Finally, he did come to Spain, but he had the whole entourage with him, and I noticed Manuela was wearing a gold chain with his symbol encrusted in diamonds. Not exactly the kind of thing you get from the merch table at a concert. He didn’t even bother trying to explain to me why it was important for an administrative person from the charity to be at every concert, including this appearance on my own stomping ground. Conveniently, the extramarital relationship didn’t conflict with the “study” crew dogma, I guess.
We went back to Europe, and on a chartered flight she sat directly behind us. I sat there feeling sick to my stomach. Onstage in Marbella, we performed “The One,” and I wondered, What kind of woman could watch a man she cared about onstage with his wife, professing their love like that? Did that bother her at all? Later on she told me that they weren’t physical until sometime after that, and I thought, Yeah, whatever. The timing doesn’t seem all that important to me.
Several times while I was in Spain overseeing the renovations on the house, I got phone calls from people saying, “Hey, I saw you and Prince in New York at such and such a restaurant. I didn’t come and say hi because I saw you guys walking into the private room.” I stood there shaking, left with two options: humiliate myself by saying it wasn’t me or pretend it was me and be humiliated later when they heard it through the grapevine.
My husband never went anywhere without the little black bag stuffed with the cash he’d give people when he sent them off to get things. With the growing distance between us, I was no longer certain what people were fetching for him, and that scared me. He asked me to meet him in LA one night, and as soon as I saw him in the hotel room, I could see there was something seriously wrong. He was still in bed, horribly sick to his stomach and on the verge of weeping. He gripped my hand and asked me not to go away again.
“Not without you,” I said. “Do you think you can do this?”
“No.” He said he wanted to check out of the hotel and cancel the show.
“Okay. We can do that. We can go home.”
He got dressed, and we went to the tour bus. I helped him get in bed and stroked his face and tried to talk to him, but he was beside himself. He told me there were pills in the hotel room. He didn’t trust anyone else. He wanted me to go back up there and flush them down the toilet.
“Okay. Okay, I will.” I kissed his cheeks and rocked him in my arms. “And then you’re coming to Spain with me. We’re stopping. We’re resting. We’re going to figure out how to be a family.”
He told me to take over. He said whatever I thought we should do, he would do that. I ran up to the room and found the pills exactly where he’d told me they’d be. I sat next to the toilet and cried for what felt like eons. Sorrow surged through me—for our son, our pregnancy, the loss of connection to the love of my life. What would I do if I lost him? No answer came. I flushed the pills down the toilet, pulled myself together, and went downstairs. We stayed on the bus all night and went to the airport the next morning, but I flew back to Spain by myself.
“I just have to do these last two shows of the tour,” he said. “Then I’ll meet you there.”
Several weeks later, I was still waiting. It comforted me a little to see his clothes in the closet and his piano in the living room. Eventually, he did come for a few days, but then he left again. This became a dance we did. He’d say, “I’ll be back Monday. Just wait here for me.” A few weeks later, he’d pass through again. Between visits, he’d call me almost every day and talk and talk and talk about what the study group was studying. I was more than irked by the Manuela thing, but I figured that would pass. I’d seen my parents survive affairs and infidelities. It didn’t surprise or threaten me.
This religion thing was another story. He was hard core into it and had gotten it in his head that God was displeased with the life he had lived when he was younger, and Amiir’s death was part of the price he had to pay for that. He talked about David and Bathsheba and how David’s sin had cost him the thing dearest to him, his son Absalom.
This was a place I couldn’t go to. I could not go there with him, no matter how hard he tried to make me see that path.
“There was a time when you said our love was your salvation,” I reminded him, thinking of the seven versions of himself he kills off in “7”—and together we’ll love through all space and time. The man who once wrote to me, “U are my Jesus… Ur love is my salvation,” now saw those words as blasphemous and ugly. But now, if I expressed any disagreement with the teachings of the study crew—well, I’ll quote their own literature, Watchtower, October 1998:
Opposers try to hinder this work by mocking. Sometimes individuals interested in the Kingdom message give up because they cannot endure the ridicule… Jehovah’s people long for the time when God will triumph over all his enemies. This will start with the destruction of “Babylon the Great”—a figurative city that embraces all forms of false religion.
I had disobeyed my husband when it came to my health care decisions and refused to embrace the Gospel According to Graham. I was the enemy now, the opposer, who wanted to drag him back to the sinful ways of Babylon.