My One and Only (14 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

N
ICK AND
I
WERE GOING
to drive across country for our honeymoon. Fly to California, drive back. Neither of us had traveled much. But we were going to do it the summer after our first anniversary, as Nick needed to accrue enough vacation time. And of course, we didn’t make it to our first anniversary.

Our wedding was…well, you’ve been to weddings. They’re all the same, more or less. It was very nice.

That’s a lie. It was horrible. I was wallowing in doubt, first of all, a chorus of
What the hell are we doing?
ringing under my constant self-assurances.
It’s okay. He loves you. He’s great. What the hell are we doing? We’re too young. It’s okay. He loves you. Why am I not in law school? Why am I following a man? It’s okay. He loves you. It’ll work. What the hell am I doing?

When I said yes to Nick there on the Brooklyn Bridge, I hadn’t envisioned a quick wedding. Figured I’d go to law school at Georgetown, where I’d been accepted, then…eventually…get married. I had no problem with a long-distance relationship; Nick and I had been long-distance my entire senior year, and we were doing fine. But he pushed. Why live apart when we could live together? If I could get into Georgetown, then Columbia or NYU would be a piece of cake. We loved each other. We were great together. We should get married. No reason to wait.

Nick could be very convincing. And relentless. And of course, I did love him.

So, the first day of summer, having been out of college for a month, I was about to get married and sweating blood at the thought. All morning long, as we set up chairs and put flower arrangements on the tables in my father’s yard, I waited for Nick to suddenly realize we were idiots to play this high-stakes game of grown-up. I waited for the courage to call things off. For my father to tell me this was a mistake.

I waited, too, for my mother.

See, she’d followed a man, too. My mother, a California girl, had come to Martha’s Vineyard at age twenty-one with some friends, met my father—seven years older, tanned and manly. Legend had it that my mother had been doing a modeling gig in Boston. She and her pals had decided to pop out to the island, and Dad was fixing the roof on the cottage one of the friends rented. He was tall, handsome, quiet—the best of the blue-collar clichés. Mom invited him to a beach party. When her friends left the following week, she decided to stay. A month later, she was pregnant and voila…our family.

As of my wedding day, my mother had been gone for more than eight years. In all that time, I’d received four postcards, all of them in the first year and a half of her desertion. They were all similar…
Florida is hot and muggy, lots of orange trees and huge bugs. Hope you’re keeping up the good grades!
The second one came from Arizona.
Sure is hot here! You should see the way people water their lawns! Don’t they know they live in the desert?
The third from St. Louis (Clydesdales, the arch, a baseball game), the fourth from Colorado (bluegrass festival, Rocky Mountains, thin air). None of the postcards had a return address. She signed them all
Linda
…not
Mom
.

I guess I hated her, except I missed her so much.

I had no real reason to expect her to show up. And yet, our engagement announcement had run in the paper. Martha’s Vineyard had a small year-round community; if she’d stayed in touch with
anyone
, she would’ve heard that her only child was getting married. So it wasn’t impossible that she’d come—it was just extremely, extraordinarily unlikely, and yet every time I heard the ferry’s blast, my heart rate tripled.

She didn’t come. That made more sense than her appearing, but it was crushing nonetheless. I don’t know what I would’ve done if she had. Still, in the back of my mind, a little scenario played in which my mother, gone these many years, would come home at last, and in all the excitement and happiness (because it was a fantasy, after all), my wedding would be postponed indefinitely.

Then I’d look over at Nick and see his smile, and shame would blast me in a hot wave, because I did love him so. But as much as I wanted that to be a good feeling, it wasn’t. It was simply terrifying, as if I’d been walking innocently along one day, and a yawning pit opened in front of me. Ever since he’d knelt down on the Brooklyn Bridge, I’d been scrambling back from a crumbling edge, trying to save myself from whatever lurked in that dark hole, quite sure it was nothing good.

Yet the appointed hour arrived, and there I was, putting on a white sheath dress and painful shoes, my hair worn down for once because I knew Nick loved it that way. BeverLee tried hard to be a good mother of the bride, hitting my hair with Jhirmack every time she walked past, fussing over my flowers, my dress. If my mother had been here—if she’d never left—we’d have gotten matching manicures, as we did when I was little. She’d have worn a pale blue silk dress, not the orange polyester that Bev had chosen. She’d have told me that marrying young was the best choice she’d ever made, and she could tell that Nick and I would be just like her and Dad.

Instead, I had BeverLee, chattering constantly, forcefeeding me coffee cake and bemoaning that I’d opted against the dollar dance. While I knew her intentions were good, I’d wanted to tap her with a magic wand and render her silent, stop having her tell me I was “purdier than a new set of snow tires.” How could I be getting married without my mother? How I could I be getting married, period? How was it that I’d let things get so out of hand?

No one else seemed concerned. My father told me Nick was “a good kid” and imagined we’d “do all right.” Nick’s father was beefy and charming and shallow…alas, he was Nick’s best man; Jason was already half in the bag, his hair worn long for Tom Cruise’s
Interview with a Vampire
look. Christopher, then in high school, flirted with Willa, whom he wouldn’t see again for thirteen years.

Even as I walked down the aisle on Dad’s arm, that little voice in my brain was whispering furiously.
You don’t have to do this. This has disaster written all over it.
Nick’s face was solemn, almost as if he guessed what I was thinking. He recited his vows in a somber voice, his dark eyes steady, and even then I thought the words almost ridiculously naive. Did anyone believe that vows meant anything anymore? My parents had said the same things to each other. Nick’s parents had also promised till death did them part. Who were Nick and I to believe that our vows would be any more lasting than the breath it took to say them?

Then it was my turn. “I, Harper, take you, Nick…” and suddenly, my eyes were wet, my voice grew husky and I wanted with all my heart for those words to be true. “To have and to hold from this day forth…” We could do this. We could be that little old couple who still reached for each other’s hand. “…all the days of my life.” And I looked into Nick’s gypsy eyes and believed.

After the wedding, we spent a few days in one of those huge sea captains’ houses on North Water Street in Edgartown. It was owned, as are they all, by a fabulously wealthy off-Islander for whom my dad occasionally did some work. He’d generously offered his house for our brief honeymoon, as he wouldn’t come to the island till the Fourth of July. And so, for a few days, Nick and I played house as we were playing grown-ups…we drank wine on the vast back porch, planned our trip for next summer—our true honeymoon, we called it. We made love in a room overlooking the lighthouse, cuddled and watched movies, and for those five days, I believed in happily ever after. For five days, it seemed possible that Nick and I would have a house, children, a life, an old age together. Maybe I was wrong to be so…dubious. I wasn’t.

Six days after our wedding, we drove down to Manhattan to the tiny apartment in a desolate part of Tribeca, and everything changed. Nick went back to work. His hours were long. His dedication was impressive. His ambition was boundless. His wife was left alone.

Of course, I realized he had to work, to impress his bosses, to separate himself from the pack of other young and hungry architects. It wasn’t the hours—well, the hours didn’t help. But Nick had a plan, and that plan went as follows: graduate at the top of his class. (Check). Land job with top firm. (Check). Get married. (Check). And once the box next to my name had been checked off, Nick sort of…dropped me.

Because I’d missed the deadline on applying to New York law schools, I had an unwanted year off. Our plan— Nick’s plan, really—was for me to apply to Fordham, Columbia and NYU, make our little apartment a home and fall in love with the city. No need for me to work; he was making enough to pay our bills. Alas, our apartment was a dingy little walk-up in Tribeca, which was something of a ghost town in those days, a place where it was nearly impossible to find a newspaper on the weekend, where no families seemed to live, where the noise of the West Side Highway was endless and the screech of the subway woke me up at night.

I tried to make our apartment homey, but I wasn’t really the Martha Stewart type. Painting the bathroom, scrubbing grout with bleach, putting throw pillows on our futon couch…it failed to deliver the promised satisfaction. Though I initially cooked dinner every night, stretching our dollars as best I could, Nick rarely made it home before eight…or nine…or ten.

All the effort he’d put into our courtship, into wooing me, because yes, I was a prickly porcupine of a person, I knew that…all the little ways he’d made me feel cherished and safe…that all ended as soon as we hit the Big Apple. I found myself married to a man I barely saw.

I was alone in a city I didn’t know and didn’t like, to be honest. It was so loud, so hot and muggy. At night, I’d have to wash my face twice and swab my skin with toner to get it clean. Our apartment smelled like cabbage, thanks to Ivan, the sullen Russian who lived downstairs and rarely left the building, who listened to soap operas at top volume and always seemed to be lurking, shirtless, in his doorway when I came down the stairs. Garbage trucks clattered and banged down the street at four in the morning, and someone had a dog that barked all night. Central Park was a long, tooth-jarring subway ride uptown, and Battery Park, much closer, was dirty then, filled with drug dealers and homeless people sleeping on benches, a sight that never failed to gut me.

I had two friends from Amherst down here…one in law school, one in publishing, and both were caught up in the glamour and excitement of their lives. The fact that I’d gotten married was baffling to them. “What’s it like?” they’d ask, and my answer would be vaguely pleasant. The truth was, marriage thus far sucked.

Nick left for work about twenty minutes after he got up at 6 a.m. If he did make it home before ten he’d spend perhaps fifteen minutes talking to me before disappearing with a smile and an apology behind his computer screen. Many nights, he wouldn’t get home till after eleven, and I’d have fallen asleep, realizing he was home only when I rolled over and felt his sleeping form. In the five months we were married, he didn’t take off one entire weekend, opting instead to go to the office on Saturdays and most Sundays.

He quickly made himself indispensable at work. His boss, Bruce MacMillan, aka Big Mac, loved Nick’s quick wit and work ethic, so Nick was promoted to the wine-and-dine crew, charming clients, schmoozing with the more senior architects, learning from them, kissing up to them, getting in on their projects. He was happier than I’d ever seen him.

I tried to be a good spouse, tried not to be selfish and resentful. I wasn’t stupid…I knew this was an investment in the future. But it was Nick’s future, the one he’d always envisioned, without room for accommodating another person…or so it seemed. I wasn’t a part of his world; he didn’t need advice on how to handle people or how to do his job. What I wanted desperately was to feel included but instead, as the weeks passed, I felt more and more as if we weren’t really in this new life together. I was just along for Nick’s ride. Harper—check. On to the next thing.

I tried, I really did. Wandered the neighborhoods, tried to decipher the massive subway system. I spent all day collecting anecdotes to share with Nick, then began to resent him for not being home to hear them. I hung out at the local library, signed up for some literacy volunteering, but that was just a few hours a week. New York scared me. Everyone was so…sure. So clear on who they were and where they were going. When I voiced my feelings to Nick one morning as he hurriedly shaved, he was baffled.

“I don’t know, honey,” he said. “Just try to have fun, don’t overthink everything. This is the greatest city on the planet. Get out there, enjoy. Oh, shit, is that the time? Sorry, honey, I have to run. We have a meeting with the people from London.”

I got out there, if only to please my Brooklyn-born husband. But Nick knew all the neighborhoods, was something of an expert (and pain in the ass) on the city, so my tales of wandering (when I did get the chance to tell them) seemed to bore him.

“Actually, you were in Brooklyn Heights, honey. Cobble Hill’s a little more inland. Sure, I’ve been to Governor’s Island. I know exactly where you were. Of course I’ve been in the Empire State Building. A million times.” He’d give me a tolerant smile, his eyes drifting back to his computer.

I think things took an irreversible turn about three months into our marriage. When I forced myself to tell Nick how lonely I was, he suggested we have a baby.

I looked at him for a long, burning minute, then said, “Are you out of your
mind,
Nick?”

His head jerked back. “What?”

“Nick…I barely see you! You want me to have a baby? So we can both be trapped here while you swan off and work your eighteen-hour days? So you can ignore me
and
your child? I don’t think so!”

“You’re the one who’s complaining about being lonely, Harper,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be lonely if you’d actually spend some time with me, Nick.” My throat felt as if a knife was stuck in it, my eyes were hot and dry.

“Harper, baby, I have to do this. I have to work.”