“Don’t do this to me, O.J. I was really looking forward to it.”
“I’m not doing anything to you. I just want to get through this shoot and come home.”
“Are you saying this isn’t working?”
Christ! What was I supposed to say to that? Wasn’t it obvious? “Well,” I said. “I’m not feeling all that optimistic. And if you honestly feel it’s working, then something is really wrong with this picture.”
I guess I was trying to be honest, and maybe I was a little too blunt about it, but maybe she needed that bluntness to get her mind around the situation.
When I got back to L.A., I knew almost immediately that it was over. The other Nicole had won. She came by the house with the kids and immediately got into another argument with Kato, calling him a “useless freeloader” and worse—right in front of the kids. It was scary. Her entire face was transformed by rage.
Later, when she was somewhat calmer, and I was trying to pull the story out of her, trying to figure out what had set her off, she told me that Kato wasn’t doing his job. He never helped with the kids anymore, he never ran errands, and he didn’t return her calls when she most needed him. “You’ve got to kick him out,” she said. I told her that she should deal with him herself—Kato was her problem, not mine—and I suggested that she should back off a little. “I think he’s actually been looking for a place to live,” I said.
She looked at me, pissed, shaking her head from side to side. “You don’t give a shit what happens to me, do you?”
“You’re wrong, Nicole. I do give a shit. But I can’t fix everything.”
Man, I’ll tell you: I was really looking forward to Mother’s Day. It was time to bail.
From that day on, I tried hard to keep my distance. The only time I saw her was when I was picking up or dropping off the kids, or on those rare occasions when she herself dropped them at Rockingham. She didn’t look good. She looked tired and strung out, and she seemed to be getting progressively worse. She seemed beaten, in fact.
When Mother’s Day finally rolled around, I can honestly tell you that I had never looked forward with so much pleasure to any Mother’s Day in my entire life. A year earlier, also on Mother’s Day, we had decided to try to save our marriage, and we had given ourselves a full year to do it. Now the year was drawing to a close.
That weekend, we drove down to Laguna—I had a house there, and the Browns lived nearby, in Dana Point. On Saturday, Nicole and I went out to dinner, and I basically told her it was over. To be honest with you, it wasn’t a big deal. She knew as well as I did that it was over, so this was really more of a formality.
“Maybe we tried to get back together too soon,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“That maybe we should have stayed apart longer. I should have worked on myself a little more before asking you to try again.”
“Well, you know, now that you mention it, that’s my one concern,” I said.
“What?”
“You. I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” she said, and she changed the subject. Suddenly she was talking about Cora Fishman again, and about the complications in her marriage. “I feel kind of bad about it,” she said. “Of all the couples we know, Cora and Ron had the best marriage.” She also talked a little about Faye Resnick, who was having very serious problems of her own. She was still messing around with drugs, apparently, and her boyfriend had finally read her the riot act. “He’s really pissed,” Nicole told me. “He thinks Faye is out of control.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It’s not good,” she said.
When the food came, we must have looked just like every other married couple in the restaurant. We sat there eating, not saying much, and from time to time I’d reach across the table with my fork and spear something off her plate.
The next day was Sunday, Mother’s Day. We went to church with some of Nicole’s family. Denise was there with her six-year-old son, and Nicole kept dogging her. “Why is he wearing a black shirt and black pants? What kind of outfit is that for a little boy? And in church, no less.” Nicole was venomous, full of rage and anger, and I kept my distance for the rest of the day.
By nightfall, the bad mood had passed. We drove back to Los Angeles, to her place on Bundy, and I went inside and helped her put the kids to bed.
“Well,” I said, looking at her, and feeling kind of sad. “It’s over.”
“I know,” she said.
We went into her bedroom and made love. We both knew it was going to be the last time, and that this was our way of saying goodbye. It was actually very nice. We fell asleep in each other’s arms.
In the morning, before the kids were up, I slipped out of the house and went back to my place on Rockingham.
It was time to get on with my life.
5.
THINGS FALL APART
LATER THAT SAME morning, I went by the office and told Cathy Randa all about Mother’s Day weekend. “We are done,” I said. “We are moving on.”
“You sure about that?”
“Positive.”
Cathy looked sort of relieved, then smiled a big smile and said, “Guess who’s coming to town tonight?”
“Who?”
“Paula.”
“You’re kidding me?” I said.
“No,” she said. “She’s in New York, on her way to Honolulu, but she’s stopping in L.A. for the night. I’m supposed to pick her up at the airport.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me pick her up.”
“I don’t know about that … “
“Trust me,” I said. “It’s definitely over between me and Nicole.”
That evening, I showed up at the airport and waited for Paula by the baggage claim. I saw her before she saw me, and she looked as beautiful as ever. She also looked kind of stunned, to be honest. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Well, it’s been a year,” I said. “And it’s over.”
“You’re done?”
“We’re done.”
I drove her back to her place, and she was shaking her head the whole way, unable to believe that this was really happening. A year earlier she’d warned me that she wasn’t the type of girl who would wait around for me, and she hadn’t waited around, but suddenly I was there, and she was there, and we both still wanted each other.
We spent the night together, and the next day I took her to the airport. We were happy, like a pair of kids, and I drove home wondering why I’d ever put her through such hell. I was also grateful—she was being incredibly understanding. When I reached her in Honolulu later that day, however, she sounded a little less happy. “I’m still hurt,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I did what I had to do. If I hadn’t made an effort to keep the family together, I would have wondered about it for the rest of my life.”
“It was a long year,” she said.
“It was long for me, too.”
“I don’t honestly know what I want from you,” she said. “All I know is that I want to take it real slow.”
I was game for anything, and I told her so. I wanted Paula back in my life and I made it clear that I’d jump through hoops for her. On the other hand, to be completely honest, I wasn’t sure we could make it work. Paula was looking to settle down and start making babies, and I was done with that part of my life. I figured we could have that conversation when she returned to Los Angeles, but it never happened. A few weeks later, Nicole and Ron Goldman were dead, and I was being charged with the murders.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
A few days after Paula left for Honolulu, I was in New York on business, and I got a call from Gigi, my housekeeper. She was upset. She said Nicole had just been by the house, and that she’d asked her to take care of the kids that weekend.
“What are you crying about?” I asked. “That’s no reason to cry.”
“Nicole got mad
at me,” Gigi said.
“What do you mean she got mad? What right does she have to get mad? You work for me, and you’re off on weekends. If you want to babysit the kids, that’s between you and Nicole, but she can’t be coming by making demands.”
“Yes, sir. That’s what I tried to tell her, but she said I’d better be here when she came by to drop off the kids.”
“That’s crazy! She’s got no right even coming by the house when I’m not there. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it right away.”
I called Nicole the moment we got off the phone. I was pissed, but I kept it civilized. “Gigi works for me, and she has the weekends off,” I said. “You can’t be hasslin’ her. You ran Michele off. Please don’t do the same with Gigi.”
Nicole didn’t apologize, but she didn’t come by the house that weekend, either. Two days later, however, when I was back, she stopped by to drop off the kids, and I thought I heard her having words with Kato. I looked out the window but couldn’t see her, and I couldn’t see Kato, either. He was probably running for the hills. I went downstairs as the kids came through the front door, and Nicole was right behind them, walking in like she owned the place. “I thought I told you to get rid of Kato,” she barked.
“I don’t want to talk about Kato,” I said. “Not now, not ever.”
“I never want to see him again,” she said.
“Nic, come on—back off. The guy told me he found a place, but it fell out.”
“Bullshit.”
I ignored her. I took the kids out to the pool and we jumped into the water. Nicole watched us for a few minutes, scowling. “I’m leaving,” she said.
I looked at her, as if to say, So fucking what? Leave already. She got the message. She turned and left.
I hung out with the kids and tried not to think about her, but it was hard. She was clearly deteriorating. Maybe she was upset because we were over. Maybe she was having a hard time facing the future. I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it wasn’t good. I found myself thinking of that old cliché about divorce: If you’ve got kids, you’re stuck with that person for the rest of your life. It was not a pleasant thought.
After the kids got out of the pool, I called Cathy Randa. I told her I thought Nicole was getting worse, and that I didn’t want to be around her anymore. It wasn’t good for me, I said, and it sure as hell wasn’t good for the kids. I asked her to please review the schedule, and to help me arrange all future pick-ups and drop-offs.
“You okay?” Cathy asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. And if we can get Nicole handled, I’ll be better than fine.”
I went back to New York on business, and returned a few days later, and the next morning—before I was even out of bed—the phone rang. It was Nicole. “I’m sick,” she said. “I’ve got pneumonia. Could you come by and take the kids to school?”
I got dressed and hurried over. She looked like hell. I changed the bed linens and tucked her back into bed and took the kids to school, then I stopped at Fromin’s, a Santa Monica deli, to pick up some chicken soup. I took it back to the house and sat with her, watching her eat it. I didn’t understand why she was sick. This was mid-May. Who catches pneumonia in mid-May? I just knew this had to be connected to the drugs. “You’re not doing anything you’re not supposed to be doing, are you?”
“O.J. Please. How many times have I told you: I don’t want to talk about this.”
The weird part was, she didn’t deny it. She has always been a lousy liar, so she just avoided the topic. I wanted her to talk about it, though. So did her mother. So did anyone who cared about her. Hell, Cora Fishman had begged her to talk about it. We all wanted her to face this thing so she could begin to do something about it.
“I wished we had tried harder,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“During the year we tried to reconcile. I know we could have done better.”
Now this was something I didn’t want to talk about, so I said nothing. She set down her soup spoon and stared at me. She looked like all the hope had gone out of her. In the course of the previous year, while we were still working at reconciling, there were times when everything seemed to be going completely to hell—but Nicole never stopped hoping. Now that we weren’t even trying anymore, however, there was nothing to be hopeful about, and that’s what I saw in her eyes: A complete absence of hope.
For the next few days, Nicole was pretty sick. I ended up shuttling the kids to and from school and to and from my house, and Cathy Randa pitched in, but mostly Nicole wanted me to take care of things. I went to the pharmacy to pick up her medicine, and I went back to Fromin’s for second and third helpings of chicken soup, and I helped her change the linens a couple more times. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to suggest that I was the perfect ex-husband. All I’m saying is that I was very worried about her, and that I wanted to help her find her way back. No matter what had gone wrong in our lives—and plenty of shit had gone wrong—she was still the mother of my kids. I was stuck with her, but for their sake I wanted to be stuck with her. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nicole was a great mother. Schoolwork. Manners. Appearance. She was all over those kids. The only thing I objected to was when she turned into the other Nicole, and that Nicole was still very much around, still lurking, ready to leap out and make more trouble.
Meanwhile, Paula was back in town, and I was trying to keep that romance going. It was strange. Not all that long ago, I’d cheated on my girlfriend with my ex-wife. Now I was cheating again, in a manner of speaking: I was nursing my ex-wife back to health and trying to keep my girlfriend from finding out.
“I still think separating was a good thing,” Nicole told me a couple of days later. We were standing in her kitchen at the Bundy place, and I was ladling hot soup into a clean bowl. “I just wish I’d made a little more progress in therapy.”
“You don’t think the therapy helped?”
“It helped, I guess. But it didn’t really change anything. I wanted to get stronger for us, so that we could have a stronger relationship, but that didn’t work out too well.”
“Well, you know—that shit takes time.”
“I already quit therapy,” she said. “I didn’t think I was making enough progress.”
A few days later—this is in late May, less than a month before Nicole’s death—I was having a party at my house for the kids and their classmates. It was a little fund-raiser for the school, and this was the third consecutive year I’d played host. I had clowns and magicians and those bouncy things for the little kids, and of course lots of good food for everyone.
The day of the picnic, Kato was on his way out of the house, to meet some friends, and he stopped by the party to say hello. I heard the kids giving him a hard time—they were repeating all the things they’d learned from Nicole: that he was a freeloader and a bum—and I went over and told them to cut it out. I wasn’t mean about it, though. I realized they didn’t know any better. Nicole had poisoned them with her anger.
To tell you the truth, though, I was a little sick of Kato myself. I’d already told him to find a place of his own, on more than one occasion, and he kept assuring me that he was trying. It’s not like he was underfoot or anything, though, so I didn’t give it much thought, but that was one of the things that made it hard for me to understand the depth of Nicole’s rage: She saw him even less than I did, but the mention of his name could really set her off.
About an hour after Kato left, Nicole showed up in the middle of the picnic. The first words out of her mouth were, “Where’s Kato? I sure hope I don’t see him.”
“He left,” I said. I wondered what she was doing there, but since she had often co-hosted that little picnic with me, I wasn’t going to ask her to leave.
“You feeling better?” I asked.
Instead of answering, she reached up and gave me a little kiss, then she went around saying hello to the parents, most of whom she knew from schoo
l. She was acting very friendly, and behaving like the hostess, and even thanking people for coming. I thought that was pretty strange. Everyone knew we were no longer together. Everyone knew she didn’t live there anymore.
I tried not to think about it. I went inside and joined some of the dads, who were watching the NBA playoffs. A few minutes later, Nicole came down and dropped onto the couch next to me and asked me to rub her feet. I rubbed her feet for a few minutes, mostly because I didn’t want to get into anything. She was pale and still looked pretty sick. “You okay?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” she said. “Just tired.”
I stopped rubbing her feet and told her to go upstairs and lie down, and I said I’d stop in later to check on her. She went, and I thought I’d gotten rid of her, but within a few minutes Gigi, my housekeeper, came by to tell me that Nicole was asking for me. I went upstairs, frustrated, and found her lying on my bed.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Why is Kato still here?”
“Why is Kato still here? What the hell does that have to do with anything? He’s not here now.”
“I hate him.”
“For Christ’s sake, Nicole, you’re the one who asked me to put him up.”
“I know,” she said. “But that was five months ago. He was supposed to work for his rent, and he’s not working. He’s not doing shit for me. I keep asking you to get rid of him, and you’re not getting rid of him.”
“Why are we having this conversation now?” I said. “I’ve got people downstairs.”
“We’re having this conversation now because I don’t want him around anymore. I don’t want to see him when I’m here.”
I felt like saying, Nobody asked you to come by, but I didn’t. The whole thing was crazy. Nicole wasn’t making any sense on any level.
“I don’t like Gigi either,” she said suddenly.
“Gigi? What has she ever done to you? What is going on with you, Nicole? Are you on something besides antibiotics?”
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