Page 420 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
certainly not on my mind at my Dreamwold surprise party in Novem- ber 1984. Nor could divorce have been on my mind when, during Presidents’ Week in February 1985, we had many a laugh skiing with Rebecca and Marcel Margulies and the children at Killington.
(It should be noted for posterity that I had two major accomplish- ments during that vacation, neither of which bears the slightest relationship to the subject matter of this chapter: First, Marcel and I, after hours of planning, contrived to ski down each and every one of the mountain’s more than one hundred trails, thereby becoming proud members of the Killington Trail Masters Club. [It should also be noted for posterity that my first skiing lesson—which was more like a getting- up-and-brushing-the-snow-off lesson—had taken place at Killington on the same day that Danny, then seven, learned to ski.] Second, I taught Rebecca’s nephew, Matthew Zames, how to play poker; as of this writ- ing, Matthew is chief operating officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and is thought by many financial experts to be first in line to replace Jamie Dimon as chief executive officer.)
But, in retrospect, divorce should have been on my mind.
I must have been in denial. Our personalities no longer meshed; we had grown apart. There was undoubtedly tension in the marriage before that horrible day in January 1983, but I thought the tension, and what I perceived to be the distance between us, to be transient and, in any event, to be what marriage, certainly a marriage of many years, was about. We didn’t really talk, and we weren’t really very affectionate (Phyllis never had been demonstrative), but those problems just didn’t seem to be evidence of an infected core.
Of course, from Phyllis’s point of view (but I cannot be sure of her point of view, because I don’t recall her really expressing it), I must have had many negative characteristics in addition to what I’m sure she detected as my negative reactions to some family social commitments and her involvement with the synagogue and the rabbi. I believe that what I see as my sense of humor just didn’t work for her, but perhaps this was merely evidence of her growing disaffection with me. I had had episodes of depression, which had to have been hard for her; my irrever-
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