***
        Back in the conference room, the commissioner whirls toward us and explains that a software program called DissoMaster will determine the amount of my temporary alimony. “Numbers in, numbers out,” he says. “And remember the only people benefitting from today’s get-together are these folks right here.” He sweeps a hand toward our attorneys. Where should I place my trust, I want to ask, but I can’t get the words out. Certainly not my husband—who is, since our final decree of divorce was issued two months ago—actually my ex-husband. Confidence in my attorney has steadily waned during this year of little progress. Every month I must replenish her retainer without an income I can call my own. The joint checking account is under a financial restraining order, but would you trust a shared bank account with a cheater who’s now married to a woman with a closet full of 800-dollar shoes?
        “Sign here,” the commissioner says. At the door, I swim to the surface and say good-bye to my attorney. The hallway is unfamiliar. I don’t know which way to turn to find the elevator. Out on the street the entrance to the subway does not seem to be where I left it. When you are this lost you must keep moving to figure out where you are. You must orient yourself from some place new because in the old place you are turning in circles. I walk in a straight line until I find a Red Line Metro station. It’s not where I got off but it gets me to Union Station. Getting out of the Gold Line train in my neighborhood, I know exactly where I am. I also know my alimony will be enormous. But I’ve been living on joint credit cards for months, and I don’t need a crystal ball to see that my husband will eventually use this against me.
        I’m in Virginia a few days later when Southern California bursts into flame. In the breakfast room of the place where I’m staying, someone asks me if my home is near the fires. “The fires are usually in the West Valley,” I say.
        “Is that what they call the San Gabriel Valley?” he asks. I explain that no, the West Valley means the area around the San Fernando Valley, and I’m from the San Gabriel Valley to the east.
        “The fires are in the San Gabriel Valley,” he says.
        When I check the news on my laptop, I see the fire is being referred to by the name of the suburb where my ex-husband still lives—in our house, where we raised our daughters—with his new wife. The flames are just four or five miles away.
        My younger daughter is at college in Minnesota. “The fire’s not far from 270, I tell her when she answers the phone. This is how we refer to the house where her bedroom sits like a shrine, untouched since she left a year ago. It’s not “our old house,” or “Dad’s house.” It’s just its house number.
        “It would be poetic for it to burn,” she says. “I’m rooting for a freak ember—reduce it to a fucking heap of rubble.”
        But then we remember her sister’s journals are there. An entire shelf with her almost daily writings going back to when she was eleven or twelve years old. My younger daughter has her own keepsakes there—soccer jerseys, stuffed animals, the box under her bed with school yearbooks.
        And then we think of the dogs. The two 50-pound Collie-Shepherd mixes are mine now, but we’ve agreed that when I travel, my ex-husband will care for them. If the fire is only a few miles away, did he take them somewhere before he went to his office downtown? Or is he working from home? “I’ll handle it,” my daughter says.
        Nothing is ever safe from fire in Southern California. The condo I bought 10 miles from 270 seems far from the action now, but winds shift and sparks take flight. Climate and geography conspire yearly to render one neighborhood after another a landscape of chimneys standing sentry over nothing. Every fall the moist Pacific air will be obliterated time and again by a wind that has its origins in the Great Basin, the largest and most desolate desert in America. From this void, the heart of it largely in Nevada, dusty dry winds with gusts as high as 100 miles an hour sweep between the two mountain ranges where Los Angeles resides on a coastal plain, the hundreds of hills and canyons resounding with a wind so dry and powerful that it can extract even drier air from the stratosphere. One minute your neighborhood is paradise, and the next the hillside behind your house is aflame.
                                                                ***
        My husband and I set out for California together. We met our freshman year of college in Minnesota, and five years later, after I’d earned my degree and enough money at my waitress job to give an acting career in Los Angeles a try, we made the trip in a 1966 Dodge Coronet with over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer. Motels were not in the budget, so we camped. The very first night our tent and everything in it nearly floated away before we made it to the car. The thunderstorm had already soaked us to the skin as we stood between lighting bolts trying to pry open the Coronet’s jammed trunk. Every night thereafter, state after state, the free places we found to pitch our tent were marked by signs that read, Danger! Flash flood zone! “We’re getting up and leaving at the first sign of rain,” I said each night. Each night raindrops fell. We argued, but never left.
        During the day, my bladder resided in its own flood zone. “You just went,” was the admonishment I heard whenever I said I needed another rest stop. Eight days later when we pulled into San Diego where I’d landed a place in a summer theater troupe, my body was on fire. The urinary tract infection took until fall to resolve. By then we’d driven north to Los Angeles and settled in a crumbling duplex in Culver City. The hills surrounding us were the tawny brown of a mountain lion—when they weren’t obscured by smog. It rained only seven inches during the winter of 1975-76, and only 12 inches the year after that. Somehow, despite our rough start, it felt like love was blossoming.
                                                                ***
        In November of 2008, a month after the court appearance that granted my temporary alimony, I return from Virginia. As the plane’s wheels touch the tarmac, panic rolls over me. My brain, on antidepressants or off, no longer functions in Los Angeles. There is too much history, too many years of being a wife. There’s too much geography that maps out the three decades of my marriage. I take a particular freeway exit and remember it’s the way to this or that partner’s house, or here’s where we went to a big party, or concert, or play. The map of Southern California has my ex-husband’s fingerprints all over it, and the scent of jasmine or rosemary smells like every bedroom we’ve ever slept in.
        It is geographic change that will cure me. I’m sure of it. Places that smell like frost. Or horses. Or the sea. My first trip, a move out of our upstairs bedroom into the guest bedroom downstairs where I had a lock installed on the door, fulfilled none of those aspirations. But it was the best I could manage after the unexpected Sunday evening conversation at the end of July in 2007 when my husband revealed our marriage was over because he was in love with someone else, and they were getting married in the fall, and they wanted to raise their new family in our house.
                                                                ***
        My subsequent travels were more ambitious: Nova Scotia where I went to meet my older daughter after she got off a historic tall ship after furthering her sail training; our road trip back to California; Maryland to tell my mother in person that my husband was leaving me; family in Iowa; friends in Portland and Virginia; and a hiking trip to Greece where I lost track of the time just as I’d hoped. One evening on a patio bordered by bougainvillea with a platter of baklava in front of me, I can’t figure out if my husband’s wedding is happening right then or if it will happen tomorrow.
        But even away from Los Angeles I can lose whatever foothold I’ve found. When the hiking group disbands I spend a long weekend on the island of Santorini—in a beach town called Kamari. Kamari is a place no one visits alone. Mixed grill for two. Fish plate for two. Greek salad for two. Every chalkboard at every restaurant is geared up for romance. No one walks, swims, or lies on the beach alone.
        My first night I turn my chair at the boardwalk restaurant so I can watch the moon rising over the Aegean. Barely halfway into my stuffed tomato there’s a street performer at the next taverna. She has on white face like a clown and a flowing ankle-length white dress. She’s dancing with something in her arms—a beribboned bouquet, perhaps, or a puppet that’s a miniature version of herself. She twirls in the moonlight, her dancing fevered and anxious, until the headwaiter shoos her away. She ambles into the darkness like a rebuffed bride, her ribbons dragging.
        My last morning I visit the ancient mountaintop city of Thira, and finally I see someone who is alone. Half-way down the rocky slope there’s a white-haired man with a rickety wheelbarrow picking up stones and jouncing them to the remnants of one of the ancient city’s walls. He’s rebuilding it all by himself.
        That afternoon I buy a bikini. It’s difficult to make peace with the geography of my body, but I am rebuilding my image of it. The mountainous hump of my right shoulder blade, the twisted bulge of my ribcage beneath my left breast, the scars the surgeries left, the stretch marks from my pregnancies are my ruins. This is the rubble upon which I must construct my future. I know this. It’s the ongoing battle of the divorce that tears me down and drops me back in the disaster zone again and again.
                                                                ***
        Ten days after my return from Virginia, the Los Angeles area holds a drill for “the Big One,”—the quake we all know is coming though we have no idea when. The center of the Los Angeles basin is the meeting place of the Los Angeles and Rio Hondo rivers. The sand, silt, and clay are deepest here—nearly 30,000 feet down before hitting bedrock. Fifteen million years ago all this was underwater. Ten million years after that when the mountain ranges were finished spiraling and the earth’s crust had stretched to its breaking point and collapsed, the bowl filled in. As Los Angeles rose from its ancient ocean, seismic activity began shoving the contents of the basin upwards and has never stopped. California’s two tectonic plates move horizontally, slipping and striking, shaking the soft body of the basin like a bowl of Jello. TV news plays footage of the earthquake drill. “Victims,” lie on the ground battered and bandaged, covered in stage blood. A few hours later the hillsides are in flames. It looks like twilight at 3:00 p.m., and when the full moon rises over the building next door, it’s as brown as a vanilla wafer. Here is my emergency plan: Try not to die. Or try to die. It depends how I’m feeling at any given moment.
        My divorce is in two pieces like the tectonic plates beneath California. One piece is the dissolution of the marriage, which has been accomplished. The other piece is the settlement of our finances and division of joint assets. The divorce proceedings were bifurcated so my husband would not have to delay his wedding. “What’s my husband’s incentive for dividing our assets if he can get married without doing that?” I asked my attorney.
        “It’s the cordial thing to do,” she said.
        Here is what is not cordial: unequivocally announcing the end of your marriage as if you are only married to yourself. Booting your family out of their house. Letting your wife base her choice of a grad-school program on the assumption that her life is not going to be upended. Ditto your daughter’s choice of college. It’s not cordial to lie to your mother and tell her the spilt was mutual and we both have someone else. It’s not cordial to ignore every communication from your wife’s attorney so the attorney has to keep trying, thereby rocketing her bills to the moon. It’s not cordial to forget your wife worked two jobs to put you through law school. It’s not cordial to start a new family when your daughters are grieving the loss of their family. It’s not cordial to say and do what you want—like adding a second child to your new family after placing a restraining order on your ex-wife, forbidding her to mention you, your wife, or your new children. And later on it won’t be cordial to reduce your ex-wife’s alimony by twenty percent without a court order just after she buys a house and moves her mother in with her. It won’t be cordial to withhold her portion of your bonuses and try to hide it by refusing to comply with the divorce agreement and provide your tax returns. There is nothing—and never will be anything—cordial as this divorce swings its wrecking ball into my life.
        Through all of this, I’m as bifurcated as the proceedings. I’m suicidal. I’m homicidal. I’m my usual awkward self, but my conversational mental block is blown to bits, leaving a wilderness inside my head. I say inappropriate things to everyone. “My husband left me,” I tell the TSA agent examining the contents of my suitcase. “My daughters and I are going to my son’s house for Thanksgiving. We’re trying to make a new family tradition.”
        “Are you Indian?” I ask the turbaned taxi driver who has picked me up at the train station in Washington D.C. on the way to my mother’s house. “My husband ran off with an Indian woman young enough to be his daughter. I want to know how Fate works. I want to know how to change my karma.”
        I blubber to the woman sitting next to me on the plane about how my mother wailed and stamped her feet when I told her my husband was leaving me. Talking to people I don’t know, even across a language barrier, is my new super power. It’s as if I have one of those fiery Holy Spirit tongues from my Catholic grade school catechism book hovering over my head. Words flame out of me.
                                                                ***
        I thought my husband was joking when he told me one evening after our girls had gone to bed that he was unhappy with the way I was raising them. “Things had better shape up around here,” he said, jabbing his finger at me. I realized he was serious when he asked me what the hell I thought I was doing and how I planned to change things. Something had set him off, but it seemed to me that when you live in a house with three females—one going through menopause, one just settling into her periods, and one getting her driver’s license—life is going to be nuts. I wish I had said that, but I said nothing and burst into tears. We avoided each other for days, but we never talked things out. The old me viewed talking things out as an un-learnable skill.
        I was a ninja at secret-keeping then. You could spend all day, day after day, with me, not know that anything was wrong, not know that this moment is a lie because there is something huge I’m not telling you. I could look straight into your eyes, jujitsu-ing around what I don’t want you to know. I got pregnant the first time I had sex when I was 16 and kept it a secret from everyone including my boyfriend. If my mother hadn’t asked me if I was pregnant three weeks before the baby was born, nobody would have ever known.

 

2011
        I arrive at the mediator’s office first. It’s early on a Saturday morning. I’m not nervous. Not angry. Not sad. “I’m hopeful,” I tell her. While continuing to retain my attorney, I’ve hired a divorce mediator, hoping that her three-session package will resolve the division of joint assets. My ex-husband is only slightly late, and we proceed with only a smidgen of drama. Progress is made. We agree to meet again.
        But just like exiting the courthouse conference room three years earlier, I get lost when I leave the mediator’s office. My car is parked on the street somewhere, but I have no idea where. At a Starbucks I take forever deciding that I want a dulce cinnamon latté, distractedly staring out the window, piecing this fractured geography together. I drove down Lake. I turned on Green. Green is a one-way street. From Green I turned right. Then I drove a block or two. My car is off of Green on a side street.
        Back at home I talk to a friend on the phone about books, cakes, stress, and yoga. We decide I should have a party to celebrate the progress with the divorce. But a minute after I hang up I’m cold and shaking. Hours later after I wake from a nap, the man I’ve been dating for the past year calls and says we should go to a movie—that Woody Allen Paris movie. “I don’t know,” I say, “is it a romance?” He laughs.
        “It’s okay. I get it,” he says, “you don’t know what to do with emotional involvement right now.”
        “I don’t know what to do with Paris,” I say. A wail blasts out of me and I can’t stop.
        Hours later I wake up on my couch under two blankets. This man who loves me is there, watching over me.
        I need watching over. I’ve recently discovered that my credit score has stepped into an abyss. In the first year of the divorce, accounts from my ex-husband’s house were still in my name, and after I moved out, he’d been paying them late. I mailed off letters and copies of my final decree of divorce, but now the situation with the credit card companies is worse. I make calls and write letters to Union 76, Chase, and U.S. Bank. On some accounts, I am a co-owner, and on some I am simply an authorized user. In neither case can I extricate myself without the participation of my ex who has little interest in resolving my problems. I have not used any of the cards since I began receiving temporary alimony, but payments have been late, fees have been levied. My desperation is rising.
        In a box under my desk there’s a sixty-page report from a forensic accountant, hired by my husband, with a six-figure tab demanded of me as reimbursement. “My” expenses include a $14,000 bill for wedding décor, his life insurance premiums for the policy that will benefit his new wife. There are doctor bills and parking tickets that do not belong to me or my daughters, invoices for remodeling his house after I was bought out of my share in it. I know how this happened. I can see my ex-husband handing off a couple of brown paper grocery sacks with check registers, credit card statements, and a crumpled pile of receipts—leaving the accountant to parcel it all out in a guessing game. The disorganization is the point. I am meant to spend hours weeping over paper and pencil, hours explaining these notes to my attorney who will slap me with another huge bill.
        I would be happy to jump into the abyss with my credit score. One night I drag the box from the forensic accountant out to my patio and light it on fire. On a day when humiliation feels like it’s skinning me alive, I drive to my ex-husband’s house and padlock a heavy chain to his front door handle. Artwork from our daughters’ childhoods is laced through the links of the chain—drawings of the four of us in primary colors. Another day I put on a dress and make-up, high heeling it into a bank where we have a joint investment account. A statement from July of 2007, the month when my husband told me our marriage was over, shows a balance of over $200,000 dollars. I’ll divide this asset without any help from the courts, I decide, and withdraw half of that amount to deposit in an account for myself. More than a year went by before I received a cent of alimony. So why not? It won’t even come close to covering my attorney bills.
        The day I got a call from my daughter because her father had not deposited the money to pay her tuition, and she couldn’t register for classes, I set out for the bank. Waiting for the light to change, I called my ex-husband, shouting and sobbing into the phone. “What do I have to do to get you to do what you are supposed to do? Step in front of a bus?” I’d imagined suicide repeatedly over the past four years, and now I was on a corner next to a bus stop with a bus approaching. A man leapt off the bench and stood, arms and legs wide, between me and the street.
        It’s so easy to dissolve a marriage. A judge signs a piece of paper and it’s over. Years ago I stood at my mailbox, tearing open an envelope in the sunlight, and there it was. The judge had no idea what she’d undone. She hadn’t seen a single photo of us, didn’t know our first kiss tasted like ice cream, or that our first words of love traveled from Alaska to France, inscribed on the delicate tissue paper of an aerogram. She didn’t know that we slept on the floor in sleeping bags our first year in California, or that we carried the first real mattress we bought home to our apartment on foot. She didn’t know we played gin rummy while driving through the desert, or that my husband spoon-fed me for two full days when both my eyes were patched with corneal abrasions. She didn’t know that I picked out his clothes for him every morning when he got his first job as a lawyer. If it was so easy to end that, why can’t we divide our assets?
        The mediation process turns out to be my redemption, and like so many good redemptions, it comes just in time. Some months after the first session, there’s a second one, and then a third. On October 15, 2011, four years and three months after my husband ended our marriage, the judgment on the division of joint assets is finally entered in Los Angeles Superior Court.

 

2017
        California’s largest wildfire on record erupts and spreads so rapidly that a secondary blaze is visible from my bedroom window an hour later. Cell phones buzz with an emergency alert to log onto the county disaster website. In less than a minute the power goes out, and the bars on our cell phones are reduced to a dot. A friend and I drive toward the flames to see how close they are. After returning home, I back my car into the garage and pack it. The next year there’s an even bigger fire.
        There’s no solution to California’s fire problem unless we can magically turn back the clock and eliminate the wildland/urban interface.
Southern California is an especially arid

Photo by John Wiley
Wikimedia Commons

place. Its swaying palm trees are a lie—pretenders imported from South America in the 1930s. Palms defy their tropical origins and ignite like torches during a wildfire. All we need is a good rain, people say winter after winter, but when the rains come, the ground is so dry, it’s like filling a martini glass with a fire hose. The precipitation that does manage to soak into the ground creates more growth that will dry out and turn to tinder for next year’s fire.
        Fifteen million years ago Los Angeles was an ocean. And a dozen years ago, I was a wife.