A Beautiful, Terrible Thing

by Jen Waite

  I brief him. “He said he’s finally being completely honest and that none of this would have happened if he was in his right mind,” I finish, and look expectantly up at my father.

  “Men do not have emotional affairs,” my dad says simply.

  “But . . .” I start and falter. “He said he was addicted to the attention.”

  “I am telling you what I know,” my dad says. Each of his next words are crisp and hard, like a hammer pounding down a nail. “Men. Do. Not. Have. Emotional. Affairs.”

  “Robert,” my mom interjects, “why the hell would Marco be sleeping with a girl he doesn’t even find attractive when he has a beautiful wife and brand-new baby?”

  “He’s clever. He’s telling you lies that sound like the truth.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “Let me see this girl,” my dad says.

  I pull up the selfie on my phone and hold it up. My dad peers down at it.

  “You need to make an appointment to get tested for STDs as soon as possible,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “Oh,” I say. It is the only sound I can make. I hadn’t even thought of that, and now my mind travels to Louisa. If their relationship started before I gave birth and I have an STD, she might, too. “Excuse me,” I say quietly. I run to the bathroom and throw up into the toilet.

  —

  FIVE days later, my dad picks up Marco from the airport. He wants to talk to him on the way to the hotel. Before he leaves the house I hear him tell my mom, “I’ll find out whether he’s lying or not. I’ll be able to tell,” and then the door slams.

  I wait on the couch, huddled up with a cup of tea.

  “He’ll know, Jen,” my mom says confidently. “Dad has amazing radar when it comes to lying.”

  My dad walks in the door an hour later.

  “How was it?” I ask cautiously.

  “I couldn’t get a read on him,” he says. My heart sinks. “He was like a zombie. The only time he showed any emotion at all was when I dropped him off at the hotel and told him that whatever happens, it was a pleasure having him as a son-in-law.”

  “That’s good, right?” I say hopefully. “It fits with him losing all his feelings. But the fact that you saying that stirred something in him I think is a good sign.”

  “I don’t know, Jenny,” my dad says, walking toward his bedroom. “I really don’t know what to think.”

  —

  I KNOCK on Marco’s hotel door an hour later. Louisa shrieks happily in her stroller. She is two months old today. I smile down at her nervously. Marco opens the door. We stand face-to-face for a moment. He is paler than I have ever seen him. His face breaks into the smile that I know, and I can’t help but smile back.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” I say.

  I shuffle into the room, pushing Louisa ahead of me on the plush carpet. I catch my reflection in the mirror as I remove my winter coat and hat. I am thin. Too thin to have just had a baby. I look away in shame. I need to eat so that Louisa can eat. I settle into a wing chair beside the bed. Marco sits across from me in a computer chair by the desk. I look out the expansive window at the Old Port below. Marco and I have visited Maine so many times together that each section of this port city holds a different Marco memory. It used to be my city. Now it is our city.

  “Marco,” I say with a sigh. “Where do I even begin? I don’t even know how to process these past couple of weeks. I don’t know how we can ever get past this.”

  “OK,” Marco says blankly. “I’ll get a lawyer to do the divorce.”

  My heart stops. He says it like it is nothing. If anyone is going to be talking about divorce, shouldn’t it be me? He came to Portland to tell me this? In a whirl, my mind travels back to the Square, meeting Seb, our engagement, Louisa’s birth, and then zooms forward to the four of us celebrating Christmas next year, playing at the park in the summer, taking our first family trip to Buenos Aires. The past five years and the future I was so sure of evaporate in an instant. I want to yell, “That’s not what I meant, please, Marco, please.” But when I look into his eyes, they are dead. I gulp back, what is it, a scream? A sob? And reply as calmly as I can, “OK.”

  I stand up in a daze. “I should go.”

  I am almost out the door with Louisa when I hear, “Wait, Jen, please. I came here to make things right. I came here to get my family back.” His voice is still monotone, but I want to throw myself into his arms. I want to shake him and scream, “Where is my Marco? I need him to come back right now.” Instead I say very carefully, “We have a lot to talk about. We have a lot of work to do.”

  “I know. I don’t know how we got here. I don’t know how this happened.” He pulls out his phone. “I’m going to give my two weeks’ notice right now. This job almost killed me and broke our family. It’s not worth it.”

  Three weeks ago I would have looked at him like he was crazy. Now I say, “I think that’s a good idea,” and try to keep the elation out of my voice.

  He types on his phone for a few minutes. “Done,” he says placing his phone on the desk. I walk over to him and wrap my arms around him.

  “Jen.” He puts both hands on my shoulders and then holds my face. “My health is very, very bad. I’m not excusing myself, but there is something very, very wrong with me.”

  “I wish you had told me sooner. I wish you hadn’t let it get to this point.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  “Marco, I have to ask.” I take a deep breath. “Did you have sex with the girl? Or even kiss her? Did anything happen? I need to know the truth.” My mind travels to the last selfie Viktorija had posted. Shot from above, she is wearing a lacy black corset. Her breasts spill out the top, and she is giving the middle finger. “Life’s a bitch,” the caption reads. It is the type of picture Marco would have shown me before and groaned, “Why does every trashy girl think she’s Kim Kardashian?” But when I saw it this morning, my stomach dropped.

  Marco laughs wearily. “Jen. I told you a hundred times. I don’t find her attractive at all. Yes, I made a huge mistake by talking to her about things that I only should have been discussing with you, but it was never a physical thing. If I wanted to cheat, or if I did cheat, I wouldn’t want to be in this marriage. I would walk away.”

  “Are you still attracted to me?” I ask.

  Marco has always made me feel like a goddess, like the most beautiful woman in the world. I often caught him staring at me in the morning before I had any makeup on. “You’re so beautiful,” he would breathe. Now I am bracing myself for his answer.

  “Of course I am,” he says, and kisses me softly. The kiss grows deeper and we are on the bed, pulling each other’s clothes off. I pray Louisa stays asleep in her stroller.

  When we finish, he looks at me. “Why did you want to have sex?” he asks seriously. I can’t read his tone.

  “I don’t know,” I answer slowly. I pause and think about it. “I think I thought it would bring us closer together, and I haven’t felt close to you for the past couple of weeks,” I say honestly.

  “Oh,” he says, and quick as that, old Marco is gone. The stranger is back.

  BEFORE

  “OH my God,” I said to Holly, Charlotte, and Stacy as they fastened the long, flowing veil to my chignon. “I look like you guys did,” I said, remembering the awe I felt as I watched each of my closest friends get ready for their own weddings.

  “You are simply stunning, my friend,” Holly said, giving the veil one last tug to secure it firmly in place.

  “And you can’t see any bump at all,” Stacy said from behind me in the mirror, eyeing my middle section.

  “Really? Are you sure?” I asked, turning sideways.

  “Positive,” said Charlotte, straightening out the train of my dress.

  Sixteen weeks ago I had gone out on a romantic dinner date with my
husband and come home to find a pregnancy test that I had taken earlier that afternoon poking out of the trash.

  “Babe . . . ,” I called from the bathroom. “What the hell. What the hell.”

  “Did you say something?” Marco said. I emerged from the bathroom slowly to find Marco turning on Game of Thrones in the living room and setting two glasses of rosé on the table.

  “What’s wrong? Jen, are you OK?” Marco said, taking in my ashen face.

  “Remember when I said earlier today, ‘I better take a test just to make sure since I’m a few days late’?”

  “Yes . . . it was negative. Right?” Marco said, eyeing the stick in my hand.

  “Yes. It was. And now it’s positive. What the hell?” I said again.

  “Babe, I’m sure it got messed up from being in the trash. But maybe you should take another test. Just to make sure?”

  “Um, yes, baby, I absolutely am going to take another test, but I don’t have another one to take,” I said. I whipped out my phone and Googled “pregnancy test turns positive hours later,” as Marco started to put his shoes back on.

  “I’ll run to Rite Aid,” Marco said, “but seriously I’m not worried. There is a one percent chance you’re pregnant. And anyway, wouldn’t that be kind of a good thing?”

  “Oh, you know what, this website is saying that all pregnancy tests turn positive eventually. Something happens when the chemicals mix with the air. OK, phew. Well, you do keep saying you have baby fever, but I don’t really want to find out I’m pregnant right after sharing a bottle of wine and taking shots,” I said, laughing. Marco knew the owner of the French restaurant we had just come from, and at the end of our meal he had come over with two shots of absinthe.

  I paced around the living room while Marco went to Rite Aid. “There is no way I’m pregnant,” I said out loud. I sat down on the huge cream chair that matched the cream couch and then jumped up, remembering that this was the chair where, a month ago, Marco and I had thrown caution to the wind and gotten frisky without using protection. One time. “You can’t get pregnant from one time,” I said out loud again, and then thought immediately, Of course you can.

  “OK, go go go!” Marco said, walking in the door, handing me a small Rite Aid bag.

  I walked into the bathroom, my heart pounding, and came out three minutes later with tears streaming down my face.

  “What are we going to do?” I said.

  Marco stood up from the couch and walked toward me, his face breaking into a huge smile. “This is good news, baby. This is such good news.” He wrapped his arms around me, and I fell into him and cried.

  But he was right.

  Eventually, my crying had turned into laughter and my worry had turned into excitement. We decided together that Marco would take a step back from the Thirsty Owl and start looking for a full-time, salaried job as a restaurant manager when we got back from our honeymoon. The team mentality had faded a few months after the restaurant’s grand opening, and stress levels had risen. Tensions between the four of us were at an all-time high.

  “I’m telling you, babe, they’ve been trying to push us out from the beginning. This is bullshit.”

  “How can they push us out when we invested so much money in the restaurant?” I said, pacing up and down the living room. “We can barely pay our fucking rent, and now I’m pregnant and I haven’t even found a good doctor yet and—”

  “Baby, stop. You have your rash.” He stood in front of me and placed his hands on my shoulders. “You need to promise me that you’ll let me handle this. You can’t be this stressed out right now. When we get back from France, I will get another job that actually pays me and then I’ll get your money back and we’ll cut ties with those guys, OK?”

  “OK. You’re right. Let’s try to get back whatever we can. I really hope I can get it all back. That money would be really useful now.”

  “I will take care of it. Don’t worry about this anymore. At least not for another nine months, OK? Do you promise?”

  “OK, I promise.” From that moment on, I stopped waking up at 2:00 A.M. to worry about the restaurant and started focusing on being calm and happy for the baby. Marco sent me messages from his new job every night (“How are you TWO doing??”) and—no matter how many times we assured each other that it might not be a girl—pictures of what our daughter might look like (“I can’t wait for this!” captioned a picture of a man and tiny blonde-haired girl preparing dinner together; him chopping vegetables, her on a stepping stool watching in fascination.).

  Standing in front of the mirror now, I looked at the bride across from me and touched my stomach. “Let’s go see Daddy.”

  We said our vows in front of seventy-five of our friends and family with the endless Maine ocean as the backdrop. An old-fashioned trolley brought our guests to the oceanfront ceremony spot and then to my parents’ house where a huge white tent was set up. We splurged on an oyster bar, top-shelf liquor, and a cheesy, fantastically talented band. When Marco and I arrived hand in hand at the reception after taking pictures at the ceremony location, the party was well under way. My sister gave the first toast. “Something I noticed right away is how much Jenny admires Marco, and I think that’s so important in a relationship and in a marriage,” she began. I nudged Marco with my elbow and whispered, “Es verdad.”

  “I remember the first time she really talked to me about Marco. It was near the beginning of their relationship, and she was really excited about him but I also noticed something else—I thought, Wow, Jenny respects this guy, and I remember thinking it because I had never heard her talk with such admiration or respect for a partner before. And then I met Marco and I understood why she felt the way she did.” She spoke for a few minutes about respect and admiration being as important in a relationship as love. I squeezed Marco’s hand. “That was a really great speech,” he said.

  “Well, duh, it was all about how awesome and admirable you are. No wonder you loved it,” I said.

  Up next was Seb, and before he even said a word there were whoops and whistles of encouragement as he very seriously straightened his bow tie and cleared his throat into the microphone. “Hello,” he began. “Some of you may not know me, but, in a nutshell, I am Marco’s son, Sebastian. I loved Jen as soon as I met her because, let’s face it, you can’t meet Jen and not love her. Her and my dad are a match made in heaven. If you believe in that sort of thing. I happen to be an atheist,” the tiny black-haired boy chirped into the microphone, and the crowd roared in laughter. By the end of his speech, both Marco and I had tears streaming down our faces, and we were laughing hysterically. “Before my dad met Jen, he seemed like a puzzle with a piece missing, and Jen was that piece. I’m so happy that I get such an amazing stepmom and such wonderful stepgrandparents,” he finished.

  “He’s amazing,” I said to Marco.

  “He’s ridiculous,” Marco said, and seized Seb in a hug. “That was great, buddy.”

  Right before dinner, the leader of the band tapped the microphone and said, “I’d now like to welcome the father of the bride to give his toast,” and my body turned to spaghetti. My dad had been taking Spanish lessons for months, practicing the toast that he would give first in Spanish to Marco’s family and then in English. I gave a silent prayer that he remembered his Spanish. I held my breath as my dad took the microphone.

  “Before I give my toast, I’d like to say a few words to Marco’s family, who have traveled here from Argentina and Denmark to be with us today.” And then he began speaking in rapid, fluent Spanish and my mouth opened in shock.

  “Damn, your dad speaks better Spanish than me!” Ian, Marco’s goofy Puerto Rican groomsman, said.

  My dad spoke for ten minutes in Spanish to Marco’s family, and then switched to English for the rest of the guests. “I just spoke about Marco’s character and how our family is so incredibly happy to welcome him and Sebastian in
to our family. I remember when I met Marco for the first time, I wasn’t so sure.”

  Everyone laughed, and I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Oh my God, Dad.”

  “But then I got to know him, and I have truly found him to be one of the most kindhearted, hardworking, admirable men I could have possibly imagined for my daughter. She went through a lot of guys before Marco, and I was a little worried for a minute there that she might not ever settle down.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, and buried my face into Marco. “I’ve dated, like, four men,” I told the wedding party table.

  “It has been a true privilege and honor to get to know Marco and Seb over the past couple years, and it is with great happiness that I welcome Marco into my family as my son-in-law.” My dad finished his toast, and Marco’s father rushed the stage to clap my dad on the back and thank him for his speech.

  “That was epic,” Ian yelled, and all seventy-five guests rose in a standing ovation.

  We were about to sit down to dinner when we heard “Marco, Marco, vien aquí” over the speakers. Oscar had the microphone and was motioning Marco to join him onstage. “Oh, wow, this is going to be interesting,” Marco said, standing up.

  “Did your dad prepare a speech?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Marco said, “but don’t worry, that’s not gonna stop him.”

  “This is the best thing ever. I feel like I’m at the movies,” Ian said as we watched Marco nervously take his place beside his father onstage. Oscar spoke for a full five minutes in beautiful, gorgeous Spanish, rolling his Rs and lifting his hands to tell his story. He handed the microphone to Marco and nodded.

  “My dad said . . . um. This has been an amazing day, and it would be great if any of you guys wanna come to Argentina. You are welcome anytime.”

  Ian yelled over the laughs and claps, “Your dad is a freaking poet. That was like asking my cat to translate Shakespeare.”

  At the end of the night, Marco, Seb, and I all held hands and danced to the song “Happy” by Pharrell. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, determined to soak in the last moments of the night. My mind rewound to the beginning of the day, and I pictured Marco standing across from me hours before, reciting the vows that it had taken him weeks to write, his voice trembling the tiniest bit.