Free Sleep by Nino Ricci Page B

estate crash, through all the legal troubles, through their father’s illness and death. When their father died David had figured the company was about five minutes short of receivership. Yet somehow Danny has managed to survive. Not just survive: to thrive. To grow rich. David, meanwhile, has been reduced since the divorce to a one-bedroom condo downtown that, ironically, was part of a deal he’d made to relinquish any claim in the family business when his father had made Danny a partner.
    This was something David hadn’t reckoned on going into the divorce, how much it would cost him. Even though he was told by everyone who cared to offer an opinion that divorce was a fight in which there were no winners except the lawyers, still he forged ahead and committed every error, animated by what in retrospect seems to have been a kind of derangement. He wasted a lot of money up front on idiocies, taking his lawyer’s advice that he not move out of the house because it would prejudice his claim to Marcus but then paying for an office downtown to have a place away from his students to work and maxing out his credit cards on restaurant meals and dry cleaning and hotel stays. Then right from the start Julia’s father had got into the act, calling in chits from every quarter to make sure Julia was properly lawyered. Almost weekly, David was served with some new motion or disclosure order. The worst was the forensic accountant her father set on him, who made his every smallest excess seem the sign of a criminal profligacy.
    If David had been smart he would have accepted from the start how outgunned he was. Instead, with each setback he dug in his heels, firing lawyers and hiring new ones, firing thoseand representing himself, somehow convinced at each stage that if he fought hard enough it would prove he was in the right. One by one, the judgments went against him. He was forced to move out of the house, was left on the hook for both child and spousal support, was assessed a big whack of Julia’s legal fees because of motions of his own that the court deemed frivolous. Through a couple of loopholes Julia’s lawyers even managed to get almost the entire value of his condo thrown in as common property, though he’d had it for years before the marriage, so that when the final balance sheet came in, what Julia ended up owing him for his share of the house—the house she had insisted on, on which she had indulged her every whim, that had cost him every penny he had earned from his books—had barely been enough to cover his legal bills.
    The sucker punch was custody. Julia got sole, which meant final say on everything, and managed to limit his access to three weekends a month. He had gone to great lengths to fight her on that one, had brought in experts, dredged up the postpartum episode, forced Julia to go in for psychiatric testing, yet the asshole judge—the same one who had issued the injunction against his taking Marcus on the highway—completely turned the tables on him, going so far as to cite concern for the boy’s safety on account of David’s disorder. The whole system seemed rife with this sort of hypocrisy, demonizing fathers under the guise of being progressive when it was just the worst sort of mother worship, of old-style family-values conservatism. The same hypocrisy he had had to put up with his entire marriage: for all his dereliction, all his mistakes, it was Julia, from the start, who had set the boundaries, who had closed him out from what she’d claimed as her realm until it held no place for him.
    Now, though, he finds it hard to connect to the self-righteousness he felt then, hard to piece together his actionsin any way that makes sense. He can barely fathom how they ever got through those long nightmare months when they were both still in the house, all the work of negotiating bathrooms and breakfasts and bedtimes, school drop-offs, of murdering every emotion, every memory or image of the different people