My One and Only(49)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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