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 talk 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 abou
t 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.
The next day, while I was struggling to make sense of this, she came by to get the kids. They were out back, in the pool. When I went to answer the door, Nicole reached up and gave me a little wifely kiss, then we walked through the house, heading for the pool. She saw the pictures of Paula again, and made a nasty remark, and it really pissed me off. I guess she thought our weekend in Cabo meant I was ready to walk down the aisle with her that very afternoon, and that by this time I should have dumped both Paula and her pictures. “That was uncalled for,” I said. “I don’t want you here.”
“Fine,” she said.
She went out back, got the kids out of the pool, and split. I thought, Great. She made it easy. If I was actually thinking about reconciling – if I was actually crazy enough to think about reconciling – I don’t have to think about it anymore.
Two days later, she called to apologize. She had discussed the incident with her therapist, she said, and her therapist had told her that she’d been completely in the wrong. “We had an amazing weekend, so I was hoping that everything would magically go back to the way it used to be,” she explained. “That was a mistake. I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” I said.
For the next couple of weeks, we kept our distance, but there was no denying I had strong feelings for her. I also had strong feelings for Paula, however, and that relationship was much less volatile, so I wasn’t about to make any big changes – my life was good.
Then one morning, a strange thing happened. Paula was in town, and she had spent the night, and we were up early because I was leaving for Cabo that morning. Just as I finished packing, the limo pulled up outside and I looked out the window. The guys I was going to Cabo with were all there. They got out to stretch their legs and looked up at the window and waved.
Paula and I went downstairs and said hello to the guys, then she kissed me goodbye, got into her truck, and drove out the Rockingham gate. Not a minute later, as I was putting my bags in the limo, Nicole pulled up on the Ashford side of the house. The two women had literally just missed each other. I looked over at my friends, and they looked at me, all big-eyed and everything: O.J. that was too close for comfort!
Nicole got out of her car and wandered over, smiling a friendly smile. She was wearing golf shoes, click-click clicking down the driveway, and it struck me as pretty funny. Golf had never been her thing, but she’d started taking lessons recently to show me that that she was interested in the same things I was interested in. Nicole gave me an unexpected peck on the cheek, said hi to everyone, and noticed the limo. “It looks like you guys are going out of town,” she said.
“We are,” I said. “We’re going to Cabo to do a little golfing.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said.
Anyway, the limo was waiting, and we said goodbye and took off, and on the way to the airport the guys ribbed me about that very close call. I remember telling them a little bit about my confused romantic life. I was crazy about Paula, I said, but Nicole had been pursuing me pretty relentlessly lately. “It’s making me a little crazy,” I said.
One of the guys said, “I wish I had your problems,” and everyone laughed.
Anyway, we got to Cabo and hit the links and I forgot all my problems golf is pretty magical that way – but that evening I got a call from Nicole. She said she was coming to Cabo, too, with her friend Faye Resnick, whom I’d never met, and she told me that she was bringing the kids. The next day, like a good ex-husband, I went to pick my family up at the airport, and I dropped them at this time-share they’d booked. For the next few days, I shuttled back and forth between my friends and my family, enjoying my time on the links, but also enjoying hanging at the beach with the kids, and taking them jet-skiing and stuff. When it was time to head back to L.A., Nicole said, “Why are you leaving? Why don’t you stay for a few more days?” And my kids piped in: “Yeah, Dad! Please don’t go! We’ve been having such a great time!” I thought about this – I didn’t have all that much to do in L.A., and Paula was away on some modeling gig and wouldn’t be back till early the following week – so I decided to hang through the weekend.
It was very nice. For the next few days, we were like a regular family – swimming and playing and eating meals together and just forgetting about the real world.
Faye hung out with us, too. She was dating this guy, Christian Reichardt, a chiropractor, but they were sort of on the outs. From what I overheard during her many phone conversations with him, some of which got pretty heated, Faye seemed to have a little issue with drugs, which she apparently didn’t consider a problem. Whenever these calls ended, usually pretty abruptly, Faye would turn to Nicole and tell her that the problem in the relationship wasn’t her – it was Christian. I thought that was kind of amusing, because that was pretty much the way Nicole had felt about our relationship. She was perfect, and I Was the fuckup. I almost said something about it, but I bit my tongue. We were having a good time and I didn’t want to ruin it.
The last night we were there, Faye was back on the phone with Reichardt, crying. Apparently, he was willing to take another shot at making the relationship work, but he wasn’t sure he wanted her to move back in with him. Once again, it sounded eerily similar to my own situation. It also made me think about the fact that all relationships are messy, and that everyone suffers through their fair share of pain – and sometimes more than their fair share. The more I thought about that, especially given the talk I’d recently had with my mother, the more I began to think that maybe Nicole was right about us. We’d had something special, and if we wanted it badly enough we could have it again. She kept hammering at this during those few days in Cabo: We were a great couple, she said. The kids had never seemed happier. She’d learned a great deal in the sixteen months we’ve been apart.
It finally got to me. This was in May 1993, and that Sunday was Mother’s Day. We were still in Cabo, getting ready to fly home the following day, and I finally broke down and told Nicole that I was willing to give the relationship another try. But I made myself clear on one thing. “I can’t have you moving back into the house,” I said. “That’s not going to happen. I’m not going to have the kids move in, then move out again if it doesn’t work. They’ve moved enough, and it’s too disruptive – and I’m not going to put them through that kind of trauma again.”
Nicole thought this made perfect sense, but she had concerns of her own. “I don’t want to be in a position where we have one argument and you tell me it’s over,” she said.
I thought this was a good point. “Well, okay,” I said. “What do you suggest?”
“If we’re going to commit to this, we need to commit for a full year.”
I thought about that, too, and it seemed reasonable. It was just one year, but a year that could alter the course of the rest of our lives – hers, mine, and the kids’. “Okay,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”
“No matter what ha
ppens, you stick with it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “No matter what happens, I stick with it.”
“And if it works for a whole year?”
“If it works for a whole year, you’ll move back into the house and we’ll remarry,” I said.
Nicole was so excited that she called her mother, Juditha, and told her what had happened. Juditha asked to talk to me, and I got on the phone and made light of the situation. “I’m not really sure about this little arrangement, but I guess your daughter thinks it’s going to work,” I said.
Juditha told me she was hopeful, too.
The day after we returned to L.A., Paula got back to town. I called her and told her I had made dinner plans for us, and I went and picked her up and took her to Le Dome, a fancy restaurant in West Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard. I told her what had happened in Cabo, and I broke the news to her as gently as possible. Paula was not exactly thrilled, as you can imagine. “Don’t expect me to be waiting for you,” she said.
“The last thing I want to do is hurt you,” I said. “But I honestly feel like I’ve got to give this a try. I’m still very confused about the whole thing, and I need to know if it’s going to work. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I screwed up my whole family. I owe it to myself, and I owe it especially to my kids.”
Paula went kind of quiet on me. She was the opposite of Nicole. When Nicole got mad, she got hot and bothered. When Paula got mad, she went cold and quiet.
I drove her home, feeling bad, and she didn’t invite me in.
To be honest with you, I didn’t know if things were going to work out with Nicole, but in my heart I felt I had to give it an honest shot. In a way, I still loved Nicole, and I wanted the best for our kids.
At first, things went pretty easily. I was in New York for a good part of the summer, working, and when I came home it was always very pleasant, sort of like a family reunion. Sometimes I would spend the night at Nicole’s place, on Gretna Green, and sometimes she and the kids would stay with me, on Rockingham. In was a perfect arrangement. I had a family, but I lived alone. How can you beat that?
If I Did It Page 6
