Andrew Phipps had never thought the unthinkable - that his wife of many years would up and leave him. He, unlike other married men his age, had been faithful, dutiful to his children, remained a good provider and supportive companion. He had done nothing to upset his wife, let alone this.
He came home from work one Thursday evening and found the house bare, emptied of everything but the early American painting picture of Great Aunt Tally which had graced the living room and had looked down on his evenings by the fire, his glass of port, and the New York Times.
A nasty looking old woman, he thought as he walked into the now empty living room - a reaction to the shock of his wife's departure, some kind of compensatory mechanism laying blame on all women and the frightful Aunt Tally was the closest at hand.
'Now what?', he thought, the usual first understandable notion that came into his head - one of survival, a resettling of accounts, a refurbishing of his life, moving on - but that was displaced by a spew of long-closeted words - bitch, cunt, slattern, trollop - which made him feel good as they echoed around the empty house.
Not a word of intimation, not a fair warning, nothing. A summary dismissal and abrupt departure.
He had read about such things, and wondered how any man could be so clueless, so vulnerable, so impossibly tone deaf; but there he was with his dick in his hand, alone after thirty years of marriage, facing the prospect of take-out, unmade beds, unwatered plants, and junk mail.
When he had calmed down and fixed himself a drink, he began to deconstruct the event. Obviously she had not run home to mother - too calculating and comprehensive was her departure - and so he began to vet a list of possible lovers. Was it Armand from Hastings & Porter? William from Tuckahoe? Frank the IRS man? By his third martini, the cavalcade of lovers didn't seem to matter much anymore. Dumb fucking cunt, better off without her, plenty of fish to fry.
But the next morning as he grappled his way off the couch, stuck his head under the faucet, and pulled on old bucket of fried chicken from the refrigerator, Andrew was at a loss. Anger, resentment, parsing, and rage had disappeared and he was faced only with 'what next?'.
Word got around the office - everyone knew that he had been left on the curb. Some blamed his wife - women could never be trusted, said one, better off without them - while most others blamed him, a traitor to the cabal of macho men, those who knew a woman's place. To them he was a pussy, a wuss, man with his nose wide open and a distant look in his eyes. Fuck him, he gives us all a bad name.
It was inevitable that Andrew change jobs, and residences while he was at it. He closed up shop on all fronts, moved to Tucson, moved up in rank, and settled in to his rancho in the foothills, and started a new life. Of his ex-wife he heard nothing. For all he was concerned, she could be in Timbuktu a white slave in some salt caravan bound for Adrar. It was all about him now.
Despite the recent fracaso, Andrew had had his fair share of girlfriends, mostly coeds and cheerleader types who were attracted by his interest, his flashy car, and his willingness to spend lavishly. This generosity was in fact his signature. At that heady, late adolescent time no girl probed any deeper than a man's wallet, and Andrew fit the bill of a happy-go-lucky legacy boy without complications.
There were a few girls who mistook his generosity for serious intentions and thought they had a keeper, but Andrew, as light-witted as he was openhearted, never fulfilled anyone's promise.
At the same time when he fell for a girl, he fell hard, and Lucinda Archer was his first love. She was a junior at Bennington, a girls finishing school in Vermont, and her cute, pert, charming little ways struck a chord. In Junior Year he was madly in love with her, besotted, and lost. His grades dropped, his extracurricular activities dwindled, and he spent most of his time away from school and up north.
Lucinda, as cute and innocently desirable as she seemed to Andrew, was actually a serious hunter - a girl from a modest background with the intelligence, savvy, and wherewithal to get ahead in the world; and her planned trajectory had no place for the likes of Andrew Phipps.
However, she, unlike his wife much later, had the decency to let him down slowly with concerns about her aging grandmother, her frail and needy siblings, and the farm in Chillicothe; and so it was that she was the first old girlfriend Andrew called when he had his feet on the ground.
It is not surprising that men always seem to turn to their Rolodex after a difficult divorce. There is no balm for the sick soul than memories of innocent times. It is also not surprising that most men either find their adolescent loves fat and ugly, married with children, or worst case scenario, clueless as to who was calling.
'Who?', said Lucinda when he rang her up; but after some unravelling of the layers of the past, she at least remembered who he was, but little else. 'I thought we could get together and relive old times', said Andrew to which Lucinda, a real estate agent who had learned how to sort buyers from losers, deftly but quickly scotched the idea. 'Wonderful idea, Andrew. Let me get back to you'.
The squalling baby in the background didn't do much for Andrew's hopefulness, but he sincerely believed he would hear from her.
Then there was Lucretia, a tarty Italian girl from the Bronx whose 'earthiness' had appealed to him in his Greenwich Village days. She was part goomba and part Columbia rebel, rampaging through her post-graduate years with abandon, and took Andrew in when he was on the rebound from dear Lucinda, benefitted equally from his generosity and his neediness, and then left him hanging after she moved in with one of Abbie Hoffman's Weathermen associates.
Yet the credulous, desirous Andrew never trailed her or wished her unwell. She had her reasons, he knew, and she had loved him, so she would remain in his memory if not in his bed.
He tracked her down to a town on the Jersey shore where she lived with the owner of South Jersey's biggest cement works. Amodio Brothers mixers were seen on just about every construction site north of Philadelphia, and thanks to a number of Man of the Year Articles in the Trenton Dispatch, Andrew was able to locate Lucretia.
She would remember him, Andrew knew. 'Ours was anything but an incidental affair'; but she answered the phone with the same querulous tone. 'Andrew who?' she said, but after the same reconstruction of the distant past, she still had no recollection of 'our days and nights on MacDougal Street'. The grinding sound of a cement mixer could be heard in the background. 'Tony's doing our basement', she explained and then with a quick goodbye hung up.
Tucson is not exactly a swinging town, but every town has its go-to places to meet women. At his age he would not be welcome at the Desert Lounge, the Cactus Bar at the Radisson, or Mountain Range; but the Museum of Western Art was more welcoming and culturally congenial. Widows, divorcees, and older single women still looking for romance were always found there. Times had changed and age changes everything, so Andrew as a lot clumsier than he was in the old days. Funny thing about it was, the women at the museum were not much different from his old flames - certainly as tired, settled into a modestly satisfactory and uncluttered life, and old - so it was time to settle.
He ended up with one of the women he had met in the Remington wing of the museum, all Indians on horseback and lassoing cowboys; and for a while they shared company at his and her places; but he faded into the woodwork, out of sight and radio contact, presumably married again. At least there's that. 'She's not my first love', said Phillip Roth's Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, 'and she's not my best love; but she certainly is my last love. Doesn't that count for something?'
One hopes that all ended well for Andrew Phipps. God knows, he earned it.
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