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Chapter 12: Washing Away

June 1993. Iowa City. The footbridge was along series of three-foot-wide wooden planks hanging off the side of a railroad bridge, with a three tier metal pipe railing to keep you from toppling into the river. According to the morning paper, the river was at 27.8 feet, six feet over flood stage. The day's rain-and there was rain almost every days that summer, sometimes two or three thunderstorms coming through at intervals like trains-hadn't started yet. But the wind had kicked up, and the clouds hung low and leaden. Orange plastic snow fence-recently strung across each end of the bridge by the city-snapped and billowed like a bedsheet. I clambered past a small white sign that, underneath loopy swirls of black spray paint, announced: "DANGER: PEDESTRIANS KEEP OFF BRIDGE." Trains weren't coming through anyway, because the tracks were submerged in different places all across Iowa. I put my foot on top of the fence and pushed it down to the rail, then swung my other leg over.

Normally, crossing that bridge, I'd have to stretch my neck over the pipe railing to see clear to the water below me. I'd lob rocks I'd scooped from the railroad bed, then peer over to watch them hit. The drop was thirty or forty feet, enough for rocks to gain speed and describe a gentle arc. The impact occurred so far down that I'd see the splash and then wait for the plunk to rise slowly after it. On this day, though, I could almost have dangled my feet in the river. It was running fast, foamy and muddy. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and felt barely suspended above the current. The bridge's piers seemed to have sunk up to their shoulders in the mud. It would have been a short jump-as stepping off, really, as into a pool-and I thought about it simply because it was right there, and because it felt almost as damp in the humid open air as it would have underwater.

I didn't have my usual handful of rocks. And I wasn't trespassing on the railroad company's property as a shortcut, my usual excuse. I was there that day with my old wedding ring, sitting as heavy as a stone in my jeans pocket.

I was throwing it into the river because Plan A had failed. Cold, unsentimental, Plan A was to sell the ring. I'd taken it to a jeweler's downtown, a silent fat man who lifted the ring from my hand without looking at me and scraped at the gold with a penknife. He tossed the ring into the metal tray of a scale, where it clanked around like a coin, then murmured an offer of twelve bucks. I had to ask him to repeat himself. The ring was only a quarter-inch gold band, but I'd expected at least to pay the phone bill with it.

Plan B hit me the moment I turned my back on the jeweler's fluorescent-lit cased. I walked the four sloping blocks west to the river as if I'd been going there all along. I was glad, I realized, that jeweler had been cheap. With one good heave into the river, I'd cleanse myself of the ring without soiling myself with cash. Cast deep into the water, the ring would never end up on someone else's finger or find its way back to me through the mysteriously circuitous routes that objects travel through the universe.

It was the summer of floods.  The Midwest's worst floods, meteorologists theorized, in five hundred years. It rained seven and a quarter inches in Iowa City in May, well above average but not enough for anyone to suspect what was to come. It rained a half-inch on June 2, three-quarters on the fifth, and inch and a half on the eighth, eighteenth, and nineteenth. A few rainy days in between made almost eleven inches total for the month of June, more than thirteen total in July, another dozen in August. By September 25, we’d had more rain than in any of the previous 121 full years.
The rain felt cleansing to me, and by mid-June I had come to dwell on everything's washing away. It was hard to avoid such thoughts, with water in the streets constantly ankle deep, and some neighborhoods in town open only to canoes and hip-waders. Maura's and my basement floor was bisected by currents that seeped in along one wall and swirled toward the drain along the other. And the TV news showed constant footage of big things-cars, cows, houses-that actually had washed away.

In the midst of it, I felt that the last vestiges of my old marriage had not yet completely washed away. Out on the bridge, I wanted to make my ex-marriage ancient. I wanted distance, in time and in space. Sometimes I felt it, sometimes not. With my marriage only three years in the past, what I still had was a relatively young divorce.

But those mazy lines of communication between us still existed. Enough to track each other's lives, but with time between those blips on our radar screens for eight years of marriage to fade like a book I hadn't read since I was fifteen.

I was striving to relegate my old marriage to history because that summer of floods was the summer of my marriage to Maura. I envied Deucalion and Pyrrha, the newlyweds in Ovid's Metamorphoses whose marriage gift from the gods is a flood that washes away everything in the known world except the boat in which they drift.

Ever since the divorce, the overlap of relationships had scared me, the possibility that some of the energy I wanted to give to Maura could be drawn off. People I know who've gotten married for the second time often have about them an air of concentration. I can see a determination right below the sheen of happiness, which proclaims that now they know what they are doing.

So why did I still have my old wedding ring? Three years, a spit of time, is nonetheless long enough to clear out all mementoes of a marriage-rings, books, corny poems, and all the other objects that have an intimacy only because you owned them together (a toaster, a hammer). Was I was hanger-on, trying to have it both ways? Was I afraid to make the clean break to which a divorce like mine-no kids, the two of us living a thousand miles apart-lent itself? Had I been waiting for this flood, trusting that some higher force than myself would tell me when the time was right to let go completely?

Sociologists have taken to calling them "starter marriages"-marriages that end in divorce by the time husband and wife reach thirty, with no children and little more joint property than a stereo. My friend Elizabeth, whose first marriage lasted five years during her twenties, simply calls it "the one that didn't take." At the end, Julie and I had shared three cats, a car with three years of payments left on it, books, a few secondhand pieces of furniture, and some well-used pots and pans.

Pitted against my family's forty- and fifty-year marriages, eight years is, anyway, succinct. But even a short marriage possesses the property of inertia. Like eating, giving birth, picking at a cracked fingernail, marriage is harder to stop than to start.  For the term to be exact, a "starter marriage" would cut itself off like an ignition.  People would move out of them the way they move out of starter homes. No one takes the shutters and doorknobs from their first home with them to their second.

I'd found the ring in a box in the hall closet, a few days after Maura and I got back from our honeymoon. (We went to Seattle, which was strangely sunnier than Iowa.) I tried to force myself to feel surprise when I discovered it there, but in truth I'd never really forgotten its presence. I'd stopped thinking about it, the way you stop thinking about a coat you haven't worn in years but never gave away. I was going through the box looking for something else-a snapshot, a notebook, something innocuous. It was a mishmash box that I'd hefted from the closet to the dining room table and was picking though immunization certificates, birthday cards, and expired passports. On the bottom, alongside some Kennedy half-dollars my grandfather had given me twenty years before, lay the ring.

It hadn't moved an inch, hadn't tarnished, hadn't lost any of its scratches. It was only thicker than I'd remembered. I'd expected to find a ring as thin as gold leaf, as if I were remembering only the impalpable dissolution it had come to stand for rather than its initial weighty reality. But there it was. Ample.

How did this particular ring hang on to the soft flesh below my knuckle? I rolled it between my right thumb and index finger, measured its eye against the tip of my left index finger, tracing its circumference. In Jewish weddings it is traditional for the bride to slip a ring onto the tip of the groom's index finger while she recites her vows, and for the groom to do likewise, an allusion to the belief that a vein runs from the index finger straight to the heart. Slipping this ring on, I thought, would have felt like adultery—not a sensation I wanted two weeks into my new marriage. I bounced it in the palm of my right hand, weighing it, wondering what the price of gold was that day.

Out on the footbridge, what I wondered was how far the river would take it. As furiously as the water was running, I could easily imagine the ring being washed quickly over the ten-foot dam a half-mile downstream. If the current held and the ring didn't lodge in the muddy bottom, it could even be swept past the flooded cornfields of southeastern Iowa, sixty miles into the engorged Mississippi, picking up steam down through St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans-into the Gulf of Mexico.

Or it could get lodged in a crevice south of town. Or in the sandbags that volunteers were stacking by a riverside trailer court. But that would be okay. I only wanted the ring-the instrument of this ritual-to suffer its own blows.

The next thunderstorm was bearing in from my right-as oppressive as the dozens preceding it. People were scurrying down the sidewalks on the riverbanks. Some of them glanced over at me and then at the bright orange snow fence, seeming to wonder how I'd gotten out on the bridge. I was leaning forward casually on the railing, the fingers of my hand that didn’t hold the ring wrapped around the top bar. I looked nothing like someone who might be planning to jump to his death. And I tried to look nothing like someone who might be planning to perform a ritual. I adopted the guileless expression of a man who happened to find himself out on a railroad bridge in an approaching storm and was thinking through his options. But I didn't want to perform casually, didn't want my ceremonial casting off of the ring to be as perfunctory as flicking away a cigarette butt. I was making up the ritual as I went along, feeling my way into the realms of what final thing I needed this ring to give me.

In nonflood years, the Iowa River is often nearly stagnant. In the last few years of our marriage, I'd been moving away from Julie with the same sort of slowness. Our lives had diverged in ways I couldn't see at the time, and had a hard time pinpointing even those few years later. Maybe it would have been cleaner, easier, with screaming fights, shrill markers on our timeline. But I doubted that even such drama could guarantee you control over the drift of your marriage.

Instead of fighting outright, Julie and I had shared deeply submerged dissatisfactions. Or we'd each come to have our own. We'd floated apart, steered in different directions, not realizing for the longest time that we'd been cutting new banks, that the one river we'd both been navigating had become two. The body of land that had come between us kept getting wider and wider. A glance at any atlas shows that a river that splits rarely comes back together. The two streams empty into different parts of the ocean, or end mysteriously in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles apart.

But in a divorce, you're supposed to despise each other. People expect you to be as passionate in your revulsion from each other as you were, in the now inconceivable beginning, in your attraction. You are supposed to blow up, storm out, camp on the couches of friends or relatives; make angry lists of who gave you the coffeemaker, the blender that still works but has a handle that needs to be glued back together. It is your duty to rifle the shelves at night and write your name in your future ex's books so you can claim them as your own. It's all part of the lore, the story our culture has created around the cycles of romance. Like everything linear and predictable, there is nothing more confining.

From the moment I'd first imagined myself as divorced (was it way back during Julie's first year of grad school?), I planned to be a good ex-staying above the frays that snared other couples. I knew even then that I wouldn't want a "typical" divorce any more than I’d wanted a "typical" marriage. I'd wavered from that resolution in the last moments, when the imagination of divorce inched closer and closer to reality. Then Julie had called me to my better senses. "Let's make it nice." And so our divorce had become as amicable as a graduation.
Maybe my new marriage-this much more satisfying and balanced relationship-was the catalyst for the anger that finally, like a drowned body broken free from the bottom of a weedy lake, rose to the surface. And that anger had hung on; it was much slower to disappear than my sadness had been. Even in the first summer of my new marriage, I recalled my old one and wanted-in ways I never had while Julie was my wife-nothing more than to throw plates against a kitchen wall. My desire was frustrated, because the marriage seemed so removed, the grief therefore so inappropriate. Occasionally, when I got a letter from Julie, I threw that, but watching it flutter to the carpet only dissatisfied me more.

Out on that footbridge, though, I could finally define my anger. It came from having to feel the disappointment and muddiness of being an ex-husband, rather than simply the joy of being a new one. I reared back and slung the ring as far downstream as I could. I saw it sail through the mist. The rapids overwhelmed its tiny splash and the water's roar drowned out it plunk. I couldn't tell exactly where it hit.

How I wanted the moment to be dramatic! The weather was playing its part-raindrops had started to fall, thunder rumbled from the other side of the buildings on the riverbank. And I so much believed that witnessing the ring's actual submersion would ease some enmity inside me. I rested both empty hands on the rail, stared hard at the water.

The real plunk was inaudible. But something metaphoric rose from the physical act of throwing the ring. The realization was in my gut, and it held not so much its own drama as its own surprise. The river hurtled southward and the wind wailed from the west, and I realized this: It wasn't drama I wanted, but nothing. I wanted the ring to become as meaningless as a rock. I wanted not only to complete my divorce from Julie but to feel as if our marriage had never happened. I wanted the "null and void" that the Catholic church had already presumed to bestow upon me so that Maura and I could get married. But I wanted it from the inside.
I had a professor at the time, Carl, who told me that when he got divorced, in 1964, he received one piece of advice from a man who was ten years into his own divorce: "He said, 'Carl, you'll know you're better when you never think about your first marriage at all, when it never enters your mind.'" Carl laughed, a resonant bark. "Ha!"

"Did you try it?" I asked him.

It wasn't his style, not his way to cut connections so bloodlessly, he said. "But," he said, bunching his forehead in thought over the struggle, "in 1964, the act of forgetting made a lot of sense."

In 1993 it enticed me too. Before me was my new marriage to Maura, and I wanted to be open to the simplicity of one love, the cleanliness of my married life to come. I was hoping that unburdening myself of the ring would create a vacuum to be filled emotionally, with a love and intimacy. On the other hand, there was Ovid. After the flood came and the newlyweds were set adrift, Deucalion "Looked out on silent miles of ebbing water. He wept, called to his wife.  'Dear sister, friend, O last of women, look at loneliness...'"
"Ha!" I barked. I'd felt that plunk in my gut, but around it bubbled up a suspicion that it was crazy, useless, selfish to wish that my first marriage could suddenly mean less then than it ever had. How do you rid yourself of your history? What is it that Carl's friend was getting "better" from? Why shouldn't you live a divorce as deeply as you're supposed to live a marriage? And is simplicity even something to be desired? I never strove for it in my first marriage. Isn't it really the complexities and layers that satisfy us, make us feel human?

Past the red-brick power plant downriver on the left, the water curved into a line of swaying trees. I peered at the point where it disappeared, where it rushed around its turn and headed for the Mississippi. There was a churning in the air, just as much as under water. Feeling it, I let myself think that one way to live in the joy and contentment of my new marriage was to let the best memories of my old marriage wash not away from me but over me.