“And then it became an obsession.”
“Obsession is an understatement,” says Nicola. “Like calling a sperm whale a moderate-sized creature.” Immediately, an inconvenient, telling warmth floods her cheeks. So many whales to choose from, and she chose the sperm whale. Then: Grow up,she tells herself sternly. You are an almost-thirty-year-old woman, not a fifth-grade boy. You can sayspermin the context of a whale. You can sayspermin any context!She hurries on with her thoughts, to move the conversation forward. “But if NASCAR opened the door,” she says, “sports car racing ushered him over the threshold.”
“Gorgeous metaphor,” says Jack. “If I were wearing a hat right now, I’d tip it.”
After that, David was a lost cause. All his energy went into thinking about cars; every penny he made at their fathers’ furniture store went into his car fund, until he had enough to buy an old Mazda Miata. Once he had it, all he did in his free time was tinker with it, modify it, make it into the closest thing to a sports racing car he could.
“When we were in college, he used to talk about missing that Miata like some guys in college talked about missing their high school girlfriends,” says Jack.
“He loved that car,” says Nicola. “I remember he was always talking about the holy trinity of sports cars. Bigger wheels, bigger engine, closer to the ground.”
She heard enough about it back then to know the deal. If NASCAR is the Country Cousin of motorsports, sports car racing is a two-olive martini, elegant, elevated, with turns and curves and straightaways. Racing sports cars became what David thought about, what he wanted to do.Allhe wanted to do. He did a track day with his car when he was seventeen, and after that he was officially a lost cause. He wrote his college essay—this is the one that got him into Yale—on coming from behind in his first race. “It was called ‘The Power of the Underdog,’ and it was published in some anthology,” she tells Jack.
(David going to college on the East Coast, by the way, paved the way for Nicola to make her pitch for attending the University of Rhode Island; she had a visceral desire to put herself near the ocean, even if it took her an undergrad degree in poli-sci, a law school degree, and a failed relationship to allow her to find her path.)
But, but, but. Racing is not like soccer; you don’t grab a ball and a pair of cleats and go for it. You need time, and you need money, and in an ideal world you need a parent who’s willing to support you in your quest. David didn’t have any of these. The Furniture Brothers work at the store on holidays and weekends, even now. There are four girls in Nicola’s family and three boys in David’s: there was never room for one child out of seven to retain an expensive, time-consuming hobby. When David went east to college, most people assumed his dream had remained behind. Still, the flame burned strong and bright all those years. Nicola knows it did.
“But what,” she asks, “does any of this have to do with Juliana?”
“Let’s go back to 2019,” Jack says. Taylor was going gangbusters working for Brice Buchanan, learning the ropes so fast it was almost like she’d made the ropes herself. Jack was on the Tour and was gone a lot. And David was going any chance he got up to Monticello Motor Club, in the Catskills.
“To drive cars?”
“Noooo,” says Jack. “The people who drive cars there are gazillionaires. The Buchanans are mere millionaires. He had a job there.”
“A job? Doing what?” How did she not know about this? There was a time when she knew everything about David!
“I don’t know, changing tires and stuff. Pit work. Sometimes he got to take a car around the track, to test it or whatever. Basically he did all the work he did for those rare moments of driving. But here’s the thing. Taylor had just asked him to stop doing it.”
“Why?”
“Depends what you believe. It’s far from the city. The trip could take two hours each way. And David didn’t have a car. He had totake one of the Buchanans’ cars. He wanted them to plan an occasional vacation to a big race. But Taylor didn’t want any part of that. It wasn’t a shared interest, blah blah.”
“What do you mean, ‘depends what you believe’? It wasn’t that?”
“That’s not what I think. What I think is that she didn’t want to be engaged to someone who was working as a mechanic. When they first met, she thought it was cute and wholesome. But as time went on, not so much. Taylor felt that every little boy needs to move out of his race car bed and into a real one eventually.”
“David never had a race car bed.”
Jack laughs. “Metaphorically speaking, then. Anyway. On the day in question, I was home. I wasn’t playing again until Sanderson.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Doesn’t matter. I had just started dating this model”—he says this so casually, like someone like Nicola would say,I was eating this grilled cheese sandwich—“and it was Fashion Week, you know, so there were events going on everywhere, not just the shows but all kinds of networking stuff, and parties, and whatever. She got me an invite to one of these parties, and I needed a date, so I brought David as my plus-one.”
“What about the model?”
“Oh, we were over by then.”
“That was quick.”
“Yeah,” he says ruefully, rubbing his chin. “Yeah. Short but sweet.”
“So how did you get into the party if you and the model were over?”
“I was on the list. And I thought, Why the hell not? Anyway. We go to this party at Chelsea Piers, David and I. Juliana was there too, networking for LookBook. Something to do with her next round of funding. Who knows. The details aren’t important. What’s important is—” Jack takes a long, dramatic breath. “What’s important is, David and Juliana met at that party.”
The puzzle pieces begin to slot into place. David hasn’t just heardof LookBook—DavidknowsJuliana. She remembers Juliana’s enigmatic smile, her mention of a favor. David is hiding something from Nicola. What is it?
