Thirteen #2
At the beginning it was easy to tell herself that the awkwardness of living with Sam was getting to know each other, that they had both lived alone longer than most people who married, and of course it was an adjustment, and Sam was being respectful.
She tried everything she could think to send the right signals, let him know she was eager for a greater intimacy.
Lingerie, alcohol, candlelit dinners, breakfast in bed, which she hoped would segue into something more romantic.
He was appreciative and enthusiastic, but they never quite got beyond their initial unease.
They had sex, but it was quick, and whenever she tried to get him to slow down, pay attention, it seemed to have the opposite effect.
It made a peculiar type of sense to Nina that her growing love for Finn somehow made her a better wife to Sam.
Her love for Finn seemed to take shape overnight and feel both inevitable and thrilling and had created a valuable distance, a kind of airlock, between her and her marriage.
When she stopped longing and hoping for a different intimacy, she fully appreciated what a great father Sam was, his nimble mind and good looks, his professional ambitions.
Sure, he was occasionally distant and moody.
He was human. But then she would be jerked back to the reality of her situation.
She couldn’t occupy this forlorn space forever.
Finn was pushing them to do something, anything.
Well, not anything. He was pushing for the universal undo, and he was antsy.
He was done with Honey, and he was going to move on—with Nina or without her.
Nina knew she had to choose between staying rooted in the life she’d built with Sam or giving up Finn.
Once he managed to get a divorce from Honey—and she had no doubt he would—he wouldn’t be single for long.
She wasn’t so lovestruck that she couldn’t see the inevitable.
But completely blowing up her life to create a new one with Finn and her daughters and his children and somehow incorporate their ex-spouses into the mix?
Who did she think she was? She was a housewife with a food column in Rochester, New York, and maybe divorce was “sweeping the nation,” as Newsweek had just put on the cover, but not in her world.
Not in any way that looked exciting or desirable or, frankly, even tolerable.
Custody battles and squalid apartments and downsizing and kids who walked around looking drawn and confused.
Bitterness, anger. She didn’t know a single person whose marriage had ended who didn’t seem more miserable than before.
Or if they were happier, their circumstances were reduced—the quaint phrase from Jane Austen always came to mind.
Sam would not only be blindsided by her request for a divorce, he would never agree to one, and on what grounds? Lack of ardor? Not enough foreplay? Kissing wasn’t hot?
“Aren’t you angry?” Bess used to ask her. “Aren’t you just furious all the time at how unfair it all is?”
If Nina was angry then, she couldn’t locate it, and Bess seemed angry enough for everyone.
A small scandal on their block had erupted earlier in the summer when Bess was quoted in the newspaper after leading a workshop as part of a regional conference for women called “Speak-out.” Her session, “Women and Anger,” had sold out so quickly the organizers asked her to hold three more and there was still a waiting list. “Why,” a local reporter asked Bess, “do you think so many women are angry?”
“Where do I begin?” Bess said to him, rolling her eyes.
“We’re indentured servants in our own homes, forced to obey the whims of children and husbands.
It’s exhausting and maddening. We can’t catch a break.
We’ve been told we have more opportunity, but nobody’s giving us a hand with our existing opportunity.
How are we supposed to do all these new things liberation has brought into our lives and find the time to still run everyone else’s lives?
It’s not like you can drop your kids off somewhere for a few days or weeks or months.
There is no Lollypop Farm for children,” she said, referencing the animal adoption farm that held regular tours for elementary schools. The backlash had been swift.
“NO LOLLYPOP FARM FOR CHILDREN”
Says Local School Nurse
The headline was splashed across page two of the front section of the next day’s paper.
The letters to the editor went on for weeks.
Even Bess, who seemed to have a spine of steel since her divorce, was cowed.
She had to meet with the principal and the head of the school’s board to explain herself and apologize.
Her kids were mortified and Bess was a social pariah for months and she hadn’t even done anything, she’d only said a thing.
She suspected Bess knew what was going on with her and Finn.
Bess walked in on them one night having a heated argument in Finn and Honey’s kitchen during a party.
In the midst of all the confusion, Nina had allowed herself one fantasy: that once all the children in both of their houses were safely off to college, they would do something.
“Three years,” she said to Finn that night. “We can hold on for three years.”
“Three years is—” Finn said. “No.”
“No what?”
“No, I’m not waiting. I’m leaving Honey at the end of the year.”
“She agreed?” Nina felt a queasy combination of hope and fear.
“No, but I’ve found a way. I’m moving on with my life before I drop dead in the produce department like my father.”
“You’re not your father.”
“Unless I am.”
“Three years will go by so fast,” she said even as she knew it wasn’t true.
Rochester was small. Their world was even smaller.
They were bound to be caught. It was a miracle they hadn’t been spotted somewhere yet.
She was pleading with him, whispering, when Bess opened the door.
A startled Nina blurted out, “I’m annoying Finn about the type of produce he carries.
” It was such an absurd sentence, so dumb given her tear-streaked face and his heightened color.
“Okaaayyy,” Bess said, looking back and forth and raising an eyebrow to Nina as if to say, Do you need help here? after which Nina quickly shook her head. “Then I will leave you two to continue discussing—produce.”
Bess, bless her, never brought it up again.
After the produce incident, they’d agreed to take a break.
Think. Regroup. But Nina couldn’t think or regroup.
She was miserable and couldn’t see her way through to any kind of resolution.
She didn’t want to be this person: guilt-ridden, traitorous, impatient, distracted, unhappy, occasionally mean.
She broke it off with him but suggested they could still be friends!
Still have their lunches! They could still talk about the kids and politics and his stores and her column but could not touch each other. They could not have sex.
“Nina,” Finn said when she laid it all out for him.
They were standing by their cars in Ellison Park on an unusually cold day in late September, both wearing winter coats still smelling of mothballs.
He stared up at the sky for a long time, and she had the completely demented thought that he was going to hit her.
Instead, he breathed in deeply and exhaled and looked at her and said, “I don’t want to be your friend.
I love you. I want to marry you. I want to live with you. ”
It took her breath away. It was simultaneously the only thing she wanted to hear and the last thing she wanted to hear.
It was an impossibility. It was a dream.
“I can’t see the path,” she eventually said.
“I can’t even fathom how we get from here”—she looked around at their pathetic rendezvous spot—“to a world where we’re together.
Married. I can’t. Aren’t you guilty? I feel awful all the time. A terrible wife, a worse mother.”
“I don’t believe in guilt,” he said.
She laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “How convenient.”
“I don’t believe guilt is helpful, how about that?” He grabbed both her hands, pleading, “Don’t you think we deserve to be happy?”
“I think everyone deserves to be happy. I don’t think I deserve happiness at the expense of other people I love. My girls. Your kids. What are we teaching them if we just take off and put ourselves first and upend their entire lives? What does that say about vows and duty and obligation?”
“That a mistake should not be a life sentence. We show them how to correct.”
She hit him, a joke of a punch. She’d never hit anyone in her life; she’d never even gently slapped the girls on their bottoms. She tried to punch him in the solar plexus, make it hurt, but it landed softly and he grabbed her wrist and said, “Nina, please. Marry me.”
She started sobbing. She couldn’t look at him. “Don’t be cruel. I can’t marry you.”
“But do you want to?”
“That’s not the right question.”
“It’s the only question.”
That was four weeks ago.
And now, this envelope tucked into a book.
This madness. Had he lost his mind? She wasn’t entirely sure where the Dominican Republic was on the map, but it looked pretty.
She went into her office and spread all the documents out on her desk—the hotel brochures, the article clipped from the New York Times about divorce tourism, the airline tickets with open-ended dates to and from Santo Domingo via New York City, the photos of the hotel rooms and balconies and restaurants leading out to a bright blue swimming pool—and started to read.