Why didn’t I sue? That night I was racing from a Burger King in New Jersey to New York City, desperate to pick up the kids on time, I was supposed to have swung by a law office to join the other women in their complaint. I took the glass elevator up to Bruce’s sex pad. Instead of him being mad, he fixated puppy eyes on me and acted like he was in mourning.
“So run and do your thing and leave the kids here tonight,” Bruce had said in a tone far too nice for me to trust. He sounded so giving and borderline loving. He sounded like someone I used to know.
“Yes, but I’m late, and what if you use that against me?”
“Against you?”
“With the judge and all.”
“Belle, we aren’t living out some episode of Kramer vs. Kramer.”
“We’re not?” I hated that Bruce was looking so well. I thought he’d get scruffy and fat. I had heard he broke up with his young girlfriend and hadn’t dated since and was working. Some part of me wanted him eating Fritos on the couch and bankrupting himself.
“We’re in this thing together,” he went on, “and you got stuck in traffic or whatever, so no biggie.”
“Yeah, traffic, or lost my rental car keys, actually,” I said.
“You lost them? You don’t lose stuff.”
I remember thinking that even though I was still wearing the spiky boots and a nice suit, I was anything but hot-looking. I looked more like what I was, the bedraggled soon-to-be divorcée. I sat on his bottom step and Bruce instinctively bent over and pulled each boot off. They made a sucking sound as they detached from each foot and he laughed while we looked at each other awkwardly.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forget who we are now.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to change the subject fast. “Well, all I know about the keys is that they’re still in New Jersey. Maybe underground.”
Bruce lifted his eyebrows, making his face look adorable. “Underground? So how did you get to the city with no car keys?”
“I took a bus,” I said. “Like on Buses of New Jersey or something. They offer very slow service.”
When he gave me a slight smile, I suddenly remembered how I once loved this man. It all came back to me.
“Well, I think that subliminally you didn’t want to be on time. You didn’t want to sign on to any lawsuit,” he said.
“Not true.”
“You were treated poorly and you were treated great,” he said, nailing exactly what I was thinking. Despite the sometimes insane working conditions, that place gave me a shot to move so far, so fast, at least for the first bunch of years. This was what I loved about Bruce. He could see through everyone and everything and then could tell me what I already knew about myself. I forgot he could do this. I forgot that once, Bruce had been my friend.
“I just didn’t think that my getting money out of this was going to help change anything about Wall Street. I mean, how is paying me going to help the women coming behind me? Besides, I do like to move on.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said. “You move on fast.” His eyes misted up.
I couldn’t believe it. While this whole gut-throbbing, anxiety-plagued, crappy separation managed to bring me to my knees, and sometimes had me walking around teary and terrified, Bruce had shown as much emotion as the guy who collects toll money on the George Washington Bridge. I was starting to think he should date Kathryn Peterson just to see who could exhibit less feeling. But that night something was changing about him, or some feeling was returning to him. There we stood, on child-defying slate floors, with bad modern art canvases hung at finger-painting level, and he went gooey on me. I could tell the guy still loved me and I wanted to figure out a way to love him back. But I couldn’t. Not then.
That was the night that Bruce and I became friends and he started growing up. He supported my decision to go live in the Tea Bag House, and to put the kids into a public school. Within three months he missed our joyful chaos far too much, so he gave up his bachelor pad and, I believe, his tantric yoga practice. He rented a quaint, tiny house in Southampton and planted a vegetable garden with the kids and got a job. He has a young, single, next-door-neighbor lady, who hits on him, leaves him cutesy notes and (gag me) casseroles. Really. A frickin’ casserole with condensed soup as an ingredient, which I asked him to not serve the kids, as canned foods are a known carcinogen. That was my own way of saying, “Please don’t take your neighbor’s bait. Please. We may just still have a chance.”