Knowing Jane

I never imagined being best friends with my ex-husband’s first wife. We bonded after I divorced him and moved back to Jacksonville from Chicago. To my amazement, Jane became a curative person in my life. Jane One (she was his first) shared openly with me (Jane Two), her successor, about the husband we had in common.

At first, Jane One and my stepdaughter Lauren lived near us in a beach town bordering the Atlantic Ocean. At the time, I felt grateful to have a good husband, the opposite of my gambling, womanizing father. I believed him when he told me I made him want to be a better person. And, I adored my stepdaughter, which is how I met Jane—years of waves and smiles at Lauren’s recitals, weekend hand-offs and pick-ups. At Lauren’s college graduation, I complimented Jane’s stylish blond wig, knowing she was recovering from breast cancer treatments.

Years moved my marriage from Florida to the Midwest, job to job, through sick parents and faded passions. Now, my husband read his mail while I told him about my day; he never talked about becoming a better person. One weekend morning though, with nothing to go on but a vibe, I walked into our master bath and asked if he was having an affair.

“I’ll tell you when I get out of the shower,” he said. The shower water banged my ears like hail as I dreaded his answers to my high-pitched questions: “When were you going to tell me? Who is it? Have you told anyone else? Are you in love with her?”

“She’s Asian,” he explained. He had fallen for a Thai waitress on a business trip to California. And, hadn’t I noticed he hadn’t been wearing his wedding ring? As he toweled off, I crumpled into tears and sank to the floor between the bathroom door and our bedroom.

He stepped around me and headed down the stairs saying he was going to his friend’s place for the day and night, to give me time to call “your people.” Oh, and that he wouldn’t be mowing the lawn this afternoon.

I filed for divorce the next morning.

As the divorce morphed into meetings with lawyers, accusations about my breaking the law by opening his mail and changing passwords on joint accounts, we continued to live under the same roof. He paraded around shirtless with his new thin body and whispered into his phone if I was nearby.

During those divorcing months, I missed hearing from Lauren, who lived in Japan at the time. Had she dropped me out of loyalty to her dad? Had she, too, fallen for the waitress?

Newly divorced and alone on my 60^th birthday, I spotted my ex in the produce section of my grocery store. My knees buckled as if I’d been kicked. There he was holding a baby carrier complete with an infant in a pink blanket.

 Turns out he married the waitress two days after our divorce and three days before the baby was born. I felt like a dupe in a National Enquirer story.

I emailed Lauren and told her I’d run into her dad and his little pink infant. “God, I can't imagine how horrible that was for you,” she said. “He told me not to tell you, so I didn’t talk to you because I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening.”

She knew I was moving back to Florida where I had family and friends, but then she sent me her mother’s contact information, with a note: “She feels a bond with you since you’ve both been burned by dad.”

I couldn’t think what else her mother and I had in common. She had been in a happy relationship for years, and I was newly alone, a failure with a propensity to blame myself for the breakup. If only I’d liked those interminable family reunions, enjoyed the screaming football games, confronted the cavern of distance between us. 

The husband connection between Jane and me bonded us together like twins. Despite my being a Southern Jew and MSNBC watcher and she an observant United Methodist who favored Fox News, she charmed me with her big laugh and directness.

She seemed to enjoy talking to me about our ex. I think she did it to make me feel better. Her swaggering knowhow about who he really was helped me feel less like a failed wife. He had maintained that Jane One was the one who cheated on him first, but she said it was just the opposite. She initiated one of our husband stories by saying, “I was with him ten years and never really connected with him in a conversation.” Relief flooded through me as I remembered all the silent dinners out.

When I told her a secret about his health because I thought Lauren needed to know and then felt guilty, she said, “Hey, don't sweat it. You’re a good, honest person and he cheats, lies, and cannot really connect with anyone.” Every time we met I found a way to seek her reassurance that our husband’s deception was not my fault. She never lost patience, and I lapped up her understanding like a thirsty kitten.

After a bout with what she thought was the flu, Jane was diagnosed again with cancer, and this time it had spread. When her doctor told her to quit her job, I wanted to be there for her. Since I worked nine to five, I wasn’t always available. She laughed when she said, “People are fighting over who takes me to chemo.”

“Then what can I do?”

“How about going to the movies with me on Friday nights when my boyfriend is working late?”

By this time Jane had short spiky white hair and wore little oval black-and-white framed glasses. She carried a big purse and we shared Jordan almonds from it during the movie. We talked in dimly lit movie lobbies, at sticky tables where we sat and drank tasteless tea. And we had our own silly world when it came to him. Once in a movie lobby I said, “We are sister wives.”

“Yeah,” she said, “Like the Mormons.”

We began to use pet names to address and sign off on our emails. She was Numero Uno and I, the Raven (nevermore, nevermore).We saw B-list movies like “Red,” “Case 39,” and “The Tourist.” Despite my self-imposed rule of never talking during a movie, when she asked about an actor, “Isn’t that so-and-so?” I didn’t mind.

Lauren came home from Japan after her mother’s diagnosis, and one night a few weeks later, she called me sobbing. She said her mother’s liver had too many tumors to count and the doctors weren’t sure there was anything more to do. Would I please come to the hospital? “She waited for me,” Lauren said a few short days later when they moved Jane into a hospice center.

Our ex was driving down from Chicago. I had not seen him since the baby sighting in the grocery store, but as I walked into the hospice center one morning, I saw him at the front desk. He looked at me quizzically. I knew he could see because I’d helped pay for his Lasik surgery years before. After a few indescribable moments, he came over and we hugged. It was both familiar and bizarre.

 “It’s so sad,” I said.

“I just got here,” he mentioned.

Jane One would have loved my story about his confusion when he saw me. I would tell her how I’d made sure I looked good and felt a little thrilled about surprising him. We would agree he was a good dad to drive straight from Illinois to Florida to support Lauren.

Lauren called me on Easter Sunday to tell me that Jane had “left us” and minutes later, I got a text from our ex telling me Jane had passed away. He didn’t get it that I might have known already, that his daughter and I had formed a new, even tighter bond through my close friendship with her mother.

I knew he wouldn’t be at her funeral service. But my former mother-in-law, who Jane One and I called Miss Smug, would be. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing her, I thought, as I drove along the two-lane blacktop to the funeral at the church where she had sung in the choir and been known to shout, “Preach it, pastor!” during sermons.

I sat alone in the pew behind the family. Behind me sat four women all dressed in white. They had been her “angels” the last few months and chose to dress accordingly. No one really knew that Jane One had been my angel. I thought about the thick glass cross with beveled edges I’d given her for Christmas. It spun vivid prisms of color as the light shined through it.

At the end of the funeral, there was a video tribute. “And now for something completely different,” read the slide. The video opened with Jane, snow-covered mountains behind her, wearing a wool hat and spinning around, as she trilled “The Lonely Goatherd” from The Sound of Music.

I laughed and applauded along with everyone at the image of my friend springing around like a snow sprite yodeling, kicking up the snow with her dancing feet. Now, instead of rolling my eyes at any mention of The Sound of Music as I always had, I would be reminded of Jane One, who, when I most needed a champion, intertwined her life with mine.