The First Husband (7 page)

That night, as promised, we went dancing. I changed into a silver bubble skirt and a silky tank top and put on my tango shoes—yes, I have a pair of special shoes I tango in—which were black and wiry and tied tight right above my ankle.

We danced all night. Every song. Until we were both drenched in sweat, clothes clinging, laughing. Griffin wasn’t the best dancer, but he loved the music and was enjoying every second: completely unselfconscious as he twirled me around the floor, wrapped up in the moment with me. This, after a while, started to feel like the same thing.

“Stop putting it off. It’s your turn,” I said, at one point, while we were taking a break and sharing a ginger ale.

“My turn?”

“I assume I’m not your first love,” I said. “Tell me about the girl before me. Best and worst. You know, tit for tat . . .”

He smiled.

“What? I said tit?”

He shook his head. “You said love.”

My eyes got wide. “No, I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .” I shook my head, trying to recover. “Not that I’m
love
. Or not that I’m in love with you. Or that you’re in love with me. I meant . . . that’s not what I meant.”

He grabbed me up to standing, pinning my arms behind my lower back, kissing my neck, holding me there. “The best thing about the last woman I loved,” he said, “is that she spoke in full sentences.”

“Very funny.”

He started pulling me back to the dance floor. “And the worst thing? ” I asked. But I was letting myself be pulled, already letting myself forget. “All right, I know where this is going. Same answer.”

W
hen you go from amazingly sad (sadder-than-you’veever-been sad) to happy (singing-in-the-shower happy) in quick succession, it seems like the other was never true. Like when you have a cold and you can’t remember that you ever felt normal, or when you feel normal again and, despite having someone sitting right in front of you coughing up a lung, you can’t quite feel the sick feeling. You can remember the experience. But holding on to that feeling, that is something else.

It’s a little like taking a trip. You find that lift, that lightness again, that you can’t believe went missing. Even if you know you left reality. You can’t believe—if you hold on to it just right—that your newfound freedom will ever again disappear.

Those first weeks with Griffin, I was happy. I wasn’t just a little happy. I was so happy that I could almost forget that somewhere underneath was still a terrible pain. That the happiness was so intense—at least, in part—in response to the pain being incredibly touchable before, and now not.

This led to two things that changed everything.

The first thing was that I got sent away on assignment for “Checking Out” to Ischia—a small, glorious island on the Tyrrhenian Sea in Italy. I spent five incredible days getting lost in the romantic gardens of La Mortella, staring at the volcanic slopes of Monte Epomeo, studying honey making with a beekeeper in Forio, eating that honey straight from her finger.

And when I was on my way back to Los Angeles, I had a feeling I couldn’t remember having in a long time: I was excited to come home.

Yet when I actually got to my home—to the place that had been my home in Los Angeles—I didn’t feel excited anymore. I didn’t feel excited and I didn’t feel relaxed. I felt something else. Something closer to dread. It took me a minute to realize why. Nick had been there.

It made sense that he would come during a time he knew I’d be away. He had my schedule on his calendar, I knew that—I had put it there.

My problem wasn’t that Nick had come to the house. It was his house too. The problem was that he had wanted me to know he had been there. I looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out how I knew this, when I saw it on the kitchen table. He left his coffee mug there. The one I had bought him at Disneyland, a July Fourth weekend a few years back. We’d trudged out there to visit with friends of his from back East who were vacationing with their small kids. It turned out to be a great weekend, one we commemorated with the stupid, enormous mug, a photo-booth photograph of us computer generated on the front. His arms were wrapped around my neck, my mouth in kiss formation—the two of us laughing, glowing, in picture form.

He loved that mug. And he had chosen to take it out of the cabinet and put it on the table. Not to use it—it was unused. But just to take it out and leave it there, for me to find.

I ran my fingers along the mug’s rim. My first instinct was to figure it out. Why? What did he want me to know? Was he trying to say he wanted his things? That his trip to another land was turning out to be exactly where he wanted to stay? Or, was he saying his trip away from me was moving closer to over, and he was wanting to come back again? Would I be willing to make that voyage easier for him? Would I be willing to walk him through it—whatever it was that he needed most to feel good about starting over again?

My phone vibrated and I looked down to see I had several missed calls—two from Griffin and one from my editor, Peter. I moved toward the window and looked out over my backyard as I listened to Peter’s message.

It always comforted me to hear his voice and picture him, bald and sweet-faced, racing around Manhattan while speaking to me. His message was several minutes long and it seemed like the main purpose was to inform me that our parent company was in the process of being bought out by an even bigger media company. “I just wanted you to hear it from me, so you wouldn’t worry too much, my love,” Peter said, the New York street noise in the background. “The new publisher is a gentleman of the highest order, and ‘Checking Out’ is one hundred percent safe. They couldn’t be happier. I, on the other hand, am growing quite irritated. My novel is at an impasse, and I had to hear from Nick that you two split? If I may quote Steinbeck here, ‘One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.’ ”

As I disconnected from the voice mail—unable not to wonder for a moment why Nick would take it upon himself to call Peter—the phone vibrated again. It was Griffin, his third time trying to reach me.

I flipped it open. “You don’t give a girl much chance to settle in, do you?”

“It’s an emergency,” he said.

My heart stopped. “What’s the emergency?”

“I got tickets to Wilco.”

I felt myself start to smile, biting my lip. “And how’s that an emergency?” I asked.

“It’s in Santa Barbara,” he said. “If we want to make it in time to hear ‘Remember the Mountain Bed,’ we have to leave right now.”

I could just shut off the lights, stop asking myself to answer any of Nick’s questions, and go.

This was what I did.

This was when the other thing happened, the other thing that changed everything: my mother came to town.

My mother came to town and I let Griffin meet her. She was a real estate agent most recently in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she and her newest husband, Gil, had moved about a year and a half ago. She was great at her job (no one knew how to sell a house fast better than my mother did). And she often took trips to celebrate her sales. Though this was the first time a trip had taken her to me.

My mother wasn’t exactly easy. And considering the current state of affairs, I might have even tried to avoid seeing her. I was certain she’d have a million questions about how I’d gotten from Nick to Griffin—from the point where she thought she knew what was happening in my life, to a life she didn’t know at all. But I felt guilty, knowing she was uncharacteristically worried about me. Plus, Gil was coming with her. Kind and good Gil Taylor. And I decided it might be okay. She seemed to be on better behavior when he was around. We all were.

So we decided to meet at a rustic restaurant in Venice called Gjelina. Griffin and I got there first, and I think he was taken aback when they walked in—or, maybe I should say, when my mother walked in. My mother’s beauty could do that. She looked both older and younger than she was: her long blond hair perpetually pulled back in a ponytail, showing off her flawless skin. Her tired, blue eyes complemented perfectly by a pale blue peasant dress. Knee-high maroon boots.

As she got closer to the table, not exactly smiling, Griffin squeezed my hand.

“Hey hey hey, sweet girl!” Gil said to me, as my mother reached out her hand and introduced herself to Griffin. Griffin, to his credit, didn’t just stand up to meet her handshake. He also helped her into her seat.

“It’s great to meet you, Mrs. Taylor,” he said.

“Oh, let’s not start that way. Call me Janet, please,” she said, smiling too big, too forcefully. “And it’s not Mrs. Taylor, Griffin. Even though that’s my beloved’s last name. It’s Adams. Still just Janet Adams. I kept my name from my marriage to Annie’s father. I didn’t want to change my name to be different from my daughter’s. I’m not built that way. Though if she ever
eventually
marries, I’m sure she won’t have any problem changing her name from mine.”

There was the other part that Janet chose not to mention. If she had actually changed or hyphenated her name every time she married someone else, it would now be Janet Adams-Samuels-Nussbaum-Taylor. There was an Everett in there too. But that was only for a week. A complicated week in which I turned fourteen and we moved from Boston to Seattle. That time, it was Seattle. And, then, back.

“So we have a new man at the table tonight?” my mom said, settling in. “Did you train him to be so well mannered already? Or is he putting on a show to impress your mother?”

This was vintage Janet. Asking a seemingly innocuous question—one that didn’t ostensibly suggest what was beneath it—and there was usually a lot beneath it. We didn’t speak very often, but when we did my mother asked questions,
critiqued
in the form of an interested question, so that when you argued, she could say, “What? I was
just
asking.”

A prime example: when I decided to become a journalist, she offered, “That’s an surprising decision. Are you sure you want to be stuck behind a desk writing about how other people are exploring the world? What? I was
just
asking.” And the first time she met Nick: “He’s charming, I suppose, but very devoted to his career. Does that make it hard to maintain a relationship? What? I was
just
asking. . . .”

Yet there we all were, having dinner at Gjelina’s, passing around plates of flatbread, drinking too much wine, hearing the details of my mother’s plans to rest up on the Mexican coast at a hotel with infinity pools on the edge of cliffs—not the one I recommended in my last column.

At best it was okay—more honestly it was okay
and
stilted, okay
and
slow: the dinner of people trying to act like a family for a night, people who spent the rest of the year not having to act like a family at all.

Griffin was trying, but my mother barely let him try, turning away, cutting him off. It felt like she already voted against him and didn’t want any details to get in the way of her feeling good about that vote.

So when he went to the bathroom, I braced myself. I braced myself for what she was going to say, trying to imagine what her problem with him was. He was too thin, too serious, that his pound of blond hair made him look like a four-year-old.

Instead my mother turned to me, her eyes tight on my face. “So this is the new man in your life?” she said. Then: “He certainly does love you, doesn’t he?”

I looked up at her, bowled over in surprise. No, that doesn’t do it justice. I almost passed out.

“Excuse me?” I said.

She nodded. “It’s a lovely thing. A gift, really, when you see love like that. It doesn’t happen often.”

I had lost the power to speak.

“I can see it in his eyes,” she said. “Gil, can’t you?”

Gil could.

This was when my mother reached over and took my hand.

“I’m happy for you, baby,” she said, squeezing my thumb. “I’m happy for you and I’m happy, selfishly, for me. To get to see you so much . . . like yourself with someone.”

It was the single nicest thing she’d ever said to me.

Then, as if remembering herself, she got quiet.

“But shouldn’t he wear his hair shorter if he works in a kitchen?” she said. “I mean, is that even sanitary? Does he at least wear a hairnet?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mom.”

“Shouldn’t you at least try to find out?” she said.

I shrugged, shaking my head.

“What? I was
just
asking.”

Apparently, she was still my mother.