“Yeah. I thought,Oh my God; I’m such a hypocrite. I don’t need to take Esme to a different doctor so she doesn’t have to see all this shit; I have to just stop. Stopdoingthe shit.”
He made an indistinct noise, something that told her he was listening. That he was attuned but not judging. Amazing.
“So I did. It was, initially, pretty easy. I just stopped. I told myself the work I was getting done was a hangover from my acting years, so given that I didn’t want to be in front of the camera anymore, why was I bothering?”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
“But time passed and everything started to wear off and it got harder to be so sanguine.” She paused, wondering if she should go any further. But hadn’t the point of this whole digression been to set the stage for the actual story of the breakup? “And then Reggie started noticing.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. He never said anything overtly critical. Just jokey stuff like, ‘Oh, look, you have actual lines in your forehead when you laugh.’ Eventually I just told him I was done doing stuff to my face.”
“Hecan’thave had an opinion on that.”
She appreciated the affront in Jack’s tone.
“He said I was beautiful any which way but noted that his female colleagues and the wives of his friends were all getting ‘regular maintenance.’ And they are! Some of the men are, too. I don’t judge themfor it. It’s normal in this town. It is remarkable to be a woman of a certain age who doesn’t get work done. And I’m not saying I never will again. I just… couldn’t unread that line fromGreen Light. I couldn’t stop thinking about Esme, my girl who’s perfect the way she is, who isnota fool, and, if I have anything to say about it, will never make herself into one.”
“Good for you,” Jack said quietly.
“I promise I’m getting to the point. She called me this evening, just before I got here, and somehow we started talking about the divorce. I thought because she and Cal were older, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal for them. But…”
“It’s a big deal.”
“I mean, I think she’s OK, ultimately, but she’s not unaffected. I went to the bathroom before I came over here, and I had a moment in front of the mirror where I didn’t recognize myself. On several levels. One, all the work hasdefinitelyworn off. I look old.” She made herself restate that. “No, I look my age. But then I thought,Did I rob my kids of an intact family because I didn’t want to stick needles in my face anymore? Was it worth it?”
“I don’t think you got divorced because you stopped doing Botox. You just said yourself it was an emblematic conversation but not the cause.”
“I thought so. But am I lying to myself?”
“I hate to sound like a self-help book—you have no idea how much I hate to sound like a self-help book—but I think you have to take your kids out of this equation. Did you—you—want to get divorced?”
“For the record, Idoknow how much you hate sounding like a self-help book, and therefore I appreciate your insight even more. And yes, I wanted to get divorced.”
“All right, then.”
“All right, then.”
She felt better. Lighter.
“If it helps,” Jack said, “I think kids probably understand more than you know. They don’t want you to suffer. Going back and forth between my parents wasn’t always easy, but I never wanted them to be together. I admit that my case may not be typical, but I think generally speaking, kids know that when you suffer, they suffer. I used to see that play out in my students, too.”
That jibed with what Esme had said. Blair got it, but that didn’t mean Esme wasn’t having trouble adjusting to the new normal. “Esme wants us all to have Christmas together.”
“I think that’s a bad idea.”
Blair did not agree. This might be where Jack’s ability to be an amazing, nonjudgmental listener ended. She had had several perfectly collegial chats with Reggie in recent weeks and months. Christmas would be easy. All they had to do was sit in a room together and watch their kids be happy, both because they were opening presents and because their parents were together, nottogether-together but together with Esme and Cal. A family.
Hopefully she and the new “ladylove” wouldn’t be wearing the same outfit.
“I didn’t really think about the holidays,” she said. “I was so focused on the divorce not upending their day-to-day lives. That was why we waited until Esme went to school. In retrospect, maybe that was a mistake. Maybe it would have been better to get new routines established before she went away.”
“I suppose it’s a lot of change for a kid—college is new, but then the home front is new, too.”
“Ugh. When you put it that way, it seems so obvious.”
“I think the larger question isn’t about your kids but about you. Why put off divorcing if you knew it was inevitable? Why put your life on hold like that?”
