Nine Nails

By T Nicole Cirone

This is the story of the decline of a marriage and of a woman, stepping out of the ashes—not quite a Phoenix yet, but dusting off her wings from the fire of an anguished, codependent love. It is the story of betrayal, infidelity, illness, addiction and loss. It is also a story of hope and, most of all, of personal resilience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serving House Books
• Release date: May 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781947175129

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Credits

The Man I Married

Hey, he said, looking up at me through his aviator sunglasses. He was on one knee on the frozen pavement on Manayunk’s Main Street, in front of the park bench where we sat on our first date thirteen years before. Will you marry me?

He held out a black velvet box with two diamond rings side by side, brilliant in the winter sun. It was two days before Valentine’s Day, 2011. Ice sculptures from the annual festival dazzled all around us. Traffic was backed up from the old bridge all the way through the little artsy neighborhood of Philly, but it didn’t matter: for that one moment, we were alone.

Suddenly, it was no longer 2011; it was 1998, and we were 26 years old again and on our very first date together, people-watching on the bench after dinner at Sonoma, the wine bar across the street. We had talked and laughed all night together. I liked being with him—I liked his silliness, his giggle, the way he could open two car doors at once, our shared appreciation of 80s theme parties. I liked the way he would go out of his way to help people, to include everyone in conversations and plans. What I appreciated most of all was our friendship. On the weekends, it wasn’t a question of if, but where, we would meet up for happy hour. We would talk and laugh for hours on the phone, and it seemed we would never run out of things to say to each other. My cousin and I sat through every gig he and his very loud, quite terrible alternative rock band played at dive bars throughout the city—true, she and I were usually in the back of the bar drinking and rolling our eyes, but he knew we were there. He took me to my first open mic, the very first time I read my poetry in public, and he stood up and clapped the loudest of everyone at the bar after I was finished, even though I was nervous and my poetry self-consciously angsty. When I had to write an article on a local attraction for my travel writing class, I called him right away. Do you want to go on an adventure with me? He didn’t even hesitate: I’ll pick you up, he said. It was too rainy for hot air ballooning, so I suggested, Let’s go to the power plant at Limerick. Why not? he responded. Who wouldn’t want to read a story about a field trip to the power plant? As we got closer and the massive smoke stack appeared, he giggled and said, I’m getting… excited! We laughed and made all sorts of jokes as we approached. The power plant was closed to visitors, not surprisingly, so we ended up visiting a local blast furnace village for my project. That wasn’t as exciting as a power plant, but we laughed for a long time about what a power-full day we had.

He was different from any other guy I knew. I normally went for the academics, the serious types who could recite poetry, philosophy majors, guys who thought they were characters in Hemingway novels, guys who high-key brought the drama. He was easy to be with. You want a guy who makes you laugh, my grandmother had told me once. And maybe she was right. My grandfather was that for my anxiety-prone grandmother—he had a lightheartedness about him—and they were married more than 50 years.

Our dating relationship didn’t last long that first time around. I was working full-time and going to graduate school, and he was working long hours, trying to establish himself in his career. We didn’t have time for adventures like the power plant day all the time. It wasn’t a good time for either of us to be in a relationship, but since our relationship was never serious to begin with, it wasn’t like we broke up; we had kissed a few times, but mostly, we were good friends, hanging out on weekends with crowds of people we knew, and then he met someone at work, and I met and married my daughter’s father, and we went our separate ways as we settled down.

I was divorced from my daughter’s father and trying to make a long-distance relationship work when we reconnected in 2009. He and his fiancée, the girl from work, had moved back to the area from living in another city. We talked regularly, they invited me to their Halloween party (I didn’t go). We tagged each other in silly articles and poked each other back and forth in the early days of Facebook. I didn’t think much about him beyond affection for an old friend, until one day in February 2010; his Facebook status announced: Single. His engagement had ended. And on that day, I ran across the driveway to my parents’ house and said, Guess who’s single?

He was exactly what I wanted: a self-professed family man, the kind of guy who would be a great step-dad for my daughter, who would play softball with her in the backyard, the kind of guy who loved the shore like we did, the kind of guy who would barbecue in the backyard. He knew my daughter’s dad from when we all used to hang out in the late 90s. He had known my parents since he was ten, and my sister and I had played with him and his siblings whenever we were at our cousins’ house for family parties—his parents were good friends of my aunt and uncle. In fact, the day he came to pick me up for our second first date, a few months after the status update, he said to my parents, Look who’s back! It seemed like this marriage was meant to be.

We were together for seven years, married for six. We had a beautiful wedding, and in our vows, we said, Today, I am marrying my best friend. I think in that moment, we wanted it so badly to be true.

Looking back, I see nothing went as planned. We had issues from the first month of our relationship, when I shattered my foot while jumping over a dry creek bed. Thinking I could fly, I crashed. At the time, the accident seemed an unfortunate event. We can get through anything, he said to me, and I believed him. It turned out that there were many things—serious things—we couldn’t get through. Thinking we could fly, we didn’t notice the design flaw in our very foundation.

He had a lot of demons, which he hid very carefully underneath that fun, friendly exterior. Most people that knew him didn’t even suspect there was any darkness about him—socially, he was this fun-loving guy who saw life as one big boozy party to which everyone was invited. He’ll never be a rocket scientist, one of his relatives said to me on our wedding day, but party on the moon? He’ll be the first one on the spaceship! That was exciting in the beginning, but after living with him for a while, I realized that the partying was not about having fun. I didn’t understand, and therefore, didn’t know how to handle his cyclical surges and crashes.

During the course of the seven years we were together, we officially separated three times. One of those times, he had a breakdown, and the other two times he left me for other women. Twice, he came back, and we tried to heal our marriage. You know, he said to me after returning the second time, you married a lemon. I laughed about that at the time and made some comment about establishing a lemon law for marriages. We lived a volatile life for years, trying to grow our marriage and blend a family while working in two different states. The third time he left, he left for good, just when we almost had a chance at the life we always hoped to build together.

This is the story of the decline of our marriage and of me, stepping out of the ashes—not quite a Phoenix yet, but dusting off my wings from the fire of an anguished, codependent love. It is the story of betrayal, infidelity, illness, addiction and loss. It is also a story of hope and, most of all, of personal resilience. We wanted a love story with a happy ending. I wanted to write a love triumphs over all kind of story. I wanted a different ending. Yet, I write this eighteen months after he left me, and I am still not at peace with our story, which is not the story I wanted to write, but the story life gave me to write. I can tell you what happened, and when, and how I felt, but questions that ask why? only bring up more questions.

I don’t want to go back to the beginning and see things with new eyes. I don’t want to write the story of our vacations or the days that were good—the ones that held my hand tenderly and whispered, stay. I don’t want to tell the story from my daughter’s perspective; that story is hers to tell. And I cannot tell the story from my husband’s perspective. I can’t even pretend to know or understand his deepest motivation for leaving my daughter and me when I was at my most vulnerable: I had left a job I’d held for twelve years and buried two of my best friends the summer he left us. I don’t think I will ever truly know why.

Most of the time, on this side of our marriage now, I wish I could go back to February 12, 2011, to that pivotal moment on Main street, and say, No. This isn’t right. We are not good for each other. But at that moment, I knelt down on the pavement with him and wrapped my arms around his bomber jacket-clad torso and said, Yes. I will marry you.

Patagonia

There is a point in every relationship where all of the fights, the petty jealousies, the vicious text messages, the violations of trust, the nights spent on the couch, push you to the point of no return. The point at which there is not sufficient fuel to return to the starting point. The point at which the flowers stop, the evening kisses are replaced by numbing cocktails or work woes, conversations you once had about politics and ideas turn into personal attacks, and the increasingly rare I love you chokes and cracks in the air. The point at which new colleagues hear all about your failing marriage at cocktail parties and family members advise you to cut your losses and just leave what has become a Bad Marriage. And neither one of you is innocent.

A year into our marriage, my husband and I find ourselves approaching this point, clocking the mileage carefully, wondering if there is some way we could, on vapors if need be, sputter our way back to the beginning. We are willing to try anything.

But we don’t know where to start. On our anniversary, we had come up with a safe word—a word that, when used, was to stop whatever petty conflict was stirring immediately, upon which the two of us would kiss and all would be well.

We chose this word by blindly pulling a cork out of our wine cork collection and reading the first word we saw. It was Patagonia. A wild land, some of which is uninhabitable. Only for the brave travelers. It was a perfect word.

Except that this agreement, on which we pinky-swore, was made on our anniversary, while the two of us were drinking our favorite wine and eating the red velvet cupcakes I’d made because we had had a red velvet wedding cake. The fact is, we had both said Patagonia several times during our latest fight—and somehow its magic didn’t work. We didn’t immediately drop the topic that was leading us down dangerous roads to places uninhabitable and inhospitable to love. And we didn’t kiss the next time we saw each other because by that point, the argument we had had by text while he was on the train coming home from work had become so heated that we were at the dining room table and he was telling me it was over. Our marriage was over. I heard the words but didn’t want to believe them. It couldn’t be over. But I saw, for the first time, a nothingness behind his eyes. It was one of the most gut-wrenching, frightening looks I had ever seen.

Patagonia. It is over.

I make plans to go away for a weekend reunion of alumni from my graduate program. My husband tells me he is looking forward to my being gone. I need some space to breathe and to be alone in my thoughts—head space, my friend Jayne calls it. I need head space. I don’t leave home on a good note. I had been asleep when he left for work, and the few texts we exchange once I arrived at school are of purely an informational nature: Please feed the cat and When are you coming back?

At the cocktail party, people are eager to hear all about my life. So, you are married now?! one former classmate exclaims. Lucky guy. So are you completely, head over heels in love? I smile and say something to the effect that the year had been difficult because we’d had to move a few times and that my husband commutes five hours a day to work, which my friend agrees must be very difficult. But you know, that’s marriage, right? I shrug, sharing a faint, understanding smirk to my classmate. The two of us smile a little awkwardly, and then another classmate joins us on the terrace, and we are, thankfully, on to another topic. These types of