Homesick (15 page)

It wasn’t long, though, before we were completely devoted to each other. Howard was everything I wanted in a man. He was witty, creative, and smart. He was a venture capitalist with a degree from the Harvard Business School—my fantasy Harvard guy at last. And this was the big thing: He was interested in what I had to say. He didn’t think the world revolved around him. I had never been out with a guy I could sit and talk to for hours and hours. There was room for both of us in his life.

I was also struck immediately by two of this man’s rare assets: his smiles. There was the smarty-ass smile, the one he indulged when he was having a little fun. But there was also the shy smile, the window into his sweeter, more vulnerable self. I loved them both.

Howard was centered and confident, and didn’t have to be boastful because he was sure of who he was. He was a decent man, a good man, the kind you could make a home with. And I could see that right away. I was in my thirties by now, and the high life—jetting off to the Caribbean to meet my French boyfriend for an exotic weekend—was losing its appeal. When Howard came along, I had finally found something (someone) solid and rewarding to replace it with.

After a decade’s worth of bad male behavior, though, I was still a little sensitive about just how much game-playing I would put up with. One late evening, after a full dose of dinner, dancing, and a lot of talk, Howard got up and announced abruptly that he had to go. His father’s beach house had been broken into the night before, he said, and he’d promised to check and make sure everything was okay on his way home. I admired his conscientiousness—but I couldn’t believe that he’d walk out on me so suddenly. To add insult to my injury, he left a smarmy little note on my windshield, saying how hard it was to leave, and that he “missed me already.”

Of course, his father’s house really
had
been broken into; I knew that. But at the same time that little windshield note just struck me as a trick out of Leave Them Wanting 101. I felt as if I’d been played. All through the next day I walked around fuming; finally I phoned him, and I could tell he thought his note would have hit a home run with this dainty little Southern belle. I lit into him like Scarlett O’Horror.

It was definitely a turning point in our relationship. The other day we were remembering this story, and Howard said: “The South has two sides to it. Everything is as sweet as peach pie—until it’s not. You really went after me for that. ‘What kind of amateur game are you playing with me, leaving a little note saying
It’s so hard to leave?
If this is some kind of little sophomoric game, I’m not into it.’ And you hung up. I felt like I’d just had my head snapped back like a boxer.”

But the most remarkable thing was the effect speaking my mind had on Howard. “At that moment I knew I had to marry you,” he says. “Any woman who could carry off all that intelligence and toughness with such grace—I thought, that’s someone I can’t let go.”

The truth is, until that point in his life Howard had always been able to get away with whatever he wanted. Now he was faced with a woman who knew how to stand her ground without losing her femininity. He loved that. And I loved that he loved it.

Was this, you know,
it
? We thought so, but we were
so
cautious about crossing that line. Howard and I went to Italy together, our favorite holiday getaway, and had the most romantic time imaginable. We’d spend the day touring old churches and ruins, have long, sensual dinners, drink the most exquisite wine—even if it was really only everyday Italian table wine—and tell each other we just had to get married. One night we even asked our waiter if he knew of any place to get married that wasn’t a Catholic church (and that’s not so easy to find in Italy). And yet the next morning, in the harsh light of day, one of us would back off.

I guess for me the turning point came one evening back in Los Angeles, while we were having dinner at his place. Howard turned to me and said, “I have a feeling that I might be the one to end this relationship, before you do.”

“Why on earth would you say something like that?” I said.

“Because I think I’m closer to the point—I’m not there now, but I’m close—where I’m ready to settle down with a life partner, to get married and have a family. I think I’m farther down that road than you are. And if I get there before you, that’s when I’m going to turn to you and say, ‘Well, this was a lot of fun, but I really need to be with somebody ready to take that step.’ ”

I was stunned. It’s usually the woman who says,
I’m ready to get married and start a family, so it’s time for you to fish or cut bait.
But now I was having the tables turned. This was something entirely new to me. But he was the kindest, most self-assured man I’d ever been with, and by now I was old enough to know the real thing when I saw it.

I may have been headlong in love by that point, but I knew I still needed to get Howard down to Mississippi to see the family, to learn about who I am and where I hail from. He was a Jewish guy who grew up in L.A.; what he knew about the South came from books and movies—that it was the place where the Civil War was fought, where slavery was born and died, and where if the heat didn’t kill you, the mosquitoes surely would.

We had a little work to do in the manners department, but he did fine, and they all loved him. He was a good sport about the funny accents, my father’s obsession with the Weather Channel, and the many other eccentric customs we Southerners have. He knew how much my family and home means to me, so he learned to love it from the beginning. Years later he would tell me, “I didn’t realize until I got to know the South how much of what I love in you comes from there.”

As eager as he seemed, we danced around the question of marriage for what seemed like an eternity, until Howard confessed what was troubling him: He had his concerns about marrying an actress. Between the schedules, which could take me seven thousands of miles away for months at a time, and the on-camera love scenes, he just wasn’t sure this was what he had in mind for his married life.

But at long last we ran out of reasons to wait. We were in Manhattan one weekend afternoon just before Christmas, having cappuccino at Bistro Ferrier, a quiet little Upper East Side café off Madison Avenue, when he took a small box out of his pocket and put it on the table.

“Honey,” he said, “I’m giving you this because I love you.”

I opened the box, and there was a ring inside: rose gold, with tiny diamonds all around. Howard said nothing else, so I put it on, and told him how sweet he was.

He took out a second box. It was a matching ring, this time in white gold. “I’m giving you this because I love every minute I’m with you,” he said. I smiled and put it on, still not sure what was going on.

Then he pulled out a third box, yellow gold this time. He said, “And I’m giving you this because I want to marry you.”

There, he had said it. I gazed across the table at this beautiful man, this big-hearted soul with whom I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life. He was the secret wish of my heart since I was a little girl, the man I wanted to be the father of my children, my first and my last, my true love. And this was our moment. I lost myself in his gaze.

I didn’t realize it until he told me later, but I just looked at him, without saying a word, for what Howard calls “the longest two minutes in my life.” As he sat there, sweating buckshot, thinking I was trying to find a way to let him down easy after my two minutes of silence, I brought my hand out from under the table and gave him a box.

“Open this,” I said.

Howard thought I didn’t understand what was happening. He was feeling confused, vulnerable, and angry; at that point all he wanted was for me to make the rejection quick and painless. Silently he scrambled to plan his getaway: the restaurant check, the immediate flight back to L.A., the quick transition from planned euphoria to unplanned disaster. I could see the emotion all over his face.

“Just open the box,” I said.

Inside was a Bulgari watch. “Thank you,” Howard said, taken aback. “But maybe I didn’t make myself clear. We’re not exchanging presents here.”

“Would you turn it over, please?” I said softly.

These words were engraved on the back of the timepiece:
Yes. My love forever. Sela.

Howard was stunned. His anger melted away. “How long have you been carrying this watch?” he asked.

“I’ve had it on me twenty-four hours a day since that moment I told you I was ready,” I said.

And so we were engaged.

Strangely enough, I didn’t call Mama and Daddy to tell them until after I had brunch with my sister, Jenna, the next day. I didn’t know how they would react. But Jenna made us march to the phone booth in the back of the restaurant, where I called Mama to give her the news. She told Daddy; then I put Howard on the phone to tell him personally.

Howard delivered the news to his future father-in-law, who responded with typical taciturnity: “Well, that’s what I’ve been hearing. Howard, you’ll have to excuse me a second. It takes me a while to get used to these big things. Kind of like death.”

And then he said, without missing a beat, “Tell Sela I changed the oil in her Barracuda.”

Reader, that’s my daddy. And I love him to pieces.

We had an engagement party with about two hundred people down at Boyette’s Fish Camp on the Chunky River. Howard stood up and told the crowd that he didn’t know if he was at his own engagement party or at a convention of salesmen, because he’d never been around so many people who were so genuinely friendly. “Normally when you’re around so many friendly people, they’re trying to sell you something,” Howard joked. It was his first true megadose of Southern hospitality.

As we started planning the wedding, I found myself having something of a personal crisis. Howard is Jewish, and I began to worry about having an interfaith marriage. We agreed that we would raise our kids knowing about both sides of their religious heritage, but they would be primarily Jewish. But I began to have doubts that I was doing the right thing. I went to Dr. Apperson, my childhood pastor, to seek his counsel.

He said to me, “You know what, Sela? I believe you can find God in the temple on Friday night just as easily as you can in church on Sunday morning.” With Dr. Apperson’s blessing, I knew I was ready to marry the man I loved.

Dr. Apperson died two years ago. Before he passed away, I wrote him a note to let him know what a gift he gave me, raising me in a church that wore its dogma lightly, so that I wouldn’t feel like a traitor to the faith for marrying a man of another religion. Had that dear old pastor not given me his blessing, I might have missed out on God’s three greatest gifts to me: Howard, and our two children. I told Dr. Apperson: “You gave me that gift.” And I meant it with all my heart.

We considered having the wedding in my church in Meridian, but we didn’t have anywhere special there to have the reception. The beautiful country club that had been modeled after George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon had been torn down, and replaced with an uninviting modern building that looked like a nondescript Colorado ski chalet. So instead we decided to marry outdoors at my dear friend Martee Snider’s gorgeous estate in Montecito. Daddy drove out in my Barracuda, which may be the strangest dowry any California bride has ever presented to her husband.

I probably had more fun on our wedding day—May 23, 1992—than on any other day of my life—though I had to shake off a few jitters along the way. I had a manicure scheduled, and a massage, but I was so nervous I couldn’t bring myself to relax. As I was having my makeup done, though, all my girlfriends from out of town stopped by to say hello, and just their presence helped put me at ease. When the time came for the ceremony to begin I took my place at Daddy’s side, standing in the rear of the house. Howard and the ministers—my Episcopal priest cousin Tom, and a rabbi—stood under a chuppah in the distance, with the pond and the mountains in the background. We’d given Martee a pair of swans in thanks for letting us use her home, and she’d named them Howard and Sela; they were swimming in the background as we were married. It was quite a production: As I walked down a white runner some two hundred yards long to reach the chuppah, I thought, “Only an actress would do this.”