Wiley met his first wife, Kate, because her younger brother had been a classmate of Wiley’s at Luke’s Mount and Harvard. The brother and Wiley weren’t really close, but found themselves frequently at the same parties, whether in New York or Cambridge, and once at a three-day wedding extravaganza in Charlottesville, where Kate also showed up, like Wiley, unattached.
In the manner of many very rich young women who might be called striking but never pretty, she projected confidence that any man would be glad to have her, but she was not about to have any man. Her waist-length Rapunzel hair seemed an invitation, but her raptor eyes, a warning.
Tall and stiff, with a slight forward tilt from the waist, she had a direct way of making outrageous statements, saying things nobody else would dare. At the beginning Wiley took it for a free-spirited outspokenness and it swept him away. Later he found it to be an underailable intensity with nothing guiding it but a profound belief in the rectitude of her opinions. Her favorite conversational word was “literally.” She pronounced it in a somewhat British style—“LITT-trull-lee”—and invariably misused it: “I told your boss he had made you his Filipino houseboy at Magazine, litt-trull-lee”; “I had to tell your cousin her house is a pigsty, litt-trull-lee”; and the words that had so amused and bewitched him on their second day in Charlottesville: “My brother tells me you have a quite normal-sized penis. That would make it quite large, litt-trull-lee.” She patted his neck. “Like your head.”
A courtship developed, which sent Wiley almost every weekend down and back to Delaware where he became much in demand as a bridge, scrabble, and canasta partner for Kate’s mother, who refused to play with her games-challenged husband. The drives got drearier month by month. Wiley blamed the sameness of the New Jersey landscape.
Her family money was connected to the du Ponts, and their marriage took place in Greenville two years later. Kate planned the event to outshine the Charlottesville blast, and it did. She basked in the kudos for weeks.
The fairy-tale launching, however, did not bring smooth sailing for the young couple. Before long Kate discovered that the sympathy and respect she had deserved for marrying the wild (but gifted) little fellow and for becoming at so young an age a matron with her own residence in Manhattan’s fashionable East Sixties did not materialize. The injustice at first surprised and saddened her, then gave her a chronic sense of unease.
She became inconsolable and, naturally, depressed. About that time, in the seventh year of their marriage (the clichéd timing was not lost on him), Wiley began to drink more heavily than ever and had his first extramarital affair. Even then, he told his skeptical therapist Adam years later, he rejected Kate’s ill humor as cause and his liaison with a Magazine temp as effect. The truth was, he would say, everybody at Magazine seemed to be having more sex than he was and enjoying it one hell of a lot more. And, good lord, everyone in America was having sex everywhere, at rock concerts; in the toilets of 707s; in cubicles, on conference tables, on executives’ couches, in janitors’ closets; under blankets (or nothing at all) in Central Park; in dorm rooms all over the country. So he followed the crowd and became an enthusiastic convert to the new morality.
He felt guilty he could not help her, pity for her unhappiness, impotence that there seemed nothing he could do, so when she suggested a baby, he assented at once. Until then, the idea of children seemed to offend her. Her mother had pronounced that the real curse of womanhood was not menstruation, but pregnancy, and Kate had adopted that view as an article of living faith. As for Wiley at 30, he rarely thought about children: In general he liked them, but he could not imagine changing a shitted diaper.
They agreed to abandon all methods of birth control, which they had always practiced with fail-safe redundancy, and so it was that one Saturday morning, the weekend after Kate’s trip to the gynecologist for removal of her coil, they commenced the fertilization effort. “Well,” she said, “I hope your penis and sperm produce healthy, good-sized children, now that I’ve burned all my vagina bridges, litt-trull-lee.”
Kate’s getting pregnant proved quick and simple; but having a child was not the answer: not for Kate’s unhappiness, not for their marriage. She hated her pregnancy and suffered many ills and discomforts. She bore fraternal twins, Anna and Charles, and, she would announce at parties, she prayed every night to a loving God to hasten the day the two babies could go to the bathroom, eat, and dress unassisted.
The last year they lived together, they spoke little. The twins were turning seven. Kate seemed ready to have their marriage just the way it was for the rest of their lives; but Wiley was finding the careless efficiency of it unbearable. One night when she came home late from a bridge tournament at the Harvard Club, he was waiting for her. Despite the amount he had drunk, his mind was clear and his voice steady. In a toneless monologue—“I want to tell you everything, Kate”—he related his every infidelity of the past eight years. It was as if she had been waiting for his confession, though that was not what it was, Wiley knew. It was a murder weapon.
“I could kill you, right here, right now, you little horny bastard dwarf!” At her waist, her hands clawed at each other. She sat rigid in the living room while he packed a bag in the bedroom. He could not believe the relief flooding through him. He caught a cab going down Park and checked into the Harvard Club. The next day, lawyers started billing.
She went for all joint property. All of it was hers, anyway, she had paid for it, she said from her end of the conference table. Her lawyer—did he consciously ape the Kennedys?—floated a hand to her arm and said he would do the speaking from now on, if she, uh, didn’t mind. (Yes, right down to the boyish stammer.) First, Mrs. Wiley sought no alimony.
“Means you pay all the taxes,” his lawyer breathed in Wiley’s ear.
For child support her demand was half his gross income, including bonuses. That would come nowhere near half covering expenses (“means no tax breaks whatsoever for you,” his lawyer whispered), her lawyer said; but Mrs. Wiley didn’t want to be vindictive. Kate nodded agreement. Wiley said he had to review the figures but he thought that would be possible. His lawyer looked at him as if he had lost his mind and said, “We’re here to listen. Only. Continue.”
As for child custody, Mrs. Wiley had the house, the professional help, and the “flexible hours,” as her lawyer put it, and in the children’s best interests, they shouldn’t be shuttled around unnecessarily. After all, the little ones’ lives were already complicated. In the best interests of all, Kate’s lawyer proposed that Wiley should have one visitation per month, allowing him to, say, take the children for a walk in the park or to a suitable movie.
Listening to the Kennedyesque lawyer—were broad diagonal yellow-and-black stripes one of this year’s anointed power ties?—pontificate on the needs of Charlie and Anna, Wiley was certain Kate would tire of her role as ever-vigilant she-mother. For the sake of getting out of here—a drink would go down really well—he might just as well let her vent her anger, and let time and Kate’s attention span bring him a better deal.
“Well,” Wiley said. “One afternoon a month is much less than I would consider ideal. Pretty Draconian. But . . . .”
At that, his lawyer grabbed his arm and threw a radiant smile down the table: “My client and I would like to conference. Outside.” She propelled him into the hall.
“Wiley—Edgar, for sweet Christ’s sake,” her whisper sounded like a sanding machine.
“Do me a favor and don’t humiliate yourself and me. Show some fucking fight, a little self respect, and shut up.”
“How about a drink when we’re done, Brenda? I’ll tell you what I’m up to.” He was glad he had asked a twice-divorced colleague at Magazine about cheap lawyers. “Two choices,” the fellow said, “inexperienced or incompetent.” Wiley chose the former.
“Mary, mother of Jesus.” Her hands batted her head on both sides. “What else do I have to lose? Just don’t open your mouth in there, okay?”
After five margaritas (her favorite) in the Blue Room, Wiley suggested dinner in the Algonquin dining room. It seemed to him that she was beginning to see the wisdom of his strategy with Kate after she had told him why she wasn’t working for a prestigious Manhattan law firm. A woman? And not only a woman, but a little woman? And not only a little woman, but a little Catholic woman from Staten Island with a law degree from Fordham? Are you kidding?
When he awoke, every light ablaze in what must have been the hotel’s worst room, on an airshaft on the second floor over the kitchen, she was dressed and putting on make-up out of her purse. “Just remember, Edgar, if you want to get completely fucked over by your wife and JFK, Ms. Rafferty’s not your girl.” She snapped her purse and smoothed her suit. “I can get you somebody else.” She gave his bare rump a pat and stepped to the door and unbolted it. “Ta ta,” she said, and left.
Brenda couldn’t do much, but she did get Wiley two weekends a month, and 75 percent of his bonuses. They continued to see each other off and on for two or three months, all their dates modeled on their first (with some changes in venue), until she told him he drank too much and made her drink too much, and therefore she couldn’t go out with him any more. He would miss her, but he was on a hot streak, both with women and his job at Magazine, where there was talk of his promotion to assistant managing editor. As long as his work held up, who was going to give a damn about his drinking?
For Kate and her pompadoured, chisel-chinned attorney, things worked out better romantically. Through a messy divorce, he had recently lost not only his incredibly swift Italian-built catamaran, his pride and joy, but also the yacht-club berth that went with it. Left with virtually no place to sail, and absolutely nothing to sail with, he was in despair until Wiley vs. Wiley fell into his lap. Their shared passion for water drew him to Kate, and after they were married (“storybook wedding,” reported an old, sour friend), they purchased a handsome summer cottage across from Newport at Short Point, “you know, where we can really do our boats,” and a charming early 19th-century house in Greenwich Village, a much superior address now that the upper East Side had become “litt-trull-lee, a Brooklyn slum.”
Kate’s husband did not impress his stepchildren. “He never says anything to us, Dad,” Charlie said. “All he does is go to his office and sail his boats,” Anna said. “Sailing is no fun. It’s stupid. Newport is stupid,” they both said. He patted their shoulders.
“And he makes us refill and rotate the ice trays. Even if they’re full of ice.”
“So the ice won’t get smelly. Does ice smell, Daddy?”
“ ‘Stale Ice Bad Odor,’ he says. “ ‘Easy to remember, children. S-I-B-O. SIBO.’”
“Mom agrees with him.”
“It’s the only thing he ever asks us to do, she says. Litt-trull-lee.”
“Dad?”
E.H. Harvey Jr. was born in Delaware and chooses to live in Cranston, Rhode island, illustrating his passion for lost causes. He worked, mainly as an editor and writer, in New York for many years, earning practically no money and enjoying it less. Today finds him completing a mammoth blockbuster novel, "Wiley at the Gates of Paradise," whose hero is a five-foot-tall septuagenarian and which includes among its characters Teddy Roosevelt, the serial divorcee Madam America, Scott Joplin, two Nobel prize winners (one senile), a black behemoth/polymath named Roosevelt Joplin McWashington, the Native American seeress Sun Feather, and many, many others, all seamlessly woven into an edge-of-your-chair plot, spanning more than a century, that makes the head spin with delight. Demand its publication: Talk it up, fill your blog with it, and swear on your grandmother's name you'll buy one or more.