The First Husband (2 page)

“Hey there, stranger . . .” Nick said, leaning down to give me a kiss hello—his palm cupping the back of my head, holding me there.

“Hey back at you,” I said, staying close to him for an extra beat. We were used to having long periods apart, but between my column and his movie shoot, it had been a particularly brutal time. His smell, his sweetness, felt more like the exception in my life than the reality.

As Nick got down on his knees and rubbed Mila’s furry ribs—his usual
Hey honey, I’m home
greeting to her—he whispered into her ear.

“Hi, baby girl . . .” he said.

Then he took a seat next to me on the couch, stretching his arms behind his head. This close, Nick looked even more beat: his eyes red and watery from the long shoot, and from the contact lenses he’d recently begun to wear in place of the reliable wire-rimmed glasses he’d had as long as I’d known him.

I decided against giving him grief for the lenses, decided, also, against telling him about the phone call from our travel agent. We were supposed to go to London in December. I had rented a tiny house in Battersea that we could actually afford to live in while Nick worked on a project there. I could barely wait and already found myself dreaming of having an extended period of time to visit my favorite parts of one of my favorite cities: going to the theater and hiding out in ancient flea markets, spending too much time in bookshops and no time at all walking near the Tower of London. The agent had called requesting the balance on the house. I needed to know if shooting was still on schedule in vampire land, so that I could feel safe giving it to her. But that was going to have to wait.

“What are you watching?” he asked.

“Was watching, it’s over now.” I clicked the television off, like proof. “Just a movie.
Roman Holiday . . .
”

“We own that movie? I haven’t seen it forever,” he said. “I’ve always thought it was a little overrated.”

I’d never told Nick about
Roman Holiday,
not the full story—had never told anyone but my best friend, Jordan. I knew Nick would tell me I was crazy. Though I couldn’t hold that against him. I’d think I was crazy too.

“How did last night turn out?” I asked instead.

He shook his head in a way that said,
let’s not even go there.

Then he proceeded to go there, telling me about a complicated electrical problem at the bookstore in Pasadena they had rented to film the movie’s climatic scene. It was important that
that
went well. It hadn’t.

When he was done, he cast his eyes down, almost closing them. “So,” he said. “Annabelle Adams . . .”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Nick never called me by my full name. He called me Annie—or Adams if we were arguing about something. Adams also if he was in the mood to be particularly sweet, loving. A confusing business, really, when I thought too much about it: Adams coming up only at our best and worst moments.

“Yes,
Nicholas Campbell
. . .” I said, jokingly.

Then I reached over and touched the side of his face. He leaned into it, catching my hand there, between his cheek and his shoulder.

“I need to talk to you about something,” he said. “I’ve needed to talk to you about it, but you’ve been away and I haven’t been sure exactly how . . .”

“Okay . . .”

While I’d been in Punta Cana the week before, I’d seen a couples therapist on a local morning show explain how it was aggressive behavior for a woman to look right at her husband or boyfriend when he was trying to talk about something important—that it made men think of war instead of love. Weird tip. But there I was, following the advice the best I could anyway: pulling my knees under my large top and averting my gaze, just as instructed. At least I wasn’t looking right at him when he continued to speak.

“The thing is,” he said, “my therapist says we may need a break.”

“A break from what?” I said.

This was what I said. Like an utter and complete moron.
A break from what—
what did I think? But this was how incredibly far-fetched the idea of us taking a break from each other was to me, at that moment.

“She says I need to be on my own for a while,” he said. “Without you.”

I turned to look at him. There are words you can never take back. Had I just heard them? Five years. We had been together for five years. Weren’t there different rules for saying them after so long? Didn’t everyone have to be fully dressed?

“Why?” I asked.

“She says that I love you,” he said, “but also that I’m trying to love you. That I have to stop putting everyone else first.”

I watched Mila’s face.
Am I missing something?
I asked her silently.

She looked back at me:
I think I want a nap.

Meanwhile, Nick was still talking, but it was like someone dropped a ball in my throat. And I couldn’t swallow it and listen at the same time. Instead, I looked around our home—the one I had designed, furnished, did 95 percent of the work to keep up. I wasn’t very good at making a home, maybe. Okay: definitely, maybe. I wasn’t home enough to be good at it (as evidenced by my suitcase still packed and ready by the front door). But regardless, if Nick was naming that as the game, hadn’t I been the one who’d always done most of the first-putting?

“She says I need to figure out what I need for me.”

She says.
He kept saying that.
She says.
Three hundred times now, if I was counting correctly. Probably because he knew that if he took the
she says
out, his words sounded harsher. This was my first clear thought. My second was sadder. What had I done to make him want to leave?

Which was when he started to get to the truth.

“Also,” he said, far more quietly. “There may be other reasons why I’m
confused
.”

At least he had the courage to say that.

“There may be other reasons?” I said. “Do you want to check with your therapist first?”

He hit me with a sad look. “That isn’t helpful,” he said.

Maybe it wasn’t helpful, but it was also not entirely uncalled for. Nick ’s “therapist” wasn’t even a real therapist. He had never seen a therapist before in his life. But someone from his work had recommended that Nick meet with this woman, who was closer to a psychic, or a life counselor. Or, as she called herself on her silky blue business card, a FUTURES COUNSELOR. Meaning after hearing your stories, she told you what she saw in your future and then helped you get there, or helped you to avoid it. For, you know, $650 an hour.

This was when I realized what he was trying very hard not to tell me.

“Who is she?” I asked, but I already had a guess: Michelle Bryant, Nick ’s ex-girlfriend and college sweetheart. They had gone to Brown together, dated all four years there, and lived together for the last two of them. Then they had lived together in a picturesque carriage house in Brooklyn for two years after graduating. Michelle was a pediatric neurosurgeon at the University of California, up in San Francisco. And, because neurosurgery apparently wasn’t impressive enough, she’d also become a special consultant to the FBI, in charge of studying brain patterns in children prone to violence. And did I mention she was drop-dead gorgeous? How could I blame Nick for still wanting to date her?
I
wanted to date her.

“It’s Michelle?” I said, less like a question than a statement.

“No! I’ve told you that you have nothing to worry about in terms of her.”

Nick forgot his sadness for just long enough to look pleased about this, like it proved something that he wasn’t leaving me for the person I’d been insecure about—but for someone else entirely.

“Does she work on
The Unbowed?
”

The Unbowed
was the title of Nick’s movie. He’d taken it from a William Ernest Henley poem that we loved—one of several poems that we’d framed and lined up by the refrigerator in our kitchen. The lines read, “Under the bludgeoning of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.” In more generous moments, I had loved that he was using it for the title. This wasn’t a generous moment.

“It’s nothing like that . . .” he mumbled under his breath. Then, in case I missed it, he shook his head for emphasis:
nothing at all.
“She’s just a friend . . .” he said.

“Just a friend?”

He nodded. “A friend from home,” he said. “I swear to you, nothing’s happened yet.”

He looked relieved about this part too. But I couldn’t help but wonder why he thought that the fact he was leaving me for someone he hadn’t slept with
yet
was going to make me feel better. I couldn’t help but wonder why he thought I’d hear anything but the words he offered up accidentally. She’s from home. Meaning, home was somewhere else. Meaning, not here. With me.

“I’m so sorry, Annie,” he said. “But the truth is . . .”

Then he stopped himself. He stopped himself, like he didn’t know whether to say it. Which was when he did.

“The truth is, you’re away so much, Adams. You’re always away.”

“You’re saying, she’s only here because I’m . . . not?” I finished for him.

“I’m saying, I may be the one who’s leaving. But if we’re being honest, you’re never here anyway. I’m not sure you even want to be.”

That’s when it happened. When my heart broke open, right in my chest.

Five years. We’d been together five years. We had a life together. Wasn’t I supposed to be allowed to count on it? He had promised me I could—that I should—in the breath right after the breath where he explained that he wasn’t sure how he felt about marriage. But we, he and I, were going to be more than married.
Post-married
, he’d called it.
What’s a piece of paper?
Right then, it was something I could have held up like proof that he couldn’t just decide this. Out of nowhere.

Was this the right moment to make my other point, that he traveled almost as much as I did? It didn’t seem like it. It didn’t seem like he would be open to hearing that—to hearing anything from me. He was too busy looking down, picking at his fingernails. He was picking at the dirt caught there, not in a way that he was avoiding me, but in a way that he was actually focused on it. Focused and exhausted.

When he looked back up at me, it was with a look that said,
Are we done?
I knew that look, of course. I knew all of his looks. It had been five years.

I gave him a look back.
Not yet, please. I need to understand this.

Hadn’t we been sitting here, right here, yesterday? We had. I had come home from the airport, exhausted, but stayed up so I could have a few minutes with Nick before he left for work. He’d made us peach French toast and I’d helped him rework the last scene of his movie. The very last shot. He had looked so happy when he figured it out, so happy with me that I had helped. He gave a huge smile and then leaned in toward me. He leaned in toward me, just yesterday, and said,
You’re priceless . . . You know that?

It was a moment, less than twenty-four lousy hours before, which seemed directly antithetical to this moment. I didn’t know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters—which was why I said it out loud, like evidence for my side of things. The side, as I saw it at the time, of love.

“But yesterday . . .” I said, “you said I was priceless.”

He leaned in and touched my face, and I thought he was going to say,
You are
,
it’s me. You are, and I love you, and my friend is just messing with my head. You are and I just need a break to know for sure. To remember for sure. That we belong.
Only he didn’t say any of that. And, while I do believe, even now, he couldn’t hear himself clearly—couldn’t possibly hear just how bad it sounded coming out—he did say it.

He reached over and touched my face.

“You were,” he said.

T
he allure of “Checking Out”—the reason the column met, from the start, with a certain level of success—was that it gave people a sense of control. They’d learn about a list of things they needed to experience in a certain place: an extraordinary sight (“Take in the view of the Taj Mahal from the Oberoi Amarvilas in Agra”), an extraordinary taste (“Try the special stewed bamboo rolls at the famed T’ang Court in Hong Kong’s Central District”), discovering the one thing that couldn’t be found anywhere else (“Don’t forget to buy a hundred sheets of freshly made paper from the only operating paper factory in Amalfi—it’s been going since 1592!”). They did these things, enjoyed them, took photographs of themselves enjoying them—and then they got to feel like they’d not only experienced that place, but had truly broken away from their real lives. Next!

Only, as my editor, Peter W. Shepherd, said to me not too long ago, “If I may quote Steinbeck”—Peter was British and about a hundred years old and one of my very favorite humans, but since he began working on his novel (which he described as “
Tortilla Flat,
only British”), he would use any excuse to start a sentence by quoting Steinbeck—Peter said, “ ‘A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.’ ”

Of course, whether I liked it or not, he was on to something. There was a faultiness governing “Checking Out.” That sense of control was an illusion. The magic of Big Sur, as an example, came from spending a whole day propped up on the rocks by the post office, listening to the ocean behind you. Except that most people didn’t have the time or inclination to sit by the post office all day doing nothing. But they could find fifty glorious minutes to head to Bixby Canyon Bridge and the most beautiful intersection of mountain rock and ocean you could ever hope to see. Feel like they had a perfect hegira, check it off their list.

In each of my categories in “Checking Out,” I tried to give readers that sense of escaping—of breaking free of their everyday boundaries, of leaving their comfort zone. I labeled the categories with this in mind (I called the sightseeing part of the column “Open Your Eyes” and another part, in which readers were to venture off the beaten path, “Take the Wrong Exit”). And I was very careful not to pick anything too obvious as the thing to see (no Statue of Liberty) or too common as the thing to taste (no sampling the everything pie from Ray’s Pizza in the West Village). Finally, I put the most pressure of all on the last category on the list (“Discover the One Thing You Can’t Find Elsewhere”)—which, in addition to always having to be captivating, had the most important job of all: to make people feel that, after they finished this last one, they were ready to go home again.