Clogs and Leaks
My Ex-Husband offered to fix my sink—it wasn’t draining. He’s handy like that. Marry a rich man or a handy one. It’s a bonus if, post-divorce, Mr. Fix-It still offers to batten down the hatches, look at your computer, set up your speakers.
So, he’s under my sink, butt crack peeking out from his jeans, giving me a sliver of hope he’ll be able to solve the clog. He loves tools, so he happens to have a snake—a winding metal tool that inches its way through your pipes, searching for a problem.
He and I separated for the second time this January. There’s a giddiness to him; to both of us. We’re thinking of how we got back together after a nasty, cunt-calling, demented divorce. We’d been apart for three years when I stopped by one afternoon to bring our six-year-old son his forgotten stuffed monkey.
Ex was outside hammering enormous nails into knotty pine, sweating in a drenched black tee. I watched him. The guy I was dating at the time couldn’t find the pilot light in his oven or unhook my bra. Do you blame me for liking a man who’s a little bit handy? I dumped the boyfriend and reconciled with Ex. I forgave him for looking at Big_Titty.com a week after my double mastectomy, and he forgave me for never recovering my pre-cancer sex drive. We dated for nine years after that reunion—six years longer than we’d been married. But this time, he lived down the street from me: the only way to make it work with your ex-husband-turned-boyfriend.
Could we fix it this time, again? As he went to unscrew the pipe, it crumbled. It must have been corroding from the inside for years. I’m sure the Drano I fed it last week didn’t help. But he wasn’t giving up. This was nothing a short trip to the hardware store couldn’t fix.
Several tense hours later, he filled the sink. I pulled the plug, and as he crouched near the pipes, water blasted from every direction like a Brooklyn fire hydrant on a summer day.
Our teenage son was standing by with a bucket, which was a bit of a shock; he’d stopped speaking to his dad the day Ex and I split for the second time. On that morning, I’d found my boy distraught in bed with his shoes on. I asked if he was O.K. He stood up, paced, crashed his hand against the wall, and screamed, “Dad is addicted to pills, he’s a pornographer, and he’s cheating on you!” I almost laughed until I saw the expression on his face. In addition to bottles of painkillers, he’d found his dad’s hidden world on a misplaced hard drive in the garage: photos of lanky ladies spread-eagled on the sofa, butts in the air on the bed, naked women caressing tumescent vegetables, a blond who left lipstick where daddy’s boxers should’ve been, hundreds of naughty photos. Teenagers have their vices, but are unsuspecting of their parents. Naked women gyrating on the piano where he was forced to practice every day pretzeled his reality.
I drove to Ex’s house for an old-fashioned confrontation. Although we never moved back in together, we weren’t in an open relationship.
When I arrived and presented him with the evidence, Ex laughed. “Those pills were leftovers from my root canal and shoulder surgery.” But when pressed about his photography project, he looked like someone told him to think fast after hitting him in the face with a basketball.
My mom said I got an e-ticket out of the relationship, and in a lot of ways, she was right. But after being on a roller coaster with someone for seventeen years, it wasn’t so easy to get off. My two-time Ex stood up in my kitchen and hoisted his jeans. If we could just fix this sink, we could fix everything. But water was pouring in from new cracks. We were no longer bubbleheaded, no longer hopeful.
