The First Husband

by Laura Dave

  “You did say,” he said.

  I smiled, a little confused. “Wait, what do you mean, I did say?”

  “The other night. You told me you loved this truck.” He leaned toward me. “So I found one for the afternoon.”

  “You found one?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I got inside, running my hands along the dashboard. “Where? ”

  He shrugged. “A shady guy owes me a favor.”

  I looked up at him. “Really?”

  “No, but it sounds cooler than I just rented it from the place the hotel recommended.”

  I bit my lip, touched. “Thank you,” I said. “For risking your life and calling in that favor.”

  He closed the door behind me, clicked it locked. “Buckle up,” he said.

  During the years that Nick and I had lived in Los Angeles, we had gone to several of the most popular local beaches—Zuma, Manhattan Beach, all the way out to Redondo for a house party. But I had never been to the beach that Griffin took me to that afternoon: El Matador, this cliff-foot strand all the way out on the west side of Malibu. What they call a pocket beach because it’s so tiny, so secluded. It was like a vision, with its perfectly white sand and isolated sea caves. We actually had to waddle through the farthest cave, surfboards and equipment in hand, just to get to the spot that Griffin loved most.

  “I can’t believe how incredible it is here,” I said, as he reached into his knapsack. He spread out an oatmeal-colored blanket.

  “You never knew about this place?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been missing out, apparently.”

  “We’ll make up for it,” he said. Then he smiled at me, squinting his eyes, tightly. He had forgotten to bring his sunglasses. I reached into my bag and handed him my extra pair. They were on the enormous side, oval-shaped and cherry red. Feminine and ridiculous on him.

  “How do I look?”

  “Perfect,” I said, and smiled.

  He handed me a wet suit, the legs folded awkwardly. “You’ll need to change,” he said.

  I stared at it. “You brought me a wet suit?”

  He nodded. “It would appear so.”

  “You brought me a wet suit, but you forgot your sunglasses?”

  “You’re stalling,” he said.

  I pointed my finger at him. “But . . . see . . . I thought when you said we were going surfing, and I told you I haven’t surfed, you would understand that that meant you would surf and I would lie here on the blanket.”

  “What fun is that?” he said.

  I think not drowning is a blast, I wanted to say. But, all of a sudden, I couldn’t say it—because I could picture it, as clearly as if Nick were the one standing in front of me. I could picture him laughing at that. It almost made me fall down. I was suddenly and completely inundated by it. What had been lost in losing him.

  I sat down on the blanket, trying to catch my breath. And trying to get a hold of my balance before I made a fool of myself.

  Griffin bent down, so he was leaning on his knees, standing over me. “We should probably do it already,” he said. “Just get it over with.”

  I looked at him. “What’s that?”

  He sat down on the blanket, getting comfortable, holding up his index finger. “One,” he said.

  “One?”

  “One conversation in which you tell me everything you want about him and then we never have to talk about him again.”

  “Just like that? Throw him out with the bathwater?” I joked. Then, I tried to say what I really meant. “I feel a little weird talking about him,” I said.

  “I get that.” He nodded. “But don’t. You’re talking about him more by not talking about him.”

  He was right. But, in a place where I was trying to be reductive, I didn’t know where to begin or end. So I sat there quietly, the beach heat kicking up, its strong breeze pushing my hair out of my face, leaving it bare.

  “How about if instead of going into everything, I tell you the best thing about him and the worst thing?” I said.

  He smiled. “Oh, so now you just want to make fun of me,” he said. “Fair enough . . .”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m not. I’m really not making fun. Maybe you’re having an influence.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then go ahead.”

  “Well,” I said. “The best thing is that we’d camp together. We both traveled so much for work, me especially, but when we were home, sometimes Nick would get back from work at the end of the day and we’d put a tent in the backyard, and sleep outside. It sounds silly, I know, but we’d end up staying up most of the night talking, locked into one sleeping bag, watching the sun come up together. It made me happy. And it made me feel safe.”

  Griffin smiled bigger, not threatened, not with any sort of judgment. “That is a good thing,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “What’s the worst?”

  I looked right at him. “I don’t remember really feeling all that safe any other time.”

  As soon as the words were out, I felt the weight of them. I felt the weight of what I didn’t want to know. That I had felt tested so much of the time Nick and I’d been together. And maybe part of that was my doing as much as his—growing out of my desire to keep him happy because I loved him so much, because I wanted his approval. But did the reason matter so much? In the end it was the same result. Maybe that was part of the reason I wanted to be away from home so much, so I didn’t feel so immediately affected by it. That part of Nick—that final 20 percent—that always seemed so out of my reach.

  Griffin took my hand, kissed it fast, right on the wrist, and pulled me to standing. One motion.

  “Let’s get in the water,” he said.

  “Wait, that’s it? We’re not going to discuss this?”

  “What’s there to discuss?”

  Nothing. All of a sudden, I knew. Nothing. Or, I should say, I felt nothing. The anxiety in my chest, that tight ball, smaller. Benign. Because there was no denying it. It hadn’t just been there since the breakup. It had been there for a while before that. And maybe now—maybe in this instance with Griffin—I was breaking free of it.

  “But what about you?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you tell me the same thing? About your last girlfriend?”

  But Griffin was already removing my bikini top.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting you into your wet suit.”

  His hands felt cold and good against my back, chilling me as he removed the straps. I started looking around the beach—there was another couple far out of the way, and a few surfers in the ocean. But, in this part, we were alone. We were completely alone.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t watch.”

  Then he did.

  That night, as promised, we went dancing. I changed into a silver bubble skirt and a silky tank top and put on my tango shoes—yes, I have a pair of special shoes I tango in—which were black and wiry and tied tight right above my ankle.

  We danced all night. Every song. Until we were both drenched in sweat, clothes clinging, laughing. Griffin wasn’t the best dancer, but he loved the music and was enjoying every second: completely unselfconscious as he twirled me around the floor, wrapped up in the moment with me. This, after a while, started to feel like the same thing.

  “Stop putting it off. It’s your turn,” I said, at one point, while we were taking a break and sharing a ginger ale.

  “My turn?”

  “I assume I’m not your first love,” I said. “Tell me about the girl before me. Best and worst. You know, tit for tat . . .”

  He smiled.

  “What? I said tit?”

  He shook his head. “You said love.”

  My eyes got wide. “No, I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .” I shook my head, trying to recover. “Not that I’m love. Or not that I’m in love with you. Or that you’re in love with me. I meant . . . that’s not what I meant.”

  He grabbed m
e up to standing, pinning my arms behind my lower back, kissing my neck, holding me there. “The best thing about the last woman I loved,” he said, “is that she spoke in full sentences.”

  “Very funny.”

  He started pulling me back to the dance floor. “And the worst thing? ” I asked. But I was letting myself be pulled, already letting myself forget. “All right, I know where this is going. Same answer.”

  7

  When you go from amazingly sad (sadder-than-you’veever-been sad) to happy (singing-in-the-shower happy) in quick succession, it seems like the other was never true. Like when you have a cold and you can’t remember that you ever felt normal, or when you feel normal again and, despite having someone sitting right in front of you coughing up a lung, you can’t quite feel the sick feeling. You can remember the experience. But holding on to that feeling, that is something else.

  It’s a little like taking a trip. You find that lift, that lightness again, that you can’t believe went missing. Even if you know you left reality. You can’t believe—if you hold on to it just right—that your newfound freedom will ever again disappear.

  Those first weeks with Griffin, I was happy. I wasn’t just a little happy. I was so happy that I could almost forget that somewhere underneath was still a terrible pain. That the happiness was so intense—at least, in part—in response to the pain being incredibly touchable before, and now not.

  This led to two things that changed everything.

  The first thing was that I got sent away on assignment for “Checking Out” to Ischia—a small, glorious island on the Tyrrhenian Sea in Italy. I spent five incredible days getting lost in the romantic gardens of La Mortella, staring at the volcanic slopes of Monte Epomeo, studying honey making with a beekeeper in Forio, eating that honey straight from her finger.

  And when I was on my way back to Los Angeles, I had a feeling I couldn’t remember having in a long time: I was excited to come home.

  Yet when I actually got to my home—to the place that had been my home in Los Angeles—I didn’t feel excited anymore. I didn’t feel excited and I didn’t feel relaxed. I felt something else. Something closer to dread. It took me a minute to realize why. Nick had been there.

  It made sense that he would come during a time he knew I’d be away. He had my schedule on his calendar, I knew that—I had put it there.

  My problem wasn’t that Nick had come to the house. It was his house too. The problem was that he had wanted me to know he had been there. I looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out how I knew this, when I saw it on the kitchen table. He left his coffee mug there. The one I had bought him at Disneyland, a July Fourth weekend a few years back. We’d trudged out there to visit with friends of his from back East who were vacationing with their small kids. It turned out to be a great weekend, one we commemorated with the stupid, enormous mug, a photo-booth photograph of us computer generated on the front. His arms were wrapped around my neck, my mouth in kiss formation—the two of us laughing, glowing, in picture form.

  He loved that mug. And he had chosen to take it out of the cabinet and put it on the table. Not to use it—it was unused. But just to take it out and leave it there, for me to find.

  I ran my fingers along the mug’s rim. My first instinct was to figure it out. Why? What did he want me to know? Was he trying to say he wanted his things? That his trip to another land was turning out to be exactly where he wanted to stay? Or, was he saying his trip away from me was moving closer to over, and he was wanting to come back again? Would I be willing to make that voyage easier for him? Would I be willing to walk him through it—whatever it was that he needed most to feel good about starting over again?

  My phone vibrated and I looked down to see I had several missed calls—two from Griffin and one from my editor, Peter. I moved toward the window and looked out over my backyard as I listened to Peter’s message.

  It always comforted me to hear his voice and picture him, bald and sweet-faced, racing around Manhattan while speaking to me. His message was several minutes long and it seemed like the main purpose was to inform me that our parent company was in the process of being bought out by an even bigger media company. “I just wanted you to hear it from me, so you wouldn’t worry too much, my love,” Peter said, the New York street noise in the background. “The new publisher is a gentleman of the highest order, and ‘Checking Out’ is one hundred percent safe. They couldn’t be happier. I, on the other hand, am growing quite irritated. My novel is at an impasse, and I had to hear from Nick that you two split? If I may quote Steinbeck here, ‘One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.’ ”

  As I disconnected from the voice mail—unable not to wonder for a moment why Nick would take it upon himself to call Peter—the phone vibrated again. It was Griffin, his third time trying to reach me.

  I flipped it open. “You don’t give a girl much chance to settle in, do you?”

  “It’s an emergency,” he said.

  My heart stopped. “What’s the emergency?”

  “I got tickets to Wilco.”

  I felt myself start to smile, biting my lip. “And how’s that an emergency?” I asked.

  “It’s in Santa Barbara,” he said. “If we want to make it in time to hear ‘Remember the Mountain Bed,’ we have to leave right now.”

  I could just shut off the lights, stop asking myself to answer any of Nick’s questions, and go.

  This was what I did.

  This was when the other thing happened, the other thing that changed everything: my mother came to town.

  My mother came to town and I let Griffin meet her. She was a real estate agent most recently in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she and her newest husband, Gil, had moved about a year and a half ago. She was great at her job (no one knew how to sell a house fast better than my mother did). And she often took trips to celebrate her sales. Though this was the first time a trip had taken her to me.

  My mother wasn’t exactly easy. And considering the current state of affairs, I might have even tried to avoid seeing her. I was certain she’d have a million questions about how I’d gotten from Nick to Griffin—from the point where she thought she knew what was happening in my life, to a life she didn’t know at all. But I felt guilty, knowing she was uncharacteristically worried about me. Plus, Gil was coming with her. Kind and good Gil Taylor. And I decided it might be okay. She seemed to be on better behavior when he was around. We all were.

  So we decided to meet at a rustic restaurant in Venice called Gjelina. Griffin and I got there first, and I think he was taken aback when they walked in—or, maybe I should say, when my mother walked in. My mother’s beauty could do that. She looked both older and younger than she was: her long blond hair perpetually pulled back in a ponytail, showing off her flawless skin. Her tired, blue eyes complemented perfectly by a pale blue peasant dress. Knee-high maroon boots.

  As she got closer to the table, not exactly smiling, Griffin squeezed my hand.

  “Hey hey hey, sweet girl!” Gil said to me, as my mother reached out her hand and introduced herself to Griffin. Griffin, to his credit, didn’t just stand up to meet her handshake. He also helped her into her seat.

  “It’s great to meet you, Mrs. Taylor,” he said.

  “Oh, let’s not start that way. Call me Janet, please,” she said, smiling too big, too forcefully. “And it’s not Mrs. Taylor, Griffin. Even though that’s my beloved’s last name. It’s Adams. Still just Janet Adams. I kept my name from my marriage to Annie’s father. I didn’t want to change my name to be different from my daughter’s. I’m not built that way. Though if she ever eventually marries, I’m sure she won’t have any problem changing her name from mine.”

  There was the other part that Janet chose not to mention. If she had actually changed or hyphenated her name every time she married someone else, it would now be Janet Adams-Samuels-Nussbaum-Taylor. There was an Everett in there too. But that was only for a week. A complicated week in which I turned fourteen
and we moved from Boston to Seattle. That time, it was Seattle. And, then, back.

  “So we have a new man at the table tonight?” my mom said, settling in. “Did you train him to be so well mannered already? Or is he putting on a show to impress your mother?”

  This was vintage Janet. Asking a seemingly innocuous question—one that didn’t ostensibly suggest what was beneath it—and there was usually a lot beneath it. We didn’t speak very often, but when we did my mother asked questions, critiqued in the form of an interested question, so that when you argued, she could say, “What? I was just asking.”

  A prime example: when I decided to become a journalist, she offered, “That’s an surprising decision. Are you sure you want to be stuck behind a desk writing about how other people are exploring the world? What? I was just asking.” And the first time she met Nick: “He’s charming, I suppose, but very devoted to his career. Does that make it hard to maintain a relationship? What? I was just asking. . . .”

  Yet there we all were, having dinner at Gjelina’s, passing around plates of flatbread, drinking too much wine, hearing the details of my mother’s plans to rest up on the Mexican coast at a hotel with infinity pools on the edge of cliffs—not the one I recommended in my last column.

  At best it was okay—more honestly it was okay and stilted, okay and slow: the dinner of people trying to act like a family for a night, people who spent the rest of the year not having to act like a family at all.

  Griffin was trying, but my mother barely let him try, turning away, cutting him off. It felt like she already voted against him and didn’t want any details to get in the way of her feeling good about that vote.

  So when he went to the bathroom, I braced myself. I braced myself for what she was going to say, trying to imagine what her problem with him was. He was too thin, too serious, that his pound of blond hair made him look like a four-year-old.

  Instead my mother turned to me, her eyes tight on my face. “So this is the new man in your life?” she said. Then: “He certainly does love you, doesn’t he?”