FROM THAT NIGHT on, as God is my witness, I made absolutely no effort to pursue her—never once talked to her about the possibility of reconciling—and I defy anyone to show otherwise. The following day, I called her—and I kept my emotions out of it. “I thought about what you said, and I get it,” I told her. “Let’s have the lawyers help us get through this as quickly and as amicably as possible.”
Maybe deep down I hoped she would say something—“Oh no, O.J.! It’s not like that! We can work this out!”—but that didn’t happen. She grumbled a little about the lawyers, but that was about it, then she started talking about personal shit—managing the kids’ schedules, her crazy family, money issues, and so on—so I tuned her out. I realized I was going to have to pull away from her completely, and when she paused for breath I told her that it might be best if we didn’t talk for a while.
“Why?” she said.
“We should let the lawyers handle it,” I said.
I’d seen plenty of couples in similar situations, and they tended to get highly emotional during the proceedings, and that generally made everything worse. As I said, I wanted to keep my emotions out of it.
“Okay,” she said.
“Great,” I said.
I remember hanging up and thinking, Well, O.J., it’s time to get back in the game.
The funny thing is, during the previous three or four months a lot of my friends—including Marcus Allen and his wife, Kathryn—had been pushing me to start going out with other women, but I wasn’t interested. I thought I still had a chance with Nicole, and I thought I should wait it out. I’ll be honest with you, I’d been bothered by that one incident—when I saw her through the window of her house, going at it on the couch with Keith Zlomsowitch—but I would have been willing to forget it. The way I saw it—or the way I rationalized it, anyway—a fling or two might actually be a good thing, especially if it made her see that I wasn’t as bad as all that.
Anyway, it didn’t quite work out that way. At the end of the day, we were headed for divorce court, and at that point it was pretty much out of my hands.
That same night, I was out at an L.A. club, with friends, when I ran into a Hawaiian Tropic model I’d known years earlier. She came over to say hi, and to offer her condolences. “I hear you and your wife separated,” she said.
“We did more than separate,” I said. “We’re getting a divorce.”
She was sorry to hear that, too, she said, but not so sorry that she refused an invitation to dinner. She came over to the house a few days later, and we had dinner, and all I could think was, O.J. is coming out tonight!
Sure enough, after dinner we retired to the bedroom. Just as we were starting to get serious, I heard someone at my front door, so I excused myself and went down to see who it was. Kathryn and Marcus were outside, and they’d brought a friend with them—a woman. Her name was Paula Barbieri, and she was absolutely stunning. I remember thinking that she looked a lot like Julia Roberts, only prettier.
I invited them in and got a round of drinks, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off Paula. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in the market. She’d gotten married recently, and it hadn’t worked out, so she was in the process of getting an annulment. Of course, from where I was sitting, that was a good thing.
That’s when my housekeeper came into the room and signaled to me. I couldn’t understand what she was doing. Couldn’t she see I was in the process of falling in love with this gorgeous creature? I got up and went over. “What?” I said.
“There’s a woman upstairs, in your bedroom,” she said.
Shit! I’d forgotten all about Miss Hawaiian Tropic. I told the housekeeper to have her come down, and she did, and of course Paula and my friends were there, and it was a little awkward. But what could I do? We had another round of drinks, and I showed my guests to the door, and then Miss Hawaiian Tropic and I retired to the bedroom. That was the night I began life anew as a single man.
Of course, the next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about Paula, so I called her and we began to see each other, but not romantically. She wasn’t ready for that yet—she had that annulment to get through—and I didn’t mind. I just felt good being around her: This was the kind of woman a man would wait for. We went out as friends for about a month, and it was a real clean period in my life. I wasn’t drinking, and I’d stopped eating meat for a while, and I felt physically pretty good—except for the arthritis, and my knees, which were both banged to hell from the years of football. Paula was also into clean living. She never had anything stronger than a glass of wine, and she was serious about staying in good shape. She had to be: She was a model, and a very successful one at that. Strangely enough, this was the first time in my life I’d been out with a woman who worked. I liked it, to be honest. Maybe it made her more interesting to me, maybe it gave her more substance—I’m not sure—all I know is that every time I saw her I liked her more.
It was during this period that Nicole’s phone calls started becoming more and more frequent, even obsessive, you might say. She would begin with some news about the kids, as she always did, then get to talking about her various personal problems—whether it was with friends, with Kato, or even with this guy she was supposed to be so damn crazy about. The constant phone calls got to be a little much, frankly, especially since Paula and I were beginning to get more serious about each other, so most of the time I ignored them. I knew that if it was about the kids, and it was urgent, she’d call Cathy Randa, my assistant, and Cathy always knew where to find me.
Thankfully, I was actually pretty busy during this period. I went down to New Orleans for about ten days, for the Olympic trials, and spent most of July in Barcelona, covering the Olympics. When I got back, I did some traveling for Hertz, and for a few other corporate clients, and in the fall I returned to New York to cover football. I came back to L.A. from time to time, of course—once to do a story on the Los Angeles Raiders, and a couple of times to shoot scenes for the Naked Gun sequel—but I hardly ever saw Nicole, and I liked it that way. In fact, whenever I had to pick up my kids, I usually asked Cathy Randa to fetch them for me. I didn’t want to get into anything with Nicole—not about the kids, not about her love life, and not about my own love life—and I thought this was the wisest course of action.
Then the calls began again, but this time they were less about her various problems and more about the issue at hand—specifically, the divorce proceedings. This was when she informed me that some of her friends had been advising her to exaggerate my so-called violent tendencies. She had told them what I’d said right after the 1989 fiasco—that I would willingly toss the prenuptial agreement if something like that ever happened again—and apparently they thought she should try to use that to get a better settlement out of me. “They want me to say that I’ve been traumatized by the repeated batterings,” Nicole said.
“Repeated batterings!” I said. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? What repeated batterings?”
“I know,” Nicole said. “I can’t believe it either. They’re trying to convince me that I’m a victim of abuse.”
I didn’t know what she was going to do, frankly, but I figured that when the time came she’d do right by me. As it turned out, I was called to the stand first. I admitted that I’d become physical with Nicole in 1989, and I described in detail the events leading to the blowup, and I pretty much blamed Nicole for the argument. Still, I took full responsibility for my response. I also said that Nicole had attacked me on several occasions, in the years prior and in the years since, but that I had learned to handle it by physically removing myself from the room—from the house, if necessary.
Nicole sat in the courtroom, listening, saying nothing, and the session ended before she could take the stand. She came over, smiled pleasantly, and asked if I was free for dinner. We had a very nice time at dinner. I felt like we were married again.
The next day, we were back in court, and it was Nicole’s turn to testify, but she didn’t show up. She reached me on my cell, in court, and said, “O.J., I just can’t do it.” I must tell you, I was pretty impressed. She was a good, moral, churchgoing person, and she simply refused to lie.
While we waited for the divorce to become final, we sometimes hung out together, mostly for the sake of the kids, and it was fairly pleasant. There was absolutely no animosity at that point. Some couples get angry and stay angry, and some just feel sad, and we were definitely closer to the latter type. I think, like many people, both of us wished it had worked out. I had always imagined growing old with Nicole, and watching our kids grow up and have kids of their own, but that wasn’t in the cards. So I dealt with it—we both did—and tried to get on with this business of living.
My oldest daughter, Arnelle, was in college at the time, and one day she asked me how come I wasn’t angry with Nicole. “When she calls, you talk to her. When she asks you for advice, you give it. And when she just needs you to listen to her, you listen. I don’t get it. I thought the divorce was her idea.”
“What’s there to get?” I said. “The marriage ended. We both got us to this place. What sense would it make to be angry with her? When you’re angry, you’re only hurting yourself. Life is too short to be carrying grudges. You gotta move on.”
And that’s what we did, Nicole and I—we moved on. I didn’t ask about her boyfriends, and she didn’t ask about Paula, and whenever we were together we were focused on the kids. The idea was to make them feel safe, to let them know that we were there for them, and that—the divorce notwithstanding—we loved them more than ever.
As it turned out, these little family gatherings began to affect Nicole, too. Before long, she was calling me again, at all hours of the day and night, to tell me how sad and confused she was, and to reminisce about our many years together. I guess that’s normal—part of the grieving process or something—but it was beginning to affect my relationship with Paula, and I decided I needed to put an end to it. Now, when the phone rang, I always checked to see who was calling, and whenever it was Nicole I tended not to answer.
One day she kept calling and calling, and I wondered if something was wrong, but I knew Cathy would be picking up the kids later, and dropping them off, and if anything was wrong I’d hear it from her. But about an hour before the kids were due over, they showed up—with Nicole, not Cathy. I hugged and kissed the kids, and they ran past me, into the house, heading for the pool.
“What’s up?” I asked Nicole.
“Nothing,” she said.
I could see that something was on her mind, but I didn’t pry. If she had something to tell me, she’d tell me in due course.
A few days later, when I was in New York, she called. “I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m pregnant.”
That kind of threw me a little. “With the guy you’re so crazy about?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Someone else.”
“So you’re not crazy about that other guy anymore?”
“That ended a long time ago.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
“I guess I’m going to have an abortion,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that, either. Was I supposed to give her my blessing or something? “I’m sure you’ll do what you think is best,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “For listening, I guess.”
One night, not long after, I was busy in my home office, working, and I could see Nicole was trying to reach me. She called my cell, my home phone, the cell again. I finally picked up, angry. “What?” I barked.
“I want to read you something,” she said.
“I don’t have time for this, Nicole.”
“It’s from my will.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“This is in my will, word for word,” she said, and she quoted directly from the document: “‘O.J., please remember me from early in our relationship, before I became so unhappy and so bitchy. Remember how much I truly love and adore you.’”
“That’s very nice,” I said.
“Don’t forget,” she said. “I mean it.”
“I won’t forget,” I said.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
In October of that year, 1992, the divorce became final. Everything had gone pretty smoothly. Finances, custody, visitation—all that stuff that divorced parents are only too familiar with. As part of the custody arrangement, we agreed to spend the first Thanksgiving and Christmas with the kids, as a family, to give them a little more time to get used to the idea that we were no longer together. We figured we’d celebrate Thanksgiving in New York, at my Manhattan apartment, and Christmas in L.A., and Nicole and I discussed every little detail—down to where I was going to get the turkey, what side dishes the kids liked best, and how many pies she thought we would need. Two days before Thanksgiving, with all the travel arrangements in place, she called to tell me that she wasn’t bringing the kids to New York.
“What do you mean?” I snapped. “I changed my whole work schedule for this! The network rearranged things so I wouldn’t have to go to Detroit so that I could spend Thanksgiving with my kids!”
“Well, we’re not coming,” she repeated.
“Why? You’ve got to give me a reason!”
“I can’t,” she said. “Just, you know—the trip’s off.”
I couldn’t believe it. This was the same woman who would call me two and three times a day, to walk down memory lane, to talk about feeling sad and lost, and here she was, telling me she wasn’t letting me see my kids over Thanksgiving—and not even bothering to explain herself.
“We decided this in court!” I shouted. “In front of the judge! You can’t change the deal on me!”
“I don’t like it when you raise your voice to me,” she said, and hung up.
I was furious. I called my lawyer and he called her lawyer, but by then it was too late. I didn’t get to spend Thanksgiving with my kids, and I ended up going to Detroit for the network, as originally planned, which made them happy. Still, I decided I was never going to let anything like that happen to me again, and after Thanksgiving my lawyers called her lawyers and read them the riot act. They agreed to let me have my kids over Christmas, alone, just me and them, and I was immensely relieved and immensely excited. I went shopping for presents, got tickets for shows, and arranged to do all sorts of fun stuff with the kids. It was going to be a nonstop party. I was going to make it a Christmas they’d never forget!
I called my oldest daughter, Arnelle, and asked her to fly the kids to New York, and I booked the three of them on a flight for December 21.
I was excited, but I was still wary—still pissed at Nicole for pulling that little Thanksgiving stunt. Later, I found out that she’d had a fight with yet another guy—the guy that got her pregnant, I think—and that she had been feeling needy and fragile and had wanted the kids to herself. I wondered if she was going to keep her shit together over Christmas, or whether she was going to try to mess up those plans, too. And I wondered whether I was going to get drawn into Nicole’s bullshit and drama for the rest of my life. It didn’t seem right. I’d always been there for her when she needed me, during the marriage and long after, and I suspected that her inability to get her life in order was going to create endless problems for me and the kids. I didn’t like it.
On December 21, I went to the airport to pick up Arnelle and the kids. We were over the moon with happiness. We spent the next day running around town, shopping and eating and having fun and visiting with friends. I thought to myself, Being a single dad ain’t half bad!
Then the next day, December 23, I got a call from Nicole. She was crying so hard I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but she finally pulled herself together and told me that she desperately wanted to come to New York. “I can’t be away from the kids,” she said. “I miss them too much. Please, O.J. Let me come. I want to be with my kids. I don’t want to be alone.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I was pissed at Nicole, but I’ve never been much good at holding grudges. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll have a ticket for you at the airport.”
“Really?”
I guess she couldn’t believe it was going to be that easy. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure the kids would love to have you here.”
“Thanks, O.J. I mean it.”
“There’s one catch,” I said. “You can’t sleep in the apartment with us. Paula wouldn’t like it. I’ll get you a hotel.”
She didn’t complain, she didn’t say a word, in fact, because she knew this didn’t concern her in the least. Paula and I had been dating for several months now, and we were very happy together, and I wasn’t going to do anything that might jeopardize the relationship. Of course, Nicole didn’t know that Paula wasn’t actually going to be there over the holiday—she was spending Christmas in Florida, with her parents—but that didn’t make any difference to me. If I let Nicole sleep in the apartment, it would have been disrespectful to Paula, and that wasn’t going to happen. Unfortunately, I had to call Paula to tell her what was going on, and I kind of dreaded it. Paula had taken the time and trouble to fix Christmas dinner for me and the kids before getting on her plane to Florida, and this is how I was going to repay her—by spending Christmas with my ex-wife?
“Paula, it’s me, O.J. How are things in Florida?”
“Great. How are you? You sound funny?”
“I’m fine.”
“How are the kids?”
“They’re great,” I said. “But I sort of wanted to talk to you about Nicole.”
“Nicole?”
“Yeah. She decided she wanted to be with the kids for Christmas. She’s flying in tomorrow.”
Paula got mad, and things went downhill from there. She hung up on me, and when I called back she wouldn’t answer. I called back obsessively, and for a few hours I imagined how Nicole must have felt when she was trying to get hold of me and not succeeding. I left messages—“I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about it. She’s the mother of my kids”—but Paula didn’t return my calls.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Nicole joined me and the kids in New York and we had a very nice time together. We went to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas pageant, ran around the city like tourists, and on Christmas morning we opened all the presents Santa had left.
That afternoon, the weather was nice, so Nicole and I took the kids for a long walk in Central Park. When we got back, we ate leftovers and put them to bed. Afterwards, Nicole and I packed their bags, for the flight home the next day, and when we were done Nicole poured herself a glass of wine and came into the living room. “Thanks for letting me come,” she said. She looked real sad.
“The kids had fun,” I said.
“Did you?”
“Sure,” I said, trying not to look at her. I didn’t know where she was taking the conversation, but I knew I didn’t like it.
“What happened to us?” she asked, and she began to cry. “We were so happy together.”
“Us?” I said. “What do you mean us? You left me.”
“I’m such a mess,” she said, still crying.
“Look,” I said, cutting her off. “We had a few great days. Let’s not blow it. I have to go to work tomorrow, and I’ve got notes to review, and the limo’s coming at eleven to take you and the kids to the airport.”
She finished her wine and left for the hotel, thanking me again, and I went to review my notes for the next day.
At that point, to be honest with you, I really didn’t want to hear any more of her shit. Paula was still mad at me—it had taken three days of calling before she even spoke to me—and I was in no mood to listen to Nicole. We’d had some great times together, sure, but the last two years had been torture. Nicole had been erratic, moody, and worse, and it didn’t look like she was getting any better. I had vowed to keep her at arm’s length, and I’d failed, but that Christmas I decided that things were going to change. I was only going to communicate with her if it was about the kids. I didn’t want to hear about her personal life. It was her life. She had chosen it. She had made that bed, and she needed to start getting used to it.
For the next three months, I hardly talked to her. She called once to tell me that she had decided to get into therapy, and that she was very happy with the shrink she was seeing. This wasn’t one of those high-priced, Beverly Hills, you’re-a-beautiful-person shrinks, she said—this was the real deal.
“I’m beginning to see that I messed up a lot of things for us,” she said. “I’m sorry I blamed you for everything.”
“We both fucked up,” I said, trying to be generous. “I’m glad you’re getting help.”
Of course, years later, when I was fighting her family for custody of the kids, my lawyers got hold of some of the therapy notes from her many sessions, and the picture that emerged was a little different. One thing that really pissed me off, and that they tried to use against me, was about the kids, of course. She told her shrink that after that Christmas visit I hadn’t called the house in weeks, and she wondered if I even cared how the kids felt about that. It was total bullshit. I had called, but I called when Nicole wasn’t around, for obvious reasons. On several occasions, in fact, I spoke to Nicole’s mother, Juditha, and she put the kids on the line, and I talked to them at length—and my lawyers have the records to prove it. The lawyers also explained, in court, that I had been deliberately avoiding Nicole, whose constant phone calls were beginning to affect my relationship with Paula Barbieri. I had told her, repeatedly, that I didn’t want to talk to her unless it was about the kids, and then only if it was an emergency, and I had even made arrangements to have my assistant, Cathy Randa, shuttle them to and from our homes—all because I wanted to avoid further drama.
It worked, too. We went several weeks without a single argument. In fact, the only argument we had during this entire period related to the kids’ vacation schedule. I had wanted to take them away for a week in February, and I’d booked a trip in advance, but at the last minute the school told me that it wouldn’t be a good time to take them out of class, and they asked me to reconsider. When I called Nicole to try to change the date, telling her I needed to push it back a week, she wouldn’t budge. “It’s got to be that week or nothing!” she barked. I told her to kiss my ass and hung up.
Later, I found out that she had split with yet another boyfriend, and that she’d been talking to Marcus Allen about it, in great detail, hoping that Marcus would share those details with me. Marcus wasn’t sharing anything with me, however, so I was completely in the dark. The other thing she was telling Marcus was that she was missing me, and that she wondered if he thought there was a chance we might get back together. I didn’t know about that either, because Marcus wasn’t talking, but I never imagined that she was still pining for me. I thought that it was all in the distant past—it was for me, anyway—and I was struck by the way the tables had turned. Nicole was the one who had wanted out of the marriage, and I had tried mightily to save it. When it became clear that the marriage was over, however, I found the strength to move on, but Nicole seemed to be having second thoughts about her decision. Now, these many months later, she had apparently come full circle. I didn’t know it, of course, but she was looking for a way back.
Late in February, clearly frustrated by my lack of interest in communicating with her, Nicole found another way to reach me: Every time the kids came over, they showed up with home-baked cakes or cookies. “Mom made these for you. They’re yummy.” I told them to thank their mother, but I opted not to thank her myself. I just didn’t want to talk to her. I was done. I had a new woman in my life.
One day, the kids showed up with a CD. “Mom made this for you on her computer,” they said. I listened to it and found that every last song was a love song. I was flattered, I guess, and maybe even a little moved, but that didn’t change anything. Nicole and I were finished. “Thank your mom for me,” I told the kids. But, again, I didn’t bother thanking her myself. I didn’t want to get into it, because I wasn’t going back. And yes, I know this goes against the popular conception—that I was still madly in love with Nicole, and pining to get her back—but it’s God’s own truth.
One afternoon, I was packing for a trip to Cabo San Lucas, and waiting for my kids to show up. They were going to have dinner at my place, and spend the night, and I was going to drop them back at Nicole’s in the morning, on my way to the airport. When I was done packing, I nodded off on the couch, and the phone rang a short time later, waking me. I answered it without checking the caller I.D., and it turned out to be Nicole. “I want to talk,” she said.
“I don’t want to talk,” I said. “It’s always a huge hassle. We’re not together anymore. I can’t be listening to your problems all the time.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” she said. “But there’s something I need to say to you.”
“Okay,” I said. “What?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone. I need to tell you this in person.”
“I can’t talk right now,” I said. “I have another call coming in.” This was a lie, but I wanted to get her off the phone.
“Will you call me back?”
“Sure,” I said, but that was a lie, too, and I didn’t call her back.
An hour later, my kids showed up at the house, and they had a package for me. I opened the package, which was from Nicole. I found our wedding tape inside, along with a letter. In the letter, which I didn’t read till later, Nicole told me that she was learning a great deal about herself in therapy, and that she had come to realize that she was responsible for most of the problems in our marriage. She also said that she still loved me, that she had never stopped loving me, and that she wanted me to know that she believed we’d had a truly great relationship. I had always thought we had a great relationship, so this wasn’t exactly a revelation, and as I read between the lines—or not even between the lines, really—it was pretty clear that she was looking for us to reconcile.
I went out to join the kids, and I was surprised to catch sight of Nicole, standing on the far side of the gate, looking toward the house. I didn’t know she had dropped the kids off—Cathy Randa was in charge of that—but there she was, staring at me, and it didn’t seem right to ignore her. I went over to talk to her.
“So what are you doing here?” I said. “What’s with the wedding tape and stuff?”
“I thought you were going to call me back,” she said, avoiding the question.
“I fell asleep on the couch.”
“Well, like I said on the phone, I have something to tell you.”
I was trapped. I sighed a big sigh and said, “Let’s take a walk.”
We took a little walk around the neighborhood, the same walk we had taken hundreds of times before. It’s a nice neighborhood, quiet and peaceful, and we used to love to wander up and down the streets, looking at the houses, chatting with the neighbors. This time we weren’t doing much looking or chatting, though—this time she just wanted to talk, and what she wanted to talk about—no surprise—was us getting back together. She repeated she had come a long way in therapy, and that she was sorry about everything, and she was wondering if I could find it in my heart to forgive her. “I’ve always loved you,” she said. “I’ve never stopped loving you. And I’ve never told you I didn’t love you.”
“That’s not entirely accurate,” I said. “You always told me you loved me, but you said you weren’t in love with me.”
“Well, I was wrong. I’m still in love with you.”
“How can you be back in love with me?” I said. “We barely speak anymore, and I’ve hardly seen you in months.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’ve been dealing with all the stuff I was supposed to deal with, and everything’s a little clearer now. I really feel we could make it work.”
I couldn’t believe this, even though I’d seen it coming. “You’re telling me you want to get back together?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think that’s in the cards,” I said. “I think it might be good for the kids if we tried to have a friendly dinner from time to time, but that’s about it.”
“You don’t have to make your mind up right away,” she said. “All I’m doing is putting it out there. All I’m asking is that you think about it.”
“I don’t understand you,” I said. “I’m the same guy you left. I’m the same O.J. I haven’t changed a bit.”
“Well, I don’t want you to change,” she said. “You’re fine the way you are. I’m telling you I’ve changed.”
I thought that was messed up. She was the mother of my children, and part of me still loved her, but I was pretty sure we didn’t have a future together. Still, I wanted to let her down easy, so I urged her to focus on the kids. They had always enjoyed spending time with both of us, together, and that had been the original plan when we first separated—to try to keep the kids happy by showing them that we were still a close, loving family—and I thought we could work on that. “I know the kids would love it if we had dinner as a family now and then,” I said.
“I agree,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
When we got back to the house, she asked if she could come in. To be honest, I didn’t want her to, but it seemed odd to keep her out, what with the talk we’d just had, and with the kids there, watching us standing by the front gate, so I let her in. We got the kids fed and I took them upstairs and put them to bed, and Nicole was still there when I came back down.
“I see you got pictures of Paula all over the house,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “In case you hadn’t heard, we’re dating.”
She smiled, trying to hide the hurt, and sat on the couch across from me. I didn’t know what she was still doing there, and I was about ten seconds away from getting rude. “Thank you for letting me hang out,” she said. “I just didn’t feel like being alone.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “But I’m tired, and I’ve got a plane to catch tomorrow, and I’m going to bed.”
“Okay,” she said, but she looked disappointed. I walked her to the door and watched her cross to her car. She looked good. She looked as good as she had when I first met her. I thought, It’s amazing the way people can whip themselves into shape when they put their mind to it.
When I went back inside, I opened the letter and read it. In her letter, Nicole went on at length about the issues we had just talked about—that it was her fault the relationship had fallen apart, and that she had learned through counseling to “turn negatives into positives” and “to get rid of” her anger:
I always knew that what was going on with us was about me—I just wasn’t sure why it was about me—so I just blamed you. I’m the one who was controlling. I wanted you to be faithful and be a perfect father. I was not accepting to who you are. Because I didn’t like myself anymore.
She told me that after New Year’s Eve she sank into a depression and blamed it on what I had called “that 30’s thing.” She said that she had given up on treating me as if she loved me, but she said:
I never stopped loving you—I stopped liking myself and lost total confidence in any relationship with you.
And she made her goal clear: to have her and the kids move back in with me.
I want to put our family back together! I want our kids to grow up with their parents. I thought I’d be happy raising Sydney & Justin by myself—since we didn’t see too much of you anyway. But now, I …
I want to be with you! I want to love you and cherish you, and make you smile. I want to wake up with you in the mornings and hold you at night. I want to hug and kiss you everyday. I want us to be the way we used to be. There was no couple like us.
I don’t know what I went through … I didn’t believe you loved me anymore—and I couldn’t handle it. But for the past month I’ve been looking at our wedding tape and our family movies—and I can see that we truly loved each other. A love I’ve never seen in any of our friends. Please look at the 2 tapes I’m sending over with this letter. Watch them alone & with your phone turned off—they’re really fun to watch.
She ended her letter with the following:
O.J. You’ll be my one and only “true love.” I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you and I’m sorry we let it die. Please let us be a family again, and let me love you—better than I ever have before.
I’ll love you forever and always …
Me.
At the bottom, she had drawn a smiley face.
I went to bed and reread the letter, and I had trouble falling asleep that night.
In the morning, I woke the kids, got them fed, and dropped them at Nicole’s on my way to the airport. I didn’t bother going in. I didn’t want to see Nicole. The previous day had stirred up a lot of feelings, and I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
On the flight to Mexico, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation, and about the letter. I still had feelings for her, and she was playing to those feelings, and it bothered me. Nicole was the one who had wanted out of the marriage. Why was she coming back now and making things so hard on me?
When I got to Cabo, I stopped thinking about her. A car picked me up and took me to La Palmilla, which was one of the few fancy hotels there—back in those days, anyway—and I unpacked and went off to take care of business. I was meeting with a group of guys who were going to be putting up several hotels and a golf course in Cabo, and they were hoping I’d be able to attract a few high-profile investors. We looked over the plans, talked business, then went off for drinks and dinner.
The next morning, I got a call from L.A. One of my friends, Billy Kehoe, had died unexpectedly, and I was forced to take an early flight back to L.A. I went straight from the airport to a funeral home in Santa Monica, for the wake. The actual funeral was scheduled for the next day, but I wasn’t going to make it: I had already made plans to take the kids to Las Vegas the following morning, where we were going to meet up with Paula, and they were so excited that I didn’t have the heart to let them down.
Anyway, I got to the funeral home and hung around for a bit, and the first person I ran into was Nicole. She came over and said hi and gave me a little kiss, and she told me she had left the kids at my house. She had been unable to find Kato, she said, and she knew I was taking the kids to Vegas the following day, so it seemed like a good solution.
“How was Cabo?” she asked.
“It was fine. I might build a little house there.”
Then we saw Billy’s wife and family and went over to express our condolences. Our friendship went all the way back to when Nicole and I were first married, and we talked about the old days, and I could see that stirred up a lot of feelings for Nicole.
When things broke up, Nicole and I found ourselves out in the parking lot, alone. “I’m hungry,” I said. “You want to get a bite to eat?”
“Sure,” she said.
We went to a little restaurant in Santa Monica, and for some reason Nicole started talking about Marcus Allen and his fiancée, Kathryn, who were about to get married, and who had asked me to host the wedding at my place, on Rockingham. I told Nicole, “It’s funny. Kathryn reminds me a little of you when you were preparing for our wedding. She’s over at the house almost every day, running around and worrying about every little detail, from the table settings to the flowers to the music. She wants to make sure that everything turns out just right.”
Nicole got a sad look in her eyes, and said, “She’s a nice girl, that Kathryn.”
“She’s more than nice,” I said. “I know you don’t know her all that well, but she’s been in your corner from the start. When you moved out, and she saw how upset I was, she told me you’d be coming back. ‘O.J.,’ she said. ‘Nicole has been with you since she was eighteen years old. She needs to do this—she needs to find herself—but she’ll be back.’”
“That’s the same thing I told you,” Nicole said. “But when I told you, you didn’t believe me.”
“About coming back? You never said anything about coming back?”
“No—about finding myself,” she said. “I didn’t know who I was.”
“And you know who you are now?”
“I’m getting closer,” she said.
“Well, anyway, let’s not go there,” I said. “All I was trying to tell you is that you’ve got a good friend and a big fan in Kathryn.”
Suddenly Nicole was crying and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why that would upset her. These big old tears were pouring down her cheeks, and people at the neighboring tables were taking notice. “What’s wrong?” I said, whispering. “I wasn’t trying to upset you.”
“That’s not it,” she said.
“Marcus is not your friend,” she said.
“What do you mean ‘Marcus is not your friend.’ What is that supposed to mean?”
She looked at me like she really wanted to say something that she couldn’t bring herself to say, and then it hit me. “Did something happen between you and Marcus?” I asked.
She put her head down on the table and started crying louder. I felt like the whole restaurant was looking at us, so I turned and signaled for the check. When I turned back to look at Nicole, she was lifting her head off the table, sniffling, and using the napkin to dry her tears. She looked at me, all pitiful.
“What?” I said.
“Something did happen with Marcus.”
Man, I’ll tell you, another guy would have probably lost it, but I didn’t lose it. I just shook my head, kind of stunned, and the bill came and I paid it and we went outside. I hadn’t said a word to her the whole time. I was still trying to process what she’d just told me.
“What?” she said, like she was scared of me or something. “You’re not going to talk to me now?”
“I’ll talk to you when I can think of something to say.”
I drove her back to the funeral home, because her car was still in the parking lot, and I didn’t say a word to her the entire time. But when we got there, not ten minutes later, I cut the engine and unloaded on her. “Why did you tell me this shit about you and Marcus?” I said. “I didn’t need to know this.”
“I just thought you should know,” she said, stammering. “He pretends to be your friend, and then he fools around with me. And I don’t think it’s right that he knows about something that happened between us and you don’t.”
“Hey, we’re not married anymore, remember? You’re single and he’s single. The only thing I don’t get is why you did it. You’re always bitching about people cheating and fucking around on each other, and here you are getting it on with a guy who’s about to get married.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “He was so nice to me, and he always listened, and it just sort of happened.”
“That shit doesn’t just happen,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget it. You don’t owe me an apology. You don’t owe me anything. But I still can’t understand why you told me. Or what all you expect me to do. It’s not like I’m going to cancel their wedding or something.”
“No, of course not.”
“You know what I’m going to do?” I said. “I’m not going to do anything. This has nothing to do with me.”
“Don’t get mad, O.J.”
“I’m not mad. I’m just telling you: We’re not married anymore, Nicole, and the reason we’re not married is because you didn’t want to be married.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” I said. “I’m just telling you how it is.”
“So what am I supposed to do about Marcus?”
“See—there you go again! You’re asking me what to do. Can’t you figure it out for yourself? Isn’t that what you wanted? To get out from under my shadow? To go off and be on your own and have your own friends and be your own person?”
She was crying again. “But he keeps calling me.”
“So tell him you’re going to tell Kathryn.”
“You think I should?”
“I bet that would stop him pretty quick.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
I took a deep breath. “You know, Nicole, this right here is why I’ve been avoiding you. Every time we talk, something comes up. You’ve got a problem with this or a problem with that, and you put everything on me. ‘Help me, O.J.! Fix this for me, O.J.!’ Well, I can’t be doing that all the time. You asked me to move on, you wanted to break us up, and you got it. We’re broken up and I’ve moved on. Or I’m trying to, anyway.”
She was crying again. “I’m a mess, O.J.”
“You’re not a mess.”
“Can I come to your house to see the kids?”
“Nicole, come on. They’re asleep.”
“I want to see them.”
“No,” I said, but I said it nice. “I’m taking them to Vegas in the morning. You’ll see them Sunday.”
“Okay,” she said, wiping her tears.
She got out of the car and I waited until she was in her own car, then I drove home. The kids were still up, past their regular bedtime, and I got them to brush their teeth and tucked them in. Just as they were falling asleep, someone buzzed my front gate. I went downstairs. It was Nicole.
“What’s up?” I said.
“I don’t feel like being alone,” she said. “I miss the kids.”
“They’re asleep, Nicole. And I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
“Can I just stay here for a little? Please?”
If you want to know the truth, I felt bad for her. Even with all the therapy and all of these new insights and stuff, it was obvious she was still having trouble getting it together. We went upstairs. The kids were fast asleep. I stripped to my underwear and got into my side of the bed, careful not to wake them. Nicole lay down on the far side of the kids, saying she wouldn’t stay long.
I guess I must have nodded off, because the next thing I knew she was standing on my side of the bed, tugging at my arm. A moment later I found myself following her into the bedroom next door, and a moment after that we were making love. It was the first time we’d been together since the split, and I was feeling all sorts of feelings I would have preferred not to feel.
Needless to say, it was all very confusing.