The First Husband

by Laura Dave

  “I’ve actually been living in Pimlico,” he said.

  I looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “It felt too weird, you know?” he said. “Living in a place you picked for us. Without you there . . .”

  I nodded, taking a last look at the photograph of Mila on the phone, attempting to avoid the eye contact he was trying to make. Then, still not looking, I tossed his phone back to him. Which, I like to believe, was the primary reason that the toss went short—the phone landing on the floor, beneath him, both of us staring down at it. Neither of us standing up to get it.

  He took another sip of his drink.

  “And the thing is, I’ve just been thinking for a while . . . all that time in my own place, the accidental place, and I just keep going over and over it: how we spend so much time trying to listen to each other, you know? We spend so much time rewarding ourselves for trying so hard to listen, that somehow, we can miss it . . .” He paused. “The thing the person we love most is too afraid to tell us.”

  I pulled my knees closer to myself, wrapping my arms around knees.

  “Okay . . .” I said. “What was I too afraid to tell you, Nick?”

  This was when, as an answer, he reached into his pocket—nervously, slowly—pulling something out and looking at it. Before tossing it over, across the small space between us.

  It was a small red box. Not velvet. But a ring box all the same. I opened it. And, inside, saw a diamond ring. And such a pretty one—a little like it was from another time. A little like it belonged right here, with us, in this aging sitting room.

  I took it out, holding it between my thumb and index finger, looking back up at him.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  I was still holding the ring between my fingers, still totally unsure what was going on.

  “I came here tonight because I was going to propose.”

  “To who?” I asked.

  “You.”

  I looked back down at the ring, the olden-days ring, completely and utterly speechless. “But . . . I’m married,” I said.

  “I know that.”

  I looked back up at him. “You waited until I was married to ask me to marry you?” I said.

  He started to answer me, but I put my hand up to cut him off.

  “Are you nuts?” I said.

  “Just look.”

  He motioned for me to look inside the ring, where he’d written the same thing he’d written on the back of a locket, in another life, the one we lived in together: For you, for always.

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  Then I stood up to go. Why was it taking so long to get out of this terrible room?

  “Look, Annie, I know it’s so screwed up between us now,” he said. “And I know it’s in large part my fault.”

  He was standing up now too, blocking my exit. Putting his hands up in the air, between us, in the calm-down motion.

  “But you need to know that nothing ever happened. With Pearl,” he continued. “It was never about her. It was about the idea of her, the idea of that kind of life . . . something simpler, stationary. About what I thought I was supposed to want, versus what I actually want, if that makes any sense.”

  “Not a lot,” I said.

  He looked at me, and in some ways I was waiting for an answer, but in some ways I knew exactly what he meant. And he knew that I knew. He was trying to tell me that nothing happened. What are the lines you can cross and come back from? Hadn’t he stayed somewhere within the worst ones?

  “We want the same things. We’ve built our lives, our careers, around them. And we can still have what we had, Adams. I already have two projects lined up in Europe over the next six months. And it looks like I’m going to get to shoot the new movie in Brazil at the end of the year. We can travel the world together.” He smiled at me. “It was unfair of me to judge you for wanting that, for wanting that freedom. When clearly that’s what I want too. What I want with you.”

  I tried to think of how to say no—that that wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I wanted something more solid. Not starts and stops of a life—something more continuous, more grounded, something that could grow. But then how could I explain the part of me that had been looking for a way out of Williamsburg from the moment I arrived?

  “I need to leave here, Nick,” I said.

  “I know what you were afraid to tell me,” he said, instead of listening. “You probably don’t think about it much now, but the day I left, you weren’t that surprised. You seemed, at least a part of you seemed, to be expecting it.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, it all just got to my head, for a minute. The movie’s success and my three and a half minutes of fame. It got me questioning all sorts of things about my life. And I couldn’t be more sorry about how that’s impacted you. I think you know that.” He paused. “And, the thing is, I just keep thinking that now I know it too, now I can make it okay for you, the part that scares you the most.”

  “Which is what?” I said, finally.

  “You can count on me,” he said. “I’ll always be here.”

  I looked at him in shock.

  “I might screw up and get off track, Annie,” he said. “But, if you give me a chance to, I swear I’ll always make it right. . . .”

  I felt something breaking open inside of me. And I had to get away from him. Not because I was mad and sad and totally pissed off. But for the part of me that wasn’t. For the part of me that was something else.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  Then I pushed past him out the door.

  I felt better immediately after I was away from him. After the heavy, old door was between us. I took a breath, let it out, and kept moving.

  Except that halfway through the lobby, I felt something in my hand, and looked down to see it. The ring. I was still carrying the ring.

  And the breath went back in, in a bad way. Because I had to go back into the sitting room, where I found a bloodied Batman, standing there—still and lost—exactly where I’d left him.

  I didn’t say, This is yours. I didn’t say anything.

  I just put the ring on the floor, right by Nick’s phone, not risking handing it to him directly. Not risking any more contact.

  We both looked down at the ring, resting there.

  And this time, when I left, I ran.

  29

  A little before 3 A.M. I walked into the house, carrying two dripping brown bags, to find Griffin sitting at the kitchen table, still awake, still decompressing from the night. He had a large coffee mug in front of him—the pot making more on the stove—a book open on the table.

  “Hey there,” I said.

  “Hey there,” he said.

  His eyes went to the brown bags, then back to me. He looked tired sitting there—not so much mad, but very tired, eerily calm and tired, which made it even harder for me to know exactly where to start.

  I walked into the kitchen, gingerly taking the seat across the table from him, putting the brown bags on the table.

  “When did you get home?” I asked.

  He picked up his mug, one-handed, held it to his mouth. “Not too long ago,” he said. “We decided to do a midnight supper for the old faithful who’d stuck it out all night.”

  “What did you make?”

  He gave me a look, like he didn’t want to answer that—like this was, quite possibly, the last question in the world that should be asked right then. But I had a plan. Or I thought I did.

  “Portobello mushroom sliders,” he said. “And spicy onion soup.”

  “Did you have a second to eat anything yourself?” I asked.

  He shook his head, his hand still wrapped tightly around his mug.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Well that’s good. Because . . .”

  I reached into one of the bags and pulled it out: a perfect red Lasse’s lobster claw—the one Griffin had told me about that first nigh
t. The Lasse’s lobster claw that he’d promised me that night, on the other side of the country, in that first minute where we were learning to promise things to each other. It felt like something—maybe not enough, but something—if I could deliver that promise to him now.

  “I thought I could make you some eggs,” I said.

  He reached over and took the claw from my hand. “You went all the way up to Lasse’s?” he said.

  I nodded. “In the middle of the night,” I said.

  “How did you get him to serve you?”

  I shrugged. “I have magical powers.”

  He nodded, putting the claw back in the bag.

  “No arguments here,” he said. “That was sweet of you. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, smiling, like it was no big deal. It fact, it had been a fairly exhausting ordeal that ended with me begging Lasse for a few small claws, being forced to barter them for several items I had no idea how I’d get my hands on, including a first edition copy of my newspaper and a Jack Nicholson autograph.

  I stood up, and headed toward the stove, firing it up. “So what do you say?” I asked. “Can I make you some eggs?”

  “Annie, you don’t have to do that.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “I want to. I’m starving too. I mean, it goes without saying that they may not turn out as good as yours did, but you never know, right? I do have the magical claws on my side.”

  This was when I opened the refrigerator, and saw what I didn’t have on my side, what it turned out was missing. Maybe the most obvious thing. The eggs.

  “We have no eggs?” I said.

  Griffin smiled. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  It was too much. I sat down, depleted, my head falling into my hands.

  “Who has no eggs?” I asked. “And do we know anyone who can put us in touch with Jack Nicholson?”

  He looked at me, confused, and then reached over and put his hand on my arm, calming me. “It’s okay,” he said.

  I shook my head. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I wanted to do one thing right. I thought if I could do one thing right . . .”

  “You do a lot of things right,” he said.

  “But I ruined your night, or Nick ruined it. And I couldn’t stop that.” I looked right at him. “I am so sorry about that, Griffin. I’m so sorry. You have no idea how much I want to make it okay.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “You do?” I said. “So you’re not mad?”

  He gave me a look, just a flash, which let me know he was. Then he looked back at his coffee mug, which was getting dangerously close to empty.

  “Mad might not be the right word,” he said.

  “What is, then?”

  Griffin walked over to the stove, and started to pour himself some more coffee—reaching in the cupboard to get another mug, and bring some over to me too.

  “Michael from your paper came in after you left,” he said.

  “Who?” I asked, it taking me a minute to connect the dots—the many Michaels I knew at work, until I could picture him: a small guy, originally from Martha’s Vineyard, who wrote the “Wine & Spirits” column. “Michael Thomas?” I said. “The wine critic?”

  He nodded, taking his seat again, handing over my mug.

  “He was visiting his daughter at Smith College. Thought he’d check out the restaurant, see if he could find an angle to write about it.” He paused, putting his coffee mug to his lips. “He asked me to congratulate you on your promotion.”

  I looked up at him, but he wasn’t meeting my eyes.

  “They offered you a job in London?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well . . . based out of London.”

  “When?” he said. “Not that it matters, exactly, but when did they let you know about the offer?”

  I started talking entirely too quickly, trying to explain. “Griffin, I was going to talk to you about it,” I said. “But with the restaurant opening and everything else that’s been happening around here, I just haven’t had a chance yet, and since I’m not going, obviously . . .”

  “To London? Where Nick is?”

  “Based out of London,” I mumbled, as though this was the point. “And Nick’s not there for much longer.”

  “So do you think you want it?” he asked.

  For a second, I didn’t know if he was talking about Nick or the job—my eyes getting wide.

  “The job?” he said, looking more than a little irritated.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t.”

  He looked right at me, the coffee still by his mouth, waiting for something closer to the truth.

  “I don’t know, Griffin,” I said. “I don’t really know anymore. But I am worried about what else I’m going to do here. What else I can do. That’s not a secret.”

  I looked back up at Griffin, who was still silent. But I wondered if he was hearing the rest of what I was thinking: about seeing Nick, about what that was triggering for me. Because instead of getting madder, it was like it just washed his anger away. And he gave me a smile I didn’t recognize.

  “What?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Before you walked in the door tonight, I was just thinking how my mother used to take Jesse and me to the General Store on Friday afternoons, back when we were little kids. She’d do her shopping for the weekend, and we’d each get to pick one candy,” he said. “Just one. And, the thing was, Jesse would always know exactly which candy he wanted. These hard little guys called Pop Rocks.”

  I watched him reach over, put the brown bags from Lasse’s in the refrigerator, move them away from us.

  “I remember Pop Rocks,” I said. “Wasn’t that the candy they said could kill you if you ate it with a soda? The one that they say killed that kid Mikey from the Life cereal commercial?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “And I don’t think they actually killed him.”

  I shook my head. “Man, those were great.”

  “That’s the thing,” he said. “Jesse would grab the candy and be out of the store in fifteen seconds flat. And I’d still be standing there, just staring at the candy shelf for as long as my mother shopped. They’d play these old records in the store . . . the Beatles. The Beach Boys. Billie Holiday. So my mother thought I wanted to listen to the music, but really I couldn’t decide. I’d pick up something pretty great, put it back down, pick up something else. And just when Emily would call out that I was out of time, Jesse screaming through the window for me just to get some more Pop Rocks, I’d panic, as only a six-year-old can, and end up picking something pretty awful.”

  “Like Fun Dip?”

  “On several occasions, yes.”

  “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

  He smiled, giving me a small laugh. Then he looked right at me.

  “You shouldn’t take that job, Annie,” he said, solid and firm. “And I’m not saying that because of me. Or because it’d be difficult to go with you. I would figure out how to, if I thought it was the right thing. For you, for us.”

  “Then why are you saying it?”

  He shrugged. “Because I’m worried you’ve just convinced yourself you need to go there, and that’s not the same thing as actually wanting to.”

  “I don’t follow,” I said.

  He paused. “You were the one that told me you wanted a different life.”

  “Well, I’m not sure my different life is entirely realistic,” I said.

  “Says who?”

  “Says hundreds of ruined photographs,” I said. “Says me not knowing what I’d do with them even if they weren’t. Says this travel column, my spending so much time on the road, all of it being the only life I’ve ever known.”

  He looked at me, not as if this was completely unclear, but as if this type of clarity wasn’t of much use to him. It made me feel lonely, especially after feeling understood again just a few hours before by someone who shouldn’t be understanding me at all anymore.

&
nbsp; “I can’t just become someone else, Griffin,” I said, trying again.

  “Who’s talking about you becoming someone else?” he said. “I’m talking about you becoming more like yourself.”

  I leaned back, away from him. More like myself. This was the worst part. I didn’t know why I couldn’t get there.

  “That’s the thing,” he said. “That’s why I started thinking about the Pop Rocks story. I used to be so frustrated that Jesse knew exactly what he wanted. That he could just be happy with it . . . really content. I never thought I’d be built that way. And then it changed.”

  “When?” I asked.

  He gave me a smile. “When did we meet, again?”

  I smiled back, and then looked down. “That’s not true,” I said.

  “No, not exactly,” Griffin said. “But that’s not what I’m saying anyway. I’m saying it took a long time to figure out it wasn’t about me finding my version of Pop Rocks.”

  “What was it about?”

  He stood up, taking his mug with him. “It was about learning to leave the store before time was up,” he said.

  Then he leaned down, for one more second, to kiss me on the cheek. Like that was something we did.

  “Take the job, Annie,” he said, into my ear. “Go to London.”

  I looked up as he pulled back, moving away from me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Didn’t you just say that I shouldn’t go? Didn’t you just get finished saying that?”

  He tilted his head, met my eyes. “I just keep wondering, what made Nick think he could just show up here?” he said. “Was that about him, or was it about you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, which seemed to be the only answer Griffin needed.

  Part of me wanted to scream out, It isn’t about Nick. But the words wouldn’t come. Because there was another part of me that looked at that antique ring a second too long—that listened to Nick ’s offer a second too long—to know that Nick wasn’t factoring into my confusion. And then, there was the biggest part of me: the part that didn’t think this was about wanting Nick again, at all. But that couldn’t ignore what seeing him made abundantly clear. That I was no closer to being present here. That part of me still craving an exit strategy.