Better Than New Page 7

  By the time I landed on the doorstep of a derelict home on Third Avenue in Minneapolis, my life was in worse shape than the house. The foundations of both were in ruins and needed to be replaced. I was basically faced with making good on all the things I’d said about myself. I learned from Steve when we lived in Tampa that I had to sell myself. That meant talking big. The thing about talking big is, you have to put big actions behind your words or nobody will take you seriously. The Dollar house would be where I proved the words I used to sell myself, where I backed up my big mouth and got myself on track.

  In the middle of filming season two.

  For my second season of Rehab Addict in 2011, out of desperation, I had piecemealed together a whole season using my friend Ellen’s bathroom, my friend Nick’s kitchen, and the house of newlywed clients of mine—even two episodes on my own basement; we ended with the Harriet project. I had all my money tied up in Minnehaha and, quite frankly, couldn’t fund another project for the show. Make no mistake: I had a #1 show on TV, but I still had to buy the houses I would renovate on camera. It’s always been my money. And if I hadn’t found projects to work on, the show could have easily ended right there. So hodgepodge it was.

  There I was juggling many different projects, still running my real estate business and, most important, making sure I was home every day when Ethan finished school. I was content just being a mom and working. But everyone was pressuring me to date as it had been a long time since Christopher and I had broken up. As single moms know, in a world of married friends, you’re always made out to be the odd duck. It didn’t help that more often than not, Ethan would ask, “Why can’t we just be like normal families?” It was killing me, because I would do anything for my child. In addition to all that, I found out he was being bullied in his new middle school and I saw my sweet, loving boy wear a sad face every day. It was crushing. I know some parents don’t have a choice, and so I felt blessed to have options. I wasn’t rich, but the show gave me extra income and I used it to find a better school for Ethan. I transferred him to a small Catholic school, similar to the one I had attended back in Michigan. There, all the teachers knew his name and treated him like their own child.

  Out for a walk in Minneapolis.

  With Ethan thriving in his new school, work progressing, and the show doing well, I was feeling a little more confident. I thought, Why not try to go on some dates? However, it wasn’t as simple as just trying online dating. The show was on the air and my face was becoming more recognizable. A friend of mine suggested a matchmaker. As soon as I heard that word, I burst into “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” that song from Fiddler on the Roof. But as I was to learn, my life was not a Broadway musical, and matchmakers don’t guarantee happy endings, good endings, or even not-so-bad-but-doable endings.

  Matchmakers are one step above online dating. Unlike a dat- ing website, a matchmaker vets your viable matches to weed out any potential disasters (well, at least in theory). This woman was a funny, spunky, high-energy chick. Even though she was younger than me, she made me feel like she was a big sister setting me up. The day after I sat down with her for our initial meeting, she called me. “Nicole, I have the perfect man for you.”

  I had my doubts, but the matchmaker assured me he was perfect. She described him and then added that he was a widower. I stopped her right there and said no. I didn’t want anything messy and that just felt like trouble. Her words were “Please just meet him; I think this is it.” She gave me contact information for a local businessman named Mark. She also gave him my number, and he called me at work. I already had butterflies in my stomach. I ended the call by suggesting we meet at the Minnehaha house. After two seasons of Rehab Addict, I was finding out how many creeps and weirdos there are in the world, and I wanted to be careful in case the guy turned out to be a potential stalker. I didn’t want him knowing where I lived.

  The first flowers I received from Mark.

  When I pulled up to the curb, he was already standing on Minnehaha’s porch, framed by the majestic stonework of the entryway. I immediately thought, Well, something is clearly wrong, because he looked way too perfect. He was hot like the type of dad you see among the other parents at school and think, How in the world does that happen? He was tall and in good shape. He had a meticulous haircut, and a natural “how you doin’?” smile that I’m sure got him just about anything he wanted. From my initial assessment it seemed like I would make it home alive, so we went out from there.

  As we rode to dinner in his Jaguar convertible, I thought, This is too good to be true. I was giddy, which is not like me. But honestly, I hadn’t been on a date in so long. I was either working with my hair tied up in a knot or running around looking like a mom with my hair tied up in knot. Now I actually had my hair down and my nails done, and I was wearing a dress. Things moved quickly. Within a week we had gone on three dates. One day I came home to find a beautiful flower arrangement in my living room. I thought, That’s odd. How did these get in here? I asked Ethan, and he said he hadn’t taken them in. I looked at the card, and they were from Mark, celebrating our first month together. I called him and casually asked how he’d gotten into the house. He said he’d gone around the back and found the door unlocked. I was a little more than weirded out, but then he showed up for dinner and treated me like a queen. Who cared if he’d come into my house uninvited? No big deal. Soon after that, we went kayaking and he forgot to bring a change of clothes. Boxes from Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom started to appear on my doorstep. He ordered a whole wardrobe to keep at my house so it wouldn’t happen again.

  I shrugged it off. I wasn’t worried because he had told me everything I wanted to hear, especially that he wanted more kids. I loved being a mother, and having more children was what I wanted more than anything else. Mark also knew how to romance a gal. One Friday, on learning that Ethan was staying at a friend’s house, Mark said, “Let’s go away for the weekend.” We booked a last-minute trip to Chicago and he told me to pack my dog, Polly (who traveled with me everywhere). He arranged to have Sade playing when we walked into our hotel room at the Trump Tower Chicago. He even fed Polly filet mignon. That moment meant so much, as Polly passed away a few weeks later. Remembering how he’d doted on my pup made me sure he was the one. When I came out dressed for dinner, he looked at me and said, “You’re so beautiful.” I had just spent three years in a relationship where the closest thing to a romantic exchange was “What a great price on that tile.” The way Mark treated me felt good, and as much as I still had some hesitation, I did it: I just relaxed and let my guard down.

  Polly, in Chicago.

  He opened car doors for me, and I would wake up to find a Starbucks venti green iced tea on the nightstand, with a yellow Post-it note saying, “I love you, baby.” I had fought so hard and been on my own as a single mother for so long. The idea that this man treated Ethan like his son and said he was going to take care of us was really appealing. I also adored his daughter. I set up one of my guest bedrooms for her to use when she and Mark stayed over. The whole thing seemed ideal. I didn’t realize that Mark was slowly but surely taking over. I had let my defenses down. Almost before I knew it, we became inseparable. My friends called us “the dream couple.” It was easy to get sucked in. I’ve since asked those friends why they didn’t let me know they thought something was up. They tell me that they saw me happy and didn’t want to ruin it.

  It turned out that there was darkness behind the curtain. Mark could be calm and nonchalant in public and high-strung and demanding in private. He hated hearing the word “no,” and he wanted to be in charge, whether it was planning a vacation or choosing the restaurant for dinner. It’s amazing, though, what you can ignore when you put your mind to it. I didn’t raise a fuss when he developed the habit—anytime I questioned him or resisted something he said—of grabbing my chin between his forefinger and thumb, firmly holding my face in place, and staring into my eyes. He’d say, very slowl
y as if he were talking to a child, “You trust me, don’t you? You love me? Let me handle it. I’ve got it.” You get yourself into these situations bit by bit. You give yourself up a little at a time until you finally come to the point where you don’t recognize the person in the mirror.

  The Harriet house.

  While the relationship with Mark grew more intense at lightning speed, dealing with the investors who had purchased the Harriet house could not have been more difficult. I had lost the house in a bidding war to them, and then had the genius idea of approaching them to let me work with them and use the house on my show. I loved the Harriet house and just wanted to make sure the original details were left intact. I had to get creative. The owners jumped at my offer to be on TV and to take advantage of the fact that it would garner exposure for their business.

  A few days into filming, I realized I had made a mistake. My im- patience had led me into another painful partnership. The house became a source of daily tension. The crew thought I was a prude because I wasn’t cool with off-color humor on my set. My “partners” would show up un­­announced and start berating me for my choice to save a claw-foot tub or for the tile color I’d picked. It got bizarre. I had to fight every inch of the way. If I wasn’t being told what I was doing wrong, someone else was telling me how I could never do this alone.

  The Harriet house was such a constant, over-the-top nightmare that I didn’t even want to do a TV show anymore. I had put up with too much. I had listened to disparaging comments almost every day. One of the partners had actually said to me, after I negotiated a great price for some reclaimed cabinets, “It must be nice to be hot and blond.”

  Adding to my stress, Christopher had attempted to negotiate the sale of Minnehaha without conferring with me. I wanted to keep the house, but we couldn’t agree on anything, so I had listed it. Unbeknownst to me, Christopher had been working with buyers.

  At this point, I sat down with John Kitchener.

  “I can’t do this anymore, John,” I told him.

  “Nicole, come on.”

  “I can’t, John. I just can’t. I want to be home with my kids and taking care of Mark—not dealing with partners that don’t respect me.” At that time, Mark would arrive every day to have lunch with me. I didn’t find out until later that someone had made a snide remark to him, implying that I had slept my way to the top. (I learned this months later in one of our final conversations.)

  John had a knack for always cutting right to the chase. “Nicole, if you can just get through this, you’re on the cusp of something huge. You have no idea how big this is going to be.”

  He was right, but it didn’t matter. “I don’t care, John. I’m done.”

  “Let’s just say you’re giving it some thought. Let’s keep the door open.”

  Mark knew all this was happening. He assured me that I didn’t need a TV show; I should just focus on him and the kids. One night, as we sat on my couch talking about Minnehaha, he grabbed my hands in his and looked me in the eyes. “I want to buy that house for you. I think you should always have it. It’s where we met. I’m going to buy it for you and we’ll live there.”

  Nobody had ever offered to take care of me that way. After pushing a rock uphill since forever, it was so seductive to just let someone else shoulder the burden. So I said, “Yes, let’s buy the house. I’d love to live there.”

  In renovating old homes, I always tell people to take their time and do it right. Hastiness creates chaos. Yet I was ready to change everything after being with a guy for only six months. In my business life, I pump the brakes; I pay attention to details before making any moves. But in my personal life, one “I want to buy that house for you” was enough to make me throw caution to the wind. Within a matter of days, Mark had convinced Christopher to sell the house for less than it had been appraised for just for the sake of being done with it. When all the pieces came together, I couldn’t believe it. It was like the clouds had parted and the sun was shining through; my dream life was within reach. But on the morning we were supposed to close, I looked over the paperwork and noticed that my name was nowhere to be seen. I held the papers out in front of Mark.

  “Why’s my name not on the contract?” I asked him.

  “You can’t worry about that right now.”

  “What do you mean I can’t worry about it right now?”

  “Look, we’ll fix it later. But if we don’t close today, we’re not closing at all.”

  Mark was obsessed with anniversaries. We had met on the eleventh, and he wanted every important event in our lives to happen on the eleventh. The closing was scheduled for the eleventh, and it sounded to me like he was saying, “Close today or never.” Alarms should have gone off. In hindsight, it should have been an easy call to delay the closing, but I wanted to ignore that sinking feeling in my gut and just trust him. Plus, it’s not a huge deal to add a name to a deed after the fact. I’ve done it before (the other person just has to agree). The house represented a lot of hard work and, more important, the future. I could see in my mind’s eye what it would be like living in that house. I knew exactly where the Christmas tree would go and how it would look all lit up on Christmas morning. I could imagine a baby crawling around on the maple floors while my dogs scuttled out of the way and kids cleared the table after a big family meal. I could see that new life so clearly that I didn’t want to hold it up because of a mistake in the paperwork. So against my better judgment, I let the sale go forward.

  After the closing, we drove from the lawyer’s office straight to Minnehaha. We walked through the house, then upstairs. It seemed like a dream come true; after all the work, time, and frustration, the home of my dreams was mine. I walked into my master bedroom and stood there processing the reality, my eyes tearing up. Mark stood at the door, smiling at me.

  “It’s yours, baby. There’s no more trouble. I just want you to soak it in. Because it’s never going to get taken away from you again.”

  For the first time in a very, very long time, I felt totally safe, secure, and free. But when things seem too good to be true, they usually are. As we navigated two busy lives with two kids, two dogs, and three houses, I regularly brought up the issue of Minnehaha’s paperwork.

  “When are we going to do the paperwork to get my name on the deed?”

  Mark would grab my chin, stare into my eyes, and say, “Do you trust me? Do you love me?” Then, “You need to stop worrying about this. Listen to me, Nicole Curtis. There are no worries here. I’m here to take care of you. Go buy some furniture.”

  Ethan playing the family piano that has moved to each house with us.

  So I went out and bought furniture—lots of it. I shopped for weeks, finding just the right pieces. The day finally came to move my piano, which had originally been in my grandparents’ house, into the sunroom at Minnehaha. I remember sitting there thinking how amazing my life was, seeing my family’s piano, with “Grinnell Brothers, Detroit” stamped on it, in my Minnehaha house.

  I was ready to move when Mark dropped a bomb on me. We were discussing when we would move into Minnehaha, and what the future looked like, when he said, “I’m not having any more children. I’m absolutely not having any more children. I don’t want any more.”

  “Wait a second,” I told him. “You said you wanted more children. You knew I wanted more children when we met. I told the matchmaker that was a priority. We have to discuss it.”

  The master bedroom in the Minnehaha house, before (left) and after (right).

  He grabbed my chin, looked into my eyes, and said, “Do you love me? Do you trust me? We have two children and that’s enough.” And that was the end of the discussion as far as he was concerned. The truth is, had I known he didn’t want more children, I would never have met with him. It was a deal breaker for me and something I had been up front about when I first met the matchmaker.

  But all the chin grab
bing in the world wasn’t going to settle the subject for me. I felt like Mark had misled me. I needed a little space and time to think things through. I wasn’t going to be able to properly process everything with someone holding on to my chin. I told him I needed a break and that we’d talk when I’d had a chance to figure some things out. I didn’t make any threats and I didn’t say I was breaking up with him. But he was clearly unhappy with the idea.

  I called my closest girlfriends and used them as sounding boards. They were all supportive. But in the end, I realized that no one else could give me the answer. I searched my soul and eventually came to a conclusion. The way I figured it, God doesn’t give you everything you ask for. That’s not how it works. I asked for another child, and God brought me this little girl who had lost her mom. I realized that she needed me more than I needed a baby.

  A few days after I told Mark I was “taking a break,” he wouldn’t answer my phone calls. I had just arrived home and was chatting with my plumber, who had been doing some work, when Mark burst through the front door. He had written me a fifteen-page letter and he threw it onto the coffee table.

  “You want this to be over? Fine, it’s done. You’re done. I’m done.”

  “Whoa! Calm down,” I told him. I was horrified that he had exploded like this.

  “I am calm, Nicole. You need to understand what you did.”

  He was so worked up. I grabbed my coat and pushed him out the door. We drove to Minnehaha, where I thought that at the very least, he could “air” his frustration without an audience. The minute we walked in the door, I went up to the master bedroom; it was the place where he’d told me on the fateful January 11 that the house was mine. I hoped that room would bring some peace. I had just finished placing all the furniture, and I walked over to the west end of my beautiful dressing room and asked him to sit. He had gotten himself into such a state that it didn’t seem like anything was going to calm him down.