The First Husband

“Will you slow down, please? Annie, come on . . .” Griffin said, putting his hand on my arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“That was not what she looked like,” he said.

That stopped me. “What it looked like,” I said. “It. That’s what you meant to say.”

“What did I say?”

“You said she.”

I wasn’t sure how to explain why that felt worse. Maybe because even when it wasn’t supposed to be about other people for us, it was starting to feel like it was becoming that.

“Annie, please just listen to me for a second. I see where you are going, but I need you to listen to me. Gia had an argument with her boyfriend,” Griffin said. “She wanted to talk to me, get some guidance. That’s all.”

“She wanted to get some guidance from you?” I said. “About her new boyfriend?”

He nodded. “He’s not behaving all that well.”

He’s not the only one, I wanted to add.

“Griffin, do you really think you’re the best person for her to be confiding in about that?”

“I know it sounds silly,” Griffin said. “But it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for us to be talking to each other. A good thing for all of us. Putting the past in the past, you know that?”

I shook my head because I didn’t know that. What I did know was that everything was blurring together in my mind, past lives and present ones: Gia and Nick and Griffin and me, Jesse and Cheryl and Jude. “Checking Out” and photography and “Checking Out” again. There was supposed to be a boundary parting them: the past, the present, the time I didn’t understand what I needed for myself, the time I did. The time I felt like I had to keep escaping, the time I wanted to stay still.

“Will you come back inside?” Griffin said. “It’s freezing out here.” He had his arms wrapped around himself, proving the point.

I was still too stung. But I let him know in spite of that, and maybe a little because of it, what I had done.

“I sent an e-mail out for you this morning,” I said. “I sent an e-mail out to all my former colleagues at the paper. All the food critics I know, the style editors, the arts columnists, everyone, letting them know about the restaurant’s soft opening. Inviting them to come then, or anytime in the next few months. As our guests. I thought you’d want to know that.”

“I do,” he said. “Thank you.”

Then I started walking, the right way this time.

Griffin called after me. “Where are you going?”

But I couldn’t say the words. Only he seemed to understand part of what I wasn’t saying, because he moved closer to me.

“You’re my choice, Annie. You have been since day one.” He paused. “Even if you pretend not to, I know you know that. And I know I’m your choice too.”

I shook my head, refusing to let it be that simple. “You keep saying the past is the past,” I said. “But it doesn’t feel past to me when it is immeasurably locked into the present. Then it’s something else.”

“What’s that?” he said, his voice tensing up. “An excuse to walk away?”

“At the very least,” I said, even as I knew it wasn’t helping anything, “it’s a reason to end this conversation.”

That night, when Griffin came home, I pretended to be asleep. I lay there, perfectly still, while he moved around the bedroom, getting undressed and washing up, moving beneat

h the covers, settling in himself.

He put his arm over his eyes, not saying anything. Not to me.

And I remembered the first night we spent together—or, rather, the morning after. How I had tried to pretend I was sleeping then too. How he hadn’t bought it. And how he’d gone ahead and done it: the one thing I most needed him to do. He moved toward me.

Maybe that made it my turn, this time.