move. It wasn’t.
Nine months after we were married, we closed on our dream house. Before the ink dried on the deed, Joey ran out of the bank in Brooklyn, sped away in my car, and headed to Manhattan, “Gotta run, gotta work.” With the crazy hours, crazy locations, and crazy life associated with the movie industry, it could have been true. Just like all those hang ups I’d been experiencing could have been the wrong number. I wanted to believe him. Besides, I thought there was no way he would have allowed me to buy that huge house and put his name on the deed if he had no intention of living there with me. I needed to believe him. I took the train back to the dream dwelling. I entered the the cold empty house, sat in the middle of the floor, and instead of staining the rugs with champagne, I tarnished it with tears.
Over the next couple of days, Joey and his friends moved everything, except Joey, into the house. Everything else was left to me. Joey was too busy “working” to help. He claimed he was exhausted from all the long hours, so after the set wrapped for the night, instead of trekking all the way back to Brooklyn, he chose to crash at a “friend’s” apartment in Manhattan.
According to Joey, neither the primitive apartment, or the mobile movie set locations, had phones. Cell phones were still years away from becoming an affordable appendage, so I became a prisoner of the house, tethered to the six foot cord of the walled telephone, awaiting his calls.
They’d come when Joey knew I would be working, and wouldn’t be home. The only thing that greeted me when I walked through the door each evening was the blinking light of the answering machine. It usually held a quick message from Joey letting me know he was “ just checking in,” and he was “okay.”
Since the answering machine couldn’t respond, he never knew if I was “okay” until I surprised him the day he came by to pick up “a couple of things.” It was his bad luck I had the flu. Confronted by a sick and angry wife, he denied there was another woman, and just needed some time “to think things out.” That’s when he moved to Houston Street. He never spent one night in the house. The dream house became a hell house.
One loser after another drifted through. Two more husbands drifted through. Before he became husband number four, Bobby was the first room mate to actually contribute to the house. He opened his wallet and his toolbox. He knew how to fix practically everything. Bobby said his greatest challenge was trying to repair me, “It won’t be an easy job, but I’m the man to do it.” Bobby fulfilled his quest on our wedding night, but I wasn’t aware of it until a couple of weeks later when I discovered he had bestowed upon me a gift that evening far more precious than the diamond necklace. I was pregnant.
Although the house was large enough for a growing family, Bobby said he didn’t feel comfortable living there, “It will never feel like it’s ours.” He urged me to sell it and trade in the bad memories for new ones. I resisted for as long as I could, but once Josephine was born, and Bobby was offered a promotion out of state, the decision was made. I sold it, for a loss, and we moved to North Carolina. Years later, I heard the people who bought the house made a killing selling it to a commercial developer who knocked it down, and erected a multi-family, co-op apartment building.
“A dream apartment?” I said. “That’s nice.”
Could I have been anymore insincere?
“You know why I’m calling, right?”
I wondered if he remembered the date, and wanted to wish me a “Happy Almost Anniversary” on what would have been twenty five years together.
“No, I have no idea.”
“You know what today’s date is, don’t you?”
“What?”
“It’s Valentine’s Day.”
“Oh, really? I didn’t realize it.”
Of course I had realized it. Joey’s phone call had interrupted my Valentine’s Day ritual. I also had spent hours the night before with Josephine baking heart-shaped cookies and stuffing Scooby Doo Valentine cards into envelopes for her to hand out to her classmates. All the while I had to pretend to be as excited as she was about a day I despised. I had watched my husband squirm when our daughter asked him what he was going to get Mommy for Valentine’s Day.
It had taken a couple of years for Bobby to realize when I said I didn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day, I really meant it. He finally got it when he saw thorny headless stems sitting in a vase, the two dozen tops of roses he had had delivered to me, tossed in the garbage pail. Without getting into the psychology of my hatred of the day, I told him I expected to be treated with love every day of the year, not just a day in February. And for years that worked for us, until we had our little girl. Then I relented, for Josephine’s sake. Yes, he could bring flowers home, just no freaking roses.
Although roses and hearts were the theme of my first wedding, it wasn’t the memory of that Valentine’s Day that ruined future sweetheart celebrations for me. It was the following February 14th that killed it. When Joey had shown up at my front door that day, head in hand, a bouquet of red roses perched on the outside steps behind him, I thought he came to ask for forgiveness. By then, he’d been gone for a couple of months, and with each sundown, a piece of my heart had darkened. I wondered if there was enough light left to forgive him, just one more time.
He made it easy for me. He wasn’t there for my clemency. He was there to clean his conscience. He admitted I had been right; there was another woman. Her name was Kate. He had met her on a movie set. She was the one I tried to “run down.” They were in love. And they were going to have a baby.
I wanted to scream at him, “You can’t support yourself, how the hell are you going to support a baby?” Instead, I sobbed. Kate was having my baby. With these turn of events Joey assured me he would sign the divorce papers and the house over to me, without any fights, even though he was “entitled to half of everything.” How big of him.
I knew I would feel better once I swiped his face with the roses, so I pointed to them and asked him when he planned on giving them to me. “Oh, those aren’t for you.” Ouch. Before Joey took my advice to leave before I stabbed him, he asked me if he could have the bride and groom statue I had given him on our wedding night, as a “memory.” A memory, or another Valentine’s Day gift for Kate?
I gingerly removed the expensive statue from the curio cabinet and held it up, and asked, “Is this what you want?” He nodded and smiled. With a quick move I snapped the groom’s head off, placed it in his hand, and covered it with my hand. “You can have this, and this as well – my Valentine’s Day curse to you. For as long as you live, may every Valentine’s Day be as miserable to you as this one has been to me.” He said I was crazy as I slammed the door behind him. That was the last time I saw him in person.
“I was wondering if you would, you know…”
“Wondering if I would what?”
“You know, lift the curse.”
“Curse? What curse?”
“The Valentine’s Day curse you put on me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I’ve often wondered if the Valentine’s Day curse had worked more than the one time I knew it had, the following year after I issued it. By that Valentine’s Day we had officially been divorced, and while I struggled alone to keep my head above water, I figured Joey and Kate were playing happy family. So, it was with great surprise, and yes, glee, when Joey had called then and asked me to lift the curse.
He sobbed that Kate had left him that very morning, “on Valentine’s Day, of all days!” I didn’t care what had happened to cause the break-up. I was more concerned about the child that was supposed to be mine. When I asked about the baby, I was surprised when he said they never had one. “I wanted to keep it, but Kate didn’t want to.”
I said I was sorry, but really didn’t mean it. Joey mistook my feigned concern for a sympathetic ear and blubbered, “I can’t believe she left me. I’ve never hurt this bad. Now I know how you felt when I left you. Please, lift the curse. Maybe she’ll come back.”
; My response was, “Really, you never hurt so bad? And you think she left you because of a curse, my curse? Ha! In that case, I double the curse!”
I thought, “What an idiot!” as I slammed the phone down. I never heard from him again.
“You really don’t remember placing the curse? I still have the groom’s head,” he said.
“The groom’s head? What groom’s head? Now, I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
“The one you snapped off the statue when you said for the rest of my life something horrible would happen to me on Valentine’s Day, and it has! Please, you gotta lift it.”
He sounded so pathetic I actually felt bad. He still hadn’t said the two words I’ve always wanted to hear from him, “I’m sorry,” but at least he had said “Please.” I guess I could have made up some mumbo jumbo Italian phrase and told him it was lifted. He had gone through the trouble of tracking me down, so I felt I still must have had a place in his heart. Maybe he was sorry, but hadn’t known how to express his feelings towards me.
“Look, you’ve moved on with your life,” Joey said. “Give me my life back!”
Hmmm, his congenial tone had suddenly changed. He became a bit snippy and irritated.
“You don’t understand,” he continued. “I finally met someone I think I might love as much as I loved Kate. And she’s got