This demon was powerful. It gave me a rush of control over my anger and unhappiness when I said it. But is also terrified me. It brought back memories of my parents’ divorce and left me with a low-grade anxiety, one that kept me awake late into the night, adrenaline coursing through my body. When I left Sam, I hadn’t considered divorce with the same terror, partly because Alex was only a baby and wouldn’t remember it, but also because Sam and I were so young, and so immature, that it had almost seemed like we’d been playing at being grown-ups. But with Nikolai it was different. I had carefully considered my feelings. I had wanted to be his wife. I’d wanted to give him a child. I’d wanted to be faithful to him. I’d wanted to keep my promises. I’d wanted to be with him forever. I might not have understood our Bulgarian wedding vows, but I understood what it meant to be committed. And I had been committed to Nikolai, one hundred percent.
To keep the demon away, I learned the art of avoidance. I avoided talking to Nikolai about sensitive topics (our lack of sex, lack of money, blue condom wrappers). I avoided friendships with happy couples, finding it difficult to be confronted with other people’s marital success. I avoided the present moment and imagined the future. In the future we would laugh more. In the future we would make love twice a week. In the future we would see that at all these troubles were just a phase, something we’d made it through together. I lived for the day we would put everything behind us and be happy again.
—
AFTER THE RUSSIAN GIRL, I insisted that we go to therapy. Things were becoming so tense that I saw regular discussion with an objective observer as a good solution. Nikolai didn’t want to go, but finally he agreed, so long as he went alone to a therapist of his own choosing. And so we each found therapists at different practices on the East Side of Providence. I began seeing someone on Wednesday nights, while he was home with Alex and Nico, and he was scheduled to go on Thursdays, while I stayed home with the kids. Nikolai saw his therapist twice. Then, for some mysterious reason, he stopped going.
“What happened?” I asked one Thursday night when he was supposed to be at therapy.
“Hmmm?” Nikolai was playing online chess, and it was hard to get his attention.
“I said why did you miss your session? Don’t you have an appointment now?”
“What session?” he asked, glancing up from the monitor.
“Therapy? You know, we agreed to go talk to someone about…this?”
“Oh, that,” he said, as if I’d just reminded him of the Batak massacre of the Bulgarians by the Ottoman Turks. “Therapy. What about it?”
“I gather you’re not going tonight?”
“No,” he said, clicking his rook into a corner and protecting it with a pawn, a maneuver he told me was called castling. “I’m done with that.”
“Who is done with therapy after two sessions?”
“I am,” he said. “My therapist told me I don’t need therapy.”
My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. I couldn’t get this line out of my mind. I repeated it to myself, even as I stood there watching him play chess. My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. Why would a therapist dismiss someone after two sessions?
“Don’t you think you should find another therapist, then?” I asked at last.
“Why would I?” he said, clicking on his knight and moving it to a square he called H7. “You wanted me to try, and I tried. It didn’t work.”
“Isn’t the point of therapy to help our marriage?” I asked, growing frustrated. He was just sitting there playing chess, without even looking at me, as if I weren’t even there. “Don’t you think you should at least stick with it for more than two sessions?”
“Is it really that important?” he asked, glancing up at me.
“Yes,” I said, feeling like the very stereotype of a disgruntled wife, my arms akimbo, my voice pouty. But it was important to me that he show he cared enough about our marriage to try talking to someone.
“Okay. I’ll find someone else.”
“Really?” I asked, and I could hear the hope in my voice, the sound of hope not yet being pathetic to my ears.
“Sure,” he said, turning his back as he made another move. “I’ll take care of it.”
It took Nikolai months to find a new therapist, and when he did, it happened a second time: He began therapy, and then he stopped going. When I asked him again what had happened, he said the same thing he’d said the first time, My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. Now it was two therapists who had told him he didn’t need therapy, two therapists who had assessed him and, finding that he was perfectly normal, with no problems and nothing to talk about, told him to stop coming.
Despite his resistance to therapy, I continued. I didn’t exactly like therapy. I found it too disruptive to the alternative narrative of my marriage I was trying to create. After a therapy session, it was difficult to go back to my life—my increasingly hypocritical life—without feeling like I’d opened a Pandora’s box of discontent.
And yet these sessions forced me to look at my feelings systematically. They forced me talk to someone for one hour once a week about my marriage, forced me to examine myself, forced me to look my own significant faults—my need for control, my perfectionism, my anxieties about money, my stubbornness, and my insecurities. I wasn’t easy, I knew that. My childhood left a legacy of distrust. I wanted the security of a family, but I had no real working model for one, and so I patched together ways of getting through that were not healthy and even destructive. I had, for example, a big hot Italian temper that bubbled up and burst forth in an explosive shower of screaming and throwing whatever was nearby. I needed to show, not tell, my fury. Once, when Nikolai had pushed the wrong button, I threw an entire bowl of tomatoes at the wall, leaving pale pink splotches of color on the white paint, abstract expressionism Trussoni style. I could be bossy and a know-it-all, and I often used extreme measures to decimate Nikolai in an argument, saying the meanest thing that came to mind so that he would storm off in a rage. I was always testing him, pushing him, waiting for him to break. I eventually came to see this behavior, which must have been as excruciating for him to live with as it was for me, as the result of my choice to stay married. I chose to stay even though I knew I wasn’t being honest with myself. I chose to stay even though the dynamic we’d created was killing us. My contempt—for him and for myself—was a result of my choice to stay. But I couldn’t leave either. And this tension between what I should do and what I actually did do tore me apart.
Marriage is not easy for anyone, my therapist once said. I wasn’t alone—my therapist had counseled hundreds of married patients, each unhappy in her own way. Take things slow, she told me. Forgive him and yourself. Let your love grow again. Get some distance from your anger. Give yourself space.
Like how much distance? I wondered. A continent?
Pitch
I woke in a pitch-black darkness, and from the edge of this darkness came a shrill, inhuman scream.
I flung off the covers and sat up in bed, filled with a primal fear. I listened, my heart in my throat, for the cry to return. My first thought was of Nico, not my eight-year-old Nico but my hungry newborn Nico, whose wail had summoned me at all times of the night, needing, needing, needing.
In the fraction of a second it took me to regain my sense of time and place—it was 2010, and I was in a drafty, ancient stone structure in France—I heard the screeching again, sharp and keening. No, I realized, it wasn’t a baby, not a catfight on the street below, not a soprano crying out for her lover, murdered in a plot to overthrow the kingdom: It was just le mistral, the northern Provençal wind hurling itself against the windowpane at a hundred miles an hour, slicing through the cracks in the shutters and seething into the darkness.
Our bedroom held the northwest corner of the fortress, shouldering the weight of the mistral’s winds. This position lent the room a kind of high drama of heaving and puffing and moaning, the sorts of noises usually found in the be
drooms of newlyweds but that in our bedroom were (literally) only wind. In the first months at the house, the wind scared me so much that I hung a rapier—an antique sword with a fine, narrow blade I’d found in a cupboard on the first floor of the house—on the wall over the bed, ready at hand should I need it. But I never did. The wind was incorporeal, evasive, without ill intent. It woke me and then slipped away into the night.
I reached across the bed, to feel if Nikolai was there, but found only the cool cotton sheet. He was still downstairs, in his office, probably deep in one of his online chess matches. I stepped into a pair of slippers and made my way down the hall, stopping at Alex’s room, where he and Fly were sound asleep, Fly breathing in loud, snorting bursts, Alex in soft, short ones. I glanced into Nico’s room. She had made a circle of dolls and animals around the edge of her bed, her own variety of protection against bad dreams. Alex had done the same thing when he was younger, setting up lines of Thomas the Tank Engine trains at his bedroom door—Thomas, Percy, Diesel, Toby, and Bertie—as if creating a magical barricade between his world and everyone else.
The wind howled and blew, rattling the windowpanes, sending a draft of cold air through the hallway. I shivered and walked through the Paris-Lyon doors, down the slippery stone steps, until I stood outside Nikolai’s office. I thought he would be asleep, camped out on his couch, but a bright line of light cut across my slippers. Voices rose from behind the door, muffled. Nikolai said something in Bulgarian. I’d learned a little of the language, and I knew a few phrases. Then a second voice spoke. It was a female voice, also speaking Bulgarian. From the sound quality and the fact that I could hear both people, I guessed Nikolai was on Skype.
I never spied on him, partially because I knew how painful it could be—my journals were never far from memory—but also because Nikolai didn’t give me the opportunity. His computer was password-protected with a long and unpronounceable Tibetan word, and his phone lock was set to random numbers. He locked up everything of importance in his office. But now, standing at the door, hearing his voice and a woman’s voice mingling in the air, I didn’t turn and walk away. I stood there. I listened.
It took a few seconds before I understood: This was not a voice I had heard before. This was an unknown person speaking to him on Skype. The woman laughed; Nikolai laughed. They were laughing together in Bulgarian. I held my breath, as if I might be able to understand what they were saying. I tried to remember all the Bulgarian phrases I’d learned while I lived in Sofia, but nothing came to me. Bulgarian jokes were often dark and filled with puns, with difficult turns of grammar, the kinds of jokes I would never understand, not ever. I pressed my ear against the door, too hard. The door pushed back, making a low creak.
Suddenly it flew open. I stumbled into the room. The computer screen was closed—he must have flipped the top shut before coming to the door—and the room was silent. Nikolai stood in the doorway, watching me. He wore a new black hat, not his top hat, but a black porkpie I’d bought him for Christmas. With his hat tipped over his eye and the room dark, he seemed less my husband than a trick of chiaroscuro, an outlaw from a Caravaggio painting. Of all the reactions I could have had, of all the things I might have done at that moment, I reached up and took off his hat. His hair was matted, unwashed. He stepped away from the door, leaving me holding his hat.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked.
“I heard you,” I said. “On Skype.”
“Really?” he said.
“Who are you talking to so late?”
“It’s six o’clock in New York,” he said.
“You were Skyping with a Bulgarian woman in New York?”
“Bulgarian?” he said, abashed. “That was English. I was talking to my editor. About my book.”
Nikolai had written his second book in English, a novel about his childhood as a piano wunderkind, so it was possible that he could be doing edits remotely.
“I heard you speaking Bulgarian,” I said. “Very clearly. Bulgarian.”
His gaze was deadpan yet somehow amused. “You’re just tired.”
“Come on,” I replied. “I know the difference between English and Bulgarian, Nikolai.”
He regarded me for a minute, then joined me on the couch. “I’m worried about you,” he said, looking me in the eye. “You wake up at all hours of the night imagining things. You have nightmares about the house. I think you’re stressed out by the move to France. It’s been too much for you. You need to take it easy.”
I knew what was happening. Nikolai was projecting his feelings and thoughts onto me. It was something he’d always done, but usually in more or less harmless ways. If he were hungry, for example, he would say, You’re starving. Let’s eat. If he wanted to drink red wine, he would buy a bottle and, upon bringing it home, say, You’ve been in the mood for Châteauneuf-du-Pape. If he were stressed, he would say that I should relax. For him, the line between us, of our thoughts and feelings, had become so blurred that he didn’t know where his feelings ended and mine began.
“I’m stressed out by the move?” I continued. “You’re the one installing locks everywhere. It’s crazy, all these locked doors.”
“You have to admit,” he said, “you’re not yourself lately.”
“Okay, sure, but I’m not stressed out by the move,” I said. “I’m happy we’re here. I don’t want to be anywhere else in the whole world but here. This is our home.”
Even as I said this, a shadow of doubt came over me. How could it be true that I loved my home when I didn’t trust the man with whom I was making that home? Here he was, trying to get me to doubt what I’d heard just two minutes before, trying to get me to doubt myself. It was like the Russian Girl in Providence: I knew the truth, but he denied it so passionately that I began to doubt the facts.
Nikolai put his hand on my shoulder and drew me closer, hugging me. The hug was awkward at first—we didn’t know how to hold each other any longer—then soft and familiar. It was the first instance of gentleness between us in months, and I felt myself melt into him, my heart go liquid. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was stressed about the move. Maybe the language I’d heard had been English. Maybe it was better to believe him so that we could have this rare moment of tenderness.
—
NICO WAS THRIVING in the village. She made friends fast and was confident enough to play the role of the “American girl,” even as she spoke French like a native child. I would walk her to the pétanque field to see her friends, or they would come to play at our house. Alex, however, didn’t like to venture outside La Commanderie. I signed him up for the village soccer team, and he gradually made friends, but when the village boys invited him to play, he didn’t go. Instead he burrowed into a corner of the attic, where he read hundreds of books and played hours of video games.
Every day at le goûter, the afternoon snack that French children eat when they come home from school, Alex and Nico did their homework for an hour at a wooden table on the second floor. Homework hour was built into le goûter and included the memorization of French poems, the creation of verb charts, and the completion of math worksheets. I subscribed to a children’s newspaper, Le Petit Quotidien, and we read it aloud, writing unknown French words on graph paper, learning the language together. Our efforts were paying off. The kids were fluent in French. But as with everything else, my kids approached learning differently. Whereas Nico jumped in and spoke imperfect but functional French from the beginning, Alex watched and listened in silence until one day he opened his mouth and spoke flawlessly. Nico threw herself into life, learning through experience, while Alex studied life, mastering his surroundings from a distance.
These character traits had always defined them, but the move to France had made them more pronounced, pushing the kids to extremes. The kind of controlled stress I’d created—taking them out of the United States and dropping them into a tiny village in France—was supposed to make them stronger, more adaptable, smarter, happier. But as Alex became
more introverted, I saw that he felt alienated as the foreign kid in his elementary school.
One solution I fell upon was to give Alex and Nico pets. We adopted our three cats—Napoleon, Josephine, and ChouChou—from an animal shelter in La Grande-Motte. ChouChou was a gray-and-white year-old male who’d been living on the street. Napoleon and Josephine were black kittens born of the same litter. We bought Fly, a sand-colored pug, as a gift for Alex’s eleventh birthday. I hoped that Fly would help bring Alex out of himself and maybe dispel some of his loneliness.
Fly changed everything. Alex loved his pug the second he saw him. After Fly arrived, Alex had a new role: He was the owner of Fly the pug. He walked Fly. He played catch with Fly. He bathed Fly. He fed Fly. Fly joined Alex in the attic, snoring at his feet when he read Eragon. My quiet, shy boy began to open up, to smile, to get excited about teaching Fly tricks. Alex would call me to the attic to show me how Fly’s leg twitched and thumped when he slept. “He’s running in his dream!” Alex said, proud as a parent. Fly was Alex’s best friend. I worried a little less about him with Fly at his side.
What did worry me was my son’s relationship with his stepfather. Nikolai’s attention, affection, and time were lopsided with our kids. He kissed Nico and nodded to Alex; he read Nico stories at bedtime and walked by Alex’s bedroom without stopping. When he played games with Nico, Alex was a third wheel. I didn’t want to believe that Nikolai was capable of favoring Nico, but it was obvious that he had trouble opening up to Alex. Never mind that Nikolai had known Alex since he was a baby and had watched him grow into a sweet, lovable child. Never mind that Alex called Nikolai “Dad.” When Alex went to hug Nikolai, Nikolai patted Alex on the back and punched him in the arm, but he couldn’t respond with emotion.
I didn’t believe that Nikolai didn’t feel love for Alex or that he didn’t have all the usual emotions a man feels for a child he has raised, but I saw that he couldn’t express his feelings. He couldn’t say “I love you” to him or make him feel special or needed. When it came to expressing his emotions, he was blocked. I understood this block, because my mother had been very similar. She loved us, I knew that, but she rarely touched us, and when she did, I could feel how unnatural it was for her to show her feelings. She came from cool, sturdy Norwegians whose feelings were kept in reserve, whereas my father—whose rowdy Italian family was all passionate arguments and operatic gestures of feeling—had been just the opposite. Growing up, I gravitated to the expressiveness of my dad, and I had become a woman who experienced emotional life on the surface. Happiness, bursts of passion, artistic inspirations, disappointments, anger, and meltdowns were all out there on display for the whole world to see. An emotional experience would come, inhabit me with frightening intensity, and be gone just as quickly. Nikolai, on the other hand, had a flat, deadpan way of expressing himself and an emotional chill that I found foreign. In the ten years we were together, for example, I never saw him cry. I eventually began comparing him to my mother and translating my own expressive emotional behavior as being a version of my father. When I explained this comparison to my therapist, she smiled and said, “It’s not so uncommon. Lots of women marry their mother.”
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