I missed my husband with all my heart, but I had hope, because this was also the man who wrote this to me:
… am married 2 my music. It never frowns at me. t’s the one thing know can depend on. My music has proven itself—time and time again. shouldn’t be asked to compromise… write what comes to me. U’ve seen the process. U know it comes easy 4 me.
Spirituality had always played a role in my husband’s music, and this new path was no different. There are moments where it seeps into the lyrics. But creating music was, for him, a spiritual experience. Never had a spiritual path come in such conflict with the sexual nature of his music, and I felt certain the music would win out in the end. He would never compromise that, and no one was going to oppose it, because that’s where the money was. I believed that if I just waited out the Manuela thing, if I stayed steadfast and faithful to our marriage vows, we’d return to that place where we were at the end of “The One”—bound together, on this plane of existence and all others.
During his brief visits to Marbella, we’d sit up at night and talk and talk and talk, but the long, soul-searching conversations we’d always enjoyed took a dark, baffling turn. I’d fall asleep trying to make sense of it and wake up to find he was gone again.
In October 1998, as he began the Newpower Soul Tour in Europe, my husband came to Marbella for a press conference at the Plaza de Toros. He looked weary but well enough. He held my hand as we walked in, but we started out with a measurable gap between our chairs. It started with the usual questions and answers. I answered some in Spanish, which everyone in the room loved. Someone asked about a rumor that we’d purchased a house in Marbella, and he was evasive.
“My residence is the world. I’m happy anywhere.”
Someone else asked how he balanced his professional and personal lives, and he said, “For the past twenty years, I consider work my personal life. Being married has taught me a lot about taking better care of time and realizing that recreation means recreation of self, so I think I may take a vacation soon.”
I smiled when I heard that. I felt a surge of hope when he moved closer to me, took my hand, and wove his fingers through mine.
There’s a tragic aria in Madame Butterfly. The soprano sings, “Un bel di…” as she looks out over the sea, waiting for her lover. One beautiful day. I looked out at the sea from my house in Spain with the same heart full of longing. And at some point in my waiting and longing and wondering, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten a lesson I learned my very first year at Paisley Park: The girl in Minneapolis is the girl on her way in. The girl who leaves Minneapolis is the girl on her way out.
I guess I shouldn’t have taken it so hard. Carmen Electra was replaced by a sixteen-year-old belly dancer. It took God Almighty to get me out of Minnesota.
??eleven
Here’s another Internet fiction alert for you: For almost twenty years, I’ve been reading that our marriage was “annulled” in 1998, but in fact, a legal marriage is not annulled just because an eccentric rock star says it in a press conference. That’s like you saying your marriage was annulled because you took off your ring before you hit on someone in a singles bar. That is not a thing.
This press conference—at which my husband and I were wearing our wedding rings—took place in Spain in mid-December 1998, while he was on the European leg of the Newpower Soul Tour. In the car on the way to the Santo Mauro Hotel, where the conference was being held, he enlightened me on his “revelation” about contracts. Everyone knew that he was against them when it came to record companies, but now he had been contemplating the contract we had signed when we were married, and he was against that, too.
This was baffling to me. He was the one who’d asked me to marry him when I had been perfectly happy with the way things were. He was the one who wanted the traditional vows and the half million dollars in flowers and the whole church wedding experience. But I already felt estranged and didn’t want that rift to grow, so I sat quiet and confused.