It worked, too. We went several weeks without a single argument. In fact, the only argument we had during this entire period related to the kids’ vacation schedule. I had wanted to take them away for a week in February, and I’d booked a trip in advance, but at the last minute the school old me that it wouldn’t he a good time to take them out of class, and they asked me to reconsider. When I called Nicole to try to change the date, telling her I needed to push it back a week, she wouldn’t budge. “It’s got to be that week or nothing!” she barked. I told her to kiss my ass and hung up.
Later, I found out that she had split with yet another boyfriend, and that she’d been talking to Marcus Allen about it, in great detail, hoping that Marcus would share those details with me. Marcus wasn’t sharing anything with me, however, so I was completely in the dark. The other thing she was telling Marcus was that she was missing me, and that she wondered if he thought there was a chance we might get back together. I didn’t know about that, either, because Marcus wasn’t talking, but I never imagined that she was still pining for me. I thought that it was all in the distant past – it was for me, anyway – and I was struck by the way the tables had turned. Nicole was the one who had wanted out of the marriage, and I had tried mightily to save it. When it became clear that the marriage was over, however, I found the strength to move on, but Nicole seemed to be having second thoughts about her decision. Now, these many months later, she had apparently come full circle. I didn’t know it, of course, but she was looking for a way back.
Late in February, clearly frustrated by my lack of interest in communicating with her, Nicole found another way to reach me: Every time the kids came over, they showed up with home-baked cakes or cookies. “Mom, made these for you. They’re yummy.” I told them to thank their mother, but I opted not to thank her myself. I just didn’t want to talk to her. I was done. I had a new woman in my life.
One day, the kids showed up with a CD. “Mom made this for you on her computer,” they said. I listened to it and found that every last song was a love song. I was flattered, I guess, and maybe even a little moved, but that didn’t change anything. Nicole and I were finished. “Thank Mom for me,” I told the kids. But, again, I didn’t bother thanking her myself. I didn’t want to get into it, because I wasn’t going back. And yes, I know this goes against the popular conception – that I was still madly in love with Nicole, and pining to get her back – but it’s God’s own truth.
One afternoon, I was packing for a trip to Cabo San Lucas, and waiting for my kids to show up. They were going to have dinner at my place and spend the night, and I was going to drop them back at Nicole’s in the morning, on my way to the airport. When I was done packing, I nodded off on the couch, and the phone rang a short time later, waking me. I answered it without checking the caller I.D., and it turned out to be Nicole. “I want to talk,” she said.
“I don’t want to talk,” I said. “It’s always a huge hassle. We’re not together anymore. I can’t be listening to your problems all the time.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” she said. “But there’s something I need to say to you.”
“Okay,” I said. “What?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone. I need to tell you this in person.”
“I can’t talk right now,” I said. “I have another call coming in.” This was a lie, but I wanted to get her off the phone.
“Will you call me back?”
“Sure,” I said, but that was a lie, too, and I didn’t call her back.
An hour later, my kids showed up at the house, and they had a package for me. I opened the package, which was from Nicole. I found our wedding tape inside, along with a letter. In the letter, which I didn’t read till later, Nicole told me that she was learning a great deal about herself in therapy, and that she had come to realize that she was responsible for most of the problems in our marriage. She also said that she still loved me, that had she had never stopped loving me, and that she wanted me to know that she believed we’d had a truly great relationship. I had always thought we had a great relationship, so this wasn’t exactly a revelation, and as I read between the lines – or not even between the lines, really – it was pretty clear that she was looking for us to reconcile.
I went out to join the kids, and I was surprised to catch sight of Nicole, standing on the far side of the gate, looking toward the house. I didn’t know she had dropped the kids off – Cathy Randa was in charge of that – but there she was, staring at me, and it didn’t seem right to ignore her. I went over to talk to her.
“So what are you doing here?” I said. “What’s with the wedding tape and stuff?”
“I thought you were going to call me back,” she said, avoiding the question.
“I fell asleep on the couch.”
“Well, like I said on the phone, I have something to tell you.”
I was trapped. I sighed a big sigh and said, “Let’s take a walk.”
We took a little walk around the neighborhood, the same walk we had taken hundreds of’ times before. It’s a nice neighborhood, quiet and peaceful, and we used to love to wander up and down the streets, looking at the houses, chatting with the neighbors. This time we weren’t doing much looking or chatting, though – this time she just wanted to talk, and what she wanted to talk about – no surprise – was us getting back together. She repeated she had come a long way in therapy, and that she was sorry about everything, and she was wondering if I could find it in my heart to forgive her. “I’ve always loved you,” she said. “I’ve never stopped loving you. And I’ve never told you I didn’t love you.”
“That’s not entirely accurate,” I said. “You always told me you loved me, but you said you weren’t in love with me.”
“Well, I was wrong. I’m still in love with you.”
“How can you be back in love with me?” I said. “We barely speak anymore, and I’ve hardly seen you in months.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’ve been dealing with all the stuff I was supposed to deal with, and everything’s a little clearer now. I really feel we could make it work.”
I couldn’t believe this, even though I’d seen it coming. “You’re telling me you want to get back together?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think that’s in the cards,” I said. “I think it might be good for the kids if we tried to have a friendly dinner from time to time, but that’s about it.”
“You don’t have to make your mind up right away,” she said. “All I’m doing is putting it out there. All I’m asking is that you think about it.”
“I don’t understand you,” I said. “I’m the same guy you left. I’m the same O.J. I haven’t changed a bit.”
“Well, I don’t want you to change,” she said. “You’re fine the way you are. I’m telling you I’ve changed.”
I thought that was messed up. She was the mother of my children, and part of me still loved her, but I was pretty sure we didn’t have a future together. Still, I wanted to let her down easy, so I urged her to focus on the kids. They had always enjoyed spending time with both of us, together, and that had been the original plan when we first separated – to try to keep the kids happy by showing them that we were still a close, loving family – and I thought we could work on that. “I know the kids would love it if we had dinner as a family now and then,” I said.
“I agree,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
When we got back to the house, she asked if she could come in. To be honest, I didn’t want her to, but it seemed odd to keep her out, what with the talk we’d just had, and with the kids there, watching us standing by the front gate, so I let her in. We got the kids fed and I took them upstairs and put them to bed, and Nicole was still there when I came back down.
“I see you got pictures of Paula all over the house,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “In case you hadn’t heard, we’re dating.”
She smiled, trying to hide the
hurt, and sat on the couch across from me. I didn’t know what she was still doing there, and I was about ten seconds away from getting rude. “Thank you for letting me hang out,” she said. “I just didn’t feel like being alone.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “But I’m tired, and I’ve got a plane to catch tomorrow, and I’m going to bed.”
“Okay,” she said, but she looked disappointed. I walked her to the door and watched her cross to her car. She looked good. She looked as good as she had when I first met her. I thought, It’s amazing the way people can whip themselves into shape when they put their mind to it.
When I went back inside, I opened the letter and read it. In her letter, Nicole went on at length about the issues we had just talked about – that it was her fault the relationship had fallen apart, and that she had learned through counseling to ‘turn negatives into positives’ and to ‘get rid of’ her anger:
I always knew that what was going on with us was about me – I just wasn’t sure why it was about me – so I just blamed you. I’m the one who was controlling. I wanted you to be faithful and be a perfect father. I was not accepting to who you are. Because I didn’t like myself anymore.
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 come 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 it, 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 he 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?”
If I Did It Page 5
