We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

  “So you lined up a backup?” I yelled. “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

  But for someone with an intense fear of public humiliation, who, just hours ago, felt lucky to have been chosen, I had no choice but to stay. I didn’t have it in me to call all those people twenty-four hours later to say, “You were right.” Because then everyone would know just how naïve and foolish I really was.

  The judgment, I imagined, would be on a grand scale. My publicist had also announced our engagement to the press, and I felt like there was no turning back. People had taken time to ask my publicist for details on how we met and I had already crafted a quote about our happiness. “Yeah, about what I said,” I dreaded saying. “Uh, please respect our privacy during this difficult time?” Now I know the headline would have been “Eighth Lead of She’s All That Calls Off Engagement,” but in my mind, the story was far bigger.

  I stalled, putting off sending out the Save the Dates and stretching the engagement from 1999 all the way to 2001. When the Jaguars cut him in 2000, my girlfriends told me that I should, too. But I couldn’t kick him while he was down. I also believed he had a real skill set that would be attractive to another team. The Raiders were interested, and by the time we finally got married, he was doing off-season training with them. He was technically on the team and got a small stipend for working out, but he didn’t have a contract. We married in May, and at the end of August he got cut from the Raiders and never played football again. And for the rest of our marriage, never had another check. From a job. Ever again.

  What about that kinesiology degree he was so close to getting? Funny, I asked the same question.

  “Yeah, about that,” he said. “I’m actually a year and a half away. And if you’re an ex-athlete on scholarship and don’t tell the university that you want to come back in a certain amount of time, they don’t budget for you. I’d be paying for it. Since I don’t live in Michigan, I’d be paying out-of-state tuition.”

  So the Bank of Gabrielle Union was officially open. And doing a brisk business.

  I TRIED. NOT MUCH, MIND YOU. BUT I DID TRY. WE WERE LIVING IN A cookie-cutter split-level town house in the Tarzana neighborhood of L.A., and he decided he needed office space for a company that (as far as I could tell) existed mainly in his mind. He’d convinced a few people to hire him as a marketing-type consulting person of some sort and he was adamant he needed a plush office to be taken seriously. So I got him one by the Fox lot in Century City. He needed to have that office feng-shuied, by the way. Never been to Asia, but he needed it to be feng-shuied to be on trend. I thought, If this is what will make you happy and productive, you do you. Neither happened.

  I started handing him ways to make me happy, gradually making them simpler and simpler. “What was the name of that soul food place we saw on Sepulveda?” I’d ask. “Maybe we should go there some night.”

  He upped his game, however, as a prolific cheater. I was resigned to it, more annoyed by his moping around than his cheating. I’d hear the garage door and tense up, not sure what mood he’d be in. I distinctly remember yelling, “I don’t care who sucks your dick, just come home and be nice to me.”

  Yet I would suddenly decide to get randomly, epically jealous. I was doing laundry one day and going through his pockets. Since it wasn’t his money he was running around with, he could always be counted upon to put cash or credit cards through the wash. Sitting cross-legged on our bedroom floor, I found a piece of paper reading ANGELINA, 818-whatever-whatever.

  The ragey-rage set in. I knew he was fucking other people, but finding that number set me off. I decided to stash the number on top of the armoire in our bedroom, where it sat, waiting for the perfect moment for me to go ballistic when he accused me of something. Exhibit A: You’re a dick. Prosecution rests. Case closed.

  It took a couple of weeks, but sure enough, he handed me just the right opportunity to go for it. I pulled down the number.

  “Is this the bitch?” I screamed, sounding like Rowdy Roddy Piper from the WWF. “Angelina? Is this the bitch you’re fucking?”

  He laughed. Right in my face. I became unhinged, fueled by embarrassment and anger.

  “You think you’re gonna call this bitch?” I screamed. “YOU THINK YOU’RE GONNA CALL THIS BITCH?”

  Reader, I put the paper in my mouth. I chomped and chewed until I could swallow.

  “You’re not calling this bitch,” I said, coughing a little.

  Chris paused. “Angelina is the name of the soul food restaurant you asked me to find.”

  I blinked. “Well,” I said.

  “How does that taste?”

  Another time we went nine days straight without speaking. Ghosts in a split-level house, finding reasons not to be in the same room. In the midst of this, I had a red-carpet premiere that involved some sort of love theme, so I needed a date. Reporters had been picking up a “trouble in paradise” vibe with us, and I thought I had to keep up appearances.

  Hours before the event, he was downstairs watching TV and I was upstairs thinking, How do I even get him to talk to me? And I hatched a plan I am not proud of. “I bet if I was injured he would have to talk to me.”

  I went to the middle landing and then down a couple steps. By that time, I had done a couple of action movies, so I knew how to fake a fall without being injured. I tucked and rolled, slamming the wall where I knew he was sitting on the other side.

  “Baby!” he said, running to me.

  “Don’t you baby me,” I said, screaming and pretending to fight back tears. I pulled out the performance of my life. “You don’t even want to talk to me and now I’ve got to go to this premiere all alone and I’m injured.”

  He went to the premiere. We smiled for the cameras. We played our roles.

  My drama moves weren’t always successes. Like the night I ran away from home. Yes, my adult home. You know the moment in the movies where the girl runs off and the guy runs after her? Well, I tried my hand at that. Midfight, I literally ran out of my own house in shorts and a T-shirt. No wallet, no phone. I just started running, assuming Chris was going to run after me. But I forgot that I was in decent shape, so I just kept going.

  I ended up on the backside of a park, one where he played basketball. He’ll come find me here, I thought. I propped myself against a tree and waited. Just so we could have this scene of “Thank you for finding me . . .”

  He never came. Instead, I fell asleep, sitting against a tree. I woke up to the tingling feeling of a trail of ants climbing up my arm.

  Hello, rock bottom, I thought.

  It was after 4 A.M. and the sun was just starting to creep up. I had run so far from home that now I had to walk back. Step after step of utter Charlie Brown defeat. I held on to the glimmer of hope that Chris would be waiting at the door, frantic. I planned out my apology to the police, who I was certain would be swarming my house after Chris’s call about a missing person. “I just needed some air.”

  When I got home Chris was fast asleep up in our room, snoring to the heavens. He could not be bothered.

  You are right to wonder if we sought professional help. There were indeed forays into couples therapy. The first one, we had the luxury of choice. We were on the Titanic, asking to see the bar menu. We decided we wanted a black woman, and a Christian woman at that. We thought she would shame us into being together. Fifteen minutes into our first session, before we even got to any of the tough stuff, she stopped us.

  “This isn’t gonna work,” she said. “You guys don’t belong together.”

  We’d been dumped.

  “How dare she?” I scoffed before we even got in the car.

  “Who does she think she is?” snapped Chris.

  Oh, we were going to show that woman. Things got better for a bit, in that every once in a while we would have a great night where we laughed. Maybe this is enough, I thought.

  Our friends didn’t think so. One sent us to another therapist named Sally, whom our friend credited with saving
her marriage. Like the good Christian sister therapist before her, Sally also marveled how we ever got past the dating stage, but she was committed.

  We lied to Sally constantly. Chris and I were both terrified of being judged. When one of us would go out on a limb and share some uncomfortable truth, the other person would act blindsided. My eyes would widen like I couldn’t begin to comprehend where any of this was coming from. I wanted Sally to like me, so I couldn’t tell her the truth. I wanted to win.

  Sally called me on my competitiveness pretty early in our sessions. “You think in terms of winning and losing,” she said. “But if you’re winning, who’s losing?”

  “Him!”

  “That’s your husband,” she said slowly, like this might be news to me. “You’re not supposed to want him to lose.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You don’t know me, huh?”

  Chris decided to stop coming to the appointments. I kept right on like the good student I was, needing that A.

  “Now that we’re here alone, you need an exit strategy,” she said, leaning in. “Why don’t you give yourself six months to mentally, physically, financially, prepare to leave.”

  Sally was talking truth now. I kept going alone, and I started to get a plan together. There was an actual date in my calendar, and the date came and went. I knew the milk was not just spilled all over the floor, it had been left out to curdle. And I was spooning it up, saying, “I can still eat cereal with this.”

  THEN CAMERON CAMERA ENTERED MY LIFE. THAT’S NOT HER REAL NAME—her working name was even dopier—and I resent protecting the identity of a woman who tried to extort me after sleeping with my husband, but I am not sure of the etiquette.

  Chris and I went to a summer potluck with a bunch of couples. There was this woman there, serving up Sexy Librarian and being very flirty with all the husbands. At one point, a bunch of guys were missing, and I found her showing them all her Web site, Cameron Camera, where people paid to watch her in various stages of undress. Great potluck, everyone! Gentlemen, hide your hard-ons!

  A lot of people wanted to go out after the potluck night, including Chris, but I had a girlfriend drive me home. He ended up hooking up with Cameron Camera in our SUV. And of course she left an earring, probably one she got ten-for-a-dollar at a pharmacy for just such occasions. That gave her the excuse to call him at his office—the one I got feng-shuied—which gave him the excuse to have sex with her again. “Since you came all the way out to Century City, the least I can do is fuck you.”

  Cameron Camera laid low for quite some time, surfacing when she heard I had the Honeymooners movie coming out. She contacted a bunch of tabloids and entertainment news shows, saying she was ready to sell proof that Gabrielle Union’s husband was cheating.

  A friend at one of the shows gave my team a heads-up. Before telling me about the woman, they hired Marty Singer, legal guard dog and bad cop to the stars. I was downstairs in my dining room when my cell phone rang. At the other end were my agent, my manager, my publicist, and special guest star Marty.

  “Listen,” my manager said, “this is a really hard conversation to have . . .”

  Oh God, I thought, they’re dropping me.

  “I’ll just say it,” he said. “Someone is shopping around a story that Chris is cheating on you. She has photos.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly, then louder. “Oh.” And I laughed. I howled.

  “Gabrielle . . .” said my publicist.

  “Which woman?” I asked. Chris was upstairs, and I spoke to the ceiling. “Trust me, this isn’t a problem.”

  “Her name is Cameron,” said my publicist.

  “Oh, Cameron Camera with the nudie site,” I said, blurting it out like a charades answer to show how cool I was with this. “She’s not even cute. I’m so sorry she bothered you. Please don’t worry.”

  “It might not be so easy,” my agent said. “You have a movie coming out. We need to know what the pictures are so we can warn the studio.”

  “Like if it’s kissing, whatever,” said my manager. “If it’s her hand up his ass . . .”

  “Got it,” I said. “Hand up the ass is a problem.”

  “So we need to see what she has,” said Marty. “Set up a sting and put a price on those photos. In the meantime, talk to Chris and see what she has on him.”

  Like he was waiting for his cue, Chris came down the stairs. The same ones I’d “fallen down” a few months before.

  “You didn’t notice the flashbulbs?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “When she was taking pictures of you guys fucking, you didn’t notice the flash going off?”

  “What?” Maybe he was in straight denial or, like me, was trying to figure out which woman it could have been.

  “Cameron Camera, remember her?” I said, casually, like I was jogging his memory. “You fucked her last summer? Well, she waited for just the right moment. Now she’s gone to all these people saying she has proof that you cheated. Anything you want to say?”

  Just like how we began, when he got caught with the Greek, he went right into groveling.

  “Get out!” I screamed. “I’m about to have to pay a bitch for fucking my husband. And I have to pay Marty Singer to help me pay her! Your dick keeps costing me money!”

  He was panicked, but not about losing a wife. If I left, the cash flow would go with me, and with it the illusion of his success.

  I became fixated on the word “sting,” which they set up that week for 7 A.M. in a coffee shop. All the intrigue made the situation sound at least slightly more exciting than just asking, pretty please, to see exactly what position the woman was in with my husband. I kept my phone in my hand all morning, but Cameron Camera never showed. Either she didn’t really have proof and didn’t think we’d ask to see it in exchange for the money, or she just wanted to feel relevant.

  My marriage was obviously over, but I was still desperately afraid of people labeling me a failure, so I didn’t want to jump right into the divorce, either. Carrie Fisher had a line I love about why she and Paul Simon ended their marriage: “Things were getting worse faster than we could lower our standards.” I realized that I needed to really take stock of the situation between Chris and me, and make a decision based not in anger but in what I really wanted and how I really felt.

  So one night, I was sitting up in our bed when he came in the room.

  “Let’s talk,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Listen,” I said, “if we’re gonna have this conversation, let’s be brutally honest.”

  “Okay,” he said, sitting down next to me. “The truth.”

  We went through it, question by question, bringing up even the most obscure things from years prior. “When you said you got into a fight at Mel’s Diner in Hollywood,” I asked, “was that true?”

  “No,” he said. “I was with somebody.”

  “You went through the motions of tearing your shirt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew it,” I said, laughing. “The way it was torn, I knew it.”

  He brought up an actor I had done a film with.

  “Did you sleep with him?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I was. But you would have been in love with him, too.”

  There was something about the permission to be honest that allowed us to reestablish the friendship we had in the beginning. That night we decided to split up, and yet in the months after, we became sort of best friends again. We hung out more in those months than when we were married. Before, we had been that downer couple that ruined the party when we showed up. It was that uncomfortable to be in our presence. But as separated people, our friends were like, “Hey, we can hang!”

  When we announced the separation, my team gave a statement to the AP at 9 A.M. West Coast time. By 9:15, my publicist and manager started what they called “The Divorce List.” Reps for athletes and
celebrities were calling to see if they could set up a date. Some were reaching out directly.

  My manager called to tell me I was popular.

  “Who?” I said, pretending to be disgusted but feeling flattered. “Who wouldn’t give me a day?”

  He reeled off the first two, naming an aging sportscaster and then maybe a fading music producer who held on to his Jheri curl two decades too long.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m good. Please stop.”

  The honeymoon period of my divorce from Chris was short-lived, and I did the laundry list of dumb things you do when you want your ex to like you. I invested in a company he started with one of my friends. I paid rent for six months on a new home for him and cosigned for a Porsche. Then he abandoned the Porsche at the Burbank airport and I inherited a bunch of bills and parking tickets. The business failed, so there went that money, too. And like my money, I have never seen him again.

  Chris moved to Atlanta, where I shoot Being Mary Jane. I reached out to him once and said, “Let’s get together.” I meant it, but he owes me so much money, I’m afraid he thought it was a trap. He never showed.

  He needn’t worry. My sting days are behind me.

  eleven

  PRESCRIPTION FOR A BREAKUP

  Are you experiencing heartbreak accompanied by nutty behavior?

  Symptoms include, but are not limited to, obsessively clocking your ex’s social media and light stalking of the new girl’s Instagram. You may also be having moderate to severe instances of driving past their house and hiding in their bushes. You have been given a diagnosis of generally crazy, unproductive behavior.

  I am here to help. What I can prescribe is not medication, but an easy-to-follow syllabus and wine list. This is a list of pro tips best used NOW.

  PRO TIP: WATCH SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS

  Shot in luscious Technicolor, Splendor in the Grass is Warren Beatty’s first film and one of Natalie Wood’s best. She plays Deanie, a pre-Depression Kansas girl who understandably falls in lust and love with Warren’s Bud. He loves her, too, but has sex with been-there-done-that Juanita instead. Deanie wants to have sex with Bud so badly that repressing the desire drives her insane. Everyone who I make watch this film remembers this one doozy Deanie tosses out during her mad scene in the bathtub: “Did he spoil me? No. No, Mom! I’m not spoiled! I’m not spoiled, Mom! I’m just as fresh and I’m virginal like the day I was born, Mom!”