“Wean her?” asked David. “Already?”
If David could have grown breasts and filled them with milk he would have done it.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” says Nicola. “But I get what you’re saying.”
“We don’t need the nanny every day,” David says he told Taylor. “I’m right here! I know how to hold a bottle!”
“I know you do, darling. But it’s hard to get anyone good if you can’t offer full-time hours.”
The nanny was hired, and after that, well, David grew bored. He missed the little triumvirate they’d briefly been. He had no real skills, no true experience, nowhere to put his energy. They lived far from Monticello now; even if Taylor had been okay with his returning, it no longer made sense.
Time went on: one month, two, a year, a year and half, two. David didn’t want a sugar mama. He wanted a partner. He wanted to talk to Taylor about the funny things Felicity had said that day, but instead he found himself telling the nanny. He should have thought more about what he wanted to do with his life earlier, in the years after college, but somehow time had gotten away from him, and now the idea of a whole lifetime of leisure was terrifying. He’d tuckedhis racing dream away and now, if ever it emerged, it did so only to announce that he was too old, his time had passed.
Almost two years ago, Taylor told David about an investment property her father had bought on Block Island. He was going to renovate over the next year and a half, and then he wanted Taylor, David, and Felicity to summer there. He’d give them a budget for decorating. They could return every summer, until Buchanan Enterprises decided to sell. But that wouldn’t be for a while. Property values on the island were only going up and up and up. He wanted Taylor to oversee a couple of projects. Brice would be mainly in Boston for the summer; ground was breaking on a skyscraper. And he had a trip to Malaysia planned. Taylor would be his boots on the ground on the Block.
The house on Block Island was a chance at something different; David saw it as an opportunity to reconnect. But on the island, Taylor was busier than ever. Her dad was all over her to make sure the new homes off Beacon Hill Road were on track. They were trying to get approval for the hotel and spa. Many locals were against the hotel plan, so there was a lot of diplomacy involved. There were meetings, and when those meetings were done there were more meetings. She was home less than ever.
“Can I help?” David asked her once.
She was putting lip gloss on in the mirror. It often fascinated him, how much attention she gave a small task like that, how much there seemed to be to it, because there wasn’t just gloss but there was apparently a primer to go under the gloss and some sort of a sealant to go over. And when it came to other tasks, tasks having to do with him or Felicity, she seemed to have no time at all. Not that spending time with her husband and daughter was technicallya task. But sometimes, from this end of things, it felt like it.
“With what I’m doing now? My lips?”
“No!With the work stuff. The approval process.”
She turned to him in amazement and said, “You?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well. Mostly why not because last I checked you weren’t an expert on approval processes.” She snapped the top on the gloss and told him she had to go; she was late for a meeting.
Sometimes David thought about calling his father and asking if he could be trained to run Furniture Brothers. He thought a lot about Minnesota, about returning to his roots, about raising Felicity with the solid midwestern values he himself had been raised with. The streets with cul-de-sacs, summers at Pokegama. He knew, obviously, that Taylor would never go for this. Taylor couldn’t do her job from Minnesota, and even if she could, she wouldn’t want to. She had been to the lake only one time. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was always humming in the background, this desire for something different.
Once, getting Felicity dressed for the day before the nanny arrived, he reached for a dress in the back of the closet, a little orange sundress she’d never worn. Still with the tags on it. Three hundred dollars. Felicity was going to outgrow the dress in about thirty seconds, and yet Taylor had spentthree hundred dollarson it. This kind of wealth disgusted him, but it fascinated him too, just as it had for years, howeasyeverything seemed for people with money, how the wheels were greased before they even knew that the wheels existed. Even though he was now part of it, he was still awestruck and repulsed by it.
Here Nicola interjects, “David. I looked up your Porsche. Those cars cost almost two hundred thousand dollars.”
She watched the tips of his ears turn red, then redder still, as he says, “Well, now. To be fair. It’s a 2021. So, less.” Nicola rolls her eyes so hard she almost strains a muscle. More softly, David continues: “It doesn’t even have the control-arm front suspension of the newest model.”
“I’m sorry you have to suffer like that.”
He grins then, and he’s the same old David he always was, the kid at the lake who swam farther than everyone else, the teenager who drove faster, the guy who made all the hard stuff look easy. Then he says, “I could live without any of the material things, really I could.”
Nicola feels like she has to call BS on that. “I feel like the only people who say that are people who will never actually have to live without any of the stuff they have.”
David thinks about this—really thinks about it, letting a big chunk of time and a lot of stepping over roots pass before he answers. “Maybe,” he says finally.
In June, two months after they’d moved in, he learned from Nicola that Juliana lived on the other side of the pond. Nicola had them over for drinks, and he remembered what it was like to listen to another person, and to be listened to. He felt all the same things he had felt all those years ago in New York, that night they walked to Battery Park, but stronger now. He didn’t want to feel those things. He didn’t! But they were there. It was all still there. Something that had been sleeping inside him woke up.
Juliana cared about David, and she let him care about her. She told him things that scared her or worried her; she was vulnerable. She needed him in a way that Taylor never did—never would. And the more time he spent with Juliana the more David began to suspect that this was what might bring him down. This was what might ruin his marriage: his need to be needed.
He had his suspicions that something was going on with Taylor, eventually confirmed. Jack, ever the player (Nicola cringes), was out and about in town, here and there and everywhere, and he heard something about Taylor and this guy Henry, the foreman on the four houses Buchanan Enterprises was building.
Understandably, this broke David’s heart. Taylor had made him into the kind of man he was, a playboy without skills, without a career path,literally loafing aroundin loafers, and now, apparently, shewanted a different kind of man, the kind who wore hard hats and worked with his hands and could command a construction crew.
“Icould have been a man in a hard hat!” he says. “I could have worked with my hands! But Taylor didn’t want that.”
“Yeah?” Nicola isn’t sure about this, David in a hard hat.
