The First Husband

by Laura Dave

  I kissed him. I kissed him softly and sweetly. Then I did it again.

  “I really love you,” I said.

  “I really love you back,” he said.

  He started to undress me, slowly at first, and then more frantically. Messily. Hands cupping my neck, hands cupping my thighs. Right there on the floor by the bed. The bed too far away.

  And it occurred to me, all at once. It occurred to me—despite my day, despite my past days—how happy I felt. It occurred to me in that way that you already know you’ll remember it later. You’ve already, accidently, locked it in.

  And I couldn’t help but think—the last of my clothing falling away, falling behind me—that that moment, between us, was turning into many things: a turning point, a new beginning to our new beginning.

  What it wasn’t turning into was the ideal moment to meet my mother-in-law.

  17

  “Hello, Griffin.”

  We jumped up in quick succession, Griffin’s mother standing in front of us, fixed in her place, as we tried to get it together: Griffin turning and putting on his pants, me trying to pull my black dress back over my chest. Unable to find the strap, awkwardly holding the dress there. Hearing the zipper close on Griffin’s jeans. Trying not to die at that sound.

  Griffin’s mother, on the other hand, didn’t look embarrassed at all. She was standing there in our bedroom doorway, looking surprisingly elegant, for midnight, in a pencil skirt, looking like the original incarnation of her children—Griffin’s skin, Jesse’s beautiful eyes. Her own silver hair falling just above her small shoulders.

  “Mrs. Putney,” I said. “Or should I call you Emily?”

  She looked at me head-on, and didn’t answer. It didn’t matter. I was apparently going to keep talking, talking in the way I did when I was compensating, desperately trying to change a moment from what it was turning out to be.

  “It’s so great to finally meet you,” I said. “Griffin speaks of you so fondly. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we are finally face-to-face.”

  Emily looked at me like I was speaking Russian, which I was starting to wish I was.

  “Funny enough, I have a dog named Mila, which sounds a little like Emily.”

  Was that really how I thought I was going to turn things around? By telling her that her name sounded like my dog’s?

  “Is that right?” she said.

  I nodded, reluctantly. “I’m not saying they rhyme or anything, though almost, I guess . . . if you say it fast enough . . . or slow enough . . .” I started to fade out. “I love her a lot.”

  Emily turned from me and looked at her son.

  “I ran over a soccer ball in the driveway,” she said. “You need lights on out there, Griff. Downlights, up in the trees. Don’t you know that? It could have been a person.”

  “Mom, what are you doing here?” He pulled his shirt down over the part of his stomach that was still showing. “At midnight?”

  I reached down for my bra, tried to push it under the bed. First with my hands, then, as I felt Emily glancing back in my direction, far more awkwardly, with the side of my foot.

  “I got a phone call that my sons’ lives are falling apart and, so, I thought I should probably find out in person what’s going on,” she said. “I got in the car after tonight’s lecture and here I am. As soon as possible. To find out. So start talking.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Make it less so, if you don’t mind,” Emily said, her arms crossed in front of her chest.

  This standoff was so strange—and I was still in so much shock at meeting his mother, who apparently thought it was appropriate to open Griffin’s bedroom door unannounced, and then make demands—that it took me a minute to realize what she had said. What had gotten her there. In front of us. That her sons’ lives (plural) were falling apart. Both Jesse’s and Griffin’s. What was falling apart in Griffin’s life, in her mind? He was a successful chef, opening his own restaurant for the first time. He was doing great. All that had changed was that he had married me. Which was when I started to understand that that was exactly her problem.

  “Wait. Jesse called you?” Griffin said, surprised.

  “No,” she said. “And that’s very comforting, let me tell you. Gia and Cheryl did. They called together.”

  This was when Emily Putney turned back to me. This was when she decided she wanted to deal with me.

  “You must be Annie?” she said.

  And then she gave me a look. She gave me a look—how can I explain it?—that made me want to say no. That made me seriously consider it. But before I could, I heard someone barreling up the stairs, covering at least two stairs at a time.

  We all turned to see Jesse—out of breath, a twin under each of his arms, their faces and hands covered in tomato sauce and orange juice and powdered sugar.

  “Hey Ma!” Jesse gave his mother a big smile. “I thought that was your car I saw out front! You realize that’s the twins’ soccer ball you crushed underneath your back tire, right?”

  “Darling,” she said, “of all the many questions that need answering right now, I’m not sure that is going to come first.”

  Everyone dispersed in quick succession: Emily going to put down the boys, the bigger boys heading downstairs to have a talk with her. I, meanwhile, took a shower and got into bed, not even stopping to put the photographs away, just trying to will myself to fall asleep, to make the day over.

  But I couldn’t. I just lay there in the dark, my eyes slowly adjusting to the sliver of moonlight coming into the bedroom, until I was making it out again. Those beautiful designs on the bedroom ceiling, the letters and numbers making up some sort of formula that I didn’t yet know how to understand. This was what I was trying to do—understand that formula—when Griffin came upstairs and got into bed with me.

  I expected him to say that he was sorry—sorry for his mother, sorry for the awkward intrusion into our home happening at the end of such an already tough day for me—but he was quiet, his arm over his eyes, waiting to see whether I wanted to talk. Waiting to see if I was going to say out loud what I was starting to feel inside: this was all becoming a little too much for me.

  “My mother knew we were married,” Griffin said, finally. “I called her when we left Las Vegas. You should know that. I called her long before that, four days after we met, and told her I wanted to marry you. Whenever you’d have me. You should know that too.”

  I turned toward him. “You did?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s very sweet.”

  He paused. “She just knew Gia for a long time, Annie, that’s the thing. They were close. Gia was always kind to her. Patient with how Emily can be,” he said. “It may just take her a minute. To adjust.”

  “Emily or Gia?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “She thinks you made a big mistake, doesn’t she?” I said. “I mean with me, she’s worried it was the wrong move?”

  “I think she’s just a little confused. Confused more than worried. Because, you know, it did happen so quickly with you, after . . .”

  “You were with Gia for so long?”

  “Yes.”

  I paused then, because I might not have liked it—didn’t like being on the receiving end of it—but I did get it. Emily’s question. That was a question that I had, one I was a little afraid to get the answer to, if I were being honest. How could I blame Emily for wondering too?

  Which was when I asked. Kind of.

  “Why does she think you were able to? Commit to me? And not her? What’s her theory?”

  “Look, you can’t take any of it personally,” he continued, as though that was an answer. “My mother . . . she can have very rigid ideas of how things are supposed to be.”

  “Really? I didn’t notice.”

  Griffin laughed. I couldn’t help but think of when Griffin had met my mother. How kind he was about her, how generous, how he didn’t want to blame her for anything. Part of me wanted to
match that generosity—in terms of Griffin’s mother, in terms of what her unexpected entrance was raising for me.

  But I couldn’t. In that moment, a bigger part of me had no desire to be generous at all. Nick’s mother had loved me, had treated me like a second daughter, even before Nick and I had been together. Where was I starting from this time around? Apparently hoping my mother-in-law could figure out how to stand me.

  Still, instead of going to a place where I asked Griffin to parse his mother for me further—or asking for that, and then making unfair comparisons (at least out loud) to the mothers of my past, the ones who seemed predisposed to love me from the get-go—I did the best I could do. I looked at the designs on the ceiling, the calming designs, taking them back in.

  “Am I crazy,” I said, “or is there some sort of blueprint to it? Like an ordering system?” By way of explanation, I pointed up above me, swirling my finger along the outlines of the designs. “The artwork on the ceiling.”

  Griffin froze. Only for a second. But in that second, I could see what he knew and feared was coming. More of the truth. More of how interconnected it all still was. Something like his past, something like our present.

  “They’re recipes, actually.”

  “Recipes?” I said.

  He nodded. “Recipes from the first meal I cooked professionally. When I working for a catering service near Boston.”

  “What are they recipes of?”

  “Pork confit and peppers, a braised lamb stew. Lemon cake.”

  “Lemon cake sounds good right now.”

  I looked at the ceiling in a different light, making out the words as ingredients, the numbers as quantities, the designs between them literally like a mixing pot moving them all together. Gorgeous, and incredible.

  Then I saw it, the other thing I missed—how had I missed it?—the lilt of the l’s reminding me of something. Reminding me of the lilt of other l’s I’d just recently seen. Reminding me, all at once, of where.

  “Gia drew it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Gia drew it.”

  “Did your mother help out?” I was joking. Or I was trying to joke when I said that. But then Griffin didn’t answer.

  I turned over and went to sleep.

  18

  There was an e-mail waiting for me in the morning forwarded to me from Jesse, which had been forwarded to Jesse from Cheryl, reminding all of us that I was supposed to go on the twins’ field trip to Hartford that day. Claire had sent it to Cheryl, and had asked Cheryl to send along to her sister—me, apparently—followed by a smiley face. My sister? Cheryl wrote in her e-mail to Jesse, followed by a series of expletives far less friendly than a smiley face.

  It was the last thing I wanted to do. To be at the elementary school no later than 9:15 A.M., ready to help monitor the field trip bus. No, strike that: the last thing I wanted to do was get up and begin to focus on the photographs still strewn all over the bedroom floor. No, strike that: the last thing I wanted to do was get up and deal with my husband—to go and help him at the restaurant, like I had promised—and then have to answer to the photographs on the floor. No, strike that: the last thing I wanted to do was run into my mother-in-law on the way to helping Griffin at the restaurant on the way to dealing with the photographs.

  And so I let Jesse give us all a ride to school on his way to MIT to try and work on his dissertation (and avoid his mother).

  But when we pulled up to the school—the minibus already in front, the twins jumping out—Gia was standing there, getting ready to board, wearing a pair of bug-shaped sunglasses. Sunglasses that would have undoubtedly looked great with her orange scarf.

  “Oh man,” Jesse said, just as Gia looked up and saw both of us through the car’s windshield.

  “What do we do?” I said.

  “Wave?” Jesse said.

  I, meanwhile, was stuck on the slightly less immediate problem.

  “She’s going? It’s the Children’s Museum,” I said. “A children’s science museum. Aren’t there art classes she needs to teach or something?”

  “Apparently not right now.”

  I sighed, loudly, wrapping my terrible coat more tightly around me as I opened the passenger-side car door. “Well, come on, I guess,” I said.

  “Come on where?”

  She was still looking right at us. She was still looking right through the windshield in her bug-shaped shades.

  “To say hello.”

  “No way.” He shook his head. “Too awkward.”

  “Too awkward?”

  “Yep.”

  I glared at him. “Jesse, you’re seriously going to send me out there all alone?” I said.

  “I’m not sending you anywhere,” he said, turning the ignition back on. “If you want to make a run for it, I’m game to take you. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Well, anywhere between here and MIT.”

  “Gee, how generous,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. “I’m that kind of guy.”

  It wasn’t easy, but Gia and I managed to avoid each other the entire way to Hartford—me sitting all the way up front in the minibus, Gia sitting in the back, leading the kids around her in some sort of magical-singing-puzzle contest.

  We managed to avoid each other at the actual museum, all morning—it was all I could do to keep my eyes on the twins and my other assigned peanuts as they raced from one accidentwaiting-to-happen exhibit to the next. We even managed to avoid talking to each other as we handed out paper-bag peanut-butter lunches together in the museum lunchroom—Gia somehow managing to do it with a flourish, each kid’s bag decorated with a lacy flower.

  But then, right before we were set to leave the museum, to get back on the bus and make our way home to Williamsburg, we happened to take several little girls to the bathroom in the same three-minute interval. And so, at the very end of the field trip—so close to free from each other—we found ourselves face-to-face. Or, rather, side to side. In front of the sink bank, looking into the same slightly discolored mirror.

  “Hey . . .” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. “Long day.”

  She nodded.

  I started washing my hands quickly, trying to hurry my girls along. Then something came over me, and I decided to take a different tactic. To be something like brave.

  “Look,” I said, “Gia.”

  She met my eyes in the mirror.

  “I just wanted to say how sorry I am. I’m not sure if it matters, or makes anything better, but I wanted you to know. That I didn’t know about you. Or your and Griffin’s . . . history. Not really, at least.”

  “Why would that make it any better? Griffin knew.”

  It wasn’t a bad point.

  I shrugged. “Then I’m sorry anyway,” I said. “For the rest of it. For springing it on you the way I did.”

  She looked at me for a last second, in the mirror’s reflection, before giving me a sad smile.

  “That’s nice of you to say,” she said. “But you don’t need to apologize, really. I shouldn’t have walked away from you like that. It was a little melodramatic, which is not like me. I was just shocked, as you can imagine.”

  “Of course. Or, I should say, I can imagine now.” I paused. “I didn’t mean to be the one to tell you that Griffin was married.”

  “It’s not surprising that you were,” she said. “Griffin has a hard time with blame.”

  Then she gave me a knowing look. And, all of a sudden, I felt like I was on the opposite team than Griffin. On a team with Gia. And I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want her to think I wanted to be there.

  “I don’t think Griffin meant to be unfair,” I said. “To anyone. It doesn’t feel like he had bad intentions.”

  “I’m sure that’s true. He doesn’t have a bad bone in his body. Though I’m starting to think that was part of the problem. For us, I mean.”

  I looked at her, in the mirror, confused.

  “It was a good thing he did, leaving to
wn for a while. Going out to California, giving me some breathing room. I have a new boyfriend now. And I’m doing well. We’re doing well. I’m moving on with my life. I’m moving on in a way I probably should have done a long time ago. In a way I probably wouldn’t have been able to do if he had stayed.”

  “Oh, good.” I breathed in. “That is really good to hear.”

  “I’m not finished.”

  “Okay.”

  “I shouldn’t have called Emily. That was wrong of me. But you should know something else. About Griffin. He is a good man, a very good one. But he only knows how to love broken people. He can’t show up for people who are whole. That’s why I lost him. I didn’t need fixing anymore. Which meant we weren’t just spinning our wheels, trying to keep moving in place. You know what I mean? We were actually going to have to be in it together.” She turned off the faucet. “You understand what I’m saying? ”

  “No,” I said, and shook my head because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to understand, even if I did.

  There was a world in which what Gia told me could be construed as the ex-girlfriend trying to poison the well. But in the world I lived in, all I knew was that she didn’t seem like she was trying to be mean. Or she was trying to be a little mean, maybe, by giving me a warning that one of these days Griffin would give up on me. But she also seemed like she was trying to be honest—didn’t her story, in a way, match up to Griffin’s? Just from the other side? Which actually felt much worse.

  “I don’t know what was going on with you when you two met, but my guess is you were at a low point, no?”

  She eyeballed my coat. She eyeballed my ridiculous heartcovered coat when she asked this. And from the pitying pursing of her lips, she apparently decided she had enough information to answer her own question.

  “I’m not sure it’s that simple,” I said.

  She smiled and reached for a paper towel, started to dry her hands.

  “It never is,” she said. “Except when it is. That’s the hard part. Knowing exactly when something is as simple as can be. I’m terrible at that myself.”