I was afraid of my wife. It wasn't something that a man in my business, a guy in any business—or any man—should admit. I knew that Emily was trouble. It was part of her appeal. What do you do when on the third date a woman invites you to watch Peeping Tom? What are you to think when after five years of marriage she has never once let you meet her mother? When you've never seen one picture of her when she was little, when she refuses to tell you one thing about her childhood except that her mother drank and used to say she was stupid?
You give in; you give up. You surrender something. You lose your power, and you don't get it back. Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba. The Bible is full of such stories. What they don't say in the Bible is that the sex was great.
I fell in love with Emily and married her without knowing much about her. I had my illusions about who she was. She'd cried in front of the crowd at the Dennis Nylon benefit. It was hard to believe that the person who wept at the thought of women without clean water was the same person who stole my mother's ring. Much later, Emily confessed that she hadn't been crying for the poor women but because she'd had to deal with so many disasters at the charity gala and was facing another of Dennis's inevitable shit fits. The beautiful woman who'd wept out of sympathy and compassion—that woman never existed.
I should have left her as soon as the plane from the UK landed. It was so early in the marriage; we were returning from our honeymoon. We could have had the marriage annulled. I should have acted on what I saw when I told her we'd have to give the ring back to Mum and Emily threatened to ruin my life. I should have told her I'd made a mistake. Instead we had sex in the airplane bathroom—and that sealed the deal. I was hers. I loved her. I loved her wildness, her determination, her rebellious streak. It was part of what fascinated me, what I didn't want to lose.
She would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. And I suppose I was addicted to the uneasy feeling I got whenever I gave in and agreed to do what she said.
When we learned that she was pregnant, I was delighted. But I couldn't shake the superstitious fear that there might be something wrong—if not physically, then psychologically—with a baby conceived in the Virgin Atlantic upper-class loo.
Nicky was perfect. But Emily almost died having him. I don't know if she even knew that. The doctors didn't say as much, not directly. But I could tell from the looks on their faces when they came into the room where she was in labor, the room that was decorated like a comfy living room as if that would lessen her pain.
Something changed in her after that. She adored Nicky, but she grew more distant from me. It was as if she'd fallen in love with her child and fallen out of love (if she ever was in love) with her husband. I'd heard the guys at work complain about something similar; mostly they were grumbling about the lack of sex after their kids were born. But with Emily it was different. We still had sex, good sex. The missing element was something else: warmth, affection, respect.
I was always a little surprised to come home from work and find her still there. Maybe she only stayed with me because I was Nicky's father. Not that I seemed to have had much genetic input. He looked like her; he had Emily's beauty. But he did resemble me in one way: he was nicer than Emily, more like me. I loved him. The three of us were a family, a little family. I would have done anything to protect us, to make our lives better. Anything Emily wanted.
I told myself that I liked the fact that she wasn't one of those women who blather on about their feelings and want to know all about yours. She let me have my private thoughts. But something about Emily was . . . too private, I'd say. Even on the really good days, when I wasn't working and Emily and Nicky and I would be going to some fun place in the car, enjoying ourselves, I'd glance at her, and I'd see something in her eyes, something restless, something worse than restless: the panic of a bird trapped in a house. Which is not exactly the look you most want to see on your wife's face.
