“And part of it comes from growing up as her dad’s right-hand man.”
“So what changed?”
“Sometime after college it seemed like she didn’t need that from me any longer. She needed... I don’t know. She needed something different. And I became the tail to her comet.” (What a poetic visual,thinks Nicola.) “Time went on, and life was good enough. I mean, it wasgood,of course it was good, I’m not insane, but every time I brought up any of my own plans or dreams, like the race cars, it was like Taylor couldn’t comprehend it. It was a real dream, though, Nicola. It wasmydream.” His voice cracks.
“I know it was,” she says softly. “I know.”
David always seemed so perfectlyDavid—so at ease in the world, with the beautiful family and all the money and not a care on him, that she too has forgotten that all this time he’s had desire vibrating inside him.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore. Now I am finally, officially too old to be a race car driver.” He smiles shakily as they pick their way over tree roots. Then he stops. “It’s not about the money, this story,” he says. “Okay, Nicola?”
“Of course not.” But also, she realizes, it’s very much about the money. To the son of a Furniture Brother, Taylor’s wealth must have seemed bottomless, unfathomable. It would be impossible for it not to be a little seductive, to a midwestern guy with simple tastes.
Once they were engaged, she wanted him to find a cause to take up. Something he could be a spokesperson for. He looked good onstage! Good in a tux at a charity event. “It was like she wanted me to be First Gentleman to her president,” he says. There were so many places where he could be useful. Food insecurity or children with cancer. He had carte blanche to find something close to his heart.
“What about the race car thing?” David ventured. He’d been talking about this for years—since college! She knew that this was his passion. “That’sclose to my heart.” If only she’d known him when he had the Miata he was always tinkering with—or further back, when he was ten, when he saw that first race at the Minnesota State Fair.
“That’s not acause,” said Taylor. “That’s a... hobby. Nobody actuallybecomesa race car driver. That dream is so...middle America.”
“Ouch,” says Nicola.
“Yeah. I know.” She wanted him to quit going up to Monticello. It didn’t make sense! What was the endgame? To Taylor things mattered only when there was an endgame.
Sometimes David thought about what it would have been like if he’d broken up with Taylor after he met Juliana, when she returned from Europe. Even on the eve of his wedding, when he got the email from Juliana, he thought about it. Especially then.
But he didn’t. He didn’t break up with Taylor during their engagement, and he certainly didn’t do it on the night before the wedding, after Juliana sent him the email. On the day of the wedding there were 250 people gathered in Newport. He wasn’t about toruinTaylor. He loved Taylor. He really did. He just loved Juliana...
“More?” offers Nicola.
“Differently. More equally.”
He moved with Taylor to Boston, into the brownstone in the Back Bay, right after the wedding. And in a few months, Taylor was pregnant.
“Were you in touch with Juliana at all?”
He hesitates. “Before the wedding, yes. And—a few times after.”
“David!”
“I know. I know! Phone calls. A few emails. We didn’t see each other.” Of course Juliana had dated people before and after she met David; she wasn’t anun,David explained. But she felt the same thing for David he felt for her.
As soon as Taylor got pregnant, David told Juliana he couldn’t be in touch with her anymore.
“And you kept to that?”
“Absolutely. When Felicity was born, everything changed. For a while, life was perfect.”
“For how long?”
“Two weeks.”
Nicola clears her throat. “That’s not very long.”
“No.” David stops walking for a minute and considers the sky, asif there’s additional information to be found in one of the scudding clouds. “No, it was brief.”
They had a night nurse, so they actually slept like, well, pardon the expression, but they slept like babies. Taylor’s father promised, for the first two weeks, to call Taylor only once a day with an update on the business, not two zillion times the way he typically did. For two weeks, they were a family, a cocoon of love and nursing and lying together watching Felicity’s eyelids move while she slept.
It was the first and last time Taylor didn’t put her work, and by extension herself, first. Then she started interviewing for a day nanny to go along with the night nurse and announced that she was going to begin weaning Felicity so she could go back to the office.
