“This isn’t gonna work,” she said. “You guys don’t belong together.”
We’d been dumped.
“How dare she?” I scoffed before we even got in the car.
“Who does she think she is?” snapped Chris.
Oh, we were going to show that woman. Things got better for a bit, in that every once in a while we would have a great night where we laughed. Maybe this is enough, I thought.
Our friends didn’t think so. One sent us to another therapist named Sally, whom our friend credited with saving her marriage. Like the good Christian sister therapist before her, Sally also marveled how we ever got past the dating stage, but she was committed.
We lied to Sally constantly. Chris and I were both terrified of being judged. When one of us would go out on a limb and share some uncomfortable truth, the other person would act blindsided. My eyes would widen like I couldn’t begin to comprehend where any of this was coming from. I wanted Sally to like me, so I couldn’t tell her the truth. I wanted to win.
Sally called me on my competitiveness pretty early in our sessions. “You think in terms of winning and losing,” she said. “But if you’re winning, who’s losing?”
“Him!”
“That’s your husband,” she said slowly, like this might be news to me. “You’re not supposed to want him to lose.”
“Wow,” I said. “You don’t know me, huh?”
Chris decided to stop coming to the appointments. I kept right on like the good student I was, needing that A.
“Now that we’re here alone, you need an exit strategy,” she said, leaning in. “Why don’t you give yourself six months to mentally, physically, financially, prepare to leave.”
Sally was talking truth now. I kept going alone, and I started to get a plan together. There was an actual date in my calendar, and the date came and went. I knew the milk was not just spilled all over the floor, it had been left out to curdle. And I was spooning it up, saying, “I can still eat cereal with this.”
THEN CAMERON CAMERA ENTERED MY LIFE. THAT’S NOT HER REAL NAME—her working name was even dopier—and I resent protecting the identity of a woman who tried to extort me after sleeping with my husband, but I am not sure of the etiquette.
Chris and I went to a summer potluck with a bunch of couples. There was this woman there, serving up Sexy Librarian and being very flirty with all the husbands. At one point, a bunch of guys were missing, and I found her showing them all her Web site, Cameron Camera, where people paid to watch her in various stages of undress. Great potluck, everyone! Gentlemen, hide your hard-ons!
A lot of people wanted to go out after the potluck night, including Chris, but I had a girlfriend drive me home. He ended up hooking up with Cameron Camera in our SUV. And of course she left an earring, probably one she got ten-for-a-dollar at a pharmacy for just such occasions. That gave her the excuse to call him at his office—the one I got feng-shuied—which gave him the excuse to have sex with her again. “Since you came all the way out to Century City, the least I can do is fuck you.”
Cameron Camera laid low for quite some time, surfacing when she heard I had the Honeymooners movie coming out. She contacted a bunch of tabloids and entertainment news shows, saying she was ready to sell proof that Gabrielle Union’s husband was cheating.
A friend at one of the shows gave my team a heads-up. Before telling me about the woman, they hired Marty Singer, legal guard dog and bad cop to the stars. I was downstairs in my dining room when my cell phone rang. At the other end were my agent, my manager, my publicist, and special guest star Marty.
“Listen,” my manager said, “this is a really hard conversation to have . . .”
Oh God, I thought, they’re dropping me.
“I’ll just say it,” he said. “Someone is shopping around a story that Chris is cheating on you. She has photos.”
“Oh,” I said quietly, then louder. “Oh.” And I laughed. I howled.
“Gabrielle . . .” said my publicist.
“Which woman?” I asked. Chris was upstairs, and I spoke to the ceiling. “Trust me, this isn’t a problem.”
“Her name is Cameron,” said my publicist.
“Oh, Cameron Camera with the nudie site,” I said, blurting it out like a charades answer to show how cool I was with this. “She’s not even cute. I’m so sorry she bothered you. Please don’t worry.”
“It might not be so easy,” my agent said. “You have a movie coming out. We need to know what the pictures are so we can warn the studio.”
“Like if it’s kissing, whatever,” said my manager. “If it’s her hand up his ass . . .”
“Got it,” I said. “Hand up the ass is a problem.”
“So we need to see what she has,” said Marty. “Set up a sting and put a price on those photos. In the meantime, talk to Chris and see what she has on him.”
Like he was waiting for his cue, Chris came down the stairs. The same ones I’d “fallen down” a few months before.
“You didn’t notice the flashbulbs?” I asked.
“What?”
“When she was taking pictures of you guys fucking, you didn’t notice the flash going off?”
“What?” Maybe he was in straight denial or, like me, was trying to figure out which woman it could have been.
“Cameron Camera, remember her?” I said, casually, like I was jogging his memory. “You fucked her last summer? Well, she waited for just the right moment. Now she’s gone to all these people saying she has proof that you cheated. Anything you want to say?”
Just like how we began, when he got caught with the Greek, he went right into groveling.
“Get out!” I screamed. “I’m about to have to pay a bitch for fucking my husband. And I have to pay Marty Singer to help me pay her! Your dick keeps costing me money!”
He was panicked, but not about losing a wife. If I left, the cash flow would go with me, and with it the illusion of his success.
I became fixated on the word “sting,” which they set up that week for 7 A.M. in a coffee shop. All the intrigue made the situation sound at least slightly more exciting than just asking, pretty please, to see exactly what position the woman was in with my husband. I kept my phone in my hand all morning, but Cameron Camera never showed. Either she didn’t really have proof and didn’t think we’d ask to see it in exchange for the money, or she just wanted to feel relevant.
My marriage was obviously over, but I was still desperately afraid of people labeling me a failure, so I didn’t want to jump right into the divorce, either. Carrie Fisher had a line I love about why she and Paul Simon ended their marriage: “Things were getting worse faster than we could lower our standards.” I realized that I needed to really take stock of the situation between Chris and me, and make a decision based not in anger but in what I really wanted and how I really felt.
So one night, I was sitting up in our bed when he came in the room.
“Let’s talk,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Listen,” I said, “if we’re gonna have this conversation, let’s be brutally honest.”