HotmailFor love or money? A tough call, writer finds
Our first wedding anniversary arrived in June. We celebrated with an uncharacteristically pricey dinner downtown at an haute celeb-haunt. Feeling giddy about the more or less good year we’d had, I raised my glass of champagne to him, expressed my love, and proposed a bit of a parlor game: Let’s each say what our big hopes and desires are for our marriage in the year to come.
Me first: head cocked, starry-eyed, yet somehow still ... corrective in tone, I suggested something about communicating more fully and anticipating each other’s needs. We clinked glasses and took a sip on that, amid the posh clatter of A-listers nibbling miso cod.
Then came Kimball’s turn.
He squared his shoulders and looked right at me — not his style, really. “My hope for this year is that you will get off my back about money,” he said, lowering the champagne glass — his blue eyes turning stormy. “My hope is that you will stop hounding me about my credit cards and what I spend. Because if you don’t, we’re not going to make it. I’m serious about this.”
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It was a classic come-to-Jesus moment — the most dire of my life. I hadn’t had them often, accustomed as I was to spackling over tensions with chitchat and rhetoric; there is very little I cannot rationalize, and it simply isn’t like me to be rendered speechless. But tonight was different. I felt the space between us growing, as if the table itself were pushing us apart; I saw Kimball hardening — saw the hairline cracks in his typically loving facade. I saw the damage I had done. Although he is not the type to issue threats, the message was clear. I saw in that moment that I stood to lose everything.
“Okay,” I said — nothing more. We clinked glasses.
In the dozen years since, amazing things have happened. Once it sunk in that acceptance, trust, and faith are the real mortar of a marriage, I eased up considerably on the nudging and the judging — even rolling with the occasional overdraft notice, the sort of thing that used to send me into a white-hot, hand-wringing, garment-rending freak-out. For his part, Kimball actually developed an interest in finance. Not only did he start making decent money as an art adviser and appraiser, having parlayed his bone-deep passion into a wildly marketable skill, but he even began gravitating to the stock pages and making appointments with be-suited investment advisers with names like Mike. Unbelievably, Kimball is now in charge of our financial affairs — he’s our liaison with the tax guy, our point person on estate matters — and doing a darn good job of it. We’re fine. We own a three-bedroom co-op in Manhattan, for god’s sake. The wolves simply aren’t at the door.
Did he take all of this on for me? Maybe, in part — I can be a pest, but never a monster, and I know he wanted things between us to work out. But we also had a baby on the way, and it’s amazing how the mere idea of that can transform a person.
Most important, with me off his back, Kimball could grow and change on his own, as opposed to being clipped and pruned and tortured into some unnatural shape. I shouldn’t have been so surprised that this was all it would take; some years earlier, after much haranguing and cajoling on my part to get him to give up cigarettes, he quit cold turkey — while out of town for a few weeks on business, alone and away from me.
Not that he’ll be donning tweed and nestling into a club chair anytime soon. I count on Kimball, now the fit and happy father of two, for his defiantly offbeat take on what it means to be the man of the house — whether he’s papier-mâché-ing cereal boxes in the kitchen with the kids, reading them some elliptical, transcendental verse by way of a bedtime story, or defending my son’s right not to get a haircut.
Kimball is a great provider in the deepest sense of the word. As for the lesson in real love he taught me, I’ll always be in his debt.
Lucy Kaylin, the executive editor of Marie Claire magazine, is the author of “The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies” and “For the Love of God: The Faith and Future of the American Nun.” She lives in New York City.
Click here for a trailer for the “The Secret Currency of Love,” and find out more about the book here.
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