The First Husband (14 page)

I looked up at him, tilting my head. “Did you just say ‘bastion’?”

“Yes,” he said. “I thought you’d enjoy it.”

I smiled at him. “I did.”

“So, that’s one good thing.”

I laughed in spite of myself. Then I shook my head. “I just sat there, so still, the whole train ride back here, trying to figure out, what happens now? And I couldn’t seem to come up with anything, like an answer.”

“Well, what do you want to happen now?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, which was when I remembered what I’d thought about in Peter’s office. That conversation with Nick. The conversation before the last conversation with Nick. The almost conversation.

“What?” he said. “I see you thinking something. What are you thinking over there?”

I shook my head. “It’s silly,” I said. “It’s really . . . I don’t know. Too silly to even mention.”

“Try me.”

“I’ve taken a lot of photographs. Since I started writing ‘Checking Out.’ With all the traveling, the thing that started interesting me the most was how people made a life in all these places. So I started taking photographs of . . . homes.” I shrugged. “Different homes. In all the different cities I’d go to. Homes that struck me somehow. Maybe that would teach me something about how to do it, make one for myself. If that makes sense . . .”

He was quiet, for just a minute. “Do you have them here?” he said.

“The homes?”

He gave me a smile, ignoring my snarky joke. “Sure. Or,” he said, “your
photographs
.”

I nodded. “They’re in a canvas box. Up in the bedroom.”

“Can I see them?”

“Now?”

He stood up, and reached out his hand for me to take, reached out to help me up.

“Now works for me,” he said.

 

We spread them all out on the floor—all of the photographs I had taken, all the negatives, all the rolls of films that still needed developing. Six years of a secret love, staring back at us: houses in cities as distinct from each other as Hai Phong, Vietnam, and Marietta, Georgia; houses near steep cliffs in the fishing village of Klima, on the Greek island Milos, and, midrenovation, on a tiny river in Winchester, Tennessee; a lone rocking chair in front of a one-bedroom house in Cuba. We spread them all out and sat on the floor, looking at what was or wasn’t there.

It took Griffin a very long time of looking at each photograph—and looking again—before he said anything.

Finally, when he did, he didn’t smile. Not at first. Then he did.

“I think these are good,” he said. “I think they’re very good.”

I gave him a disbelieving look. “That’s not biased or anything.”

He shook his head, his eyes back on the photographs. “Well, you can take my opinion for what it is, but I think they’re strong photographs. They’re interesting. And surprising. And unique.” He looked right at me. “They’d make me want to know you if I didn’t. Which, for me, is usually my first indication I’m around something pretty great.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Is that true?” I said.

“Very, very true.”

I covered my eyes in embarrassment. “Can we please change the subject now? ” Then I peeked at him. “And thank you,” I said.

He smiled, right at me. “You’re welcome,” he said.

Griffin moved the photographs gently out of the way and, less gently, pulled me toward him until my legs were around his waist, his palms cupping the back of my neck.

“I still need a plan. In my entire life, I’ve never
not
had a plan.”

“Maybe you don’t now.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “I think sometimes we plan the most when we’re the least sure and we want to feel okay about that. . . .” He paused. “You have something you want to do. Something you like to do. Something you’re good at. Why don’t we start with that? Why don’t you let that be the entire plan for now?”

“I can’t just . . . decide that.”

He leaned forward, our faces less than an inch apart. “What if you just did?” he said.

I kissed him. I kissed him softly and sweetly. Then I did it again.

“I really love you,” I said.

“I really love you back,” he said.

He started to undress me, slowly at first, and then more frantically. Messily. Hands cupping my neck, hands cupping my thighs. Right there on the floor by the bed. The bed too far away.

And it occurred to me, all at once. It occurred to me—despite my day, despite my past days—how happy I felt. It occurred to me in that way that you already know you’ll remember it later. You’ve already, accidently, locked it in.

And I couldn’t help but think—the last of my clothing falling away, falling behind me—that that moment, between us, was turning into many things: a turning point, a new beginning to our new beginning.

What it wasn’t turning into was the ideal moment to meet my mother-in-law.

“
H
ello, Griffin.”

We jumped up in quick succession, Griffin’s mother standing in front of us, fixed in her place, as we tried to get it together: Griffin turning and putting on his pants, me trying to pull my black dress back over my chest. Unable to find the strap, awkwardly holding the dress there. Hearing the zipper close on Griffin’s jeans. Trying not to die at that sound.

Griffin’s mother, on the other hand, didn’t look embarrassed at all. She was standing there in our bedroom doorway, looking surprisingly elegant, for midnight, in a pencil skirt, looking like the original incarnation of her children—Griffin’s skin, Jesse’s beautiful eyes. Her own silver hair falling just above her small shoulders.

“Mrs. Putney,” I said. “Or should I call you Emily?”

She looked at me head-on, and didn’t answer. It didn’t matter. I was apparently going to keep talking, talking in the way I did when I was compensating, desperately trying to change a moment from what it was turning out to be.

“It’s so great to finally meet you,” I said. “Griffin speaks of you so fondly. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we are finally face-to-face.”

Emily looked at me like I was speaking Russian, which I was starting to wish I was.

“Funny enough, I have a dog named Mila, which sounds a little like Emily.”

Was that really how I thought I was going to turn things around? By telling her that her name sounded like my dog’s?

“Is that right?” she said.

I nodded, reluctantly. “I’m not saying they rhyme or anything, though almost, I guess . . . if you say it fast enough . . . or slow enough . . .” I started to fade out. “I love her a lot.”

Emily turned from me and looked at her son.

“I ran over a soccer ball in the driveway,” she said. “You need lights on out there, Griff. Downlights, up in the trees. Don’t you know that? It could have been a person.”

“Mom, what are you doing here?” He pulled his shirt down over the part of his stomach that was still showing. “At midnight?”

I reached down for my bra, tried to push it under the bed. First with my hands, then, as I felt Emily glancing back in my direction, far more awkwardly, with the side of my foot.

“I got a phone call that my sons’ lives are falling apart and, so, I thought I should probably find out in person what’s going on,” she said. “I got in the car after tonight’s lecture and here I am. As soon as possible. To find out. So start talking.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Make it less so, if you don’t mind,” Emily said, her arms crossed in front of her chest.

This standoff was so strange—and I was still in so much shock at meeting his mother, who apparently thought it was appropriate to open Griffin’s bedroom door unannounced
,
and then make demands—that it took me a minute to realize what she had said. What had gotten her there. In front of us. That her sons’ lives (plural) were falling apart. Both Jesse’s
and
Griffin’s. What was falling apart in Griffin’s life, in her mind? He was a successful chef, opening his own restaurant for the first time. He was doing great. All that had changed was that he had married me. Which was when I started to understand that
that
was exactly her problem.

“Wait. Jesse called you?” Griffin said, surprised.

“No,” she said. “And that’s very comforting, let me tell you. Gia and Cheryl did. They called together.”

This was when Emily Putney turned back to me. This was when she decided she wanted to deal with me.

“You must be Annie?” she said.

And then she gave me a look. She gave me a look—how can I explain it?—that made me want to say no. That made me seriously consider it. But before I could, I heard someone barreling up the stairs, covering at least two stairs at a time.

We all turned to see Jesse—out of breath, a twin under each of his arms, their faces and hands covered in tomato sauce and orange juice and powdered sugar.

“Hey Ma!” Jesse gave his mother a big smile. “I thought that was your car I saw out front! You realize that’s the twins’ soccer ball you crushed underneath your back tire, right?”

“Darling,” she said, “of all the many questions that need answering right now, I’m not sure that is going to come first.”

Everyone dispersed in quick succession: Emily going to put down the boys, the bigger boys heading downstairs to have a talk with her. I, meanwhile, took a shower and got into bed, not even stopping to put the photographs away, just trying to will myself to fall asleep, to make the day over.

But I couldn’t. I just lay there in the dark, my eyes slowly adjusting to the sliver of moonlight coming into the bedroom, until I was making it out again. Those beautiful designs on the bedroom ceiling, the letters and numbers making up some sort of formula that I didn’t yet know how to understand. This was what I was trying to do—understand that formula—when Griffin came upstairs and got into bed with me.

I expected him to say that he was sorry—sorry for his mother, sorry for the awkward intrusion into our home happening at the end of such an already tough day for me—but he was quiet, his arm over his eyes, waiting to see whether I wanted to talk. Waiting to see if I was going to say out loud what I was starting to feel inside: this was all becoming a little too much for me.

“My mother knew we were married,” Griffin said, finally. “I called her when we left Las Vegas. You should know that. I called her long before that, four days after we met, and told her I wanted to marry you. Whenever you’d have me. You should know that too.”

I turned toward him. “You did?”

He nodded.

“That’s very sweet.”

He paused. “She just knew Gia for a long time, Annie, that’s the thing. They were close. Gia was always kind to her. Patient with how Emily can be,” he said. “It may just take her a minute. To adjust.”

“Emily or Gia?”

“Ha-ha.”

“She thinks you made a big mistake, doesn’t she?” I said. “I mean with me, she’s worried it was the wrong move?”

“I think she’s just a little confused. Confused more than worried. Because, you know, it did happen so quickly with you, after . . .”

“You were with Gia for so long?”

“Yes.”

I paused then, because I might not have liked it—didn’t like being on the receiving end of it—but I did get it. Emily’s question. That was a question that I had, one I was a little afraid to get the answer to, if I were being honest. How could I blame Emily for wondering too?

Which was when I asked. Kind of.

“Why does she think you were able to? Commit to me? And not her? What’s her theory?”

“Look, you can’t take any of it personally,” he continued, as though that was an answer. “My mother . . . she can have very rigid ideas of how things are supposed to be.”

“Really? I didn’t notice.”

Griffin laughed. I couldn’t help but think of when Griffin had met my mother. How kind he was about her, how generous, how he didn’t want to blame her for anything. Part of me wanted to match that generosity—in terms of Griffin’s mother, in terms of what her unexpected entrance was raising for me.