The First Husband

by Laura Dave

  “We do have that on our side, I guess.”

  He smiled up at me in the lantern light. “Still, if I’d known Jordan was here, I would have taken a break for a little while . . .” he said. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get to spend any time with her.”

  I turned from him, turned from that smile, focused on my lights.

  “Maybe it’s not the end of the world,” I said.

  “Well, I’d hope not,” he joked. “But she matters to you. And I want to know her.”

  I felt my chest clench in that moment, at that kindness. It was a small kindness, but it was so genuine. So much like Griffin.

  And, if anything, it should have moved me closer to him, closer to what I knew to be true about him, not closer to Jordan’s words. But it didn’t. Because, rationally or not, all I was thinking was, why, despite that, does our life not feel complete enough to show her?

  “Don’t forget that she’s Nick’s sister,” I said.

  “So?”

  “Her allegiance is to him.”

  Griffin drilled me with a look that I could make out, even in the dim lantern light.

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought we were playing way past that kind of allegiance.”

  That was the moment that I should have said, of course we are. But I was already heading somewhere far less productive. “Maybe you should ask Gia about that,” I said. “Or your mother.”

  “Annie . . .”

  I lowered the lights. “You don’t get it,” I said.

  “No, clearly not,” he said. “But the good news is that I’m not dumb. I mean I’m not always the smartest guy in the room, but I’ve been known to get it. It and I have a really good relationship, most of the time.”

  He was trying to make light of things. I wasn’t having it though. I didn’t want it to be light. I wanted it to be heavy. Suddenly, I wanted it to be so heavy that it would have no choice but to break.

  My hands started to shake, the lights moving like cylinders inside of them, as I stepped off the ladder. Griffin was getting dangerously close to doing it. To reaching for me, which I couldn’t let him do. Because it would be the last straw, feeling his hands on me. And it might stop me from doing it, what I felt myself already doing. Finding reasons to burn the house down.

  He must have sensed my hesitation in moving color because he pulled back, reached into the bucket, picked out some more lights. And started to talk.

  “So I was thinking about you almost all day today. I mean, more accurately, I was thinking about your photographs,” he said. “And I had this idea. It may be a little nutty, but it may also be great . . . did you look at them again today?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “Well, we should probably talk about it when they’re in front of us, but my idea . . .”

  “You know, maybe it’s a little soon for ideas, Griffin,” I said. “And maybe we should both start anticipating that I’m going to get nowhere with all of this photography stuff.”

  “That’s a good attitude,” he said.

  He paused, as I shrugged—shrugged as if to say, sorry, but it’s the only one I’ve got right now.

  “Annie, you have talent. And you can do something here. We can do something. We’ll figure it out, together.”

  Figure it out together. All of a sudden, Gia’s words came back to me: Griffin only knows how to love broken people.

  “I don’t need saving, Griffin,” I said.

  He gave me a confused look. “Who said anything about you needing saving?” he asked.

  “No one,” I said. And then, before I could stop myself: “Gia did, actually. Or, rather, she shared that that part of a relationship is a hobby of yours.”

  “Gia is wrong about that. Which maybe is my fault.” He paused, a look of shame coming over his face. “I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I stayed in the relationship too long. But I wasn’t trying to save her. I loved her. I was trying to fix our relationship, which is a different thing. It made me willing to do the work for too long after I shouldn’t have been, after I knew we probably weren’t going to get to where we needed to be.”

  He met my eyes and I had to admit what he was saying sounded like the truth—or at least the truth as far as he understood it. So why, even with evidence banking up on our side of things, did I not feel any calmer?

  “It was never about saving Gia, Annie,” he continued. “And it certainly isn’t about that with you.”

  “Well, then what is about then, Griffin? Because I’m just saying we can put together whatever plan you want, but I’m probably better off preparing for the fact that my photography is just a hobby,” I said. “And I’m most likely going to end up jobless in this town unless I take a job writing for the Boondocks Bee.”

  My tone stopped him, pulling him away from him whatever was left of his understanding.

  “What did Jordan say to you today, Annie?” he asked.

  “Nothing . . .” I said.

  “Then why do you want to fight with me so badly? Why is that, apparently, the only thing that’s going to make you feel better?”

  I was already heading away, not stopping to drop the lights back into their bucket—the small, innocent lights that I was still squeezing between my fingers, that had nothing to do with any of this.

  “It’s not,” I said. “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m just going home,” I said.

  It occurred to me, as I said it, that maybe my biggest problem of all was that I still wasn’t at all sure where that was.

  22

  Something that always shocked me, during the years that I was writing “Checking Out,” was how many letters I’d regularly receive from readers asking me about how they could get out of a trip they no longer wanted to take. How they could get out of a trip that they’d known, in advance, was not refundable. I never knew what made them think I would have that answer. Then, after time, I realized that most of the readers didn’t really want that answer. They didn’t even really want out. Not of that trip they had been planning for, hoping for, and waiting for. But like whenever you feel your options close in—even if they close in on what you were aiming to find—those looking to cancel still wanted to feel like they had the option of out. That it wasn’t a fait accompli, everything that was coming. That there was a back door they could find their way to, whether or not they were going to use it.

  When I got back to the house, there was a note from Emily waiting for me on the kitchen table.

  Annabelle,

  I was hoping to talk with you before I left, but I need to get back to Manhattan for an early class tomorrow morning. Soon?

  –Emily

  I put the note back down wondering what she was hoping to talk to me about. All the other things I didn’t understand about her son? About what he needed? All the other things we should have thought about before falling into a life together?

  The leftovers of the dinner she had served the twins were also on the table: barbeque chicken fingers and sweet-potato curly fries, blueberry-banana milk shakes.

  I picked up a handful of fries and headed slowly up the stairs, dragging myself toward our bedroom, feeling completely hammered from my arguments. The one with Jordan that I didn’t ask for. The one with Griffin that I insisted upon.

  I was relieved when I passed the twins’ room to see that the door was shut, the lights off. And I was even more relieved when I passed the bathroom, the shower water clearly running, an occupied Jesse’s loud hums audible from the hallway.

  I had ample evidence, all of a sudden, that I would be getting through the rest of my waking hours alone and unscathed.

  Then I headed into my own bedroom and saw it: I’d been wrong. Wrong about the evidence. And wrong about the leftovers of dinner. They weren’t just on the kitchen table. They were all over the bedroom floor. In shades of barbeque red. Sweet-potato orange. In bright blueberry mi
lk shake.

  They were all over the floor, and all over my photographs. All of my photographs.

  Ruined.

  “Now, that’s not good.”

  I don’t know how long I was standing there, frozen, when I turned to find Jesse in the doorway, in jeans and a T-Shirt—ATOM Spraypainted across the shirt’s front—his hair still wet from his shower.

  “No,” I said.

  “And probably not the best moment,” he said, “but I feel like I should also tell you that Sammy may have swallowed your wedding ring.”

  “May have?”

  “My only source is Sammy,” Jesse said. “Who also told me he swallowed the kitchen table.”

  I turned back to look at my bedside table, and saw what was notably missing: my thin, gold ring. I moved closer to the table, looking for the gold’s gleam in the carpet, underneath the table legs. It was nowhere.

  And then, from my new vantage point, I took in once again the disaster that was now my maybe-not-future. The photographs. The negatives. The scrunched film rolls. The canvas box swimming in a blueberry puddle.

  “You want some help cleaning this up?” Jesse asked.

  I looked right at him.

  “I want some help,” I said, “getting anywhere else.”

  We sat on the porch steps, like it wasn’t the dead of winter—me on the bottom one, Jesse on the top, a bottle of bourbon on the step between us—and proceeded to get drunk, looking up at the star-filled sky, letting the liquor help fight the cold, waiting for Griffin to get home.

  We got so drunk that I ended up telling Jesse all of it, about the end of my relationship with Nick, about losing my column, about the craziness that had been that very day: from Gia and her terrible bathroom confessional to Jordan and Chef Boyardee. I told him all of it, and apparently in an amusing way, because he was hysterically laughing.

  He was laughing so hard, by the end, that he made me tell him the Chef Boyardee part twice.

  “I’m glad my life is so humorous to you,” I said.

  “Wow,” he said, wiping at his eyes, fighting back a final laugh. “It really, really is.”

  I kept shaking my head, but I couldn’t really pretend to be offended. I was laughing too.

  “So is Jordan always such a bitch?” Jesse said.

  “Hey! That’s not entirely fair,” I said.

  “I think it is, actually.”

  “She’s just worried about me,” I said. “You know, she thinks I’ve gone off the deep end.”

  “What if you have?”

  I reached for the bottle of bourbon and took another swig, letting it fall down my throat, burning it.

  “I see three of you, so it’s not entirely surprising that I’m not exactly following but . . . I’m not exactly following.”

  “I’m saying, what if Jordan’s right that you’ve gone off this so-called deep end? Why does that leave you any worse off than before? ”

  I held the bottle out for him to take. “How’s that’s supposed to make anything better?”

  “It just seems to me that the deep end was where you were headed. One way or the other. Even if you had stayed in that halfway house of a life in L.A.” He paused. “The question is, what are you going to do about it now? Ignore what you know, or pick something that counts?”

  I was having a little too much trouble following that too, which was when—in my lucidless haze—I started to wonder who he was really talking to with his little speech: me or him.

  “Are you worried she’s not going to forgive you? ” I said. “Once the dust has settled, and everyone’s calmed down? Are you worried Cheryl isn’t going to be able to try again?”

  Jesse took another long drink, swallowing slowly. “Cheryl’s not the one I’m worried about.”

  I looked at him, confused. “You’re worried about Jude Flemming?” I said.

  “I’m worried about Jude Flemming,” he said. “After all, she’s really the wronged person in this scenario.”

  “How so?”

  “We got involved when I was at a very bad moment, very bad for anybody wanting something from me,” he said. “Cheryl and I had just separated and . . .”

  “Wait, you separated from Cheryl before Jude?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jude Flemming wasn’t the cause?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. She thought she was going to be my answer, though,” he said. “She was convinced she was going to be my answer. And, then, I guess I could be hers too. Except for the fact that I never stopped wanting to be with my wife, which I tried to be incredibly clear about. She’s still not hearing me on that point.”

  “Wait, which she?”

  “Take your pick.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  He took a long slug from bourbon bottle. “And the worst part is, Jude and I only had sex one time. Relations. One time, and she’s pregnant.” He paused. “We’re like an after-school special. The elderly version.”

  This stopped me.

  “But . . .” I shook my head, totally confused. “Then why were you separated from Cheryl in the first place?”

  “I’d gotten her yoga lessons for her birthday. Private yoga lessons. With Theodore. Just Theodore. One name. Like Madonna. Can you believe that crap? He’s supposed to be the best yoga teacher in Boston though. And I never seemed to get her anything she liked for her birthday, so, against my better judgment, I hired him.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s just say that, this year, I finally got my wife something she liked for her birthday.”

  My eyes opened wide. “Cheryl and Theodore?”

  “Cheryl and Theodore. Though, if you believe her, it isn’t physical between them. How do you even compete with that? After all, if she’s getting so much from Theodore emotionally, doesn’t that say something about what she wasn’t getting from me?”

  I couldn’t help but think of Nick—Nick and his emotional match, Pearl. How do you compete with that? With the possibility of what might be? I didn’t even know how to try.

  “Jesse, I’m so sorry,” I said.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “Now she doesn’t know what she wants. She came back to me for a minute, she left again,” he said. “She talked about coming back another time, then felt like she wasn’t ready.”

  “What does ready look like in that scenario?”

  He shrugged. “Cheryl and I . . . we’d been together since we were sophomores at MIT, and she was studying botany. I took three horrible plant and soil classes just to be near her. . . .” He shook his head. “I guess it’s hard sometimes to last . . . when you’ve lasted.”

  I took back the bourbon bottle. I held it by my mouth, feeling floored. I wanted to reach out and touch him and tell him it was going to be okay. But I also knew I had no idea if that was true so instead, I put down the bottle, and looked back up. At the stars. At the midnight sky.

  “Man,” I said, “you sure know how to put someone else’s problems into perspective.”

  He started to laugh, all over again. And then I was laughing too. “Glad to help,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be too high and mighty if I were you.”

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “I know what I want. I’m just trying to figure out how to get there.”

  I started to ask what he knew he wanted—to go back to Cheryl? Be there to help Jude? But before I could get there, he kept talking.

  “You, Annie Adams,” he said, “are still a mountain’s worth of walking behind all that.”

  I wanted to argue that that wasn’t true—that I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be with Griffin, and make my life work here. I wanted to stay. But in my head, my admittedly bourbonsoaked head, Griffin came out as Nick. So I knew saying the rest out loud was probably not the wisest move right then.

  “But consider this,” Jesse said, picking the bourbon back up, “maybe you aren’t in this position because you forgot yourself, but because you started getting hon
est about who you really might be.”

  Before I could say anything to that, Jesse tilted the bourbon my way.

  “Welcome to the deep end,” he said.

  23

  The next morning I woke up to the telephone ringing—ringing in a desperate way that let me know it was certainly not the first time the telephone had rung, not the first time the caller was trying to get through.

  My head was spinning from leftover bourbon and not enough sleep. As I reached for the phone, I slowly started to realize what was happening around me: that I was in the bedroom alone, Griffin’s side of the bed not slept in, yet my mostly destroyed photographs no longer strewn across the floor, and somehow cleaned up.

  Then, suddenly, all I could do was focus on lying very still, the bourbon moving around my stomach, dangerously close to coming up the wrong way. The phone mercifully stopped ringing.

  And then it started again. Because I was in no position to think of another way to make the ringing stop, I picked up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Are you ready to start singing to me?”

  “What?”

  “I think you should sing to me that Bette Midler song, the one about the unsung hero. The one who holds up your wings? Or if you prefer, you can sing the one by that girl who won American Idol. About having a moment in the sun.”

  It was Peter. It was Peter, former editor extraordinaire, who was on the other end of the phone making these terrible references to easy listening songs.

  My arm was covering my eyes, my elbow pointing straight up, fighting the spinning in my head.

  “Peter,” I said. “My head is spinning so badly you are coming out as an echo. Can I call you back?”

  “Absolutely not. Not when I’ve been calling you incessantly for the last two hours to tell you the great news.” He paused for effect. “You are unfired!”

  I moved my arm off my eyes. “What?”