Maybe you can’t fall in love with one handshake, but what about one evening? What about a night? What if you eat at an all-night diner on Sixth Avenue, then walk from Fifty-Fourth Street all the way down to Battery Park, then back again (eight miles in total), talking the whole time, compressing the normal first weeks or even months of a new relationship into a few hours? What if you tell this brand-new-to-you person stories about your childhood you’ve never told anyone? What if he tells you his stories, which are tamer than yours, but to you so interesting simply because they are sonormal? A midwestern upbringing, a father and uncle and mother and aunt and cousins galore. Summers at a lake, weekends at high school parties, the kind you see in the movies, an old Miata that became the gateway to his passion?
What if he doesn’t touch you after that first handshake until, oh, around 2a.m., when he takes your hand so casually, as though you are a couple, as though you always walk around linked together like this? And what if he rubs the knuckle of your right forefinger withthe thumb of his left hand and you think you might actually melt into the sidewalk?
What if you don’t even kiss until you watch the sun rise from a bench on the High Line? What if you kiss for a second time outside your apartment, and what if you are completely serious when you label this the kiss you will be trying to find again for the rest of your life?
What if you come up for air and you say, “My roommate—” at the same time that he says, “I shouldn’t—I can’t—” And then he touches your temple, and you don’t think you’ve ever felt anything so erotic in your life?
What if he says, “I have to tell you something. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say it. I can’t—I’m engaged, Juliana. I’m engaged to be married.”
What if the bottom drops out then, and you spend years wishing you could reclaim it.
She knew they both felt the same thing. That’s the key to this entire story:they both felt the same thing.
She saw him again, three weeks later, in Central Park. He was with a tall, beautiful blonde. If you looked quickly you might have thought you were seeing the ghosts of John-John and Carolyn Bessette. Juliana was walking, trying to clear her head from a stressful day. The couple was sitting on one of the wood-and-concrete benches along the perimeter.
Juliana and David saw each other at the same instant, just when Carolyn Bessette stood up to take a phone call. When she raised the phone to her ear Juliana saw the diamond winking on her ring finger. The woman walked away, out of earshot. David said Juliana’s name, and she moved closer to him. He said, “Listen, I—”
“It’s okay,” she said. There was that shame again, the shame she’d never fully gotten rid of. “It’s fine,” she repeated. She’d come to realize, playing the night over and over again in her mind, that she had misread the situation. Again.
She’s likeobsessedwith my mom.
She wasn’t normal, like everyone else. She wanted to say,I have never felt this way about anyone.She wanted to say,I know you felt it too.And she wanted to say,You’re making a huge mistake.But that was desperate, and desperation was Jade Gordon’s weakness, not Juliana George’s. So what she said was: “It’s okay. We hardly know each other. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
She walked away, exited the park as fast as she could, not realizing until she was out how close she was to George’s old building. She made sure she was far enough away before she let herself start crying.
She had thought that love, once she found it, would win out over everything else. But what did she know of love, really? Remember, she’d been raised without it.
Taylor was an Important Person whose father ran a Big Company; it wasn’t hard to track the details online. Nearly a year later Juliana made one last effort, writing that email on the eve of the wedding. When David didn’t answer, and when she saw the wedding announcement in theTimes, she told herself to give up. It’s over, it’s done! Walk away! Wash your hands of all of it. Look at all you’ve achieved. Look at LookBook! Your company needs you. The last thingyouneed is a complicated personal life.
But oh, even so. Emily Dickinson had it right. The heart wants what it wants. Boy, does it want what it wants.
Time marched on, and on. Series B investing was happening, people were vying to invest. LookBook’s cash position swelled; so did the board. Some were partners, and some were critics, but she had aboard!She had acompany!She hadmoney!By the time Juliana was ready to think about taking LookBook public, she’d been making a good salary for seven years. Market standard, this was called. Can you imagine what market standard felt like to someone like Juliana? She, who had learned to live on nothing, who had no time to spend money even if she wanted to? She’d moved into a slightlybigger apartment in New York, with no roommate, and her clothes were better, obviously,but other than that she lived much the same way she always had, which was running like the wolves were chasing her.
She tried, she really did. She continued to date. She had relationships. Some lasted weeks; one lasted a few months. But LookBook always came first, and she never felt the same way with another person as she had with David.
This past winter, her financial advisor told her she needed to diversify. She had too much in cash. She should buy property now, with a small down payment, and when the IPO came, whenthe windfall came,she could pay it off.
It was a problem she never in a hundred million years thought she’d have—the problem of too much cash. She thought of telling her old Boston College roommatewhose dress she’d once had to borrow for Thanksgivingthat she had too much cash. “The money will be safer in real estate,” her advisor said. “Away from the vagaries of the market. Plus, then you get to enjoy it.”
She almost asked what enjoyment was, as a joke, but not really as a joke. Sure. She would put something into real estate.
“Where?” she asked him. “Where should I put something into real estate?”
He folded his hands and looked at her across his desk. He blinked from behind his big brown glasses and said, “That’s up to you. Where have you always wanted to own a home?”
She still googled Buchanan Enterprises. She knew that Brice Buchanan had bought land on Block Island, and also a home that had undergone extensive renovations. She’d come across an interior design blog with a feature on the house; she knew from this that David and Taylor would become summer residents. She’d read everything she could about the island. Seven miles long and three miles wide. Shaped like a pork chop. Three hundred and sixty-five freshwater ponds, one for every day of the year. Migratory songbirds traveledthere, and bachelorette parties traveled there, and a reclusive Hollywood actor owned a home there.
“Block Island,” she told her advisor. “I loved it when I used to go there as a kid.” This, of course, wasn’t true. It wasn’t a bad idea, she went on, to have a home base where she could throw parties to put more eyes on LookBook ahead of a potential IPO, to get the social influencers more involved. To get people talking. When you raise the profile you raise the value.
“Makes sense,” agreed her advisor. “And once the IPO goes through, the sky is the limit.”
Next steps. Find a Realtor. Buy a house. Sign the papers. Hire a decorator. Throw a party, then another, then another, to introduce yourself to the island, to promote the brand, to raise excitement before the IPO. A wise investment will pay back in spades.
Lots of people came to Juliana’s parties. It was a small island, and when word got around, people showed up: locals, and social media influencers from the mainland, and rich people whose boats were docked for the night or the weekend at Payne’s or Champlin’s. But David Buchanan didn’t come, and he didn’t come, and he didn’t come, until one night she heard about the golfer Jack Baker, who not only knew David Buchanan but who was living with him.Living with him!Recovering from an Achilles injury, stepping off the Tour, staying with his old college friend, because, why not? They had plenty of room.
And it got even better. The young woman in the small cottage next door, the one she could send her assistant, Allison, over to invite to a party? That was David’s cousin.
Juliana
