JACK’S STORY

On the night of their anniversary, Jack and Leigh Anne did what they had done at the end of each of the previous 16 years of their marriage. They went to an expensive restaurant and ordered a bottle of wine that had been bottled the year they first met. They both always said that 1959 was a good year for two things: wine and relationships. Jack loved to have an expensive evening once in a while, even if it did knock a sizable dent in Leigh Anne’s household allowance. Tonight, of course, would be more special than the previous 16 anniversary dinners. Jack had been promising himself for quite a while that tonight he would be honest with Leigh Anne. And with himself.

“Honey,” he told Leigh Anne after they had raised their glasses across a candlelit table at Old Warsaw, “I’ve been able to save up a good bit of money. And I think we should do something really special with it. Maybe a trip to Europe.”

Jack gazed down at his glass as he spoke.

“Of course,a trip to Europe is a temporary extravagance. Two weeks, you’re home and the money is gone. All that would be left are a few rolls of film we’ll never remember to get developed.

“Then again,” Jack said, slowly looking up from the table, “maybe we could invest in something that would last forever.”

Jack looked directly into Leigh Anne’s eyes.

“Like a divorce.”

Jack didn’t expect Leigh Anne to laugh at his little joke. But he didn’t quite expect the reaction he got.

Leigh Anne smiled and raised her glass to toast him.

“Jack, darling,” she said. “I think that’s the best investment we could possibly make.”

So the decision was made. For the rest of the evening, they swilled down the Hen-nesey VSOP Cognac, toasted each other lavishly, and went home and made love for the last time.

The next morning, Jack broke the news to the two kids. “You know, Mom and Dad haven’t been getting along so well lately, so I’m moving out. I’m moving into an apartment.”

His eight-year-old son looked at him impassively. “Does it have a pool?” the boy asked.

The older child, the daughter, bit her bottom lip, fled to her room, and slammed the door.

The decision to split up hadn’t just suddenly materialized overnight.

They’d eloped in college. Leigh Anne’s mother had something better in mind for her daughter than Jack, who was broke. Her daughter was sorority favorite and easily pretty enough to land a rich kid.

When Leigh Anne’s mother learned that her daughter and Jack had driven up to Miami, Oklahoma, in his ’55 Chevy to get hitched, she locked herself in the bathroom and cried for four days.

Leigh Anne quit school and went to work as a receptionist in a dentist’s office. Jack struggled to finish school and worked as a night janitor in a four-story office building on Stemmons. Within a year, they were blessed with the arrival of their first child.

Jack insisted they name the baby Caroline. Leigh Anne didn’t realize it, but Jack was naming his daughter after the girl who sat in front of him in English class. He liked the girl a lot better than he liked the name.

Jack finally graduated from SMU, although it took him nine semesters and three summers to do it. And he was able to secure a job in what he felt would be his field: advertising.

His boss liked his work as a copywriter. Jack flashed occasional spurts of brilliance that nobody.. .not Jack, not Leigh Anne, and certainly not Leigh Anne’s parents … had ever realized were there.

As Jack grew more confident of his status in the business, he started taking occasional five-scotch lunches. He devoted at least one hour a day to sweet-talking the boss’s secretary.

Still, it wasn’t until after eight years that some cracks materialized in the sidewalk.

The bickering started in earnest after Leigh Anne joined the Junior League. Jack had a low tolerance for boredom, and dreaded the Junior League parties. He found most of the women painfully straight.

“What gives you the right to say what I do with my life?” Leigh Anne demanded one night.

Jack just stared at her.

Jack didn’t have the guts to move out, and Leigh Anne didn’t have the heart to kick him out.

Three mornings a week, Leigh Anne would put on her gray uniform and do volunteer work at the hospital. She loved doing that. She had a warmth of personality that the nurses and patients at the hospital liked. She was wanted there and she could tell. Since she really didn’t have a career, the volunteer work was the only source of fulfillment in her life, other than Jack and the kids.

One morning, as she was leaving for the hospital, Jack, who was hung over, suggested, “As long as you dress up like a waitress, why don’t you just be one? At least that way you could bring in a few extra dollars.”

In 1972, Leigh Anne was elected president of the Junior League. She also acquired a boyfriend.

Jack started smoking dope and voted for McGovern. By the mid-Seventies he wore his hair in a pony tail. The people in the office weren’t overjoyed, but Jack didn’t care. He was the best writer there.

Jack decided to wait out Leigh Anne’s hot affair, so he drew closer to the kids. Despite his reputation for being a rotten husband, his friends -even Leigh Anne’s friends -regarded him as an excellent father.

Jack took the kids to their favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner one night. Leigh Anne said she was “shopping” and would meet them there at 6:30. She never showed. Jack sat there, swilling down Dos Equis for two hours before it dawned on him that he’d actually been stood up. “That does it,” he muttered. “I’m pullin’ out of this lousy marriage.”

Jack’s son looked at him with tears in his eyes and said, “You mean, we won’t always be a family?”

It was the most heartbreaking moment of Jack’s life -one that would haunt him for years.

But it wouldn’t stop the divorce.

By the evening of their 16th anniversary he’d made up his mind to end it. He didn’t quite feel exhilarated, but he certainly was relieved.

But if the poor fool had realized where the pathway of divorce would lead him over the next three or so years, he wouldn’t have been so blissfully detached.

During all their years together, Leigh Anne had handled the checkbook and kept the finances nicely in order. Leigh Anne had done all the laundry and all the cooking and all the housekeeping. Jack hadn’t lifted a finger in the house in 17 years and was pitilully unprepared for the role of the carefree bachelor.

He also did something that was supremely stupid: After all the arguing, he agreed to sign all the assets over to Leigh Anne, assume all the debts, and fork over about 70 per cent of his salary to her in the form of child support. He figured he could make that up by doing freelance work on the side. He didn’t even hire a lawyer.

The first thing he did was move into a one-bedroom, furnished apartment on Throckmorton down off Cedar Springs. That summer the streetwalkers were in full flower; almost everyone in the building was a professional woman.

Every night, Jack would drift off to sleep to the gentle rhythms of sirens and breaking glass. The only good thing about his little dump was the sound system, which came blaring in from the apartment next door. “It’s the kind of deal where you pound on the walls when you want them to turn it up,” he told a friend.

Jack was just about the only person who thought the place was funny. Leigh Anne refused to let him take the kids there; Jack and the kids spent their weekend visitations at a motel.

Those first weekends with the kids were uneasy at best, and Jack found himself devoting many long hours to the IHOP and the Mesquite rodeo.

Something bothered Jack about his new life-style even more than the sirens: He was lonely. Where, all of a sudden, were all those chicks who seemed to be in such ready supply when he was married? What happened to them?

Finally, Jack, a rookie at the single man’s game, arranged a date with a woman who had been the girl friend of one of Jack’s clients a few years ago.

When he called her, she couldn’t remember who he was, but she agreed to go out with him anyway. Jack picked her up and was alarmed to discover that she had gained about 15 pounds.

Jack was still green enough to haul her to an expensive restaurant and drop a bundle on the meal. As the woman finished off her flaming dessert, she announced,

“Oh, by the way, I know you’re going to try to exploit me, so there won’t be any fooling around.”

That, officially, was Jack’s first big night on the town.

Jack started having financial problems. When he had agreed to assume all of his and Leigh Anne’s debts, he hadn’t understood the extent of his obligations. Leigh Anne had charge accounts in every store in Dallas, and every one of these stores had a nice person in the collection department who had developed a sudden interest in his welfare. Jack started disguising his voice whenever he answered the phone.

One morning Leigh Anne called to tell him the divorce was final. He didn’t think that technicality would bother him, but it did. Jack left work, went to a movie, and sat through All the President’s Men twice, and when he left the theatre, he couldn’t even remember who was in the movie. He went home to the empty apartment with the dirty laundry piled all over it and slept.

The following evening, he went over to the house he’d given Leigh Anne, to celebrate the consummation of their divorce.

About a month earlier, Leigh Anne’s boyfriend, Toby, had given her a $100 bottle of champagne that he’d stolen from the club where he was playing the saxophone; Leigh Anne had told Jack they’d drink it together the night the divorce was final.

After he finished dinner, Leigh Anne charged him $14 for the tenderloin and told him to get the hell out because Toby was coming over at nine.

Jack’s life took a brief upswing when he and a newly divorced pal, Tom, went to Florida for a week. Tom was dealing with his divorce better than Jack (although that probably had something to do with the fact that Tom had hired the meanest lawyer in Dallas and had shafted Janice royally in the settlement). Also, Tom was about to knock down another cool million in his oil-drilling operation.

Tom knew how to deal with women; Jack learned a lot by watching him in action. The reason Jack was striking out so frequently back in Dallas was that he was like a baseball player in a slump.. .he’d started trying too hard and he was pressing.

“Just relax and be your own bad self,” Tom told him. “Whenever you meet a woman, just act disinterested as hell and treat her like dirt whenever you get a chance. Let them come to you.

“When it comes down to it, most of these women are a hell of a lot more desperate than you are.”

Jack started feeling cocky. He got loaded at lunch one afternoon and called Leigh Anne, who had gone to work as a secretary for a developer.

“Of all the beautiful women I’ve ever lived with,” he said, “I always remember you as the third best. Maybe fourth.”

“You’re disgusting,” she said.

Jack went home to his apartment, which was getting emptier all the time. He was starving, but the only thing in the place – as usual – was a jar of peanuts and a six-pack.

He couldn’t go to sleep because the Mau-Maus next door were having a tribal gathering and the music was deafening.

Jack lay down on the mattress on the floor (which served as his bed) and surveyed his situation. It was the first time he had ever really bothered to admit to himself that all this woman-chasing was simply a cheap way of dealing with a flawed ego.

He could feel himself being sucked into a whirlpool of negative feelings: He was starting to feel sorry for himself.

But such realizations didn’t stop him from continuing his routine of heavy hedonism. He rationalized that there were some things he just had to work out of his system.

Jack’s late hours began to take their toll. Too often he would wake up in the morning incapable of remembering what he’d done the night before.

“You gotta get a hold of yourself,” he said to himself one day. The weekends with the kids were still a little awkward, but they were a welcome change of pace from his usual routine of carousing. He’d moved from his apartment on Oak Lawn to something more sedate on Druid Lane, so at least he could take the children home.

His once-inspired work at the ad agency declined. All of a sudden, the spark was gone. Jack’s boss remained tolerant.

Then the boss found out Jack had been going out with his girl friend. Jack got fired.

He called Leigh Anne to tell her the news. “If you’re an hour late with any of those child-support payments, you’re going to jail,” she said.

Jack had one ace in the hole: Two years earlier, he’d rat-holed nine grand on a freelance job and never told Leigh Anne.

He decided he’d live on that until it ran out and then find another job. In the meantime, Jack went back to the serious persuit of a Casanova life-style. It was September, and by his calculations, he had a good shot at making his quota of women.

The money, naturally, started running out faster than Jack thought it would.

Jack started sleeping until noon. The first thing he’d do when he got up was light a joint. He wasn’t feeling very good about himself.

He was close to the bottom the day he visited his father in hopes of borrowing some money. His father had been raking it in pretty well lately. Jack made his pitch and the response was gratifying. It was the first time he’d seen the old gentleman laugh in 20 years.

“If you take care of the pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves,” his father said. “Why don’t you get off your dead ass and make something out of yourself? Get a job as a ditchdigger if you have to.”

That’s just about what Jack did. He went to work for a friend who was a home builder, hammering Sheetrock for seven bucks an hour.

The work was absolute hell, particularly since Jack was out of shape, and the weather that year was brutally cold.

Jack would stand in an unfinished house in Irving, hammering up wallboard in a sleet storm and think back to those days when he’d sat in his fancy office, snapping off clever ad ideas faster than God makes poor folks. It seemed like a thousand years ago.

His benefactor, the home builder, was settling into hard times himself; Jack’s paycheck bounced twice. He found that distressing.

The home builder started paying cash. One afternoon after work, Jack rushed over to Leigh Anne’s house with the semimonthly child-support payment. He had white dust from the Sheetrock in his hair.

Leigh Anne looked at Jack strangely when he showed up. “You know, you’ve really gotten gray,” she told him.

“From thinking of you, dear,” Jack answered and left in a hurry.

Jack got heavily into the womanizing routine in the final months of 1976. After all, he told himself, if he ever remarried he wanted to at least try to be faithful.

1977 was a long year, but he finally found the ideal mate. Whitney was a 29-year-old divorcee. Jack moved in with her and began to moderate his habits.

Leigh Anne, meanwhile, chased off her saxophone player and married a banker. For some reason, this alleviated a lot of Jack’s bitterness, and he and Leigh Anne were finally able to arrive at a more normal ex-husband, ex-wife relationship.

He had reached a point where he had no place in his life for needless conflict.

Jack finally abandoned his blue-collar act and found a small ad agency that would hire him, despite the wild-man reputation he’d accumulated.

The money wasn’t-as good, but the quality of his work was. Jack wasn’t all the way back, but he was getting there.

Whitney was the turning point in Jack’s life because she wouldn’t tolerate drugs and wenching.

One afternoon, just for the hell of it, Jack and Whitney went down to the courthouse and got married. Then they went over to Sol’s Turf Bar and had the reception.

Recently, Jack heard a man talk about his tour with the Marine Corps. “I wouldn’t go through that again for a million dollars, but the experience was worth a million,” the guy said.

Jack looks back on his first couple ofyears as a giddy divorce and feels the sameway.