Not long after the annual Fête Votive d’Aubais, on one of those scorching dry afternoons that sent villagers indoors for a siesta, I came home to find Nikolai sitting in our Citroën station wagon. The car was parked in the sun, its gray paint giving it the look of a metallic shark, only inside the shark sat Nikolai, looking troubled. I peered through the tinted window and into the car. The door was closed, and despite the heat all the windows were up. He gripped the wheel with both hands, his knuckles white, as if bracing for a long, steep drop. I paused, thinking through the possible reasons he might be sitting there. He’d told me an hour before that he was going to drive to Sommières, to go to Carrefour for groceries. He was supposed to bring the kids with him. But Nico and Alex were not there. Nikolai was alone.
I rapped the window with my knuckle.
The window descended, revealing Nikolai’s face, his black hair wet with sweat, his eyes wide and blank, uninflected.
“What’s up?” I asked him. I could hear the fear and confusion seeping into my voice. I could hear all the questions I was not asking, the What are you doing sitting here in the car? question, the Why are you squeezing the steering wheel so hard? question. His clothes were soaked in sweat, but who wouldn’t be sweating? It was a steamy August day in the south of France, and the car was sealed up like an airless tomb. I was worried about him and wanted him to come out.
He bit his lip, as if he wanted to say something.
“What is it?” I asked. “Did something happen?”
“I’m waiting for you.”
“Why are you waiting?”
“To go to Sommières.”
We hadn’t discussed going shopping together. But he was waiting for me to accompany him.
“You want me to come with you and the kids to Sommières?”
He nodded. Yes, that’s why he was waiting. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted me to come with him.
“Okay,” I said. “Where are the kids?”
“In the house.”
“I’ll get them ready,” I said. “You sure nothing’s wrong?”
“I have stomach pains,” he said softly. “I can’t drive.”
“Did you eat something?”
“I think I drank too much coffee.”
“Too much coffee?” He was in such distress that I didn’t think coffee could possibly be the cause. “How much coffee did you drink?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Enough.”
I wanted to peel back the layers of his words—the “I don’t know” and the “enough”—and understand what was going on. He had always had trouble with anxiety, but our move to the village had triggered something in him, some latent terror, and I could feel him sinking into himself, descending further and further from reality. He would sit silent for hours at a time, staring out the window, doing nothing at all. He’d become listless and moody. He’d had a panic attack some weeks before and he’d stayed in the bathtub for hours, trying to calm himself down. He’d developed a fear of being alone—driving alone in particular—and had started asking me to accompany him when he left the house.
Like me, he’d begun having nightmares. In his dream we lived in a medieval village, a place exactly like our village, with all the same winding, narrow pathways, the same clay roof tiles and secret gardens. Everything seemed perfectly normal there—the sun was shining and the flowers were blooming—but something was wrong. The village was sinister and frightening. Evil. He walked and walked through the streets, trying to understand what was wrong, until suddenly he realized the problem: There was nobody there. The houses were empty. The streets were empty. The village was totally abandoned. He was the single person who remained. He looked more closely and found bodies piled up everywhere. A plague had struck, killing the entire population. I was dead, the kids were dead, everything had been lost. Nikolai was the only person left alive.
“Can I get you some water?” I asked. “Will that help?”
He nodded.
“Be right back,” I said, but as I turned to go to the house, he grabbed my arm. “Do you remember,” he said, looking me directly in the eyes, “when you made me go to therapy in Providence?”
“Well, I didn’t make you go,” I said. “We both agreed to go. It was something we did together.”
“And I told you that my therapist told me to stop coming?”
“As I recall,” I said, “two therapists told you this.”
“Right,” he said. “Well, I lied to you about that.”
I blinked, taking this in. Of course I knew he’d lied about it. That two separate therapists would speak to such a complicated man for one hour and tell him never to come back again could not have been true. “You lied to me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I lied. My therapist didn’t tell me not to come back. I chose not to go back.”
This, I realized, was a breakthrough. If he could admit this, maybe we could go to therapy together. There was an English-speaking therapist in Calvisson, just ten minutes from Aubais.
“I chose not to go back,” Nikolai continued, “because my therapist told me I should divorce you.”
“What?” I felt myself draw back, as if I’d been slapped. “Divorce me?”
“She said that you weren’t good for me and that I should leave you. The sooner the better. But I didn’t want to leave you. You see, I know that we’re meant to be together—we’re destined to be together. I’ve known you for many lifetimes. I can’t live without you in this one. I wasn’t going to leave you. So I chose to leave the therapist instead.”
I stared at him, not sure how to respond. “And what about the second therapist?”
“I never went to the second one,” he said. “But she would probably have told me to leave you, too.”
“Nikolai,” I said, “therapists don’t say things like that.”
“Well, mine did,” he said.
I was stunned by this revelation, partially because of when he chose to tell me—now, in the car, when he was most in need of help—but also because of the nature of the confession. Although he had admitted he’d lied, he was still not being fully honest about why his therapist would tell him to divorce me. What was behind such extreme advice? What had he told her? I wanted to believe he was trying to reach out to me, to be honest, but it seemed off somehow.
“Can you give me a few minutes?” he said at last. “I just need to sit here for a while. Then we’ll go to Sommières.”
I walked away from the Citroën, to the other side of the courtyard, and sat in the sun. I needed a minute to myself before I went to get the kids ready. Alex and Nico would take one look at me and know that I wasn’t all right, and appearing to be “all right” for them had become a priority for me.
Some crows sat at the top of the cypress trees on the other side of the courtyard. The first time I saw the cypress trees, they appeared to be just one big twisted tree, a massive cone of green lifting into the sky. But after closer inspection, I saw that three trees had been planted close together and over the course of decades had twisted up into one another, branches locking and trunks melding. Now the center tree had died. We hired a specialist to come, to remove it and take the wood away. Impossible, he’d said. Take down one, and the others go with it. And so we’d left it standing.
WHEN AN HOUR had passed and Nikolai still hadn’t left the car, I called our new friend Jett to ask for help. I described the situation, summing up Nikolai’s ailment as digestion problems related to stress, adding that he had a history of panic attacks. Jett said she had some experience with nerves herself and offered to stop by the house. She arrived at our place with a bag of remedies, explaining that she alleviated her problems naturally, with over-the-counter treatments like Euphytose, Smecta, and valerian root. “Sometimes you just need to take the edge off, and everything feels better,” she said. As I made Alex and Nico dinner, Jett spoke to Nikolai, giving him various remedies and talking to him in a soothing, maternal voice. They spoke for more than an hour, and by the end Nikolai seemed better.
Jett started coming over several times a week to talk to Nikolai. She would discuss his anxiety, give him pills and advice, and then stay to have a glass of wine with me. One day after she’d spent time with Nikolai, we sat out in the courtyard together. I opened a bottle of chardonnay and poured out two glasses and took a sip of the cool, mineral wine.
“He looks good, don’t you think?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Looks exactly the same to me.”
“He’s not in the car at least.”
“You’re right,” she said. “He’s locked up in his office.”
“But I’m sure it’s just a phase. He’ll get over this. I’m sure of it.”
“It isn’t something you just get over,” Jett said. “I know what it feels like. I’ve been there. It isn’t easy to be a creative person. I think it might be best if I stop by to check in on him from time to time. I think it may help him to be around someone who understands his situation. And I won’t tell him to divorce you, like his therapist.”
“Did he tell you about that?” Our communication had become so strained that Jett probably knew more about his feelings than I did.
Jett smiled. “Unless, that is, you want me to suggest divorce?”
“I’m not sure anymore,” I said, and it was true. I was beginning to wonder why I was holding on so tightly, why I didn’t just open my fingers and let it all slide away. But of course I understood the reasoning behind my loyalty. I had made a Faustian bargain with my husband: He would sweep away my unhappy past and make me a part of his exceptional world. In exchange, I would give him my heart and my future. I had benefited from the deal—I had a family. I loved my children, my home, and the career I’d made with his encouragement. I loved being married to a handsome, brilliant artist. That he wouldn’t make me happy was a part of the bargain I hadn’t expected.
“Darling, look at you. You’re a mess. You look exhausted. You’re taking care of the kids, taking care of a husband who has gone into a tailspin, and meanwhile you have your own career to worry about. Something had better change fast, or you’ll be the next one locked up in that Citroën.”
“It will change,” I said, taking a sip of wine. “That’s why we’re here. To change.”
“Hmmm, maybe,” Jett said, raising an eyebrow as if she were a doctor examining a broken limb. “What about sex?”
I looked away, embarrassed.
“You mean there isn’t any of that happening either?” she said, shaking her head in disbelief, as if I’d told her that Nikolai and I ate raw pig brains for breakfast each morning. “That is the one thing I would not be able to live without. If that isn’t working, nothing’s working.”
“You have a boyfriend?” I asked, realizing that she hadn’t mentioned anyone before.
“Boyfriends,” she said, emphasizing the plural nature of the noun. “Boyfriends, love. I have one who comes on Wednesday and another on Sunday afternoon, and then there are the ones who call when they’re in the neighborhood, which gives things a more impromptu nature, which actually quite suits me, as I dislike planning. How many times a week do you make love?”
“Well, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for intimacy with the kids around,” I said. “And the move has been exhausting for both of us. And there’s my book to edit, which is taking all of my time, and . . . you know. Life gets in the way.”
“So how often? Once a week?”
“Usually,” I said, too embarrassed to say that we hadn’t slept together for months.
“Don’t you find it difficult to manage? All that pent-up sexual energy and so forth? I would go out of my mind.”
“Sure,” I said, and it was true—I missed having a meaningful sexual connection with someone. I missed the easy, close affection Nikolai and I had shared in the first year we were together, before Nico was born. But it was gone, and I had no idea of how to find it again. Now we were like business partners, working to meet quotas. “We’ve been together a long time. Desire fades.”
“If you say so,” Jett said, as if she didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was talking about.
I sat up in my chair, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that now is the moment to do something really special, something symbolic to help us get adjusted to our new life here.”
“I should say that moving to a medieval village in the Languedoc is quite good symbolism.”
“I was thinking of a renewal ceremony,” I said. “We never had a real wedding. It might give us the chance to reconnect, if we renew our vows. We can just wipe out all of those problematic years. We can reboot.”
“Reboot?” Jett said, her voice incredulous.
“Why not?”
“My dear,” she said. With her huge black eyes and her deep voice, there was something divinatory about her. She was a temple priestess with too much eyeliner, a forty-five-year-old single, childless, sun-ravaged sorceress. She stood, wobbled on her plastic sandals as she walked to the trash bin and tossed the empty bottle of chardonnay inside. “Do you really think that any man gives a damn about a renewal ceremony? It won’t change a thing. My advice: You want to reboot your marriage? Go to Barcelona for the weekend. I’ll watch the kids. Eat fabulous food, stay at a fabulous hotel and fuck his brains out. That’s all the renewal you need, darling.”
BARCELONA WAS THREE hours away from our village by car—far enough for a romantic weekend without the kids but close enough that we could get back to the village if Jett had trouble. I was excited about our romantic weekend, believing that Jett had made a very good point. How could we expect our marriage to work if we didn’t sleep together more often? Sex wasn’t just an accessory to a relationship. It was the center of who we were as a couple, something that held everything else together. While the attraction I had felt for Nikolai in the beginning had died, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be rekindled.
The day before our trip, I drove to Montpellier, found a small lingerie boutique on an ancient street near the university where Rabelais had done his studies, and spent a small fortune on seductive ammunition: black lace panties, a matching push-up bra, a garter belt, and black silk stockings. The expense of my lingerie was in exact proportion to the intensity of my desire to make the weekend “work”—in other words, to have great sex and create a meaningful connection with my husband.
Friday night in Barcelona, we checked in to a small hotel with views of the city. Instead of going out, I suggested we order room service and spend our first night in bed. I wanted to surprise him with my new gear.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Nikolai said promptly, and locked himself in the bathroom. I opened some cava and sipped a glass while I stripped off my clothes and slipped into my fancy underwear. With the lingerie in place, I stood before the full-length mirror and examined myself. The mirror didn’t lie. I could see very plainly that I had the healthy body of a young woman. And yet I was surprised. For the past years, I had begun to think of myself as old, like one of the village widows. I felt haggard, used up in a way that had nothing to do with sags or wrinkles. I was young in body but old in spirit. Without love my soul was shriveling.
But the young woman in me wasn’t going under without a fight. I’d developed an active fantasy life over the past years. Sometimes I would meet a man somewhere, feel attraction to him, and then think about him later, even develop what I came to think of as a virtual crush: I would look him up online, exchange a message or two, remain distantly, electronically linked. These virtual crushes gave me the false sense that I had a circle of male friends, men who might actually want to cross over from virtual to real. There were a few times when this had happened and an actual friendship developed with one of my online acquaintances. There was Jonathan, a writer whom I met for dinner a few times in New York City. He came to one of my readings and accompanied me to a book party. There was another man, Brent, also a writer, a fun, die-hard bachelor who told me about all the women he dated. After the incident with the Russian Girl, I was more open to the idea of meeting men and was curious about how I would feel when I was with them. I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but I was opening myself up to the possibility of being with someone else.
I poured a second glass of cava while Nikolai shaved. I heard the rattling of metal on porcelain, a pair of tweezers being placed on the sink. He must have pulled a few wayward hairs from his otherwise totally bald chest. He disliked chest hair and would pluck out every last one, but I didn’t mind it. There was something warm and comforting about a hairy man, like wrapping up in a cashmere sweater. I wished he would just finish up in the bathroom and come keep me company. Two glasses of cava in ten minutes, and I was ready for love.
But Nikolai wasn’t finishing up. I heard the shaking of pills—the antianxiety remedy Jett had given him, most likely. Mineral water swished into a glass. There was a rush of water from the toilet flushing. What was going on in there? It was taking forever. I lay on the bed, feeling a bit woozy all of a sudden. I poured another glass of cava, a sure solution to dizziness, and waited.
I stretched a leg into the air. The seam of the silk stocking stretched from heel to thigh, latching onto the garter belt. Sexy. I twisted around onto my back and wiggled my legs up into the air, stretching. In the mirror I looked like a dominatrix doing yoga, my body pinched and sculpted by wires and clasps.
“Almost done?” I called at the bathroom door.
“In just a minute!” Nikolai replied.
There was a commotion in the hallway. A door slammed, and the people in the next room returned. We’d shared an elevator earlier, after we’d checked in. The couple had been speaking in rapid Spanish, and as the four of us crowded into the elevator, I’d secretly looked them over. The woman was dark-haired and sultry, dripping with gold jewelry, a big diamond on her finger, the man short and muscly with a nice watch, probably a businessman of some sort, someone who drank bourbon with the boys after work. I’d looked them over and made a mental profile of how happy they were compared to Nikolai and me. I played that game often, the couple index, comparing other people’s happiness with my own. My assessment in the elevator had been this: Recently married. Still in love. No kids. Staying in Barcelona for a long weekend after a business trip. They got an eight on the couple index. Nikolai and I were currently at three.
Whatever their reason for being at the hotel, there was no doubt about how they intended to spend their evening. Within three minutes of their return, the panting and squealing began. Before I could refill my glass of cava, the businessman slammed Ms. Sultry against the wall and was pounding out a steady rhythm highlighted by high-pitched directions in Spanish.
“Sí, sí!” she squealed. “Sí, mi amor!”
He pulled her away from the wall, and I strained to listen as he threw her onto the bed. At least I imagined he’d thrown her onto the bed—it could have been the couch or even the floor. But wherever he’d thrown her, the noise only increased. The woman’s voice rose higher. There was a crack (the sound of his hand on her ass?) and a crash (a lamp hitting the floor?) and then more highly percussive screwing and shouting before it all came to a well-deserved, perfectly synchronized climax.
We didn’t have sex like that, and in the past years our sex life had all but ceased. I wanted to change this, believing that if I could fix our lack of intimacy, everything else would fall into line. But it wasn’t so easy to “fix” the problem. I had lost desire for him. When he reached across the bed, his fingers were as welcome as a spider crawling on my thigh. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t be the way I’d been in the beginning. For a while I tried to disengage and sleep with him despite my feelings. These encounters left me empty, as if making love were a transaction, another chore to check off my list. Sometimes I would even mark a day in my calendar, reminding me that it was time to make love to my husband, a little star to prompt me. I had always believed that willpower and determination could get me through anything, but I came to see that desire is not about soldiering through. Desire is a complicated and deep and mysterious thing that two people create together. It cannot be forced into existence. At least I wasn’t capable of creating it once it had vanished.
In Providence I had been determined to put our sex life on track. I speculated that our sleeping schedules—Nikolai went to bed late and I went to bed early—were keeping us apart. And so I decided to try something different. I asked Nikolai to go to bed at 11:00 P.M., which was late for me and early for him. I’d suggested this believing that if we spent half an hour, maybe an hour, reading or talking together before we went to sleep, we would sync into a kind of biological rhythm. Like female roommates who are on the same menstrual cycle, Nikolai and I would synchronize desire. Our sex drive would be aligned. We would find physical and emotional connection again. It was inevitable that we’d fall into each other’s arms. We were only inches away, two warm bodies under a single blanket.
And so we went to bed together each night at 11:00 P.M. Once in bed, we touched feet and shared pillows, talked about the kids and work. For a while it seemed promising. Yet when Nikolai touched me, I pulled away. It was an instinctual, animal reaction, the kind of reaction the tongue has to bitter medicine: Sorry, I’m too tired, I would say. I turned off my bedside light and went to sleep. When he tried again, I reacted with the same violent refusal. I didn’t want him near me. Whereas once I had wanted his touch, now it repulsed me.
Why had I lost desire? Why didn’t I want to be intimate with him? This was a riddle I couldn’t solve. He was good-looking, had a nice body, wasn’t bad in bed, and sex made things much better between us. I wanted a deep and fulfilling sexual connection with him, but there was no spark, no flame, no fire. Nothing. I didn’t want him to touch me. When we had sex, it felt like a violation and a punishment. I ended up being cool and distant, passive and unavailable, which led Nikolai to tell me—in the middle of our many arguments—that I was frigid.
He was right and he was wrong. I rejected him sexually, yes, but I was not frigid. Something in me had shut down in relation to him. It wasn’t a matter of physical attraction. I looked at him and I saw that he was a gorgeous man. But when it came time to be intimate with him, it was not physical impulses that ruled me, rather emotional ones. It was here, in our troubled sexual life, that the evidence of our emotional distance was most clear. The lack of trust, the emotional betrayals, our inability to parent together, the disparities between our views on work and money—all of these pressures came together to create a wall between us. It was an instance of my body telling my heart that something was deeply, essentially wrong.
And yet I kept trying. As I lay on the bed in Barcelona, I tried to understand what in the hell I was doing in my sex-kitten outfit, drunk and alone, listening to another couple make love. I felt even more alone, even more isolated, than I had back at home. There I was, done up like Betty Page, wishing to God that I were somewhere else than in that bed.
Nikolai came out of the bathroom and slipped under the covers, smiling, his eyes filled with expectation. But my mood had changed. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been game, but now the moment had passed. He was ready, but I was done. I felt my flesh prickle with resistance as he slid his hand over my thigh. My stomach turned as he kissed my neck. But I didn’t resist him. I had made the preparations, had booked the room and bought the lingerie. It was too late to back out now. And while I went through all the motions of intimacy, my heart remained locked away, unreachable.
ONCE IT WAS clear that our move to France hadn’t worked miracles, the renewal ceremony became my new delusional quest. Like Scheherazade telling her 999th tale, I still believed that death could be avoided by the reinvention of our story. And the next chapter was this: a renewal ceremony to clear out all the years of unhappiness, wipe away the deceptions, the anger, the resentments, and the fantasies in one clean sweep. It would be a concrete, measurable, exterior proof that our relationship was improving. I needed such proof. I needed to go through the motions, to say the words and hear him say the words, to believe that we could change. I needed to make my efforts manifest, to see them play out physically, to make other people witness them. When the interior is weak, the exterior must appear strong. With the center hollow, the walls must be thick.
“How about poems?” I asked Nikolai one afternoon as we sat in the courtyard. After the Citroën Incident, he had gone off caffeine, exchanging espresso for pots of valerian-root tea, an infusion meant to soothe the nervous system.
“Poems?” Nikolai asked, fingering a black bag slung over his chest. Ever since Jett had given him antianxiety remedies, he’d taken to carrying the pill bottles around in a black messenger bag. A folder with his vital records (birth certificate, passport, medical records, and so forth) was stuffed in the side pocket. The bag accompanied him at all times, even to the bathroom, and Lord and Lulu joked that Nikolai was guarding top-secret documents in his bag, that he must be some kind of spy protecting classified state secrets. They called it his CIA bag.
“The vows. For the renewal ceremony. We could write them ourselves. Maybe poems?”
Nikolai was playing chess on his phone, his thumbs jabbing at the screen. He’d been playing online chess a lot lately, working on his opening, middle game, and endgame.
“Hey, hello?” I said. “Did you hear me?”
“Hmmm,” Nikolai said, a sound that meant, Just a second, let me finish this, and after a barrage of thumb jabs he put the phone down and looked at me, a flush of victory in his cheeks. He must have won. “Sorry. My ranking rose over twenty-two hundred,” he said.
“Is that a big deal?”
“Very,” he said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand and working his black top hat—his courtyard costume—over his head. “Grand masters are at that level.”
At the time I didn’t give a damn about grand masters or chess rankings, but it is clear to me now that this moment in the courtyard was one of missed connection. We were talking past each other, thinking only of ourselves, and had no idea of just how careless we’d become: The vows—and my project of renewing our marriage—were the most important thing in the world for me just then. His chess ranking gave him a solid measure of his skill and talent, something he needed to feel good about himself. But neither of us could see the other’s needs.
“Were you saying something?” Nikolai asked.
“Vows,” I repeated. “What do you think about writing vows?”
There was an utter blankness in his eyes, an almost comical lack of comprehension. The same look that I surely had when he spoke about chess.
“You know—vows? Renewal ceremony?” I said, biting my lip, trying hard not to get frustrated or hostile. I needed him to show some sign of life, something that proved he wanted to be part of this artistic collaboration called marriage. My biggest fear was that I was masterminding the whole thing while he didn’t give a fig about it. “Weren’t you listening?”
“Sure,” Nikolai replied. “You asked me about your dress. Why not wear that purple one?”
I had, in fact, mentioned getting a new dress about thirty minutes before. He had registered one small part of our conversation. That was good enough for me. I picked up where I’d left off.
“I wore the purple one when we got married the first time. It’s vintage. It was old even in 2002. But I wasn’t talking about the dress. I was talking about writing our vows.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked desperate, as if he wanted to say the right thing, perhaps to please me, perhaps to end this increasingly uncomfortable conversation. “Why don’t you decide about the vows?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take care of the vows. Although you need to write what you want to say to me, of course.” When Nikolai didn’t answer, I said, “Are you sure you want to do this? It is supposed to be for both of us, you know. If you’re not into it, that’s fine. We can just call the whole thing off.”
“Of course I want to do it,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so much better at this kind of thing than I am.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this line of thinking. It went: Because I was the more practical, organized, and capable one, I should take care of it. So it had been with our finances, and so, too, with managing the house. It would have been easy enough to stop being cast in this role—all I had to do was refuse. But I realize now that I found reassurance in being competent. Being competent meant I could make sense out of chaos. It meant that—with a little planning and organization—things worked. Maybe an unstable childhood, or the years of being stuck in Bulgaria, had created my need to believe that I was in control of my life, because I clung to my role as the competent one in our marriage, even when it left me exhausted and resentful.
And so I threw myself into organizing our renewal ceremony. I set about searching for the right location, but that wasn’t going to be too hard to find. The French countryside was so beautiful that we could have the ceremony almost anywhere. There was the village château, or the beach at La Grand-Motte, or the mountains. Jett suggested Château des Hospitaliers, a winery in Saint-Christol, a village just ten minutes from Aubais. The winery made a distinctly southern French wine, with big, jammy fruit and spiciness. The vineyard was on land once owned by the Knights Hospitaller, contemporaries of the Knights Templar. After the Templars’ downfall, their lands and wealth in the region were given to the Hospitallers.
The vineyard had a large, modern tasting room with a banquet hall. We would serve flutes of Boreale, a sparkling rosé méthode traditionelle, made on the property. When I stood in the space, looking out the huge windows, my eye followed the undulating hills of planted Syrah and Mourvèdre and Carignan. The vines went on forever, fading into blue sky.
I found an Anglican priest, a ruddy-cheeked Englishwoman who lived in a nearby village, to perform the ceremony. She was a glowing, benevolent lady, and I knew the moment I saw her that she was just the kind of person who would consent to marry two churchless foreigners. She was so kind, so good-natured, that it seemed she would be the perfect corrective to the gloom and morbidity of our first wedding ceremony in Sofia.
We met in Sommières to discuss the details, at a café overlooking the Vidourle River. We ordered boules of ice cream and cups of espresso. The priestess, as I’d begun to call her, settled back in her chair and examined us with her wise, piercing blue eyes.
“I think it is a wonderful idea to revisit your commitment to one another, and to ask God to bless your union,” she said, working her spoon into her ice cream. “Marriage is a sacrament, a holy agreement. Is there a specific reason you chose to do this ceremony now?”
“We just moved here,” I said. “We’re starting over. It seems like the right time.”
“And you?” she said, looking at Nikolai, perhaps noting that I had been answering her questions alone. “What is the purpose of this ceremony for you?”
Nikolai shrugged. “A fun party?”
I laughed, perhaps a little too loudly, although he probably wasn’t kidding. His favorite part of this whole thing would be when it was over.
The priestess chuckled. “Well, I’m only officiating the ceremony. The reception will be up to you.” She scooped up more ice cream. “Will you be exchanging rings?”
“Yes,” I said. “We will.”
“Good, good,” she said, waving her spoon at Nikolai and then at me. “And vows? You must have some ideas about how you’d like the ceremony to proceed. Have you considered the blessing? What church do you belong to?”
Nikolai looked at me, waiting for me to save him. He was an ex-Buddhist monk raised in atheist, Communist Bulgaria who didn’t believe in God any more than he believed in Santa Claus. I had been raised Catholic, felt an affinity with Zen Buddhism, and took an all-inclusive approach to spirituality and life: stay open to everything, allow the possibility of every kind of miracle, embrace every experience so as to not miss anything.
“We have a nondenominational approach to spirituality,” I said. “We’d like to bring Eastern and Western religious ideas into the ceremony, if you don’t mind.”
The priestess looked confused. “Meaning?”
Nikolai leaned forward. “Well, we’d like to have a Buddhist text read. And we’d like to ask you to take some of the usual language out of the ceremony.”
“Many couples remove ‘obey,’” she said. “That is quite normal. Some people say ‘love, honor, and cherish.’ Is that what you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “I think he was hoping you’d remove the references to God.”
The priestess blinked. She put her spoon down. “You realize that I am an Anglican priest. That my beliefs are part of the ceremony.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “He just wants to make everyone at the ceremony comfortable. His parents and my parents and . . . well, everyone.”
“Your parents are . . . ?” she asked, looking pointedly at Nikolai.
“Atheist,” I said.
“And you are atheist as well?”
“He’s Buddhist,” I said.
“Is that what you mean to say?” she asked Nikolai. I was speaking for him, and she didn’t like it. It was an annoying habit, one I’d picked up after years of explaining Nikolai to others, trying to protect him from people who didn’t understand his long silences, his defensive behavior, his nervous tics, and his refusal to answer questions directly. I’d become a kind of bodyguard, shielding him.
“Something like that, yes,” he mumbled.
“Well,” the priestess said, smiling gently, as if unsure of how the whole thing would work, “why don’t you write the vows and send them to me. I’m sure we can figure something out.”
THE RENEWAL CEREMONY became my point of focus, the spot on the horizon leading me forward. Each step closer to renewing our vows was a clear and objective proof of progress. I sent out invitations, arranged for my mother and stepfather to fly to France, invited friends from Aubais and New York. I bought a silver silk dress that was more sophisticated than anything a first-time bride could wear. I bought high-heeled shoes so I would be tall enough to meet Nikolai’s lips when the priestess concluded the ceremony. The kiss would be the moment of grace, that one magical moment when the world would stand still and I would know without a doubt that I was really, truly loved.
Why I needed this moment of grace is a question I’ve asked myself time and time again since the renewal ceremony. If that magical moment hadn’t occurred in all the years of my marriage, what made me think that a transformation would take place now? What tenacious part of me held on to the hope that a ceremony would bring about a miracle? Why wasn’t I able to take a hard look at my marriage, see that it was dead, and move on? Was it a flaw in my thinking? An emotional defect? Was I too insecure or too needy or too weak to understand that love could not simply be conjured on demand? I couldn’t answer these questions, but it didn’t mean I stopped asking them.
Once I’d even consulted an astrologer to help me understand the purpose of my relationship with Nikolai. I asked the astrologer to look at my chart and tell me what he saw about our relationship. I was born on November 9, 1973, at 2:31 A.M. in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA. Scorpio with a Virgo rising. The astrologer and I spoke on the phone one afternoon.
“Wow,” he said at the beginning of the call. “Yours is not a chart for the fainthearted. It is an intense, hard-core, magical chart. Every soul chooses its incarnation, and your soul chose a most tumultuous and difficult one. Hats off to you, sister. This incarnation will not be easy, but here’s the good news: You are here to learn human experience at a deep level and to live a true, real, solid, meaningful, loving, connected existence. Your soul’s intention is to find a love that works. In order to get that love, your soul is on a journey to root out all that is not love: all that we humans—and I don’t mean just now, but traditionally, in the form of arranged marriage or superficial connections for money or power—believe to be love. Human love, over history, has not been authentic. Your soul wants authentic love. No matter what your parents did or did not do to you as a child, it wouldn’t matter in your case. Your soul was sent into human form to redeem itself by growing through hell. If it doesn’t crush you and you can make it through this, you will understand things other people do not. You have chosen the hellish underbelly of relationships in order to learn the reality of love. Once you learn it, you will never need to do it again. Not in this life, not in another one. Your desire is to get to the bottom of things, and if you get this right, you can help yourself, and others around you, define what true love is. Only a small fraction of humanity actually experience true love. There might be divorce. There might be reconciliation. It all happens to give you clarity, to describe what love is not, to create hope. The goal for you in this life is to come to the point when you will no longer tolerate anything that is not love.”
A FEW DAYS before the ceremony, I walked through the house looking for Nikolai. The door to his office was locked, and so I went up the winding stone staircase and past the bedrooms to the altar. Nikolai was reading a Tibetan book when I walked in. A stick of incense burned, sending tendrils of smoke into the air, giving the room an earthy, spicy scent. His face was tranquil, touched by candlelight. He was beautiful. I forgot that sometimes, in the rush of our daily lives and the cloud of discord between us, how handsome he was. He looked up, meeting my eye. I was disturbing him.
“Sorry,” I said, standing at the door. “But I wanted to check if you’ve had a chance to write something for the ceremony?”
“The what?” Nikolai seemed fixed at some indefinite space in front of him.
“Ceremony,” I said. “Renewal ceremony. You’re gong to write something to say to me. And I’m going to write something to say to you? Vows? Remember?”
“Oh, yeah. The vows. I’m planning to write something.” He looked up at me and gave me a brilliant, glowing smile. “Don’t worry, baby.”
“Great,” I said, relieved. I walked over and kissed him. He would write something beautiful for the renewal ceremony, something that expressed his love for me and his optimism for our future, something to make me believe that we could overcome every difficulty together. He was a writer, after all. That was his gift.
MY MOTHER, MY stepfather, my brother, and his wife were staying at the house the day of the renewal ceremony. We spent a lazy morning together, drinking coffee and talking in the courtyard until the hot midday sun chased us inside. Nikolai joined us but said little. He didn’t understand the culture of my family—their midwestern lack of pretension, the value placed on understatement, their practical let’s-cut-through-the-bullshit approach to life. He sat silently at the table as we talked, just as I had sat silently during his family discussions.
I wondered what my mother thought of all this drama around my marriage. Back home you didn’t pick up and move to another country when things got rocky. You complained to your friends or baked a casserole or had a few too many beers after work. You kept a stiff upper lip, and then, if that didn’t work, you had a reckless affair and a messy divorce. But the kind of elaborate acrobatics I was going through—moving to France and having a renewal ceremony— were totally foreign in my culture.
It wasn’t easy for me to talk to my mom. She was a reserved and cool person, someone who didn’t feel comfortable with physical displays of love or discussions about feelings. I was always more needy, and more verbal, than made her comfortable. When I was in my twenties, I would challenge her way of thinking, more out of a compulsion to get her to react to me than to cause a fight. I needed demonstrations of love from her, to hear what she felt, but she couldn’t give me that.
When I met Nikolai, she didn’t offer an opinion about him. When I asked what she thought, she said he seemed “very nice” and left it at that. Maybe she didn’t want to interfere in my choice, or maybe she knew that I was so headstrong that I would do whatever I wanted no matter what she said, which was probably true. But it was more likely that Nikolai was just too alien. With his talk of philosophy and politics, he was exotic to my family. That’s what had attracted me. And so my mom stayed out of it. Now, on this visit to France, she was there, ready to participate in my renewal ceremony. She wanted me to be happy.
Jett met us at Les Hospitaliers. She stood by the table of food in her loose black harem pants and a loose black blouse, camera in hand, ready to take pictures.
“I can’t understand for the life of me why someone would want to get married once, let alone do the whole thing over again,” she said. Then, glancing at Nikolai, “What the hell happened to him?”
I shot a look at my husband. He had been up all night and was exhausted, the bags under his eyes giving him the look of a French bulldog. His hair stood up on end, and he had his black CIA bag, pills inside, thrown over his shoulder.
“He’s not doing much better, eh?” Jett noted, looking him up and down.
“Actually, he is better,” I said, feeling my defenses rise. I was protective of him, especially now, when we were about to start this new phase of our marriage. “He’s just feeling a little nervous about the ceremony.”
“Well, good thing his parents are here,” she said, glancing at Yana and Ivan. “They can take the load off your shoulders for a while.”
I glanced at Nikolai, standing with Yana and Ivan. It was true—their presence was a big help. Nikolai really relaxed only around them. They looked happy to be at the ceremony, happy that Nikolai and I were trying to make our marriage work. Yana and Ivan had cleaned up after Nikolai’s first marriage failed. Nobody wanted to avoid another divorce more than Nikolai’s parents. Except, of course, me.
The priestess, dressed in a long white robe, met us at the back of the room, her face flushed from the heat. She embraced me and then tried to hug Nikolai, who leaned to the side, giving her a quick air hug before stepping out of her reach. He hated to be touched, especially by people he didn’t know. The priestess led us to the far end of the hall, where there was a small pulpit surrounded by rows of metal folding chairs.
“We have about fifteen minutes,” she said, placing a Bible on a lectern. “Should we run through everything once before we begin?”
“We might need to read these over a few times,” I said, giving her the vows. I had waited for Nikolai to give me the vows he’d written for me, but when I didn’t have them earlier that morning, I’d written them myself. So both sets of vows—his and mine—were . . . well, mine. I’d taken care to make sure his vows to me were loving and tender and hopeful. I’d made sure to promise myself the world.
The priestess stood behind the pulpit welcoming the small gathering of family and friends. The creamy stone, pale and smooth as butter, gave the space a warm glow. Alex and Nico were there, dressed in pretty clothes, their hair combed. My mom and stepfather were there; my brother and his wife were there. Lulu and Lord were there. Jett was there. Friends from New York were there. Nikolai’s parents were there. The people closest to us had come to show their love and support. This was the big day.
The priestess began. “Friends and family have gathered here today from the United States and Bulgaria and England and, of course, France to celebrate the union of Danielle and Nikolai.” She looked around, as if to confirm that everyone was in fact there, and then she went on. “This is a special day. This couple has made a decision to continue on their path together, to strengthen their commitment, before all of you and before God.”
I could feel Nikolai stiffen at my side. He glanced at me: Hadn’t we said no “God” in the ceremony?
The priestess introduced Nikolai’s mother and my mother, who were going to read a Buddhist text together. They walked to the front of the room, near a window. Between them the rows of vines swelled and receded over an undulating hill. As they read, I glanced at Nikolai. He was clenching and unclenching his left hand, making a fist and releasing. I bit my lip, wary. He was covered with sweat, his shirt soaked with it. He was going to faint or, worse, have another panic attack, this one more public and more disastrous than the others
“And now Danielle and Nikolai will repeat their vows.”
Anticipation welled up in my chest. This was it. Our moment. The first day of the rest of our marriage. Suddenly a thick band of afternoon light fell over the room, giving me the feeling that the words we were about to say were blessed by all the universe—God in heaven, the sun in the sky, our families and friends, the grapes in the fields. The priestess led me through my vows, and I repeated them, word for word, looking at Nikolai. I promise to love and honor and cherish.
I tried to make eye contact with Nikolai, so that he knew I was saying those words to him, but he wasn’t looking at me. His gaze was fixed at some point beyond the priestess, a hard, determined look, as if his survival depended upon keeping his eyes trained upon that wall. He was so uncomfortable that I wanted to reach out and wrap my arms around him and comfort him. Maybe this whole remarriage thing was too much for him. Maybe I should have just left everything alone.
The priestess glanced at me, raised an eyebrow, as if to say, I’m just going to keep going as if everything is normal, okay?
On cue I plucked the gold band from the tray and slid it onto Nikolai’s finger. The priestess smiled, turned to Nikolai, and began to lead him through the vows.
“‘I, Nikolai,’” she said.
Nikolai looked at the wall. He hadn’t heard her.
“‘I, Nikolai,’” she said again.
Nikolai mumbled something—his name, maybe—his voice so low that I, standing right at his side, couldn’t hear him.
The priestess furrowed her brow. “‘Do solemnly swear.’”
Nikolai swallowed, hard, and cleared his throat. He wasn’t able to actually say the vow.
“A little louder, please,” the priestess whispered, and Nikolai mumbled something, a few weak sounds, and then she went on to the next line. “‘To love and honor this woman.’”
Nikolai swallowed. He cleared his throat, then cleared it again. “Umm,” he said, his voice no louder than before. He coughed and took a deep breath and cleared his throat. He mumbled a few words.
She chuckled. “Let’s try again,” she said. “‘I, Nikolai, do solemnly swear to love and honor this woman.’”
Nikolai stared at her as if she’d asked him to turn water into wine.
The priestess’s pale skin flushed the slightest shade of pink, the same pale, effervescent rose as the sparkling wine waiting for us in the tasting room. She smiled stiffly at Nikolai and, leaning close to him, whispered, “You need to look at her.” She placed her hands on Nikolai’s shoulders and turned him forty-five degrees, toward me.
The priestess was doing the best she could to keep the ceremony going. But I, standing at my husband’s side, felt as if these moments would stretch out forever. He was mumbling. He could hardly speak. He made an incomprehensible jumble of sounds, but those sounds were not vows. I glanced over my shoulder at my mother, who looked utterly confused, as if she were trying to decipher a foreign language. I felt an overwhelming urge to step in front of Nikolai and say his vows for him.
“I . . . umm, swear to . . . ummmm . . .”
Our eyes met. They were the same wide-set green eyes of the man with whom I’d fallen in love. They had the same color and the same shape, but they were utterly alien. I understood suddenly that I was looking into the eyes of a stranger. We had, over the course of our years together, become different people. I didn’t know this man anymore. I didn’t want to remarry him. In one glance everything—the delicate castle of cards I’d built, all the fairy tales I’d told myself—collapsed.
The priestess shot an embarrassed glance at me but, seeing my alarm, took pity and decided to draw the whole uncomfortable thing to a conclusion. With a deep sigh, she skipped to the blessing and ended the ceremony.
In the tasting room, everyone took hold of flutes of Boreale and clinked glasses. My mother smiled, and my friends raised their glasses. Jett came to my side and put an arm around my shoulders. “Well, my dear,” she said, sipping her wine, “it seems that you’ve just married yourself.”
Leaving our guests to celebrate, I headed out of the room, past the tables loaded with food and flowers, past the priestess unbuttoning her white robe, past Nikolai and his parents, to the bathroom, where I locked the door. I hadn’t known until the lock clicked that I was on the verge of tears. But as soon as I was safely inside, I slid onto my heels and buried my head in my hands. The tears came all at once, hard and violent. All the tears that I hadn’t cried for eight years, all the sadness I’d tried to wish away, all the disappointment—all of this rushed upon me as I cried over my beautiful, broken dream.