by Lisa Kleypas
I apologized abjectly to Nick.
“No, it was my fault,” he said, wrapping his arms around me in a warm, firm hug. His forgiveness was such a relief, I felt tears spring to my eyes. “I’m asking too much of you,” he continued. “You can’t help the way you were brought up. You were never expected to do things for other people. But in the real world, it’s the small gestures, the little things, that show a guy you love him. I’d appreciate it if you’d make more of an effort.” And he rubbed my feet after dinner, and told me to stop apologizing.
The next day, I saw a new can of spray starch in the laundry closet. The ironing board had been unfolded and set up for me, so I could practice while Nick started dinner.
WE WENT OUT one night with two other couples, who were guys from the construction firm Nick worked at, and their wives. I was excited about doing something social. It had been a surprise to discover that although Nick had grown up in Dallas, he didn’t seem to have any old friends to introduce me to. They had all moved away, or weren’t worth bothering with, he had told me. I was eager to make some friends in Dallas, and I wanted to make a good impression.
At lunch hour I went to the hotel salon and had one of the stylists trim several inches of my long hair. When she was finished the floor was littered with wavy black locks, and my hair was medium-length and sleek. “You should never let your hair get longer than this,” the stylist told me. “The way you had it before was too much for someone as petite as you. It was overwhelming your face.”
I hadn’t mentioned to Nick that I was getting a haircut. He loved it long, and I knew he would have tried to talk me out of it. Besides, I thought once he saw how flattering it was, not to mention easier to care for, he would change his mind.
As soon as he picked me up, Nick started to frown. “Looks like you’ve been busy today.” His fingers were tight on the steering wheel.
“Do you like it? It feels great.” I shook my head from side to side like a hair model. “It was about time I had a good, healthy trim.”
“That’s not a trim. Most of your hair is gone.” Every word was edged with disapproval and disappointment.
“I was tired of my college look. I think this is more polished.”
“Your long hair was special. Now it looks ordinary.”
I felt as if someone had just emptied a syringe of liquid anxiety into my veins. “I’m sorry if you don’t like it. But it was too much work. And it’s my hair, anyway.”
“Well, I’m the one who has to look at you every day.”
My skin seemed to shrink until my body was compressed in a tight envelope. “The stylist said it was overwhelming my face.”
“I’m glad you and she think the world needs to see more of your goddamn face,” he muttered.
I endured about fifteen minutes of thick, choking silence while Nick maneuvered through the six o’clock traffic. We were going straight to the restaurant to meet his friends.
“By the way,” Nick said abruptly, “just so you won’t be surprised, I’ve told people your name is Marie.”
I stared at his profile in complete incomprehension. Marie was my middle name, the one no one had ever used unless I was in trouble. The sound of “Haven Marie” had always been a sure sign that something had hit the fan.
“Why didn’t you tell them my first name?” I managed to ask.
Nick didn’t look at me. “Because it makes you sound like a hick.”
“I like my regular name. I don’t want to be Marie. I want—”
“Jesus, can’t I just have a normal wife with a normal name?” He was turning red, breathing hard, the air clotted with hostility.
The whole situation felt unreal. I was married to a man who didn’t like my name. He’d never said anything about it before. This isn’t Nick, I told myself. The real Nick was the guy I’d married. I glanced at him covertly. He looked like an ordinary, exasperated husband. He was asking for normal, and I wasn’t altogether certain what that was.
I worked to steady my own breathing. We were almost at the restaurant—we couldn’t walk in there looking like we’d just had a fight. My face felt as if it had been coated with glass. “Okay,” I said. “So we’ll be Nick and Marie tonight.”
“Okay.” He seemed to relax a little.
AFTER THAT EVENING, which had gone well, Nick hardly ever called me Haven, even when it was just the two of us. He said it would be too confusing when we went out with other people, if I wasn’t used to being called Marie. I told myself it could be a good thing, this name change. I would let go of my past baggage. I could become whoever I wanted, a better person. And it pleased Nick, which I wanted desperately to do.
I’m Marie, I told myself. Marie, the married woman who lives in Dallas and works at the Darlington and knows how to iron a shirt. Marie, whose husband loved her.
OUR MARRIAGE WAS like a machine I learned how to operate but never understood the inner mechanisms that made it work. I knew how to do the things that kept it running smoothly, all the minor and major requirements that kept Nick on an even keel. When Nick was happy, I was rewarded with affection. But when something had set Nick off, he would become sullen or irritable. It could take days to coax him back into a good temper. His changeable mood was the thermostat that regulated our household.
By the time our first anniversary approached, I realized that Nick’s bad days, the days I was required to sympathize and compensate for every small injustice done to him, were outnumbering the good days. I didn’t know how to fix that, but I suspected it was my fault. I knew other people’s marriages were different, that they didn’t constantly worry about how to anticipate their husbands’ needs, they weren’t always walking on eggshells. Certainly my own parents’ marriage hadn’t been like this. If anything, the household had revolved around my mother’s needs and wants, while my father showed up every now and then to appease her.
Nick maintained a steadily percolating anger toward my family, blaming my father for not giving us money to buy a house. He pushed me to make contact with my father and brothers, to ask for things from them, and he got angry when I refused.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” I told him, even though that wasn’t true. Regardless of my father’s attitude, my brothers would have given me anything I asked for. Especially Gage. The few occasions we had talked on the phone, he had asked if there was anything he could do for me and Nick, and I had said no, absolutely not, things were fantastic. I was afraid to give Gage any hint of how things really were. One pulled thread and I might unravel completely.
“Your dad will have to start doing things for us when we have kids,” Nick told me. “It would be a public embarrassment for him to have grandchildren living in a damn shack. He’ll have to cough up some money then, the stingy bastard.”
It worried me that Nick seemed to regard our future children as tools that would be used to pry open the Travis family coffers. I’d always planned to have children when I felt ready, but this situation couldn’t begin to accommodate a fussy, demanding infant. It was all I could do to keep my fussy, demanding husband happy.
I had never had problems sleeping, but I began having dreams that woke me up at night, leaving me exhausted the next day. Since my tossing and turning kept Nick awake, I often went to the sofa in the middle of the night, shivering beneath a throw blanket. I dreamed of losing my teeth, of falling from tall buildings.
“It was so weird,” I told Nick one morning while he was drinking his coffee, “this new one I had last night. I was in a park somewhere, just walking by myself, and my right leg fell off. No blood or anything. It was like I was a Barbie doll. I was so upset, wondering how I was going to get around without that leg, and then my arm broke off at the elbow, and I picked it up and tried to hold it in place, and I was thinking, ‘I need this arm, I’ve got to find someone to reattach it.’ So then—”
“Did you take your pill yet this morning?” Nick interrupted.
I had been on birth control ever since we had started sle
eping together. “No, I always take it after breakfast. Why? Do you think the hormones may be giving me bad dreams?”
“No, I think you’re giving yourself bad dreams. And I asked because it’s time for you to go off the pill. We should start having kids while we’re still young.”
I stared at him. A huge wave of unwillingness went through me, every cell in my body resisting the idea of a great big hormone-fueled helplessness that would make everything impossible. But I couldn’t say no. That would set off a bad mood that might last for days. I had to work Nick around to changing his mind. “Do you really think we’re ready?” I asked. “It might be better to put away some money first.”
“We won’t need to. Your dad will be a lot more reasonable once he finds out Gage and Liberty aren’t the only ones who can pop out a kid.”
I realized Nick had less interest in the baby itself than in its usefulness as a way to manipulate Churchill Travis. Would he feel differently when the baby was born? Would he be one of those fathers who melted at the sight of the small person he had helped to bring into the world?
As hard as I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t see Nick summoning the patience to deal with a screaming infant, a messy toddler, a needy child. It frightened me, thinking of how tightly I would be bound to him, how dependent I would be once we had a baby together.
I went into the bathroom to get ready for work, brushing mascara onto my lashes, slicking on lip gloss. Nick followed, rummaging through the assortment of cosmetics and hair products I had set out on the counter. He found the round plastic container my birth control pills came in, and flipped it open to reveal the wheel of pastel-colored tablets.
“You don’t need these anymore.” He tossed the pills into the trash.
“I need to finish the cycle,” I protested. “And usually before you try to get pregnant, you go in to get a checkup—”
“You’re healthy. You’ll be fine.” He put a hand on my shoulder, forcing me up as I bent to retrieve the pills. “Leave them.”
A disbelieving laugh bubbled from my throat. I had been conditioned over months to tolerate Nick’s whims for the sake of harmony, but this was too much. I was not going to be forced into having a baby neither of us was ready for.
“Nick, I’d rather wait.” I picked up a hairbrush and began to drag it through my tangled hair. “And this really isn’t a good time to talk about having children, with both of us getting ready for work and—”
“I’ll decide what we talk about and when!” The explosive intensity of his voice startled me into dropping the hairbrush. “I didn’t realize I had to make a goddamn appointment with you to talk about our personal life!”
I went white with alarm, my heart kicking into a violent rhythm. “Nick—”
“Do you ever think about anyone or anything besides yourself?” Anger had knotted his throat and the tiny muscles of his face. “It’s always about what you want . . . you selfish bitch, what about what I want?”
He leaned over me, towering and furious, and I shrank against the mirror. “Nick, I just . . .” My mouth had gone so dry, I could barely force the words out. “I’m not saying no. I just want . . . would like . . . to talk about it later.”
That earned a look of soul-shredding contempt. “I don’t know. It may not be worth talking about. This whole marriage may not be worth a shit pile. You think you did me some big fucking favor, marrying me? I was the one who did you a favor. You think anyone else would put up with your crap?”
“Nick—” Panicky and confused, I watched him walk to the bedroom. I started to follow, but I hung back, fearful of maddening him further. The men in my family were generally slow to anger, and once they worked up to an explosion, it was over soon. Nick’s temper was different, a fire that fed on itself, growing until its proportions had far outstripped the cause. In this case, I wasn’t sure what the best strategy should be . . . If I went after him to apologize, it might pour fuel on his rage. But if I stayed in the bathroom, he might take new offense at being ignored.
I settled for hovering at the doorway, straddling both rooms, watching for a sign of what Nick wanted. He went to the closet and pushed through the clothing with quick, vicious movements, hunting for a shirt. Deciding to retreat, I went back into the bathroom.
My cheeks looked white and stiff. I brushed on some pink blush in light strokes, but the tinted powder seemed to sit on top of my skin, not blending. The brush caught at the mist of nervous sweat and made ruddy streaks. I reached for a washcloth, about to clean it all off, and that was when the world seemed to explode.
Nick had come back, cornering me, clutching something in one fist. Screaming. I’d never had someone scream into my face like that before, certainly not a man, and it was a kind of death. I was reduced to the level of an animal under attack, unable to slip beyond the whiteness of fear, frozen in mute incomprehension.
The thing in his hand was a striped shirt . . . I had ruined it somehow . . . a mistake . . . but Nick said it was sabotage. I had done it on purpose, he said. He needed it for an important meeting this morning, and I said no, I didn’t mean to I’m so sorry but every word brought murderous heat to his face and his arm drew back and the world caught fire.
My head snapped to the side, my cheek blazing, and droplets of sweat and tears went flying. A burning stillness settled. The veins in my face felt huge and pumping.
I was slow to comprehend that Nick had hit me. I stood swaying, blank, using my fingertips to explore where the heat had turned to numbness.
I couldn’t see through the blur in my eyes, but I heard Nick’s voice, thick with disgust. “Look what you made me do.”
He went back into the bedroom.
No retreat. I couldn’t run from the apartment. We had only one car. And I didn’t know where I would go. I held the washcloth under cold water, sat on the closed toilet seat and held the dripping mass against my cheek.
There was no one I could tell. This was something Todd or my other friends couldn’t comfort me about, couldn’t say it was part of a normal relationship. Shame spread through me, leaking from the marrow of my bones . . . the feeling that I must have deserved it, or it wouldn’t have happened. I knew that wasn’t right. But something in me, in the way I had been formed, made it impossible to escape that spreading shame. It had lurked inside me forever, waiting to surface. Waiting for Nick, or someone like him. I was stained with it, like invisible ink . . . in the right light, it would show.
I waited without moving while Nick finished getting ready for work. I didn’t stir even when I heard him call the Darlington and tell them I wouldn’t be in that day. His wife was sick, he said regretfully. The flu or something, he didn’t know what. He sounded compassionate and concerned. He chuckled a little at something the other person on the line said. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll take good care of her.”
I waited until I heard the jangle of the keys, and the front door closing.
Moving like an old woman, I reached into the trash and pulled out my pills. I took one, and scooped water into my mouth with my hand, and downed it with a painful swallow.
I found the striped shirt on the floor of the bedroom, and I laid it out on the mattress. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. I couldn’t find the flaw that had driven Nick berserk. “What did I do?” I asked aloud, my fingers trailing down the stripes as if clawing through iron bars. What had I done wrong?
THE URGE TO please was a sickness in me. I knew that, and I did it anyway. I washed and starched and ironed the striped shirt all over again. Every thread in the cotton weave was pressed perfectly flat, every button gleaming and pristine. I hung it in the closet and I checked all the other shirts, and aligned his shoes and hung all his ties so the bottoms were all at the same level.
When Nick got home, the condo was clean and the table was set, and I had put a King Ranch casserole in the oven. His favorite dinner. I had a hard time looking at him.
But Nick came in contrite and smiling, bringing a bouquet of mixed
flowers. He handed me the fragrant offering, petals rustling in layers of tissue and cellophane. “Here, sweetheart.” He leaned down to kiss my cheek, the one he had struck earlier. The side of my face was pink and swollen. I held still while his mouth touched my skin. I wanted to jerk away from him. I wanted to hit him back. Mostly I wanted to cry.
Instead I took the flowers to the sink and began to unwrap them mechanically.
“I shouldn’t have done that this morning,” Nick said behind me. “I thought about you all day.”
“I thought about you too.” I put the bouquet into a vase and filled it with water, unable to face the prospect of cutting and arranging the flowers.
“It was just the last straw, seeing what you’d done to my shirt.”
I wiped the counter slowly, moving a paper towel in tight circles. “I don’t understand what was wrong with it.”
“It had about ten times too much starch. I mean, I could have cut a slice of bread with one of those sleeves.” A long pause, and then he sighed. “I overreacted. I know that. But like I said, it was the last straw. So much other stuff has been driving me crazy, and seeing what you’d done to my shirt was too much.”
I turned to face him, gripping the edges of my long sleeves over my fingers until they were shrouded like cat paws. “What other stuff?”
“Everything. The way we live. This place is never clean and organized. We never have home-cooked meals. There’s always piles of crap everywhere.” He raised his hands as if in self-defense as he saw me start to speak. “Oh, I know, it looks great right now. And I can see you’ve put dinner in the oven. I appreciate that. But it should be like this all the time. And it can’t be, with both of us working.”
I understood right away what Nick wanted. But I didn’t understand why he wanted it. “I can’t quit my job,” I said numbly. “We can’t afford to lose my salary.”