Why had I lost desire? Why didn’t I want to be intimate with him? This was a riddle I couldn’t solve. He was good-looking, had a nice body, wasn’t bad in bed, and sex made things much better between us. I wanted a deep and fulfilling sexual connection with him, but there was no spark, no flame, no fire. Nothing. I didn’t want him to touch me. When we had sex, it felt like a violation and a punishment. I ended up being cool and distant, passive and unavailable, which led Nikolai to tell me—in the middle of our many arguments—that I was frigid.
He was right and he was wrong. I rejected him sexually, yes, but I was not frigid. Something in me had shut down in relation to him. It wasn’t a matter of physical attraction. I looked at him and I saw that he was a gorgeous man. But when it came time to be intimate with him, it was not physical impulses that ruled me, rather emotional ones. It was here, in our troubled sexual life, that the evidence of our emotional distance was most clear. The lack of trust, the emotional betrayals, our inability to parent together, the disparities between our views on work and money—all of these pressures came together to create a wall between us. It was an instance of my body telling my heart that something was deeply, essentially wrong.
And yet I kept trying. As I lay on the bed in Barcelona, I tried to understand what in the hell I was doing in my sex-kitten outfit, drunk and alone, listening to another couple make love. I felt even more alone, even more isolated, than I had back at home. There I was, done up like Betty Page, wishing to God that I were somewhere else than in that bed.
Nikolai came out of the bathroom and slipped under the covers, smiling, his eyes filled with expectation. But my mood had changed. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been game, but now the moment had passed. He was ready, but I was done. I felt my flesh prickle with resistance as he slid his hand over my thigh. My stomach turned as he kissed my neck. But I didn’t resist him. I had made the preparations, had booked the room and bought the lingerie. It was too late to back out now. And while I went through all the motions of intimacy, my heart remained locked away, unreachable.
—
ONCE IT WAS clear that our move to France hadn’t worked miracles, the renewal ceremony became my new delusional quest. Like Scheherazade telling her 999th tale, I still believed that death could be avoided by the reinvention of our story. And the next chapter was this: a renewal ceremony to clear out all the years of unhappiness, wipe away the deceptions, the anger, the resentments, and the fantasies in one clean sweep. It would be a concrete, measurable, exterior proof that our relationship was improving. I needed such proof. I needed to go through the motions, to say the words and hear him say the words, to believe that we could change. I needed to make my efforts manifest, to see them play out physically, to make other people witness them. When the interior is weak, the exterior must appear strong. With the center hollow, the walls must be thick.
“How about poems?” I asked Nikolai one afternoon as we sat in the courtyard. After the Citroën Incident, he had gone off caffeine, exchanging espresso for pots of valerian-root tea, an infusion meant to soothe the nervous system.
“Poems?” Nikolai asked, fingering a black bag slung over his chest. Ever since Jett had given him antianxiety remedies, he’d taken to carrying the pill bottles around in a black messenger bag. A folder with his vital records (birth certificate, passport, medical records, and so forth) was stuffed in the side pocket. The bag accompanied him at all times, even to the bathroom, and Lord and Lulu joked that Nikolai was guarding top-secret documents in his bag, that he must be some kind of spy protecting classified state secrets. They called it his CIA bag.
“The vows. For the renewal ceremony. We could write them ourselves. Maybe poems?”
Nikolai was playing chess on his phone, his thumbs jabbing at the screen. He’d been playing online chess a lot lately, working on his opening, middle game, and endgame.
“Hey, hello?” I said. “Did you hear me?”
“Hmmm,” Nikolai said, a sound that meant, Just a second, let me finish this, and after a barrage of thumb jabs he put the phone down and looked at me, a flush of victory in his cheeks. He must have won. “Sorry. My ranking rose over twenty-two hundred,” he said.
“Is that a big deal?”
“Very,” he said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand and working his black top hat—his courtyard costume—over his head. “Grand masters are at that level.”
At the time I didn’t give a damn about grand masters or chess rankings, but it is clear to me now that this moment in the courtyard was one of missed connection. We were talking past each other, thinking only of ourselves, and had no idea of just how careless we’d become: The vows—and my project of renewing our marriage—were the most important thing in the world for me just then. His chess ranking gave him a solid measure of his skill and talent, something he needed to feel good about himself. But neither of us could see the other’s needs.
“Were you saying something?” Nikolai asked.
“Vows,” I repeated. “What do you think about writing vows?”
There was an utter blankness in his eyes, an almost comical lack of comprehension. The same look that I surely had when he spoke about chess.
“You know—vows? Renewal ceremony?” I said, biting my lip, trying hard not to get frustrated or hostile. I needed him to show some sign of life, something that proved he wanted to be part of this artistic collaboration called marriage. My biggest fear was that I was masterminding the whole thing while he didn’t give a fig about it. “Weren’t you listening?”
“Sure,” Nikolai replied. “You asked me about your dress. Why not wear that purple one?”
I had, in fact, mentioned getting a new dress about thirty minutes before. He had registered one small part of our conversation. That was good enough for me. I picked up where I’d left off.
“I wore the purple one when we got married the first time. It’s vintage. It was old even in 2002. But I wasn’t talking about the dress. I was talking about writing our vows.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked desperate, as if he wanted to say the right thing, perhaps to please me, perhaps to end this increasingly uncomfortable conversation. “Why don’t you decide about the vows?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take care of the vows. Although you need to write what you want to say to me, of course.” When Nikolai didn’t answer, I said, “Are you sure you want to do this? It is supposed to be for both of us, you know. If you’re not into it, that’s fine. We can just call the whole thing off.”
“Of course I want to do it,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so much better at this kind of thing than I am.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this line of thinking. It went: Because I was the more practical, organized, and capable one, I should take care of it. So it had been with our finances, and so, too, with managing the house. It would have been easy enough to stop being cast in this role—all I had to do was refuse. But I realize now that I found reassurance in being competent. Being competent meant I could make sense out of chaos. It meant that—with a little planning and organization—things worked. Maybe an unstable childhood, or the years of being stuck in Bulgaria, had created my need to believe that I was in control of my life, because I clung to my role as the competent one in our marriage, even when it left me exhausted and resentful.
And so I threw myself into organizing our renewal ceremony. I set about searching for the right location, but that wasn’t going to be too hard to find. The French countryside was so beautiful that we could have the ceremony almost anywhere. There was the village château, or the beach at La Grand-Motte, or the mountains. Jett suggested Château des Hospitaliers, a winery in Saint-Christol, a village just ten minutes from Aubais. The winery made a distinctly southern French wine, with big, jammy fruit and spiciness. The vineyard was on land once owned by the Knights Hospitaller, contemporaries of the Knights Templar. After the Templars’ downfall, their lands and wealth in the region were given to the Hospitallers.
>
The vineyard had a large, modern tasting room with a banquet hall. We would serve flutes of Boreale, a sparkling rosé méthode traditionelle, made on the property. When I stood in the space, looking out the huge windows, my eye followed the undulating hills of planted Syrah and Mourvèdre and Carignan. The vines went on forever, fading into blue sky.
I found an Anglican priest, a ruddy-cheeked Englishwoman who lived in a nearby village, to perform the ceremony. She was a glowing, benevolent lady, and I knew the moment I saw her that she was just the kind of person who would consent to marry two churchless foreigners. She was so kind, so good-natured, that it seemed she would be the perfect corrective to the gloom and morbidity of our first wedding ceremony in Sofia.
We met in Sommières to discuss the details, at a café overlooking the Vidourle River. We ordered boules of ice cream and cups of espresso. The priestess, as I’d begun to call her, settled back in her chair and examined us with her wise, piercing blue eyes.
“I think it is a wonderful idea to revisit your commitment to one another, and to ask God to bless your union,” she said, working her spoon into her ice cream. “Marriage is a sacrament, a holy agreement. Is there a specific reason you chose to do this ceremony now?”
“We just moved here,” I said. “We’re starting over. It seems like the right time.”
“And you?” she said, looking at Nikolai, perhaps noting that I had been answering her questions alone. “What is the purpose of this ceremony for you?”
Nikolai shrugged. “A fun party?”
I laughed, perhaps a little too loudly, although he probably wasn’t kidding. His favorite part of this whole thing would be when it was over.
The priestess chuckled. “Well, I’m only officiating the ceremony. The reception will be up to you.” She scooped up more ice cream. “Will you be exchanging rings?”
“Yes,” I said. “We will.”
“Good, good,” she said, waving her spoon at Nikolai and then at me. “And vows? You must have some ideas about how you’d like the ceremony to proceed. Have you considered the blessing? What church do you belong to?”
Nikolai looked at me, waiting for me to save him. He was an ex-Buddhist monk raised in atheist, Communist Bulgaria who didn’t believe in God any more than he believed in Santa Claus. I had been raised Catholic, felt an affinity with Zen Buddhism, and took an all-inclusive approach to spirituality and life: stay open to everything, allow the possibility of every kind of miracle, embrace every experience so as to not miss anything.
“We have a nondenominational approach to spirituality,” I said. “We’d like to bring Eastern and Western religious ideas into the ceremony, if you don’t mind.”
The priestess looked confused. “Meaning?”
Nikolai leaned forward. “Well, we’d like to have a Buddhist text read. And we’d like to ask you to take some of the usual language out of the ceremony.”
“Many couples remove ‘obey,’ ” she said. “That is quite normal. Some people say ‘love, honor, and cherish.’ Is that what you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “I think he was hoping you’d remove the references to God.”
The priestess blinked. She put her spoon down. “You realize that I am an Anglican priest. That my beliefs are part of the ceremony.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “He just wants to make everyone at the ceremony comfortable. His parents and my parents and…well, everyone.”
“Your parents are…?” she asked, looking pointedly at Nikolai.
“Atheist,” I said.
“And you are atheist as well?”
“He’s Buddhist,” I said.
“Is that what you mean to say?” she asked Nikolai. I was speaking for him, and she didn’t like it. It was an annoying habit, one I’d picked up after years of explaining Nikolai to others, trying to protect him from people who didn’t understand his long silences, his defensive behavior, his nervous tics, and his refusal to answer questions directly. I’d become a kind of bodyguard, shielding him.
“Something like that, yes,” he mumbled.
“Well,” the priestess said, smiling gently, as if unsure of how the whole thing would work, “why don’t you write the vows and send them to me. I’m sure we can figure something out.”
—
THE RENEWAL CEREMONY became my point of focus, the spot on the horizon leading me forward. Each step closer to renewing our vows was a clear and objective proof of progress. I sent out invitations, arranged for my mother and stepfather to fly to France, invited friends from Aubais and New York. I bought a silver silk dress that was more sophisticated than anything a first-time bride could wear. I bought high-heeled shoes so I would be tall enough to meet Nikolai’s lips when the priestess concluded the ceremony. The kiss would be the moment of grace, that one magical moment when the world would stand still and I would know without a doubt that I was really, truly loved.
Why I needed this moment of grace is a question I’ve asked myself time and time again since the renewal ceremony. If that magical moment hadn’t occurred in all the years of my marriage, what made me think that a transformation would take place now? What tenacious part of me held on to the hope that a ceremony would bring about a miracle? Why wasn’t I able to take a hard look at my marriage, see that it was dead, and move on? Was it a flaw in my thinking? An emotional defect? Was I too insecure or too needy or too weak to understand that love could not simply be conjured on demand? I couldn’t answer these questions, but it didn’t mean I stopped asking them.
Once I’d even consulted an astrologer to help me understand the purpose of my relationship with Nikolai. I asked the astrologer to look at my chart and tell me what he saw about our relationship. I was born on November 9, 1973, at 2:31 A.M. in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA. Scorpio with a Virgo rising. The astrologer and I spoke on the phone one afternoon.
“Wow,” he said at the beginning of the call. “Yours is not a chart for the fainthearted. It is an intense, hard-core, magical chart. Every soul chooses its incarnation, and your soul chose a most tumultuous and difficult one. Hats off to you, sister. This incarnation will not be easy, but here’s the good news: You are here to learn human experience at a deep level and to live a true, real, solid, meaningful, loving, connected existence. Your soul’s intention is to find a love that works. In order to get that love, your soul is on a journey to root out all that is not love: all that we humans—and I don’t mean just now, but traditionally, in the form of arranged marriage or superficial connections for money or power—believe to be love. Human love, over history, has not been authentic. Your soul wants authentic love. No matter what your parents did or did not do to you as a child, it wouldn’t matter in your case. Your soul was sent into human form to redeem itself by growing through hell. If it doesn’t crush you and you can make it through this, you will understand things other people do not. You have chosen the hellish underbelly of relationships in order to learn the reality of love. Once you learn it, you will never need to do it again. Not in this life, not in another one. Your desire is to get to the bottom of things, and if you get this right, you can help yourself, and others around you, define what true love is. Only a small fraction of humanity actually experience true love. There might be divorce. There might be reconciliation. It all happens to give you clarity, to describe what love is not, to create hope. The goal for you in this life is to come to the point when you will no longer tolerate anything that is not love.”
—
A FEW DAYS before the ceremony, I walked through the house looking for Nikolai. The door to his office was locked, and so I went up the winding stone staircase and past the bedrooms to the altar. Nikolai was reading a Tibetan book when I walked in. A stick of incense burned, sending tendrils of smoke into the air, giving the room an earthy, spicy scent. His face was tranquil, touched by candlelight. He was beautiful. I forgot that sometimes, in the rush of our daily lives and the cloud of discord between us, how handsome he was. He looked up, meeting my e
ye. I was disturbing him.
“Sorry,” I said, standing at the door. “But I wanted to check if you’ve had a chance to write something for the ceremony?”
“The what?” Nikolai seemed fixed at some indefinite space in front of him.
“Ceremony,” I said. “Renewal ceremony. You’re gong to write something to say to me. And I’m going to write something to say to you? Vows? Remember?”
“Oh, yeah. The vows. I’m planning to write something.” He looked up at me and gave me a brilliant, glowing smile. “Don’t worry, baby.”
“Great,” I said, relieved. I walked over and kissed him. He would write something beautiful for the renewal ceremony, something that expressed his love for me and his optimism for our future, something to make me believe that we could overcome every difficulty together. He was a writer, after all. That was his gift.
—
MY MOTHER, MY stepfather, my brother, and his wife were staying at the house the day of the renewal ceremony. We spent a lazy morning together, drinking coffee and talking in the courtyard until the hot midday sun chased us inside. Nikolai joined us but said little. He didn’t understand the culture of my family—their midwestern lack of pretension, the value placed on understatement, their practical let’s-cut-through-the-bullshit approach to life. He sat silently at the table as we talked, just as I had sat silently during his family discussions.
I wondered what my mother thought of all this drama around my marriage. Back home you didn’t pick up and move to another country when things got rocky. You complained to your friends or baked a casserole or had a few too many beers after work. You kept a stiff upper lip, and then, if that didn’t work, you had a reckless affair and a messy divorce. But the kind of elaborate acrobatics I was going through—moving to France and having a renewal ceremony—were totally foreign in my culture.
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