If I Did It

by The Goldman Family

  She told me that after New Year’s Eve she sank into a depression and blamed it on what I had called “that 30’s thing.” She said that she had given up on treating me as if she loved me, but she said:

  I never stopped loving you—I stopped liking myself and lost total confidence in any relationship with you.

  And she made her goal clear: to have her and the kids move back in with me.

  I want to put our family back together! I want our kids to grow up with their parents. I thought I’d be happy raising Sydney & Justin by myself—since we didn’t see too much of you anyway. But now, I …

  I want to be with you! I want to love you and cherish you, and make you smile. I want to wake up with you in the mornings and hold you at night. I want to hug and kiss you everyday. I want us to be the way we used to be. There was no couple like us.

  I don’t know what I went through … I didn’t believe you loved me anymore—and I couldn’t handle it. But for the past month I’ve been looking at our wedding tape and our family movies—and I can see that we truly loved each other. A love I’ve never seen in any of our friends. Please look at the 2 tapes I’m sending over with this letter. Watch them alone & with your phone turned off—they’re really fun to watch.

  She ended her letter with the following:

  O.J. You’ll be my one and only “true love.” I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you and I’m sorry we let it die. Please let us be a family again, and let me love you—better than I ever have before.

  I’ll love you forever and always …

  Me.

  At the bottom, she had drawn a smiley face.

  I went to bed and reread the letter, and I had trouble falling asleep that night.

  In the morning, I woke the kids, got them fed, and dropped them at Nicole’s on my way to the airport. I didn’t bother going in. I didn’t want to see Nicole. The previous day had stirred up a lot of feelings, and I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  On the flight to Mexico, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation, and about the letter. I still had feelings for her, and she was playing to those feelings, and it bothered me. Nicole was the one who had wanted out of the marriage. Why was she coming back now and making things so hard on me?

  When I got to Cabo, I stopped thinking about her. A car picked me up and took me to La Palmilla, which was one of the few fancy hotels there—back in those days, anyway—and I unpacked and went off to take care of business. I was meeting with a group of guys who were going to be putting up several hotels and a golf course in Cabo, and they were hoping I’d be able to attract a few high-profile investors. We looked over the plans, talked business, then went off for drinks and dinner.

  The next morning, I got a call from L.A. One of my friends, Billy Kehoe, had died unexpectedly, and I was forced to take an early flight back to L.A. I went straight from the airport to a funeral home in Santa Monica, for the wake. The actual funeral was scheduled for the next day, but I wasn’t going to make it: I had already made plans to take the kids to Las Vegas the following morning, where we were going to meet up with Paula, and they were so excited that I didn’t have the heart to let them down.

  Anyway, I got to the funeral home and hung around for a bit, and the first person I ran into was Nicole. She came over and said hi and gave me a little kiss, and she told me she had left the kids at my house. She had been unable to find Kato, she said, and she knew I was taking the kids to Vegas the following day, so it seemed like a good solution.

  “How was Cabo?” she asked.

  “It was fine. I might build a little house there.”

  Then we saw Billy’s wife and family and went over to express our condolences. Our friendship went all the way back to when Nicole and I were first married, and we talked about the old days, and I could see that stirred up a lot of feelings for Nicole.

  When things broke up, Nicole and I found ourselves out in the parking lot, alone. “I’m hungry,” I said. “You want to get a bite to eat?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  We went to a little restaurant in Santa Monica, and for some reason Nicole started talking about Marcus Allen and his fiancée, Kathryn, who were about to get married, and who had asked me to host the wedding at my place, on Rockingham. I told Nicole, “It’s funny. Kathryn reminds me a little of you when you were preparing for our wedding. She’s over at the house almost every day, running around and worrying about every little detail, from the table settings to the flowers to the music. She wants to make sure that everything turns out just right.”

  Nicole got a sad look in her eyes, and said, “She’s a nice girl, that Kathryn.”

  “She’s more than nice,” I said. “I know you don’t know her all that well, but she’s been in your corner from the start. When you moved out, and she saw how upset I was, she told me you’d be coming back. ‘O.J.,’ she said. ‘Nicole has been with you since she was eighteen years old. She needs to do this—she needs to find herself—but she’ll be back.’”

  “That’s the same thing I told you,” Nicole said. “But when I told you, you didn’t believe me.”

  “About coming back? You never said anything about coming back?”

  “No—about finding myself,” she said. “I didn’t know who I was.”

  “And you know who you are now?”

  “I’m getting closer,” she said.

  “Well, anyway, let’s not go there,” I said. “All I was trying to tell you is that you’ve got a good friend and a big fan in Kathryn.”

  Suddenly Nicole was crying and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why that would upset her. These big old tears were pouring down her cheeks, and people at the neighboring tables were taking notice. “What’s wrong?” I said, whispering. “I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

  “That’s not it,” she said.

  “Then what?”

  “Marcus is not your friend,” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘Marcus is not your friend.’ What is that supposed to mean?”

  She looked at me like she really wanted to say something that she couldn’t bring herself to say, and then it hit me. “Did something happen between you and Marcus?” I asked.

  She put her head down on the table and started crying louder. I felt like the whole restaurant was looking at us, so I turned and signaled for the check. When I turned back to look at Nicole, she was lifting her head off the table, sniffling, and using the napkin to dry her tears. She looked at me, all pitiful.

  “What?” I said.

  “Something did happen with Marcus.”

  Man, I’ll tell you, another guy would have probably lost it, but I didn’t lose it. I just shook my head, kind of stunned, and the bill came and I paid it and we went outside. I hadn’t said a word to her the whole time. I was still trying to process what she’d just told me.

  “What?” she said, like she was scared of me or something. “You’re not going to talk to me now?”

  “I’ll talk to you when I can think of something to say.”

  I drove her back to the funeral home, because her car was still in the parking lot, and I didn’t say a word to her the entire time. But when we got there, not ten minutes later, I cut the engine and unloaded on her. “Why did you tell me this shit about you and Marcus?” I said. “I didn’t need to know this.”

  “I just thought you should know,” she said, stammering. “He pretends to be your friend, and then he fools around with me. And I don’t think it’s right that he knows about something that happened between us and you don’t.”

  “Hey, we’re not married anymore, remember? You’re single and he’s single. The only thing I don’t get is why you did it. You’re always bitching about people cheating and fucking around on each other, and here you are getting it on with a guy who’s about to get married.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “He was so nice to me, and he always listened, and it just sort of happened.”

  “That
shit doesn’t just happen,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it. You don’t owe me an apology. You don’t owe me anything. But I still can’t understand why you told me. Or what all you expect me to do. It’s not like I’m going to cancel their wedding or something.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You know what I’m going to do?” I said. “I’m not going to do anything. This has nothing to do with me.”

  “Don’t get mad, O.J.”

  “I’m not mad. I’m just telling you: We’re not married anymore, Nicole, and the reason we’re not married is because you didn’t want to be married.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing,” I said. “I’m just telling you how it is.”

  “So what am I supposed to do about Marcus?”

  “See—there you go again! You’re asking me what to do. Can’t you figure it out for yourself? Isn’t that what you wanted? To get out from under my shadow? To go off and be on your own and have your own friends and be your own person?”

  She was crying again. “But he keeps calling me.”

  “So tell him you’re going to tell Kathryn.”

  “You think I should?”

  “I bet that would stop him pretty quick.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  I took a deep breath. “You know, Nicole, this right here is why I’ve been avoiding you. Every time we talk, something comes up. You’ve got a problem with this or a problem with that, and you put everything on me. ‘Help me, O.J.! Fix this for me, O.J.!’ Well, I can’t be doing that all the time. You asked me to move on, you wanted to break us up, and you got it. We’re broken up and I’ve moved on. Or I’m trying to, anyway.”

  She was crying again. “I’m a mess, O.J.”

  “You’re not a mess.”

  “Can I come to your house to see the kids?”

  “Nicole, come on. They’re asleep.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “No,” I said, but I said it nice. “I’m taking them to Vegas in the morning. You’ll see them Sunday.”

  “Okay,” she said, wiping her tears.

  She got out of the car and I waited until she was in her own car, then I drove home. The kids were still up, past their regular bedtime, and I got them to brush their teeth and tucked them in. Just as they were falling asleep, someone buzzed my front gate. I went downstairs. It was Nicole.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “I don’t feel like being alone,” she said. “I miss the kids.”

  “They’re asleep, Nicole. And I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “Can I just stay here for a little? Please?”

  If you want to know the truth, I felt bad for her. Even with all the therapy and all of these new insights and stuff, it was obvious she was still having trouble getting it together. We went upstairs. The kids were fast asleep. I stripped to my underwear and got into my side of the bed, careful not to wake them. Nicole lay down on the far side of the kids, saying she wouldn’t stay long.

  I guess I must have nodded off, because the next thing I knew she was standing on my side of the bed, tugging at my arm. A moment later I found myself following her into the bedroom next door, and a moment after that we were making love. It was the first time we’d been together since the split, and I was feeling all sorts of feelings I would have preferred not to feel.

  Needless to say, it was all very confusing.

  3.

  PERIOD OF CONFUSION

  I WOKE UP EARLY with Nicole still there, fast asleep. I felt pretty bad about the whole thing. I was dating Paula, and I hadn’t wanted this to happen, and suddenly I felt like one of those fools that tries to make all sorts of phony excuses for screwing up. I woke Nicole and told her she had to leave before the kids got up—I didn’t want them to see her there, and to tell Paula about it—then I walked her downstairs and let her out. I felt lousy. I was cheating on my girlfriend with my ex-wife. How weird was that?

  At noon, the kids and I left for the airport and went to Vegas and had a wonderful weekend with Paula. I didn’t tell her about Nicole. If that makes me a coward, and I guess it does, then I’m a coward. I justified it like a million guys justify these things: It was a mistake. It would never happen again.

  When I got back to L.A., Nicole and I got into what I often think of as our Period of Confusion. This was early April, a month before Mother’s Day, more than a year before the murders, and Nicole pretty much began stalking me. She would drive by the house late at night, and if Paula’s truck wasn’t out front she’d ring the bell. Like a fool, I would let her in. That thing that wasn’t supposed to happen again was happening again—two and three times a week. It was messing me up. All the old feelings were coming back, and I kept fighting them, but Nicole was relentless about getting me back. Still, whenever she broached the subject, I would cut her off. “We’re not getting back,” I said. “We’re just doing this.”

  “Why are we doing this if you don’t have feelings for me?”

  “I never said I didn’t have feelings for you. I said we weren’t getting back.”

  “But—”

  “Listen to me: I don’t want to talk about it. This is what we’re doing and it’s all we’re doing. There’s no future in it.”

  Sometimes, after we made love, we’d lie there side by side, and Nicole would talk about her therapy. Things were going well, she said, and she was learning a great deal about herself. She got into all sorts of psychobabble about her childhood, and “unfinished business,” and about the anger inside her. I listened because she wanted me to listen, and some of it seemed to make sense, but at the end of the day it really wasn’t an issue for me. If she believed she was getting better, that was a good thing—and she certainly seemed to believe.

  “My therapist says I like to be angry,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “She says I look for trouble because it makes me feel alive,” she explained. “We’ve been trying to figure out where this comes from, so we’ve been talking a lot about my childhood.”

  “So what have you figured out?”

  “Not a lot yet,” Nicole said. “This anger thing is mostly unconscious.”

  It might have been unconscious, but I’d seen plenty of it over the years—especially in the period leading up to the split. Nicole could mix it up with anyone—a bouncer at a club, some asshole at the gym, a close friend—over absolutely nothing. Nicole was always looking to make enemies, and she had finally turned me, the person she was closest to, into Enemy Number One. I was glad she was talking about this stuff with her therapist. I remember thinking that it would have been nice if she’d figured some of this shit out before the marriage fell apart. I didn’t say so, though. Instead, I said, “That’s good. I’m glad you found a therapist you like.”

  During this time, this Period of Confusion, we started spending a little more time with the kids, especially when Paula was out of town, which was pretty often. It was actually kind of pleasant, maybe too pleasant, and once again Nicole began to drop hints about getting back together. I didn’t understand it. She’d gone out to “find herself,” as she put it, and all she’d found is that she wanted me back.

  I called her mother one day and asked her what was going on. “I’m really confused,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I never thought Nicole wanted to leave you.”

  I called her best friend, Cora Fishman, and she told me the same thing. “She loves you, O.J. She was just dealing with her own issues and she let things get out of hand. But I honestly don’t think she ever imagined it would lead to divorce.”

  “I spent months trying to talk her out of it,” I said. “She had plenty of opportunities to change her mind.”

  “She didn’t know what she wanted,” Cora said. “She was confused.”

  “Great!” I said. “Now she’s not confused and I’m more confused than ever.”

  “Ron wants to t
alk to you,” she said. “Hold on a minute.”

  I held on, and Ron, Cora’s husband, came on the line. “How you doing, O.J.?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Like I told Cora, I’m pretty confused.”

  “So you’ve talked with her?”

  “With Nicole? Yeah, of course I’ve talked to her. That’s all we’ve been doing—talking.”

  “About everything?” he asked, and it sounded like he was fishing.

  Then suddenly it hit me. “You mean about Marcus?” I said.

  “Wow,” he said, taken aback. “She told you about Marcus?”

  “Yeah, Ron. She told me about Marcus.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because, you know, I wanted to make sure everything was out in the open. That’s the kind of thing where, you know, you find out about it later and it fucks everything up.”

  “Well it’s out in the open, man.”

  I then called my own mother to tell her what was going on, hoping she might be able to help me shed a little light on the situation. “How do you feel about it?” she asked.

  “I honestly don’t know how I feel,” I said. “When we’re together, I see how happy the kids are, and that makes me happy, but I don’t know that anything has changed. I don’t know that she’s changed.”

  And my mother said, “O.J., until you figure this thing out, you’re not going be able to move forward with your life. You won’t be able to commit to a relationship with another woman. You can’t go on like this. You have to get clear on your feelings for Nicole.”

  Paula was away again, on another modeling job, so I called Nicole and asked her if she was free that weekend. This was in late April, 1993. We went to Cabo and had a very nice weekend. It was just the two of us, with no distractions, and I felt like I was in love with her all over again. When we got back, I was more confused than ever. I was trying to figure out if I was really in love, or if I just loved the fact that she was desperate to get me back. I couldn’t help it. If you get dumped by someone, it feels pretty good when they come crawling back. They’re telling you that they’ve screwed up, and that they’ve loved you all along.