Bewilderment

Josie Deleon was gob smacked by the divorce papers. The longevity of her marriage to Roscoe was a point of pride, a dividend of the successful navigation of their union. Divorce? It took her a moment to recall her maiden name.

“Is it the cruise?” she said. “We don’t have to go to Alaska.”

Roscoe sat in the dining room, his silence scouring her. Beer-colored light spilled from the kitchen and onto the divorce paperwork placed where he had pulled out a chair, an uncapped pen ready for her hand. There was zero chance she was going to sit down.

“Is this a midlife crisis?” she said, massaging his shoulders. It felt like kneading meat. She stepped away.

“No crisis,” Roscoe said, peering at her over his half-rimmed glasses with an unearned academic air. “Just felt like time.”

“Is it the Frenchwoman at your office?” she asked. Roscoe was a simple man, the kind who would feel that a brief affair necessitated divorce. She could forgive him. Women did it every day.

“C’mon,” he said, his thumb flicking a dark tab along the long edge of the paperwork. He probably did that to the Frenchwoman’s nipples.

“It is her,” she said.

“Stop it.”

She made a laugh-like sound. “If there’s a problem with us, there are steps, counseling, therapy. You can’t just jump to divorce.”

But Roscoe wouldn’t be dissuaded. Twenty-four years of marriage—and plans for an early retirement when they hit sixty—evaporated. The house was sold the month after. So began the era of bewilderment.

Because Roscoe wasn’t forthcoming with grounds for their divorce beyond the nonsense of irreconcilable differences, Josie’s imagination spun. If she had made him unhappy, why hadn’t he left decades ago? If it wasn’t the Frenchwoman, was he involved with someone else? Was he gay? Was he going to tell her he’d always felt like a woman? Had she driven him away, and if so, was it due to what time, gravity, and neglect had done to her body? When they’d met, she’d been a different creature. Lithe. But he’d been someone else, too. Was it a habit or tic of hers, or something she’d withheld that she hadn’t known she’d been withholding? Was it the dog they’d had after their daughter moved away? True, she had given it a great deal of affection, perhaps at Roscoe’s expense, but it wasn’t a wife’s job to emotionally pet her husband. Or was it?

Josie knew that the history of a failed marriage could only ever be subjective, seen through a particular window, the viewer ignorant of the drama unfolding in other rooms. But their relationship had been a studio apartment, simple, like the man she’d thought she’d known. What was she to do with all the trivia of his life, especially the most embarrassing bits? Was she free to tell the story of how middle-school Roscoe was caught with his dick up his trumpet—an erection that favored the key of D? Would he, in turn, divulge to others her passing teenage infatuation with Muammar Gaddafi, her younger self drawn to the sunglasses, the posture, the Arabness and curls? She’d fantasized about joining the Colonel’s all-female bodyguard team, becoming a Revolutionary Nun in his Amazonian Guard. She imagined wearing a red beret and a uniform sporting gold epaulets. She should never have told Roscoe this and a hundred other confidences she had trusted would go to the grave. ‘Till death do us part. She wished the divorce paperwork had included a non-disclosure agreement.

Divorce was a word Josie had known nearly all her life, but she was surprised by what a pain in the ass it was in practice. The anguish and upheaval were matched by paperwork and tedious decision-making that gave no timeline for the restoration of a single self.

With the proceeds from her half of the house sale, Josie bought a mobile home at The Green near her old neighborhood. Her plot came with a narrow lawn of fake grass with real weeds, and a sun-bleached deck littered with the previous owner’s collection of cowrie shells, each like a polished turd. As depressing as it was to see the toll simple division took on what she’d thought had been a full life, The Green was still better than throwing money away on rent.

She’d continue to pick up her prescriptions at the same drugstore, navigate the market’s memorized grocery aisles, and greet the bank tellers who knew her by name and—from the numbers in her account—by her change in circumstance. But she felt claustrophobic in her mobile home, her thoughts burning up all the oxygen.

She took to pacing along the narrow canal that segregated the trailer park’s runners of St. Augustine grass from the municipal golf course’s rolling expanse of vibrant sward. Some of her neighbors had built rustic decks looking out over the course, tiki torches at the corners, epiphytes entangled in macramé that drooped from the trees. But there was never anyone there with whom she could strike up a conversation and ask: Why does a man leave a life, a future, a house, a home, a woman who never refused him?

She asked friends, but they defaulted to platitudes as their loyalties also extended to Roscoe. Even the accomplishment of not having raised their daughter in a broken home felt retroactively tainted. She asked their daughter—who now lived on the West Coast and whom she almost never saw—what to make of it all. “As long as the two of you are happy,” her daughter said—cold comfort.

Josie didn’t believe Roscoe about the Frenchwoman. One day after work, she drove across town and trailed him to see where he made his bed. She willed him to drive to The Green instead of the Frenchwoman’s boudoir, to head toward her place and tell her he’d been a fool. Of course, she’d take him back, but not without making him squirm first, a thought that turned her on a little where she sat trailing him two cars back in traffic. And then Roscoe did just that: he pulled into The Green. But he turned left after the gate into section A, where he parked beside a double-wide—his, it turned out. They were neighbors. Of all the luck.

In the weeks that followed, Josie expected to unwillingly witness the lack in Roscoe’s life. For him to go hog wild, carouse with the women of The Green, and reveal the true colors she had apparently muted by confining him in marriage. But all he did was buy a used golf cart and spend weekends at the public links across the canal. A haircut and a few new shirts.

If Roscoe possessed no hidden shades, perhaps she did. There was her Portuguese neighbor, fit and deeply tanned with a mane of white hair. He paddled down the canal every morning, where he said it fed into another canal, and then to the sea. He claimed to have invented the idea of lining swimming pool bottoms with solar panels, delivering water-cooled efficiency. A partner had beaten him to the patent. He wasn’t sore. He’d let it go, though it didn’t sound like he had, as she sat on his deck, avoiding the served coffee and listening to him go on about the patent affair. She realized she could never have feelings for this man. His driveway held a chronology of broken-down cars, and the dog pen held more dog shit than dog. She never went past a single sip of his coffee, microwaved from yesterday’s leftover batch. He wasn’t a coffee snob, he said.

If not the Portuguese neighbor, she could go on one of those hookup apps and let word get back to Roscoe. That Josie. What a delicious wonder. Went at it so hard she made her trailer hop its blocks. The things she won’t do for the man who is true. But she felt neither urge nor need—and Roscoe had never been the jealous type.

A few weeks later, her Portuguese neighbor failed to return from one of his paddles down the canal. Roscoe took in the man’s dog, treating it to rides in his golf cart, the pooch sitting in the spot that should have been hers. Was that why they divorced? Because she’d refused to get another pup after the heartbreak of putting Muammar to sleep? They’d been over that. She’d wept. She hadn’t yet wept about the divorce. She knew that was telling and tried to weep, and succeeded, and felt temporarily better.

She wondered if there was a limit to this phase of their lives. Would they reconcile after a year, sell their spots at The Green, and find a house somewhere they could afford, perhaps near their daughter? After a lifetime of humidity, she could use a dry heat.

Roscoe didn’t need dry heat. That his biggest post-divorce personal transformation was a new haircut solidified Josie’s suspicion that the divorce had been about her. She was bad company. Or maybe she was looking at it all wrong. Maybe Roscoe had wanted out to spare her the thankless drudgery of taking care of him in his coming old age. Maybe he’d even been told that he was in the early stages of dementia, a diagnosis he’d concealed from her. Or had he detected something in her and realized he didn’t want to take care of her when fate delivered its inevitable bad news?

True, sometimes she mixed up words or had trouble remembering a name, but he was worse at that than she was. And he seemed healthy, maybe even a few pounds lighter, while she suffered from stage five marriage failure with a fever that wouldn’t break.

The bastard.

Rumors swirled about the fate of her Portuguese neighbor. Shark attack. Heatstroke. Picked up by authorities for outstanding warrants. Maybe he was an illegal, she suggested. Undocumented, she could have said, had she been generous. Was it her conservatism, her vocabulary that had caused Roscoe to divorce her?

In the last decade, they’d abandoned watching the news together and had avoided talking politics completely. She’d bitten her tongue so many times it was a wonder it wasn’t reduced to a nub—though what good had silence done her? Still, she knew she could have been more open and understanding about others. Unhoused, she could have called the homeless pair that set up camp along the canal just before the Fourth of July. These people, whose minds were elsewhere, ranting at voices she couldn’t hear, troubled her, not least because a small part of her believed the voices were real; she was simply deaf to demonology. Another thing she should never have admitted to Roscoe.

Roscoe entered his golf cart in the local parade, decorating it in American flags and bunting, the dog wearing an Uncle Sam hat. Roscoe’s sudden patriotism ruled out politics as having been the final wedge between them. Had he left her because of her notions? She reported the homeless people to the police.

Roscoe retired. He’d been squirreling away money! But then she ran the numbers and realized it wasn’t so, and that she could also retire if her ambition was to never travel, never buy another car, simply coast into old age here at The Green. That wasn’t for her. She needed at least forty hours a week in which her thoughts didn’t swirl around the unknown force that had stomped on her future. Unknown, not only because Roscoe was unwilling to articulate why he’d left her, but because divorce seemed an act beyond his natural initiative.

Late that fall, Josie visited Roscoe’s former colleague, the Frenchwoman Mary. Not a particularly French-sounding name, she thought. Catching her in the parking lot, Josie confessed that she had to know what had gone on between her and Roscoe, and that she didn’t care if it was still going on. They were standing beside Mary’s car. The air was uncomfortably cool, and her anger at Roscoe’s likely infidelity no longer gave off any heat. She simply wanted the cold truth so her fever would abate. Josie clasped her elbows and asked what Roscoe was like.

“Pleasant. Quiet. Friendly.”

“I mean in bed. What French things did you do that I didn’t?”

Mary tossed her bag onto a blanket covering the rear seats. The sedan’s freed, day-warmed air gave up a masculine scent. Had Mary and Roscoe’s affair started on a cool late afternoon like this, in the sudden intimacy of Mary’s sun-warmed car, their pale butts squirming on a quilt?

Josie returned to The Green angry at herself and at Mary. The woman had sat with Josie in the car and kissed her, but then said that she couldn’t tell her anything about Roscoe’s lovemaking because the two had never slept together. Mary had zero interest in men.

So, was she bisexual now? It had only been that kiss. Admittedly, a good one. Maybe thirty seconds. She had yielded to it in good faith to understand Mary’s allure and her own deficiencies, and yet she had been taken advantage of. She’d been abused, assaulted. No, maybe not that. Still, some people will take advantage of anyone.

She read up on oxytocin, the love hormone, and wondered if she and Roscoe hadn’t slept together often enough for traces of the hormone to endure in the spans between their couplings, allowing for weeks-long, sometimes months-long gaps where Roscoe was free to explore the notion of an existence without her. She read up on pheromones. Should she have showered less often and allowed her natural musk to ensnare Roscoe? That would have felt like Mother Nature’s manipulation. She wanted to think of herself as having had agency.

“New haircut,” she said, seeing Roscoe before a community meeting at The Green.

“How have you been keeping yourself?” he asked her.

“Pheromones. Oxytocin,” she said. “Was that behind the divorce?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Roscoe said, and took a chair between two occupied seats, the wuss.

Josie left the meeting early and peered through the windows of Roscoe’s double-wide, hoping to glimpse a pigsty of strewn clothes, empty beer cans, a sheen of dust, a gay pornographic magazine. But no. He was still orderly. The simple arrangement of half their furniture cried out to her, like children separated from their siblings. The Portuguese man’s dog slumbered on the sofa, tits up.

She called her daughter and learned that Roscoe was flying out for Christmas. “I didn’t think you’d want to come,” her daughter said. Josie didn’t, couldn’t, not on such short notice anyway, not with all the projects at work. She made more excuses and lied about owning a cat that needed looking after. Her daughter asked whether she’d met someone new.

“Your father was enough for me,” she said, opting for the truth but hearing the reciprocal statement in her head, the theme of these last months. I was not enough for your father.

Christmas came cold, the air tainted by the smudge pots that kept the nearby orange groves solvent. She broke down and bought a small Christmas tree and smothered it with ornaments Roscoe hadn’t wanted. She received a selfie from their daughter that showed Roscoe in front of an enormous flocked Christmas tree in a shopping mall. The photo appeared on her phone a couple of days after Roscoe returned. An afterthought.

While preparing for work one morning, there came a knock on her front door. She’d never heard anyone knock on the door before and was disappointed by the muffled, insubstantial thud. She found Roscoe dressed in a hoodie and gloves, a scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Come down to the canal,” he said.

No Happy New Year, she noted. He knew better.

Josie put on her one winter coat. She found Roscoe standing under the trees and looking out at the golf course. She saw it then, the vast sparkle of frost on the blades of grass, but like she’d never seen before, refracting the colors of the rainbow. And then she saw what Roscoe had really brought her here to see, floating in the canal. She drew beside him and looked at the bloated, scarred lumps, floating snout to fanned tail, only slightly narrower than the canal itself.

Manatees.

One was nibbling at the overgrown grass at the canal’s edge, but most floated serenely in a submerged gray line that she imagined stretching straight out to the colder sea. Roscoe could have told anyone else about this first, she thought.

A couple of neighbors were sipping their morning coffee further down along the canal. A mug was raised in greeting. Roscoe didn’t see them, but Josie waved, though she didn’t know them. She returned her hand close to Roscoe’s, where he could take it, if he wanted. Maybe the couple saw her and Roscoe and thought: here’s a pair like us, come out to witness the lengths creatures will go to stay warm as they patiently wait for the cold snap to pass.