12 — Sex chess

How Stevie Nicks wrecked my marriage.

Where were we? Oh yes, the train from Sanfran to New York. September 2008.

Sorry. That’s not the story I feel like telling at the moment. I’ll get there. But you know I like to tell it backward. So let’s skip forward. Ten years, give or take.

2018.

There’s a man everyone assumes I left my ex-husband for. That story makes sense: he and I worked together, long hours. We were both lawyers. We both liked to read and climb.

We went climbing together and everyone knows climbing is foreplay. Then we had a brief affair and smashed apart our respective marriages.

So: I left my husband for him.

That story makes sense, it’s the story everyone knows.

But it isn’t true. That man is not why I left my husband. He’s not why my marriage ended. My marriage ended way before him.

He was the end-stage final fracture: the straw on the back of the long-laden camel.

The truth? It was all because of Stevie Nicks. It was all her fault.

Let me explain.

—

The man who really deserves the credit (blame?) for ending my marriage was a different man. He had a generic name, a name everyone and their mother is called.

Let’s call him Rob, because that was his name. Or because there are a million Robs in London. Trying to find him would be like looking for the proverbial needle.

Rob was a junior lawyer in the team where I did my final rotation as a trainee lawyer. He was a private equity lawyer. He was quick and clever; tall and thin. Taller than me and almost no one is taller than me, in heels, but he was.

He had a long-time live-in girlfriend. I was married with a child. These facts were known and acknowledged.

It was also known that he was an incorrigible flirt: everyone batted eyelashes at him. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, average bone structure, but there was something about him.

He was magnetic.

Everyone, men and women, were drawn to him. It was undeniable. He had, as the kids today call it, riz.

The older male partners all wanted him on their deals, they would ask me to fetch Rob for them, wanted to know what he thought about so-and-so.

The secretaries spoiled him, perched by his desk and giggled when they brought him photocopies.

The older female lawyers would closet themselves in meetings with him for hours longer than necessary, tinkling laughter behind closed doors.

Everyone wanted a piece of Rob.

He had a knack for making everyone feel special: like he and they shared a particular relationship, separate from everyone else.

My first interaction with him was when we worked on a deal together.

He came into my office and stood behind my chair while we both looked at something on my screen. I wasn’t sure about the something on my screen. Is this right, I asked him, it looks weird to me.

Hmm, he leaned in close, considering the screen.

Too close.

I could smell his breath, peppermint and the laundry detergent of his shirt: starched collar, light blue cotton.

And something else. Some other incredibly appealing smell I couldn’t name.

Pure pheromones.

I’d never been so physically proximate to anyone in the office. It carried a power with it: the power of what was forbidden in a strictly professional setting.

No one looking in would have seen anything out of the ordinary: two junior lawyers examining a docs list.

But inside that office, where he was just a little too close for an undisturbed mind, I could hear my heart pounding in my ears, neck hot, senses flooded with his nearness and his smells.

Hmm, he said again. Yeah. It is weird. Can I see?

He took the computer mouse and was now leaning right over me.

I didn’t dare look sideways at his face because he was too close. If I had turned even a little bit, the next logical step after that would have been to rise quickly from my chair, press two hands to his chest and push him back against the filing cabinet to fuck his brains out.

He moved the mouse and typed a few things. As he did, I noticed that his hands shook, just a fraction. He was nervous.

I was making him nervous.

This was atavistic, primal. It was a game of chicken: sex chess. We were in the jungle, circling and sniffing each other.

He typed, with shaky hands. I didn’t move. Just continued to stare straight ahead, considering the computer screen as if it was the only fascinating thing happening in that room. We both stared at that screen, inches apart, for minutes.

He admitted later he knew exactly what he was doing in that moment. He did it on purpose, for a laugh, to see what would happen, because he could.

He knew his own power.

And I knew mine.

Eventually, we figured out whatever weird thing the documents were doing and he left.

But now the ice was broken. Now, he and I had our “special relationship” too.

It was coming into summer so we would walk out for breaks to get smoothies, sit on the lawn next to the office in the sun. Two of the other girls, also trainee lawyers, told me they saw us and were jealous: you looked like models, they said. You’re both so tall and thin. You looked like sleek, famous people, absorbed in each other, smiling in the sun. You looked like a power couple, they said. You match.

I laughed, delighted. Don’t be silly, I said. We’re just mates. I’m married! He has a girlfriend.

The WhatsApp messages started soon after that: at first, exchanges of cute pictures of my son, his niece. He sent me a house he was thinking about buying, wanted my opinion on it. Lots of messages about work, me complaining about having to go into the office on a Saturday.

Scrolling our chat history, there is a significant message sometime in March 2018: was I coming for drinks after work?

Of course I was.

We went to a bar near my office with several other colleagues. It was fun, a bit messy, everyone bantering and drunk on being young and rich.

At a certain point late in the evening, we all decided we were hungry and ended up in a place that was half cocktail bar but also had round tables, scattered about between plants and golden lamps, at which you could order food. I don’t remember what we ordered: lots of small plates that we shared with greasy, messy fingers.

He and I were sitting opposite but also kind of next to each other. Stevie Nicks started playing.

“I fucking love this song.” That’s me, obviously.

“Yeah? Who is it?”

“Are you kidding? It’s Stevie fucking Nicks!” I said.

“Stevie… fucking… Nicks?” He didn’t smile, looked me dead in the eye.

“Yeah.” I stayed level. “Stevie fucking Nicks.”

You know the song I mean. It’s urgent, frantic. It’s delirious. It’s existential exigency, in musical form.

It reminds you, over and over again: these are the only moments we have.

The days go by, like a strand in the wind.

Under the table, our knees touched, as if by accident.

There was a silent beat, in which all sound faded out and I was aware only of the small patch of my leg against his.

In that silent beat, I felt myself falling, fathomlessly, out of my marriage.

When neither of us moved away, our knees pressed a little more urgently.

Nothing else matters, sang Stevie,¹ and the noise of the restaurant flared around me again.

I looked away from him, smiling at our colleagues, joining in their separate conversation, chiming in with whatever they were joking about. Stevie played on.

Under the table, we rubbed legs for an hour. At one point, he put a hand under the table and squeezed me hard, just above the knee. I slid a foot up his trouser leg.

We all dispersed outside the restaurant. He and I ended up in the same taxi with a few others—it made sense, we all lived in the same direction.

In the taxi, I didn’t look at him. It was like a stand-off. We circled each other.

I got out first and ran to my door: to my warm house, my waiting husband and my sleeping child.

The next day at work, news broke that he and his whole team had been poached by an American law firm for exorbitant sums of money.

The entire department was in uproar. The partners were desolate at the loss and firm-wide emails instructed no one to speak to the press.

It was chaos: rumours were flying that the partner who headed that team had been having an affair with a female partner in another department and that’s why he had to leave, and take his team and all his juniors, including Rob, with him. I thought he probably just did it for the £10 million signing bonus he was rumoured to have bagged.

Later that afternoon, my WhatsApp pinged.

It was a message from Rob. Was I coming out for his leaving drinks or what?

Of course I was.

That was the real beginning of how I left my marriage.

—

Pair with Stevie Nicks, Edge of Seventeen.

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1. The actual lyric is “nothing else mattered”, past tense. But, at the time, in the very momentous present, I definitely heard “nothing else matters”.