“There’s nothing going on,” he insisted. “Why would you even think that?”
“I know that handshake. I remember it from when I was eighteen years old and Carmen Electra was standing there next to me, thinking she was the only woman you’d ever love.”
When I got the handshake in front of Carmen, he and I weren’t intimate yet, but we both knew it was going to happen. With Manuela, I could feel the “coming attraction” energy like the moment the lights go down in a theater before the main act comes onstage. He hadn’t been intimate with her yet, or so I’ve been told, but the overture was playing. And this time, he was a married man. In my mind—and in his, I know—this made a huge difference.
The hailstorm of harsh words—jealousy, betrayal, denial, indignation—it was all sickeningly familiar. I’d listened to my parents have this same fight a thousand times, and so had my husband. We were just keeping up the family tradition, it seemed. He was terribly offended, denied everything, and sent me home to Minnesota. And I didn’t cry all the way home. I never saw this as a deal breaker. My husband was a complicated man. I knew what I was signing up for, and along with the tradition of waging war on each other, my parents routinely strayed, then got past it and stayed together. They had children. They made a life. Their complicated marriage lasted decades, because even when they couldn’t stand to look at each other, they still loved each other.
I told myself I just needed to be with him. I had to prove my strength as a performer and a wife and a friend and a partner who brought to the table something meaningful of my own. I thought that if I performed with him again, it would bring back that energy we had.
One night he wanted me to go to a basketball game with him, but I was feeling so wrung out and depleted, I just couldn’t. Somehow my “no thanks” turned into a giant blowout—the first and only time in all our years together that he looked me in the eye and said, “Fuck you.”
“What?” I was instantly at code orange. “What did you say to me?”
“You know how many people want to go to this basketball game with me? How many women exhaust themselves trying to get my attention?”
“Oh, I know,” I promised him. “Believe me, I know.”
Larry and Tina were now living in our guesthouse. They were touring together, working on an album. I had a hard time understanding what the business arrangement was between him and Larry. I sat through a lot of blather about how contracts are hostile, but Mama had brought me up to know that “good fences make good neighbors,” so the idea of working that way made little sense to me.
I kept reminding my husband of our decision to go somewhere far away from all this. He suggested we could open an orphanage in Spain, but I had no idea how such a thing would be accomplished. I still don’t. I tried to talk to him about adopting a baby, but he stuck to the company line about God’s will and the superior wisdom of nature. But what’s more natural than loving a child?
Manuela was now diligently studying with the group, he told me, and she always looked so comfortable in jeans and boots, her hair naturally wavy.
“You should stop straightening your hair,” said my husband. “Keep it natural.”
I was starting to feel desperate. I just wanted to get him to Marbella so we could start over. I went to Spain to buy the house, and the money for the down payment wasn’t there. I panicked, and thinking about the Cherokee purchase, I said, “Do you take American Express?” They didn’t. After two anxious days, the money appeared. I bought the house and started the complicated process of moving us over there.
I made frequent trips home, not wanting to leave him with Manuela too long. If I’m to be totally honest, I have to accept that I’d left him alone too much already. I wondered if I could have tried harder to understand what he’d been through. I thought about the many days and nights I spent locked inside my own pain, not knowing or particularly caring where he was, other than to note that he wasn’t there for me. Trying to shake off the fog of depression, I’d spent time with Jan in New York. I’d taken refuge at Mama’s house in Miami. I went to Hawaii alone. When we were in bed together, if I was able to come home or he’d let me meet up with him on tour, I spooned up to him, wanting to be close, but I could feel the silence, and the coolness, and the tension growing.