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  But by five o’clock, when Coco resumed domestic duty on the first floor and began preparing another candlelight dinner to precede her nightly battle with Gavin, the children were always tired, hot, and hostile. They would hang around the kitchen, cranky and peevish, persecuting Coco for her day-long neglect by stealing Oreo cookies from the big glass apothecary far on the counter (impractical—since it was glass—but a definite personality point in the kitchen) or running through the first floor fighting and howling about whether they should watch the cartoons on Channel 4 or Petticoat Junction on 5. Inevitably the phone would join the posse in pursuit of Coco’s cool, jangling repeatedly so that Coco became cook/operator, cramming the receiver against her ear with an aching shoulder while shuffling burning bacon around in the fry pan, setting the kitchen table, passing out paper cups of Hawaiian punch, writing checks for the grocery-and/or liquor-store delivery men, and guiltily letting Josh drink his bottle uncuddled in the middle of the kitchen floor surrounded by the pots, pans, and canned goods he inventoried every evening.

  As an act of penance, Gavin had begun coming home from work before six, presumably to establish his credibility as a good away-from-home celibacy risk. Looking sheepish and ill-at-ease, he would play with the children while Coco cooked dinner, eratically help set the table, and pick up toys when the kids went to bed. Although for several weeks he uncomplainingly submitted to Coco’s intensive after-dinner interrogations, he eventually began to show some signs of impatience with his nocturnal punishment and gradually became more resistant to her questions about his affair. At the end of three weeks, he still would not identify the girl by name, reveal which hotel they used, tell what name he had written in the register, confess if they had indulged in room service, describe their mode of transportation, discuss what time of day they rendezvoused, reveal if the girl used a douche (if so, she wasn’t Jewish), or entertain any discussions about hotel-inspired fancy intercourse positions, postcoital co-ed showers, or how much the totaled hotel bills had cost. Although early in the month Coco had worn Gavin down to a point where, in a moment of exhaustion and penance for the nerve of his adultery, he agreed that the Washington Hilton would have been a convenient location and that the month of March had been an expeditious one, he eventually began to field or ignore Coco’s questions thus igniting her genuine hysteria which he couldn’t distinguish from her simulated spells.

  During the long June evenings Coco would drink gin until she finally exploded into screaming accusations, charging Gavin with ruining their marriage, her mental health, her social status, and her new state of political enlightenment achieved through the Columbia Road Local Consciousness Raising Sessions as well as the Northwest Washington Theoretical Council. Coco insisted that Gavin’s affair was unfair because it was only a last brutal swipe of chauvinistic terrorism, an attempt at neocolonial repression before the advent of the postrevolutionary age which would produce a more equitable balance of domestic power and make extramarital sex totally irrelevant as well as difficult to obtain. Coco spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to educate Gavin about the counter-revolutionary nature of his infidelity, but she was never totally convinced that he accepted her analysis.

  two

  Sometimes Coco wondered if everything had gone wrong simply because of a pill she had taken. After many unsuccessful weeks of hunting for uppers on the campus, Coco had finally scored twenty dexedrine spanuals from one of her freshman students who dropped by the office after class to discuss a late term paper. When Coco asked how anyone could possibly complete all the necessary research in the last week of the semester, the girl insisted it would be no problem. Then Coco inquired if college students still used stay-awake pills, and right on cue Lillian Greenberg produced an enormous bottle of bennies and dex from her Greek fabric shoulder bag. She gave Coco twenty ten-milligrams, and Coco extended Lillian’s term-paper deadline by one week.

  It was on the morning of May 31 that Coco took the first fat green capsule, with coffee, as a final effort to shift the stubborn marker on her scale from 118 to 113. Then she went to campus, gave a two-hour-long final examination to her 107 students; stopped off for an end-of-the-year beer at her faggot officemate’s apartment; came home; made dinner; played with the children before putting them to bed; devised a variation of solitaire with several months’ worth of past-due bills; sanded down half of an old rocking chair she had bought at Goodwill; impulsively inspected the children’s coloring books and threw away those without empty pages; gathered Mike’s baseball cards from around the house, consolidating them into a grocery bag; threw away all the pigeon feathers that Nicky had stored away in the mitten drawer, which, in warm weather, might produce poliomyelitis germs; took a shower; rebleached the already invisible peroxide-blond moustache on her upper lip; finished reading Some Parts in the Single Life by Jimmy Miller, while sitting on the toilet; and then discovered that it was after one A.M. and that she still wasn’t the least bit tired.

  Walking down the hallway, Coco wondered if she might have dropped meth instead of dex, and then opened the bedroom door to see Gavin sleeping soundly in a very immature fetallike position on his side of the bed. Perversely, she waited a few minutes to let some hallway nightlight spill into the darkness, but when the glare didn’t seem to disturb him, she entered the room and kicked the door shut loudly behind her. Gavin still didn’t stir. His sleep seemed like a consummate insult, a logical extension of his daytime insensitivity. Slowly, and involuntarily, Coco felt herself start to shake with tiny ripples of discontent. Fluffs of disappointment fluttered through her body like little lint balls in the Bendix dryer.

  She sat down at her dressing table, flicked on the small lamp she used for making up, lit a Marlboro, and began to straighten her cosmetics, scraping electric-roller hair clips into the sliding drawer of her carpenter’s tool chest, sliding perfume bottles into a line against the mirror, dropping earrings into her jewelry box, and rehanging strings of beads from a coat hook she had pounded into the wall. Next she arranged, in descending order of size, all twenty of the white plastic containers in which she kept creams, astringents, Q-Tips, cotton balls, makeup removers, and other essentials. Several months ago Coco had even scooped the Vaseline out of its squat ugly glass jar and finger-pushed it into one of her white plastic traveling containers so that she was totally coordinated cosmetically and prepared to gather her toiletries on a moment’s notice to fly away to Paris with a Perfect Lover.

  After cleaning the dresser top, she amused herself briefly by reviewing the total effect of her long hair brushed back from her bronze-tanned face in various upsweep styles. After a while, craving more action, she began to run through her repertoire of various poses, manufacturing facial expressions that made her look innocent, then mysterious, then seductive, intelligent, lusty, and finally, mischievous. Midway through her recital, she folded her arms beneath her breasts to produce a stirringly deep line of cleavage and traced her tongue over her lips so that they glistened with Monroe-ish moisture.

  But when she looked her most irresistible, Coco felt a palpitating impatience rise up from within her cleavage. She had always believed that her beauty was of such a tentative nature, so unpredictable and so fleetingly dramatic, that she needed a witness—someone else to see and appreciate it so that it could be recorded in history. To have such incredibly seductive poses go unobserved and unappreciated was terribly agitating. Gavin, still sleeping, and totally oblivious to Coco’s enormous need for attention, made her so angry that she lost interest in looking beautiful just for herself. Coco tilted the lamp shade upward until Gavin was illuminated by a fierce blade of light, and then studied him through the mirror.

  The thing about Gavin’s physique was that he was very, very long and just too thin. Coco had always felt that his scrawniness was an indictment of her cooking, as well as a hostile threat to anyone with a weight problem, and that his long, narrow, eternally and perversely thin, boney body, stretching from the pillows right down to t
he foot of their king-size bed, was like a long stretch of undeveloped land near a big city that was badly in need of some subdivision and construction. But worst of all, his physical thinness made him look like a sexual lightweight—without any magnitude, decisiveness, or physical authority.

  And, of course, when Gavin stood up, his body extended so high that it made his head seem inordinately small on the top. His head was the head of a short man—decorated with a nice small nose, a small neat mouth, small flat ears, and small narrow eyes circled by miniature glasses. Coco always felt that her head looked bigger than Gavin’s, and this upset her traditional view that all parts of a husband were supposed to be bigger than the wife’s. And though she sometimes thought that if Gavin’s head were delivered to her on a tray, she might say he had a pleasant face, while it remained attached to his long skinny body it bothered her.

  “Well, this has gone on just long enough,” Coco said in a loud, firm voice.

  Through the mirror she watched Gavin open his eyes.

  “I want a divorce immediately,” Coco said, banging her hairbrush down on the table to startle Gavin so he wouldn’t drop back off to sleep again. “I simply cannot stand another day like this. And this time I really mean it.”

  Automatically Gavin reached back toward the bookcase to find his glasses. He put them on and then propped himself up on the pillow, knowing enough to appear attentive and interested.

  “In just three months I’m going to be thirty-two,” she announced ominously. “If you remember your Kinsey, you’d know that thirty-five is the absolute sexual peak of a woman’s life—a period of incredible passion. I’m just going to have to get a divorce.”

  After twelve years of rehearsals Gavin had finally learned all of his lines and cues. He now knew what to say at each appropriate point in the dialogue, although Coco, as the star, always staged the scenes, set the tempo for each act, and gave him his cues.

  “As soon as the children get out of school, we will have to separate.”

  “Who? You and the children?” Gavin asked, blinking his eyes behind his glasses.

  “We,” she said emphatically, “will have to leave you. And it would be best for everyone if we made all the necessary arrangements right now.”

  “Why do we always have to make ‘arrangements’ after midnight?” Gavin asked in an aggrieved voice. “Why can’t we ever do it in the morning? Or on weekends?”

  “I don’t really care what time it is, Gavin,” Coco said insistently. “I just know something has to be done, and it should he done as quickly as possible.” Creating a commotion to fill an emotional vacuum—which her nature abhorred—made Coco’s eyes more hazel than brown. “I simply can’t go on living like this, Gavin.”

  The decision to leave immediately was an important starter-line for one of the Burmans’ games, initialed I–L or #7. Coco kept playing with her hair, winding it all into a curl over one shoulder or twisting it into a bun high on her crown.

  “All right,” said Gavin.

  “I work all day, run this incredible crazy establishment … blah-blah-blah. And I have absolutely no emotional life at all.”

  “Well,” Gavin said, “since I can’t see how or why anything’s going to change, maybe you really should leave.”

  “Not only don’t I have any emotional life,” Coco said, beginning to accelerate and escalate, “but I also have no sex life.”

  “I agree with you completely,” Gavin said in his usual defensive way. “By my last calculations, we haven’t fucked in about six weeks.” Then he paused. “Maybe you really should go.”

  This time his invitation to leave hit Coco with the impact of a car accident filmed for a buckle-your-seat-belt commercial. “Go” was not in their regular script, and it sounded out of key, especially since Gavin seldom repeated himself.

  Coco kept brushing her hair while her heart pounded with an unfamiliar rhythm. Watching herself in the mirror, she finally decided that it was her own hypertension—the ever-warned-about paranoid feeling produced by amphetamines—that was causing her to misinterpret Gavin’s tone of voice.

  “Where will you all go?” Gavin asked on his own initiative, which was suspiciously out of character.

  “Oh,” Coco murmured, tilting her head back so she could observe her husband better, “probably to some island.”

  “What island?”

  Although Coco had kept firmly in mind, for many years, a particular kind of cottage where she planned to flee during her rustic escapes from marriage, she had, in fact, never geographically located the exact stretch of ocean beach where it could be rented.

  “Maybe Manhattan?” he suggested nastily.

  “Now, listen,” she said angrily, delivering Gavin her aren’t-you-pedestrian-though look. “I mean a real place on a real island. Near the ocean. A house. This is going to be a permanent separation, Gavin, not just a summer fling. I intend to live on that island the whole year round.”

  “That’s nice, Coco, very back-to-the-countryish. But tell me, is there a school on your island? I gather some of the kids are interested in continuing their education.”

  “Of course there’s a school.” Coco picked up a tube of lipstick and slowly outlined her mouth with a glistening shade of Yardley’s honey-beige to evoke a Jean Shrimpton shine. Her immediate allure was so reassuring that Coco decided Gavin sounded hostile because he was still sleepy. Nevertheless, she felt compelled to press onward to discover why he was acting so uncooperative when they hadn’t had a real fight in almost two weeks and why he was trying to upset her by focusing upon irrelevant particulars rather than discussing divorce in general.

  “Anyway, I’ll make my own arrangements, Gavin. You don’t have to worry your busy little head about any of that. All I hope is that you’ll move your ass and get yourself into analysis before you try to start another relationship. Because otherwise the same thing will happen to you all over again. Some woman will feel an initial attraction, decide she wants to live with you, and then …” Coco’s voice trailed away; it was Gavin’s turn to get pissed off about her mentioning his need for therapy again.

  Gavin shifted around slightly in the bed, rearranged the lightweight summer blanket over his body, and peered toward the mirror to see Coco’s face. “Do you know something,” he began with a polite smile, “I don’t think you have to worry about my mental condition anymore.” His small neat face looked malignantly benign. “In fact, you don’t have to worry about anything concerning me anymore. What you should do is just make all the necessary plans to get the hell out of here. I want you to feel free to split even if it’s just for the summer. It’s clear you’ve wasted enough time being miserable living with me, and since you’re not getting any younger, maybe you really better split now while you’ve still got some other options.”

  Gavin’s acceptance of her resignation speech was a stunning break with tradition. His words set off a series of shocks that reverberated through Coco’s body, making the Island Escape Fantasy fuzzy, like the educational channel on the old TV in the basement.

  “What do you mean?” Coco asked.

  “What do you mean ‘what do I mean?’”

  That was enraging—an authentic provocation.

  “I take it for granted,” Coco said nastily, “that you understand why I want to leave you.”

  “Well, I sure as hell hope it’s for the same reasons you’ve been bitching about for twelve years, because I don’t think I’m up to hearing any new complaints right now. I’m tired, and I want to get some sleep.”

  “You’re whaaat?” Coco made the word hiss like a blast of steam from the kitchen radiator.

  “I’m tired,” Gavin repeated.

  But it seemed he was getting more reckless than sleepy, pressing her toward a dangerous precipice of rage. Coco whirled around on the little stool. Although she was finally beginning to feel tired, she flipped her hair away from her face and hunched forward to give Gavin a flash of breasts beneath her blue nightgown.

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nbsp; “You’re tired,” she repeated. “You’re tired? Well, would you like to know something? That happens to be exactly the reason.… That’s exactly the reason why you’re such a failure as a human being. You may be a great lawyer, Gavin. You may be a great success in your career. But you are unquestionably a failure as a human being. That is clearly why your first marriage broke up. That is why you are a two-time loser. You are always tired. You are always tired at the wrong times. You have all kinds of energy for everything in the world except for the things that are really important. I mean really important. In human terms. And that’s the reason why I’ve always wanted to leave you and get the hell away from here.”

  Coco had, indeed, spent a disproportionately large portion of the last twelve years planning, discussing, threatening, and fantasizing about leaving Gavin. Her most frequent verbal justification for a separation was Gavin’s sexual shortcomings. Coco had discovered long ago that there was nothing comparable in driving power to bitter sexual complaints. Orgasm shortages ruled majestically in the realm of grievances and remained the stateliest grudge of all the injustices she had collected over the years. Indeed, Coco used the highly effective low-sexual-profile argument as both a description of Gavin’s original sin as well as an explanation for all his subsequent failures.

  Suddenly Gavin swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Coco was stunned. Gavin never got up while they were fighting. Night after night, year after year, he just lay in bed, flat on his back, while she raged and ranted at him, infuriated by the passive resistance of his prone position. But now, all of a sudden, he was sitting up and energetically using a comb of bent fingers to rake paths through his hair.