Divorcing and One Fine Day
Oh hello
I’m sitting under a tree with Sam. He thinks it’s oak. All I can offer is that it’s big and the roots are stretching out of the ground and pressing against my calf. Sam is slicing an apple to have with cheese. He doesn’t moisturise his hands and there’s a patina of grease under his nails. I’m using a stick to trace x’s into the dirt. Sam is looking for love, he tells me. Officially, he looks up from the apple, I am interested now in repetition. Newness is a cult! I want to learn what repetition with another feels like (he suggests: water droplets on your back in the shower? zipping up an old hoodie? your favourite tv show’s theme song?). Right now who he is currently seeing has this tsk tsk verbal tic that Sam can’t stand. Sam says I like his spirit but the tsk thing reminds me of something my dad might do at dinner, and I’m not sure I want to repeat that. Last night, Sam and I went to dinner at Eva’s. There are apples hanging from the ceiling, which were supposed to be decorative and frilly, but come across as more ‘goth girl’ less ‘tips to hosting from a London It Girl’ than Eva, the It girl, intended. It seems, I tell Sam, that Eva absolutely loves dill.
Sam and I don’t really belong at this dinner. It feels like we were invited simply to queer the table, like gay decorations at a world fair. But the fish is delicious and there is an apple pie that performs a faux nostalgia. I talk to a woman next to me called like Cristabel or Danny who keeps on biting her lip like a Hollywood Star and humming along to the background music. But she says eww when I described the new perfume I was working on so I don’t think the friendship will go very far. She doesn’t ‘get me’. I’m interested, I tell her, in the return to clean scents, the revival of CK One and, as a nod to that, I’m making a perfume that smells like the disposable blue gloves that dentists wear, that hint of talcum powder, that blush of bleach, and mixing that with a floral iris blossom. The perfume screams, I say to her as she unbites her lip and begins to simply frown shocked, the perfume absolutely yells safety, freshness. It is awake! Cristabel or Danny reaches over to me. She changes the subject and says, to level with me, perhaps, or simply because she needs to get it off her chest: I feel a bit lost in the city and I’m not sure if I need to quit my job, move to the countryside, cut my hair or dump my boyfriend, gesturing at a man who is pulling down with his teeth one of the apples hanging from the ceiling. Cristabel or Danny blushes. She waits for an answer, her lip returning to its bitten position.
This week I’m writing about Susan Taubes’ lyrical and frenzied novel Divorcing and the 1996 George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer classic One Fine Day.
Divorcing (1969) by Susan Taubes
A woman opens her eyes, is possibly awake, is maybe in Paris, or in a dream, or in fact dead. This woman, Sophie Blind, moves through her life, writing a novel apparently, but not one that we see much of, or much work done on. She is in Paris, New York, Hungary. With her children, alone, divorced, married. Divorcing begins and ends with Sophie yet does not allow her the introspection or freedom that a reader would expect from a novel that opens with blunt solipsism: “She opens her eyes …”
Sophie is brilliant. She is sick of her husband Ezra. She wants a divorce. She raises her children. She has affairs. She returns to Budapest where she left as a child, Jewish, before World War 2. Without her, the lyrical pace and narrative maze would make a reader struggle, impatient with things to happen and for them to make sense. But Sophie we cling to, hoping for a resolution, aware dimly that we are not allowed it. Early on, Sophie looks at her lover and is “astonished by the phrase” ‘... that happiness, so improbable, we call it love …’ Sophie remains throughout Divorcing restless for happiness and satisfaction, as improbable as it may be.
Susan Taubes, the Hungarian American author, wrote Divorcing in 1969 and there is, in its ethos, a 1960s anxious preoccupation with Sophie’s freedom and the bigness of the world she occupies. It is about the frailty of life, reality, and our movement in it. In Divorcing, Sophie finds herself bundled up in history, in divorce, in motherhood, in daughterhood, always seeking something else than the simple mimicry of those roles. She explains to her son Joshua that growing up with the war “The things that had happened and that after they happened everything could just go on as before … it made one’s personal future somehow irrelevant”.
Late in the novel Sophie, as a child, is talking to her dad, a psychoanalyst, about a particular patient. This woman, her father said, was incurable. She entered his office and talked about her day concluding, “and it goes on and on and something”. It is the “and something” that her father couldn’t understand but also what moves Sophie, as a curious child in her dad’s office. And it is what many of us then and now, use to grapple with the going on and on of our flimsy lives. The possibility, I think, of “and something” to open our eyes to.
One Fine Day (1996) by Michael Hoffman
We all come to relationships with children and trench coats. One Fine Day like Divorcing places its leads entangled in relationships. Melanie, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, is single and looking after, that one fine day, her son Sammy. George Clooney, as Jack, is single and looking after his daughter Maggie. Jack causes Maggie and Sammy to miss their school trip. Sammy has to look after the class goldfish. Melanie who works in planning, has a big presentation that day that would allow her to smash the glass ceiling. Jack, a roguish journalist with an unflappable nose for the truth needs to get a mob wife to come forward in order to save his story. Together, and much to Melanie’s initial frustration, Jack and Melanie must share the responsibility of looking after their children together. Love, thank god, ensues.
This is a movie to watch on the couch on a rainy autumnal day like today, and marvel at the outfits. (Clooney with a trailing trench, Pfeiffer with her son’s dinosaur t-shirt under a waistcoat). But it’s also a gorgeous portrayal of the difficulties of finding love and relationships as you get older. Melanie and Jack have their careers, their children, their kids’ football games, their ex’s, their therapy-speak responses to anything the other says. Life for them, like us, is harder to move around flirtatiously with another. Neither are prepared to drop it all. But both, still, want, maddeningly, life and love, in a 90s film trailer voice, without compromise. Is there a kiss? I won’t tell. But Sammy and Maggie watch Wizard of Oz. Jack sits on the couch tired at Melanie’s in his pyjamas. Melanie is getting ready to see him.
Love
Anne