The Christmas after Nico was born, Sam asked me to bring Alex back to the States for a visit. I readily agreed. Alex hadn’t seen his father for over a year, and the trip was long overdue. Yet, there was more to my eagerness to leave Sofia than that. With six months of his J-1 homestay requirement left, Nikolai couldn’t leave the country. I would be going alone.
I couldn’t wait. There were a thousand small reasons for this: I wanted to eat American food; to see a dozen movies in English; to buy something, anything, from an American bookstore and read it cover to cover; to listen to NPR, letting the sweet sound of my language wash over me. And then there were the larger, more profound reasons. In the past months, ever since Nico was born, we had been in a state of conflict. I realized, as the plane took off into the sky, lifting over the snowy peaks of the Vitosha mountains and turning over the endless blocks of concrete apartment complexes, that I was relieved to get away. It was my fault.
The problems started after we brought Nico home from the hospital. There were all sorts of superstitions surrounding the birth of a child. There was a belief that a baby’s soul was weak and easily harmed, and so a newborn should be kept inside the home for at least forty days, to avoid its being hexed. Guests and visitors were kept away during these forty days, so that they didn’t accidentally (or intentionally) curse the child. If anyone except the parents complimented the baby, that person should say “Pu! Pu! Pu!” so as not to curse the baby.
I didn’t believe in any of these superstitions. I had taken Alex out walking the week after his birth, believing that fresh air would be good for him. But Nikolai did believe, or believed enough to follow these dictums, and so we stayed inside for the first months of Nico’s life, taking her out only rarely and only when no one was around. It was winter, and cold, and so I didn’t object.
For the first month, I stayed with Nico night and day, sleeping on a twin bed near her crib, to be close at hand when she woke. I would feed her, change her, and put her back to sleep the way my mom had taught me: quick, without talking or playing or singing, so that the baby would understand that she must sleep through the night. One morning I found Nikolai standing in the doorway, watching. When I asked him what was going on, he told me that Z had excluded him from the nursery after Rada was born and that he wanted to be a part of Nico’s nightly routine. His first wife had believed in the strict division of traditional gender roles: that a man should work and provide money while a woman had control of the house. It had been a parenting power struggle, and Z had won. Now, with Nico, he wanted to be part of the action.
That sounded like heaven to me. I didn’t believe in the traditional division of gender roles at all. The combination of breast-feeding, exhaustion, and postpartum hormonal fluctuations made me feel like a carnival mirror image of myself: Distorted and slow and hazy. I was thrilled to have Nikolai’s help. In fact, I expected it. But, it turned out, we had vastly different ideas about how to care for Nico. We had disagreements about how she should be bathed and changed and put to sleep. He wanted to make her sleeping schedule, and he wanted to decide when she could go out for a walk and when and how she should be fed. When I tried to explain my way of doing things or impose rules of my own, he brought in his parents, who defended his choices.
Things got particularly heated about breast-feeding. Nikolai told me he wanted to feed our daughter, and while he was equipped to provide her with care in every way, he didn’t actually have breasts. The solution: formula. Nico was over two months old, hungry all the time, and needed a lot of milk. We consulted a doctor and was told it was fine for a baby to have a mixture of breast milk and formula, so there was no reason not to add formula. And honestly, I hated breast-feeding. My breasts were always sore, and Nico wanted more milk than I could produce. I couldn’t leave the apartment for more than a few hours at a time without leaking, and I had all sorts of dietary restrictions. I felt like a cow, pumping milk and bottling it, and I didn’t feel like being intimate with my husband with stinging, leaky, cracked nipples. And so we agreed that Nico would transition to formula. We would begin slowly, introducing just a little formula into her diet while continuing with breast milk for a few more weeks.
It was Nico’s midnight feeding, and I was groggy with sleep when I found her in Nikolai’s arms, a bottle of formula in her mouth. I stared at them, my husband and my child, trying to put it all together. We had just agreed to wait. Yet here he was feeding the baby a bottle.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I said, squinting in the darkness.
“Go back to bed,” he whispered. “I’ve got this.”
“You’ve got what?”
“Shhhh!” he said. “You’ll wake her up.”
“But we agreed that—”
Nikolai gave me a look: Stop overreacting. He put his hand on my back and gently ushered me out into the hall.
“Go back to bed,” he whispered. Then, he closed the door.
From that day on, Nico had formula instead of breast milk. She was a healthy girl and was absolutely fine without breast milk. But the problem wasn’t really about breast-feeding versus not breast-feeding. I’d been more than ready to switch over. The problem was that we had agreed to wait, and he’d gone ahead anyway, ignoring what we’d decided. He had closed the door on the discussion. He’d said one thing and done the opposite. And I stewed, silently, adding this slight to a growing stockpile of slights, storing them up. The formula-versus-breast-milk conflict hurt us, and our marriage, more than it hurt our child.
Thus the dynamic that would define our relationship as parents was set: Nikolai told me what I wanted to hear and then did exactly as he pleased. This kind of thing happened with many small, daily decisions and with bigger ones as well, such as the naming of our daughter. Months before Nico had been born, even before we knew the sex of our child, Nikolai and I had made a deal. If the baby was a boy, he would have Nikolai’s family name. If the baby turned out to be a girl, she would have mine. I had made the same bargain with Sam before Alex was born, and Alex had Sam’s family name. I felt strongly about this system. I didn’t particularly like hyphenated names, where the father and mother stick their names together so that both parties will be equally represented, but I wanted my identity as a parent to be recognized. I didn’t believe it was right that the father’s name was always passed down. It seemed outdated and out of step with the modern world, where mothers were equal to fathers in every way. Nikolai agreed with me. His parents listened to our agreement and did not object, chalking it up to my American need to upend tradition. It seemed fair enough, this deal. Fifty-fifty odds. After we learned that our child would be a girl, we agreed that she would be called Nico Sidonie Trussoni. The name Nico was inspired by the female singer of the Velvet Underground, and simultaneously had an echo of her father’s name. Her last name was to be my family name. The middle name was French, a reference to the given name of the writer Colette. I loved our daughter’s name, and I thought Nikolai did, too.
The registration of a baby’s birth at the U.S embassy in Sofia had to be completed soon after the child was born, and so Nikolai did all the paperwork right away. But when the Certificate of a U.S. Citizen Born Abroad came back in the mail some weeks later, Nico’s name was different from the one we had agreed upon. Printed on the birth certificate was the name Nico, then Nikolai’s family name and my family name. The middle name had been left out entirely. He had in essence inserted his name alongside mine, giving her two family names. The name was all wrong, an awkward mistake. I wanted to think that it was an accident and that he had in a moment of distraction written the wrong words on the registration. It couldn’t be possible that he’d done it intentionally. That would mean that our deal had been turned on its head: Instead of valuing my identity as an equal, he had purposely devalued it.
Then it happened again, this time with Nico’s vaccinations. Bulgarian children were required to have a BCG tuberculosis vaccination, a shot that leaves a knotty scar on the upper left arm. I objected to the inoculation: It isn’t required in the States, and Nico, as a U.S. citizen, didn’t need it. Nikolai and I talked it over, and he agreed with me: Nico stayed home and wasn’t exposed to other kids, so she wasn’t at risk of getting TB. She had all of the other vaccinations and would receive the rest on the recommended schedule. And besides, the two-year requirement to stay in Bulgaria would be over in just a few months. We were going home soon. There was no need to subject our daughter to something that would leave a scar. But when she came home from her next visit to the pediatrician—Nikolai and Yana had taken her, while I stayed home with Alex—she had a bandage on her arm and swelling all the way to her shoulder. He had gone ahead with the vaccination, despite what we had agreed.
“Did we decide against that?” Nikolai asked. “I thought we came around to the idea in the end. Well, it’s too late now.”
When I tried to talk to him about these incidents, he said he’d acted in my interest (feeding Nico formula instead of breast milk), or he’d forgotten what we’d agreed upon (Nico’s name), or he’d misunderstood (the vaccination). He acted as if it were all perfectly normal behavior to say one thing to me and do the exact opposite. But it wasn’t normal behavior. We had different ideas about how to parent, yes, but there was something else, a deeper problem, that I was only beginning to fully understand. The birth of our child allowed me to see a side of my husband I hadn’t known before.
There’d been other warnings. One day, not long after Nikolai and I had moved in together in Iowa City, he saw a red suitcase in my closet and asked what was inside. The suitcase was where I kept my journals, about fifty or so notebooks filled with stories and poems, bits of this and that I’d glued onto the pages: a note from my first boyfriend, a rejection letter from the New Yorker magazine, a receipt from the coffee shop where I’d written my first awkward short story. The pages were filled with disfigured self-portraits, twisted and half-real reflections of me at sixteen, at eighteen, at twenty. Much of what was inside these notebooks was badly written and embarrassing, but I felt too attached to the efforts—the deformed beauty of my ungainly sixteen-year-old handwriting—to throw them out. As a result I’d lugged these notebooks with me from apartment to apartment for years. I never opened the red suitcase but slipped it into the closet of whatever apartment I was renting.
I had unlatched the brass clasps of the red suitcase and shown Nikolai the rows of neatly arrayed notebooks. He picked one up and began to open the cover. I eased it from his fingers and replaced it in the suitcase, snapping the clasps closed.
“They’re private,” I’d said, and although nothing in the notebooks was exactly a secret, the collection of them together created my own bible of sacred texts.
“I can’t read them?” he asked, hurt.
“Nobody has ever read them but me,” I said. “And I want to keep it that way.”
A week or so later, I came home from class to find him sitting cross-legged in the middle of the living room, stacks of my notebooks spread at his side. There was a cup of tea steaming on the floor next to him, and as he looked up, he gave me a big goofy smile, an awkward I didn’t expect you back this soon grin. The suitcase was open at his side. I was so surprised I could hardly speak. “What are you doing?”
“Reading,” he replied as he closed the journal and set it aside, as if he had been glancing through the New York Times style section.
“But I asked you not to read these,” I said, taking the journal and hugging it to my chest. A subtle shift had developed in my perception of him, a wavering of my confidence, the first doubt.
“Did you say that?” he said, a look of consternation crossing his features.
“Yes,” I responded, but part of me didn’t want to acknowledge that I had said it. A hopeful part of me wished that there’d been a mistake, that I actually hadn’t told him, that he had not broken my trust.
“Well, maybe you did,” he admitted. “But you didn’t actually mean it, did you? You want to share everything with me. So there are no secrets between us.”
He took a long sip of his tea, still smiling, and I realized that he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. But for me it was an enormous surprise, this invasion of privacy, this lack of respect and the absence of remorse. I tried to rationalize Nikolai’s betrayal of trust. I thought maybe he didn’t understand me when I’d told him it was private. Maybe it was a cultural misunderstanding, and he assumed I wasn’t serious when I’d made the red suitcase off-limits. I took my journals and replaced them in the red suitcase, and I stashed it away again. But somewhere, at the back of my mind, a loud buzzer was going off. This buzzer, I later realized, is called instinct. My instincts were telling me something important about this charming, handsome, brilliant man, but I didn’t listen. I knew, deep down, at a visceral level, that something wasn’t right. It was the first of my many errors about love: I thought the heart more prescient than the gut.
WHEN I LANDED in Chicago with Alex, Sam met me at the airport. I turned on my phone and found it filled with voice messages from the previous nine hours. Nikolai had texted or called about every fifteen minutes. The content of the messages wasn’t memorable, or at least I don’t remember it. What I remember is the quantity. There were dozens of texts, a deluge of messages pouring forth from my phone.
Later, when I checked my e-mail, I found the first of his many love letters to me. His Christmas letters, as I came to think of them, were beautiful and tender, but most of all they convinced me that despite our growing problems, Nikolai loved me. The letters were filled with references to his writing and our life together. I saw how funny he was, how smart, but also how needy he could get, how badly he craved my attention. In every letter he made it clear that he was struggling without me. At one point, he said that he couldn’t write unless I was nearby, and that his days felt empty. I didn’t feel that way at all. We had become symbiotic, he and I, and while losing myself in him had once made me feel strong and hopeful, now it felt good to have some space. I needed room to breathe.
There was one passage in particular in these letters that was seared into my memory, just a few sentences about the pain he’d felt when I left Sofia. It was the first and only time he would be honest with me about the emotional baggage he carried around with him. When he was with me, he wrote, he forgot the scars of his past. When I was gone, all the pain came rushing back to him. I was an anesthetic, a drug that numbed him. He wrote that he wanted to forget the scars but couldn’t unless I was there. Later I would ask him what he meant by this passage, but he wouldn’t explain in any real depth. When I tried to go deeper into his past, he shut down. I wondered if this pain came from his time as a pianist or if there was some deeper secret, something he was too ashamed to tell me. I would reread these letters years later, looking for ways to reach him. I would find his voice, his humor, his intelligence, and his need for me. His letters gave me a way back to the man who, over time, had become a stranger.
I’D WAITED FOR months to see pages from Nikolai’s first book in English, and when he finally gave them to me, I read them all in one sitting. The book was brilliant, with all his customary humor and energy, his stream-of-consciousness sentences, and his wild and funny characters. I was sure that he was ready for the next step, and so I suggested that he apply to M.F.A. programs in the States.
“It will be great,” I said. “Getting an M.F.A. will help you perfect your English, and you can also teach one day, if you want.”
“But I’ve written two bestsellers,” he objected. “I’m overqualified.”
“I know,” I said. “This is a way to get your foot in the door.”
“My academic history isn’t good enough,” he said. “I never graduated from high school.”
“You didn’t?” I said, taking this in, one more surprise in a year of surprises. “You told me you went to college in Boston.”
“I did.”
“So how did you get into college if you dropped out of high school?”
“They let me in after hearing a tape of my music,” he said. “They waived all the requirements and gave me a full scholarship.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. I had to admit—why finish high school if you get that kind of treatment?
“And then I dropped out of college,” he added, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to throw away a free ride at one of Boston’s more prestigious universities. “And went to India.”
This I knew. He’d told me that he’d left in the last semester of college for Dharamsala, to study Tibetan Buddhism. And still, I was amazed that he’d been so rash, so ready to give up on his degree. I had struggled through my undergraduate years, taking loans and working full-time while going to school, graduating with thirty-five thousand dollars in student-loan debt. Nikolai had been given a free education, and he’d just walked away from all of it.
“Creative-writing programs don’t care much about transcripts,” I said. “They tend to focus on the writing itself.”
“Will they hold India against me?” he wondered, warming up to the idea. “I can say it was good material for my writing.”
“It was good material,” I said. “Don’t worry. You’re talented. You’ll get into a program. I’m sure of it.”
This was a particularly American belief, that with hard work and talent one will inevitably succeed, and Nikolai eyed me with suspicion when I said it. I knew he was thinking of the Chopin Competition, where it had been connections, not talent, that paved the way to victory. I could feel how difficult it was for him, to put his work out for judgment, to be vulnerable. I wanted to help him get past that fear. I wanted to help him trust the world again. I wanted his future to be brilliant.
There was more at stake than just finding a good writing program. If Nikolai wanted to live in the United States, he would need a job. He couldn’t arrive on American soil unemployed and directionless. As it was, Nikolai was qualified for very little. He had no work history, no degree, and no clear plan as a writer. He wrote beautiful books in Bulgarian and played Chopin that could make me cry, but these skills weren’t easy to translate professionally. His parents had raised him to be a hothouse flower, one protected behind glass, but he couldn’t survive like that away from home. If he could get into a graduate program, he would be on a path toward sustaining himself. If he had a degree, he would find his way. I was sure of it.
Never before had I been so practical-minded. Usually I was the artistic one, my head in the clouds over some new project. But after a year and a half in Bulgaria, I understood what it meant to be really poor. While my parents had never had money for luxuries, we’d always had enough food and clothes and cheap entertainment. But Nikolai and I lived—like so many other people in Eastern Europe—on very little. Yana gave us 250 leva, the equivalent of about $125, each Friday, and we supported a family of four on it. This worked out to about $18 a day, or $4.50 a day per person.
We developed a program to make our leva last through the week. On Friday night, when we were flush, we might go to a movie, spending 20 leva on tickets and paying a babysitter to stay with Alex and Nico. For the rest of the week, we scrimped. We bought cheap vegetables from the market—potatoes and leeks and cucumbers and tomatoes—and rationed them. Nico’s formula was expensive, and so Yana sometimes dropped off a container midweek, along with cute baby clothes, but we didn’t have money to buy clothes or shoes for Alex. We didn’t go for a drink in the bars in the center of Sofia, and we didn’t have lunch at the pizza place near Alex’s day care. By the time Friday came around again, we were scraping for change to go have a coffee at the neighborhood café, where a cappuccino was 2 leva. I would sip my coffee, grateful to be out of the apartment, happy that we would soon be leaving Bulgaria.
BEFORE LONG, THE two-year homestay requirement ended, and we were free to go home. Nikolai had been accepted to Brown University’s M.F.A. program, and so we moved to the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island, filling a two-bedroom Cape with all the furniture, books, and toys we’d left in Iowa City three years before. After we’d settled in, we chose a day care for Nico and enrolled Alex in the neighborhood public school. We made new friends, went to dinner parties and book readings. We threw ourselves into our writing projects, hoping we would find success.
We were on our way. My first book, a memoir about my relationship with my father, was going to be published. It had sold to a publisher in New York City in 2004, just months after my thirtieth birthday, when Nico was less than a year old. For the first time in my life, I would be published, a goal I’d worked toward since I was a freshman in college. I found profound happiness in this achievement: My work—and my self, which was so deeply bound up in my work—was being taken seriously for the first time. My writing had been rejected in the past—a five-hundred-page novel I’d written as a graduate student had been turned down by over twenty publishers in 2002—and these rejections had pushed me to write another book, to try another approach, to keep rewriting and experimenting. Now, finally, it had paid off. The advance had allowed us to buy airline tickets back to the United States from Bulgaria and put a down payment on a used Toyota RAV4. The advance had put us back on track from (what I considered at the time) our detour in Bulgaria. Now our real life could begin.
Nikolai began classes at Brown. The M.F.A. program was small and consisted of a collection of young, talented, and primarily “experimental” writers. One student in his program wrote a story in Morse code, for example, and flicked the lights of the classroom on and off to “read” it. Nikolai came home after that particular class and demonstrated the short story to the kids, flicking the lights on and off until we were all laughing. Eccentricity was accepted at Brown’s M.F.A. program. In fact, Nikolai told me, eccentric was the norm, and he felt he belonged there. His work was unusual, experimental, and this program gave him a community in the United States. It also gave him some professional clout: He got an agent after he began his master’s at Brown, and he sold his first book in English—a memoir about his time in India as a Buddhist monk—a year later.
Now we were both memoirists, two people who used our own lives to create story, people who fashioned characters from living and breathing human beings. We both understood the moral risks of writing about people we’d known and loved. We didn’t want to hurt anyone we wrote about, but we also wanted to represent our own experiences, the way we lived and felt them. In between the objective and the subjective, we needed to find truth and make that truth our own.
I had been trying to write about my father for many years before my memoir was accepted for publication. My dad knew I was writing the book, and had allowed me to interview him, but I didn’t ask his permission, and I didn’t share drafts with him. I gave him a copy of the final book, and he read it in one long sitting. He told me he was proud of me, but I knew that my book was surely not the book he would have written about himself. It was my book, with my perspective of our relationship. He understood that. He knew I had told our story from my limited, emotionally colored, and singular point of view.
It couldn’t have been otherwise. I had adored my father as a child, but this love had not always been good for me. He was a charming, damaged man, who never fully came to terms with his own destructiveness. As a kid I’d loved him despite—and even because of—his flaws, glorifying his wild and reckless behavior, elevating him to a legend in my heart. No one was quite as charming, quite as crazy, as my dad. But when I became an adult, this adoration ended. I left home. I formed my own opinions. I wanted to be free of him.
Writing about our relationship helped me find this freedom. Readers of the book always asked me if it was cathartic to write, and it was, I suppose, a release from the past. Yet the real magic came not from getting feelings out but from the turning inward, the examining of myself and my past, in relation to my father. I saw us both more clearly, more truly, than before. Re-creating the past required an imaginative possession of our characters, of who we used to be together. I had to speak as he spoke, walk as he walked. I had to make him come alive on the page. The writing was an incantation, and the incantation helped me find peace.
But the magic worked two ways. My father had cancer when I began writing about him, and while I was working on the book, he got better. He went into remission, and his doctors believed he could fully recover. He was strong and healthy for some years. Then, not long after I turned the book in to my editor, his cancer returned. During the prepublication period of my book, he declined rapidly. The month the book about my father was published, he died. While I’d been writing about my father, he’d been strong. When I stopped, he withered.
Some years later Nikolai wrote me a letter that explained the workings of magic. He wrote that everyone, that all human beings, are actually magicians, but some more powerful than others. Our minds are our weapons, and we have more power than we realize. He explained the difference between black magic and white magic, namely that black magic will initially hurt the target but will turn around and damage the sender even more strongly. White magic, on the other hand, helps both the target and the sender. He said I could, by visualizing a person or situation, transform it through compassion (“Om mani padme hum”) or emptiness (“Om gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha”). My intention could change the karmic and metaphysical reality of my world. Mind and matter cannot be separated, he said, and we all have the power to transform our lives and relationships. It was a two-way street: The object of my thoughts would undergo a transformation, and I would undergo a transformation as well, because everyone is connected.
He wasn’t commenting specifically on the act of writing in this note, and I don’t know if he believed that magic could explain what happened as I wrote and published the book about my dad. But we both understood that we, as writers, were magicians. We were powerful in ways we might not even realize.
IN PROVIDENCE WE were writing all the time. Nikolai was in school and writing his memoir. I was writing a new book, a novel, and teaching as an adjunct writing instructor in Boston, taking the train north in the evenings. We were working seven days a week, and yet each month we struggled to scrape up enough to pay our bills. The stress of it wore on us, and we fought more and more about money. Neither of us wanted to think about the practicalities of life. We wanted to live in our books, where we worried about nothing but character development and the right turn of phrase. But we had two children under five years old, and there was no choice except to take responsibility for our finances. I’d been on my own for my whole adult life and had more experience than Nikolai when it came to paying bills, and so it fell to me.
I was terrible at managing our money. I didn’t know how to do it at all. My solution to this lack of comprehension was denial and avoidance. I was in denial about the fact that we were broke and avoided finding a solution. My life raft became credit. I applied for a credit card and began to use it for groceries and other necessities. This eased the tension a little, although I still dreaded going to the mailbox each afternoon, knowing I would find a fistful of past-due bills. Soon this credit card was maxed out, and so I applied for another one. Miraculously, I was approved. Again I felt as if I’d been given a reprieve. When the second card was full, I repeated this process, until I had five credit cards that were charged to the limit. I paid the minimum balance each month but couldn’t pay more, and so these debts grew as the interest accumulated. I would go over our expenses and try to understand what I was doing wrong, but we weren’t living outlandishly. We simply weren’t earning enough.
I felt both powerless and powerful about the role that money played in our relationship. Because I would (eventually, after lots of mistakes) be better at managing our money and because I had a career, I knew I would never have to be financially dependent on my husband. This gave me confidence that I could always stand on my own. I remembered my father and his criticism of dependent women, and I felt that I had avoided that fate, that I had not become “that kind of woman.” And yet, at the same time, I longed to be taken care of by a man, to feel secure, and for my financial well-being—which was really the well-being of me as a person—to be respected. But I wasn’t able to depend on Nikolai in this regard. He spent freely, and always expected someone—his parents or me—to rescue him financially. He couldn’t understand the correlation between work, money, and respect. While being in charge of our finances put me in a position of power, I didn’t always like being there. I couldn’t ever be vulnerable, or in need, with my husband.
And yet while the practical problems were stressful, the romantic ones were corrosive. By the time we arrived in Providence, the romantic story I’d invented had all but crumbled. In Bulgaria I could tell myself that we were momentarily waylaid and that our “real life” hadn’t started yet. But in Providence real life hit us hard. The dream life I’d imagined I would have with Nikolai was nothing at all like what I was actually living. The dream life could not accommodate exhaustion; the dream life could not accommodate money problems; the dream could not accommodate needy children. The very nature of the dream had been unreal. And so when reality arrived and the dream I had of my marriage began to die, I found myself wishing I could stop everything and start over.
AS PART OF his financial-aid package at Brown, Nikolai taught an undergraduate workshop each semester. He told me about his students and sometimes brought home their workshop stories for me to read, and so I knew a little about his class. For example, I knew that on the first day of the semester, when everyone went around the table and made introductions, one of the students had identified himself as a “Mayflower descendant,” a term that Nikolai didn’t understand and, with my being midwestern and of Italian descent, one I rarely encountered. Another student was a world-class cellist and another a Russian whose parents were, Nikolai speculated, “rich ex-Communists.” Danny DeVito’s twins were at Brown that year, as was Donatella Versace’s daughter. We joked about how cool it would be if a DeVito child and a Versace child got married. It would be an off-the-charts Italian dream couple.
Nikolai’s class began at five-thirty on Thursdays. Usually he was home around eight, or if he went out for a beer after, he’d be back at ten. But on the last day of the spring semester, he was going out for sushi with his students after the workshop, a kind of farewell party. I knew he’d be out for dinner, so I put the kids to bed, had dinner alone, cleaned up, and went to bed, expecting to hear the front door open any moment. Hours later I woke up and found his side of the bed empty. I glanced at the alarm clock: It was two-thirty in the morning. He still wasn’t home.
I got up, found my phone in my bag, and called him. He didn’t pick up. I texted him and got no reply. I went to the window and looked outside, to see if our Toyota was parked in front. It wasn’t. For a moment I considered calling the police, but then I didn’t. Clearly he was still out with his students, and so I decided to wait another hour. I went back to bed, took a book from my bedside table, and began to read.
I woke the next morning with my lamp on and the book across my chest. I felt a nagging sensation that something wasn’t right and realized, when I looked at Nikolai’s side of the bed, that he hadn’t come home. I jumped out of bed and went to the front window. The car was there, and, sure enough, so was my husband. I stood over the couch, where he had fallen in a pile, his coat still on and his black leather boots on his feet. The keys to the Toyota were on the floor. It looked as if he’d just made it to the couch and collapsed there. That, I thought, scooping up the keys, is one mother of a hangover.
I didn’t have time to talk to Nikolai. I’d do that after I got back from the school drop-off. I made some toast and hot chocolate for the kids’ breakfast, poured coffee into a mug to bring in the car, and helped Nico get ready for school. Alex didn’t want my help. At seven years old, he loved to be independent. He dressed himself, packed his own school bag, tied his own shoes, and got his own cereal. Nico, at four, still loved to be dressed. She waited for me to pull up her cotton tights and slip on her shoes and put on her sweater. When she was ready, I took her in my arms and carried her outside.
Alex waited by the car. I unlocked the door, and he climbed into the backseat. I went to put Nico in but found that her car seat had been unbuckled and tossed into the cargo area. A green flannel blanket lay in its place. I leaned over the seat, pulled the car seat back into place, and was wrangling the straps around Nico, when Alex said, “What’s this?”
I didn’t look around right away, and so he repeated himself.
“Mama!” he said, more loudly this time. “What’s this?”
I turned to see what he’d found. There was a bright blue condom package in his hand.
“Sweet Tarts,” I said, taking the package from his fingers. It was torn and empty, the condom gone. Used.
“Can I have one?”
“Not now,” I said. “Maybe after school.”
Alex wiggled onto the seat and buckled himself in. He slid his backpack down by his feet, shoving aside a Louis Vuitton wallet lying on the floor. Another condom package, also bright blue, lay next to it, this one unopened. A credit card, a driver’s license, a student ID, and a handful of change—a whole mess of quarters—were scattered over the floor.
“Can I have those quarters?” Alex asked.
“Sure,” I said, distracted by the wallet. I picked up the quarters and dropped them into Alex’s outstretched hand. Then I shoved the student ID, driver’s license, and credit card inside the wallet and climbed into the front seat, where I took a closer look.
“Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five,” Alex counted from the backseat.
“Hey,” Nico said, realizing she’d missed out. “I want some monies, too!”
The Brown student ID showed a picture of a pretty blond girl with huge blue eyes.
“These are mine,” Alex said. “I found them.”
I looked over the credit card—what kind of student has a platinum card?—and saw a long Slavic name, a name with so many consonants that I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce it. Nikolai, who could speak Russian, would be able to pronounce it perfectly.
“One dollar. One twenty-five.”
“I want one, too!”
“Give her a quarter, please,” I said.
“They’re mine,” Alex groaned. “You gave them to me.”
I examined the driver’s license and read the date of birth. The Russian girl was nineteen years old. Her height was five-ten, and her weight was 122 pounds. These dimensions left my imagination to create a tall, thin, blond nightmare.
While Nikolai had mentioned that he had a Russian student in his class, he hadn’t mentioned that the Russian student was a beautiful nineteen-year-old blonde with enormous blue eyes. I looked over my shoulder at Alex and Nico, sitting in the backseat, sorting out their booty. The flannel blanket that had been lying across the seat was scrunched up between them. An equation scrolled through my mind, and the equation was this: Blanket + an empty condom package + car seat thrown in the back + a nineteen-year-old blond Russian student + Nikolai out all night. The sum of this equation was not anything good.
I drove Alex to school and then Nico to day care, trying to keep my cool. There are many possible explanations for this, I thought as I dove home and parked the Toyota in front of our little white house. I’m sure Nikolai will explain everything. I unbuckled my belt, leaned back into my seat, and, suddenly I had what I will call a WTF moment. It was a moment when I would take a step away and look at the larger picture of my life and think, WTF am I doing? This kind of moment happened every so often in my life with Nikolai. I’d had a WTF moment at Maichin Dom, although I hadn’t yet had the acronym in my lexicon then. Now, as I looked over the Russian girl’s perfect teeth and her four-hundred-dollar Louis Vuitton wallet, a very strong, very angry WTF moment hit me. WTF was I doing on this beautiful Friday morning in Providence with a ripped condom wrapper in my hand and a blond nightmare in my mind?
Nikolai was still sleeping on the couch when I opened the front door. I went to the kitchen to make more coffee and then returned to the living room, where I sat on my favorite faux Eames chair, a yellow pleather affair I’d bought at the Salvation Army thrift store.
“Nikolai,” I said. I leaned over and pushed his shoulder to wake him up. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy, and he smelled of cigarettes. Of course, I thought, all Eastern Europeans smoke.
“Hmm?” He opened an eye and looked at me.
“Coffee?” I asked, offering him a sip of mine.
He shook his head.
I dropped the wallet and the ripped condom wrapper on the floor. We hadn’t bought a coffee table yet.
“We need to talk about that,” I said.
He sat up. “What’s that?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
We sat there for a good minute, me at the edge of my chair, him on the couch, the wallet and condom between us. Finally Nikolai cleared his throat and said, “I don’t know what that is.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
We sat there for another full minute. The silence between us was like the rest in a piece of orchestral music—a pause between big, raucous kettledrums.
“No idea at all?” I said.
He shook his head. I bent over and took out the driver’s license and read, “Nzxhsarradvhda.” He gave me a look, part derisive, part pained.
“You mean Nadezhda,” he said.
“Is that how you say it?” I said. “Na-desh-da? Because I can hardly stand to read such an ugly word, let alone pronounce it.”
“Hope,” he said quietly.
“Excuse me?” I hadn’t expected him to say that word then, at that moment, and tears sprang to my eyes.
“Nadezhda. It means hope in Russian. And in Bulgarian, actually.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “So what’s her wallet and”—I nudged the blue wrapper with my shoe—“that doing in the car? The kids found them. Alex asked me what it was. I said it was fucking Sweet Tarts.”
“Nothing happened,” he said, going into defensive mode.
“I woke up at two-thirty,” I said. “You weren’t here.”
“My students went out for sushi with me. And we had a little too much to drink, and then I drove them home.”
“You and like all ten of your students were in the car?”
“No, just a few of them,” he said.
“So you were driving drunk all around Providence with a carload of undergraduates until three in the morning?”
He covered his eyes with his hands. “I know it sounds bad,” he said. “But I took Nadezhda home. She must have dropped her wallet.”
“And that?” I said, looking at the blue wrapper again.
“She must have dropped that, too.”
We had a long, tense discussion that turned into, over the next hour, a major fight. He became adamant that nothing had happened and that I was wrong to suspect him. Meanwhile I went through all my doubts about him, the ones I’d been collecting since the Red Suitcase Incident. I outlined the pattern of behavior that had begun even before Nico’s birth, in Iowa City, with my journals, and continued with his J-1 visa requirements, and continued after Nico’s birth. I was beginning to understand that this pattern of behavior was deeply rooted in his personality. It had always been there, but I’d chosen not to see it. It was like looking at a favorite painting and finding that the perspective was off, the shadows fell the wrong way, with no correspondence to the angle of the sun. The flaw had been there all along, only I had been too blinded by love to see it.
By the end of our fight, our positions had solidified. He denied that anything had happened, and I was left with the equation I’d worked out in the car. I had a choice. I could leave or I could stay. Leaving would mean pulling apart everything I’d worked to build—breaking up my family and my home. Leaving would mean admitting—to myself and everyone else—that I’d been wrong about Nikolai, that I had bad judgment, that I was unable to maintain a healthy long-term relationship. It meant there was something inherently problematic with me for choosing a man who wasn’t honest with me. It meant that I was damaged goods myself. I’d been married and divorced once already. I’d put my children through a lot of difficult changes in the past years. I was too ashamed of my past failures. I couldn’t do it again.
But staying married created an equally damning situation. Staying married meant that I must suspend my instincts and my own perceptions about what was true and what was false. Staying married meant that I accepted all the past deceptions—the minor ones, like Nico’s vaccination shot, and the major ones, like Nikolai’s J-1 homestay requirement. It meant that I tacitly agreed to accept whatever future deceptions came up. Even if there were no future deceptions, it would mean being forever suspicious. But worst of all, staying married meant that I must push all these feelings of doubt and uncertainty about him down, below the surface of my life, and put on a happy face. It meant living with it. It meant making things work, come hell or high water. Reader, I chose to stay married.
BUT THAT DIDN’T mean that I was happy to stay. I wasn’t. And, as masking my feelings has never been my strong suit, we began to fight regularly. During many of our fights, I threatened to leave. I told him we should get divorced. The word was uttered in the way the word “bankrupt” is said at the board meeting, the way “terminal” is said at the doctor’s office. It was a locked-and-loaded word. A final-solution word. It was more than a collection of consonants and vowels, but a demon I’d conjured into our lives.
This demon was powerful. It gave me a rush of control over my anger and unhappiness when I said it. But is also terrified me. It brought back memories of my parents’ divorce and left me with a low-grade anxiety, one that kept me awake late into the night, adrenaline coursing through my body. When I left Sam, I hadn’t considered divorce with the same terror, partly because Alex was only a baby and wouldn’t remember it, but also because Sam and I were so young, and so immature, that it had almost seemed like we’d been playing at being grown-ups. But with Nikolai it was different. I had carefully considered my feelings. I had wanted to be his wife. I’d wanted to give him a child. I’d wanted to be faithful to him. I’d wanted to keep my promises. I’d wanted to be with him forever. I might not have understood our Bulgarian wedding vows, but I understood what it meant to be committed. And I had been committed to Nikolai, one hundred percent.
To keep the demon away, I learned the art of avoidance. I avoided talking to Nikolai about sensitive topics (our lack of sex, lack of money, blue condom wrappers). I avoided friendships with happy couples, finding it difficult to be confronted with other people’s marital success. I avoided the present moment and imagined the future. In the future we would laugh more. In the future we would make love twice a week. In the future we would see that at all these troubles were just a phase, something we’d made it through together. I lived for the day we would put everything behind us and be happy again.
AFTER THE RUSSIAN GIRL, I insisted that we go to therapy. Things were becoming so tense that I saw regular discussion with an objective observer as a good solution. Nikolai didn’t want to go, but finally he agreed, so long as he went alone to a therapist of his own choosing. And so we each found therapists at different practices on the East Side of Providence. I began seeing someone on Wednesday nights, while he was home with Alex and Nico, and he was scheduled to go on Thursdays, while I stayed home with the kids. Nikolai saw his therapist twice. Then, for some mysterious reason, he stopped going.
“What happened?” I asked one Thursday night when he was supposed to be at therapy.
“Hmmm?” Nikolai was playing online chess, and it was hard to get his attention.
“I said why did you miss your session? Don’t you have an appointment now?”
“What session?” he asked, glancing up from the monitor.
“Therapy? You know, we agreed to go talk to someone about . . . this?”
“Oh, that,” he said, as if I’d just reminded him of the Batak massacre of the Bulgarians by the Ottoman Turks. “Therapy. What about it?”
“I gather you’re not going tonight?”
“No,” he said, clicking his rook into a corner and protecting it with a pawn, a maneuver he told me was called castling. “I’m done with that.”
“Who is done with therapy after two sessions?”
“I am,” he said. “My therapist told me I don’t need therapy.”
My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. I couldn’t get this line out of my mind. I repeated it to myself, even as I stood there watching him play chess. My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. Why would a therapist dismiss someone after two sessions?
“Don’t you think you should find another therapist, then?” I asked at last.
“Why would I?” he said, clicking on his knight and moving it to a square he called H7. “You wanted me to try, and I tried. It didn’t work.”
“Isn’t the point of therapy to help our marriage?” I asked, growing frustrated. He was just sitting there playing chess, without even looking at me, as if I weren’t even there. “Don’t you think you should at least stick with it for more than two sessions?”
“Is it really that important?” he asked, glancing up at me.
“Yes,” I said, feeling like the very stereotype of a disgruntled wife, my arms akimbo, my voice pouty. But it was important to me that he show he cared enough about our marriage to try talking to someone.
“Okay. I’ll find someone else.”
“Really?” I asked, and I could hear the hope in my voice, the sound of hope not yet being pathetic to my ears.
“Sure,” he said, turning his back as he made another move. “I’ll take care of it.”
It took Nikolai months to find a new therapist, and when he did, it happened a second time: He began therapy, and then he stopped going. When I asked him again what had happened, he said the same thing he’d said the first time, My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. Now it was two therapists who had told him he didn’t need therapy, two therapists who had assessed him and, finding that he was perfectly normal, with no problems and nothing to talk about, told him to stop coming.
Despite his resistance to therapy, I continued. I didn’t exactly like therapy. I found it too disruptive to the alternative narrative of my marriage I was trying to create. After a therapy session, it was difficult to go back to my life—my increasingly hypocritical life—without feeling like I’d opened a Pandora’s box of discontent.
And yet these sessions forced me to look at my feelings systematically. They forced me talk to someone for one hour once a week about my marriage, forced me to examine myself, forced me to look my own significant faults—my need for control, my perfectionism, my anxieties about money, my stubbornness, and my insecurities. I wasn’t easy, I knew that. My childhood left a legacy of distrust. I wanted the security of a family, but I had no real working model for one, and so I patched together ways of getting through that were not healthy and even destructive. I had, for example, a big hot Italian temper that bubbled up and burst forth in an explosive shower of screaming and throwing whatever was nearby. I needed to show, not tell, my fury. Once, when Nikolai had pushed the wrong button, I threw an entire bowl of tomatoes at the wall, leaving pale pink splotches of color on the white paint, abstract expressionism Trussoni style. I could be bossy and a know-it-all, and I often used extreme measures to decimate Nikolai in an argument, saying the meanest thing that came to mind so that he would storm off in a rage. I was always testing him, pushing him, waiting for him to break. I eventually came to see this behavior, which must have been as excruciating for him to live with as it was for me, as the result of my choice to stay married. I chose to stay even though I knew I wasn’t being honest with myself. I chose to stay even though the dynamic we’d created was killing us. My contempt—for him and for myself—was a result of my choice to stay. But I couldn’t leave either. And this tension between what I should do and what I actually did do tore me apart.
Marriage is not easy for anyone, my therapist once said. I wasn’t alone—my therapist had counseled hundreds of married patients, each unhappy in her own way. Take things slow, she told me. Forgive him and yourself. Let your love grow again. Get some distance from your anger. Give yourself space.
Like how much distance? I wondered. A continent?