Our daughter C was BFF with his daughter when they were toddlers, so we grownups all became BFFs too, with (I thought) cheerfully chaotic dinners that often ended in tears for the kids but good feeling (I thought) among the adults. Sure they squabbled and sniped, but so did Other and I. It never occurred to me that all the quarreling presaged any more lasting trouble for them than a night on the couch for one. I thought their discord was part of the vitality of their marriage, maybe even sexually exciting to them.
We grew apart when the kids ended up in different schools, and we eventually stopped calling one another to catch up. So when I ran into the dad one morning a year or so ago, I was eager to tell him about my cancer ordeal. But my news was trumped by his news: he and his wife had divorced. Last night over a dinner of comfort food (shepherd's pie, green salad, pumpkin pie), he gave us a blow-by-blow account of how the divorce went down.
When a marriage collapses, it would seem, it doesn't go down neatly from top to bottom like the Twin Towers. The partners flail around, grabbing for support. In this case, the husband had a meaningless affair with a somewhat unethical choice of partners (a younger subordinate), whom he later had to figure out how to offload. The wife had an affair with a married colleague with kids; that marriage was destroyed. Their own kids "acted out": the daughter became clinically depressed and was placed on antidepressants; the son flunked out of high school, fell in with a "bad crowd" and got mired in drugs.
The dust is settling now. He is in love again; she is living with her lover. The daughter has weaned herself from antidepressants; the son is in boarding school and doing better. In some ways it's a happy ending. But who knows what boats are still being rocked by the ripples of their rupture?
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