You have to understand that when Nicola came to dinner early in the summer and Taylor made the Country Cousin comment, she meant it as a joke. She flubbed it, and she came off like a bitch. How she agonized over this! She knew Nicola was David’s favorite cousin, and in going for a laugh she’d landed on an insult. (She was good with people except for the times when she wasn’t, and then shereallywasn’t.)
David was different from Taylor. David was funny and charming and everybody loved him; David was so comfortable in his skin that he made everyone around him comfortable too. He was a balm to Taylor’s anxieties, a cool hand on the warm forehead of her stress. Even Brice, whose standards were skyscraper-high for Taylor, loved David. He loved that he had a wholesome middle-class background but that he’d married it to an Ivy League degree.David could navigate so many different worlds while Taylor could navigate only one. She felt terrible about calling Nicola the Country Cousin. But Brice had raised her in the “never apologize, never explain” school of thought. She didn’t know how to walk her comment back without looking weak.
You have to understand that small things like these ate at Taylor and that she had to push them aside and keep going, because that’s what she was supposed to do. That’s what she’s always done. She’s always kept going.
Taylor’s father wanted her on Block Island that summer to manage what, in his mind, were two fairly easy projects in the Buchanan portfolio: the construction of the four homes off Beacon Hill Road, and the building of the new hotel in the downtown section. The hotel was going to have a full-service spa; a restaurant to which they were close to wooing a chef who’d earned his previous restaurant a Michelin star; oversized luxury rooms with top-of-the-line bathrooms, each with its own infrared sauna for two. Luxury shuttle service around the island. It was going to be beautiful! It was going to attract people to the island, to eat in its restaurants and hike on its trails and spend money on its nightlife.
But while she was managing all of this, her father said, it was supposed to be a “summer off.” Family time! said Brice. Go to the beach! Have barbecues! Make friends! Make another baby, you and David! As if it were that easy.
As if it were that easy.
The reality of the business was that there were no summers off; there were hardly any days off. Her father wanted a bigger hotel than originally planned, and that was on Taylor, because it wasn’t like on an island such as this you could just snap your fingers and make that happen. There was a sticky approval process to go through, and a lot of locals who didn’t want it. If she were being honest with herself Taylor understood how they might feel that way. But she wasn’t allowed to say that. Her job was to execute for the company, not tohave opinions on what her father wanted her to execute. Navigating that channel between her father and the locals was on Taylor. Everything was on Taylor.
One time Taylor came home from work crying. It was as simple as that, and it was as complicated as that. This was in June. She’d had a terrible day. Somebody had started an Instagram account called @keeptheblocktheblock to protest the hotel. Normally Taylor’s skin was thick enough that something as tame as an Instagram account wouldn’t get to her. After all, she’d been raised by a man who bulldozed (sometimes literally) over anyone in his path. If Brice Buchanan wanted something, and if he believed he was correct to want it, he didn’t worry about the guys on the other side of the table. He wasn’t going to let himself get worked up if something he was tearing down or building up made somebodysad. It was the nature of the business. He wasimprovingthe land/building/town/city. Progress was moving forward, not looking back. That’s how he trained his daughter too. That’s usually what she believed.
But for some reason—oh, who knows what the reason was?—this Instagram thing really got to Taylor. She hadn’t slept well the night before, always a trigger for her. David had gone out drinking with Jack Baker. She’d stayed home, hoping for an early night, but she really didn’t settle until the boys were back, after midnight. When David drank hard liquor he snored and moved around in his sleep, and when David moved around in his sleep Taylor’s sleep suffered. She’d set her alarm for 6a.m., and when it went off she was already awake, which meant she’d probably slept three hours at the most.
She was answering emails by seven, and on the worksite by eight for a meeting with the foreman, Henry. Her phone kept pinging with messages from her father, who needed her to get in touch with New York, call the Boston office, maybe schedule a trip to Atlanta to look at a building he was interested in. He needed her to kick the tires, look in the horse’s mouth, make sure the building was sound. Could he maybe send someone else? Taylor wanted to know. (Shewas so tired!) There was nobody else he trusted, he told her. Her opinion was everything.
Okay, so now she had to figure out when to get to Atlanta. Taylor was holding so many details in her head, in so many different compartments, that if one compartment spilled over into the one beside it she knew she was going to be in real trouble. She hadn’t seen her husband or her daughter for more than a few minutes at a time over the past forty-eight hours—the previous night she’d gotten home right before Felicity’s bedtime. She got to kiss her, read her one story, but that was it. She felt disengaged from her family, a ship at sea without its anchor. She worried all the time that she might be a bad mother; it chewed at her, the fear that growing up without a maternal example meant that she was missing some innate understanding of how to mother.
So when she saw the Instagram post around 3p.m., instead of ignoring it as she normally would, she followed the “link in bio” to an opinion piece in theBlock Island Times,written by an anonymous local whose opinion it was that the Buchanans should not develop the land they had bought (and paid over market value for, the articledidn’tsay) but shouldgiftit back to the island to become conservation land. Below the article there was space for comments. Here, people who registered to comment did not need to use their own name, did not need to include a profile photo, did not need to identify themselves in any real way—and therefore they could unleash their vitriol with no fear of repercussions.
Greed is the only thing motivating these people.
Go home Buchanans
And the worst:Stupid bitch daughter needs to find someone else’s island to ruin.
Where was the line between expressing one’s opinion on a topic and hate speech? She supposed that privileged white property developers were not a marginalized group, so the label of hate speech didn’t apply—but it all feltso very hateful. It felt so personal!Stupidbitch daughter.She wasn’t stupid (she had a degree from Yale!), and she wasn’t a bitch. She was a daughter, yes. She was a daughter.
Did she agree with the sentiment behind what these people were saying, if not their methods? Maybe. But it wasn’t up to her. She was at the mercy of her father’s wishes. Their whole lives were built around Buchanan Enterprises. She couldn’t walk away from her father—where would she go? Buchanan was her job, and her family’s livelihood, and the livelihood of all the people who worked for her too. Certainly they couldn’t subsist on David’s impossible dreams.
The first thing Taylor did after she saw the account and read the article was call her dad. Brice Buchanan was vacationing in Malaysia. It was 4a.m.in Malaysia, and Brice Buchanan was asleep with hisDo Not Disturbenabled.
The second thing she did was call Shelly Salazar to see how she could sprinkle some PR fairy dust on the situation. When Taylor looked next, the most vitriolic of the comments were gone (although a few others, not kind but ever so slightly kinder, had tiptoed in to take their place). But they weren’t gone from her mind. They burrowed right in there, making a home.
She made phone calls in her home office until 6p.m., by which time her father was awake and calling, so she spent another ninety minutes on the phone with him. The whole time she was talking to Brice she was watching the clock. She missed dinner. Felicity’s bedtime was getting closer and closer.
At seven forty-five she hung up with her father. All she wanted by that time was to talk to David and hug Felicity. She wanted someone to pour her an oversized glass of Sauv Blanc and rub her feet and tell her that everything was going to be okay. She closed the door to her home office behind her and looked for David in the living room, on the back patio, in the kitchen. No David. She checked his location on her phone and saw that he was at Poor People’s Pub.
Okay. She could join him... maybe? But she didn’t want to. She crept by Felicity’s bedroom, where the nanny was reading Felicitythe book about the bear who has come to visit and won’t leave. Every time the nanny read a direct quote from the bear or the mouse—Perhaps we could have just a spot of tea?—she did it in a perfect British accent. Taylor knew that if she had been reading the book she wouldn’t have been able to do the British accent. She was a terrible mother. She could tell by the way Felicity’s arm was hanging over the side of the bed, motionless, that she was already asleep.
The next day she was still upset. She woke before David or Felicity were up, and she headed to the site. The foreman, Henry, who was earnest and handsome andjust so nice,asked her if anything was bothering her. Yes, she said, everything was bothering her. Everything.
And then she started crying. Crying! On the job site. Mortifying! And what did Henry do? He took one of his thumbs and he wiped away her tears, and then he opened his arms and invited her in. It was so similar, eerily similar, to how she’d met David. Maybe she was only attractive to men when she was vulnerable and teary.
That’s how it started. With a hug. She was so tired. And here was a person opening his arms to her, offering her a place to lean. So she leaned. And over the course of the summer, when she didn’t know what else to do, she leaned again and again and again. She and David, she realized, had forgotten how to do this; they’d forgotten how to be kind to each other.
Taylor didn’t want to be having an affair! She didn’t want to be fighting over a man, especially if the man was her husband! That was counter to everything she believed in; it implied, of course, that a man was a prize, and women merely contestants. But also, she wanted to stay married. Yes, she very much wanted to stay married. She wanted to grow old and gray with David. Well, okay, not gray. She would certainly color any grays that crept in, but old, yes. She wanted to grow old with David.
So the day after the party at Juliana’s, she broke things off with Henry. She wanted to make her marriage work: for Felicity, of course.She’d grown up a child of divorce and no part of her thought that was okay to do to a child. For the sake of the business too. She knew her father (though he had been through one himself) would frown on a divorce, on the negative publicity it might bring, on the behind-the-scenes disorder it would imply to potential business associates. Taylor’s father wanted everything squeaky clean on the outside and the inside. Besides that, Brice adored David.
But most of all, she wanted to make the marriage work for herself.
You have to remember, all Taylor Buchanan ever wanted was the fairy tale, the pretty dress, the happy ending. The prince. And also the business suit.
Nicola
