‘It sounds incredible.’
‘Then why are you looking at me like that?’ He pulled his knit cap off and ran his fingers through his hair.
‘Because I don’t have any vacation days left, and it’s right in the middle of the semester for the Huntley girls. Do you think we could go over Christmas instead? If we left on the twenty-third, it would give us almost—’
Julian released her hand and collapsed back into the couch with a loud, frustrated exhalation. ‘I have no idea what will be happening in December, Brooke. I know I can go now. I just can’t believe you’d let something like that get in the way of an opportunity like this.’
Now it was her turn to stare at him. “‘That” happens to be my job. Julian, I’ve taken off more days this year than anyone. There is no way I can just march in there and ask for another week off. I would be fired immediately.’
His eyes were steely when they met hers. ‘Would that really be so bad?’
‘I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.’
‘No, I’m serious, Brooke. Would that be the worst thing in the world? Between Huntley and the hospital, you’ve been killing yourself. Is it so horrible to suggest that you take some time off?’
Everything was spinning out of control. No one knew better than Julian that Brooke needed to get through one more year before she’d hopefully be opening her own practice. Not to mention how close she’d grown to a couple of the girls, especially Kaylie.
She took a deep breath. ‘It’s not horrible, Julian, but it’s not happening. You know I only need one more year and then—’
‘So what if it’s just a temporary break?’ he interrupted, waving his hands. ‘My mom thought they’d probably even hold your job for you if that’s what you wanted, but I don’t think it’s necessary. It’s not like you’d never find another—’
‘Your mom? Since when do you talk to your mother about anything?’
He looked at her. ‘I don’t know, I was just telling them how tough it is being away from each other all the time, and I thought she had some good ideas.’
‘That I should quit my job?’
‘Not necessarily quit, Brooke, although if you wanted to do that, I’d totally support you. But maybe time off is the answer.’
She couldn’t imagine it. Of course, the idea of being entirely unencumbered with schedules and shifts and cramming in as many extra hours as possible sounded heavenly – who wouldn’t want that? But she genuinely loved her work, and she was excited to be her own boss one day. She’d already thought of a name – Healthy Mom & Baby – and could perfectly envision how she wanted the website to look. Brooke even had the logo figured out: it was going to be two sets of feet, standing side by side, one obviously a mother’s with just a hand reaching down to hold the hand of a toddler.
‘I can’t, Julian,’ she said, reaching over to take his hand despite the anger she felt toward him for not understanding. ‘I’m doing my best to be a part of everything that’s happening to your career, to share in all the excitement and craziness, but I have a career, too.’
He appeared to be thinking about this, but then he leaned over and kissed her. ‘Have a sit and a think, Rook. Italy! For a week.’
‘Julian, I really—’
‘No more talking,’ he said, pressing his fingers to her lips. ‘We won’t go if you don’t want to’ – he corrected himself when he saw Brooke’s expression – ‘if you’re not able to. I’ll wait until we can see it together, I swear. But promise you’ll think about it?’
Not trusting her voice, Brooke just nodded.
‘Okay, then. How about we go out tonight? Somewhere low-key but great. No press. No friends. Just us. What do you say?’
She had figured they would spend their first night together at home, but the more she thought about it, she couldn’t remember the last time the two of them went out alone. There was still so much to talk about, but they could do it over a bottle of good wine. Maybe she was just being too hard on him and it would do them both some good if she could just relax. ‘Okay, let’s do it. I just want to dry my hair a little so it doesn’t frizz.’
Julian beamed and kissed her. ‘Excellent. Walter and I will call around and find the perfect spot.’ He turned to Walter and kissed him, too. ‘Walty, boy, where should I take the wife?’
Brooke quickly ran the blow-dryer over her damp hair and picked out her cutest pair of ballet flats. She slicked on some lip gloss, added a double-chain gold necklace, and after a bit of a debate, decided in favor of a long, soft cardigan rather than a boxier blazer. The look wasn’t going to win her any awards, but it was the best she could do without completely stripping down and starting from scratch.
Julian was on the phone when she walked back into the living room, but he immediately hung up and walked over to her.
‘Come here, beautiful girl,’ he murmured, kissing her.
‘Mmm, you taste good.’
‘You look even better. We’ll get some dinner, drink some wine, and then what do you say we come directly back here and get reacquainted?’
‘I say yes,’ Brooke said, kissing him back. The uneasy feeling she’d had since the moment Julian walked in – the sense that so much was happening, so quickly, and they hadn’t resolved anything – was still nudging her, but she tried her best to ignore it.
Julian had chosen a great little Spanish restaurant on Ninth Avenue and the weather was still warm enough to sit outside. After they kicked the first half bottle of wine they ordered, both of them relaxed, and the conversation grew easy again, more comfortable. Randy and Michelle’s baby was due next week, Julian’s parents were going away over New Year’s and had offered up their Hamptons home, Brooke’s mother had just seen an incredible play off-Broadway and was insisting they go see it as well.
It wasn’t until they got home and undressed that the awkwardness came rushing back. Brooke had expected Julian to make good on his offer of makeup sex the instant they walked into the apartment – after all, it had been three weeks – but he was distracted first by his phone and then his laptop. When he finally joined her in the bathroom to brush his teeth, it was already after midnight.
‘What time are you up tomorrow?’ Julian asked as he plucked out his contact lenses and squirted them with cleaning solution.
‘I have to be at the hospital by seven thirty for a staff meeting. What about you?’
‘I’m meeting Samara at some hotel in SoHo for photo shoot.’
‘Got it. So, should I put my face moisturizer on now or later?’ she asked Julian as he flossed. Since Julian hated the smell of her intensive night cream and refused to come near her when she was wearing it, this was code for ‘Are we going to have sex tonight?’
‘I’m beat, baby. The schedule is pretty intense now. So close to the new single.’ He set the little plastic box of floss on the sink and kissed her cheek.
She couldn’t help but be insulted. Yes, she could understand how absolutely exhausted he must be after all that time on the road. She was pretty tired, too, after her daily six o’clock wake-ups to walk Walter, but he was a man and it had been three weeks.
‘Got it,’ she said, and immediately slathered on her thick, yellow face cream – the same one every reviewer on beauty.com opined was 100 percent fragrance free but which her husband swore he could smell from across the living room.
Okay, fine, she’d admit it: she was also relieved. Which is not to say she didn’t love sex with her husband, because she did – from the very first time, it had been one of the best features of their relationship, and certainly one of the most constant. Of course, having sex every day (sometimes twice) when you’re twenty-four and it still feels vaguely scandalous just to sleep over at someone else’s apartment isn’t such a rarity, but things hadn’t slowed much as they dated or even married. For years she’d listened as her friends would joke about their different methods for avoiding husbands and boyfriends each night and Brooke would laugh right along with them, but she di
dn’t understand. Why would they want to? Crawling into bed with her husband and making love before they fell asleep had been her favorite part of the day; hell, it was the good part about being an adult in a committed relationship.
Well, she got it now. Nothing between them had changed – the sex was still every bit as great as it had always been – but the two of them were just so exhausted all the time. (The night before he’d left, he’d fallen asleep on top of her, halfway through, and Brooke only managed to be insulted for about ninety seconds before she passed out, too.) They were both constantly in motion, often separated, and overwhelmed. She hoped it was only temporary and that once Julian was home more often and she could more easily determine her own hours, they’d rediscover each other.
She turned off the bathroom light and followed him to their bed, where Julian had settled in with a copy of Guitar Player in hand, Walter snuggled in the crook of his elbow. ‘Look, baby. There’s a mention of my new song.’ He showed her the magazine.
She nodded, but she was already thinking about sleep. Her routine was military efficient, designed to bring on unconsciousness in the shortest amount of time possible. She turned the air conditioner colder despite the fact that it was a pleasantly cool sixty degrees outside, stripped naked, and climbed under their hugely puffy down comforter. After washing her birth control pill down with a swig of water, she arranged a pair of blue foam earplugs and her favorite satin eye mask right next to the alarm clock and, satisfied, began to read.
When she shivered, Julian leaned over and rested his head on her shoulder. ‘My crazy girl,’ he murmured with pretend exasperation. ‘Never seems to realize that she could be warmer any time she’d like. Just has to turn on the heat a little, or – god forbid – turn the AC off. Or maybe wear a T-shirt to bed …’
‘Not a chance.’ Everyone knew that good sleeping conditions were cool, dark, and quiet; therefore, it stood to reason that the best sleeping conditions were freezing cold, pitch-black, and completely silent. She’d slept naked from the time she was old enough to take her pajamas off and could never sleep really well when situations (summer camp, freshman-year dorm, early-twenties sleepovers with guys she hadn’t had sex with yet) demanded she wear a nightshirt.
Brooke tried to read for a while, but her mind kept drifting to a series of anxious thoughts. She knew she should have just snuggled up beside Julian and asked for a back rub or a head scratch, but before she knew it, she was saying something completely different.
‘Do you think we have enough sex?’ she asked while adjusting the band on her eye mask.
‘Enough sex?’ Julian asked. ‘According to whose standards?’
‘Julian, I’m serious.’
‘So am I. Against whom are we judging ourselves?’
‘No one in particular,’ she said, a hint of exasperation becoming apparent. ‘Just, you know, the norm.’
‘The norm? I don’t know, Brooke, I think we feel pretty normal. Don’t you?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Is this because of tonight? Because we were both really tired? Seriously, don’t be so hard on us.’
‘It’s been three weeks, Julian. The longest we’ve ever gone before was maybe five days, and that was when I had walking pneumonia.’
Julian sighed and kept reading. ‘Rook, can you please stop worrying about us? We’re fine. I promise.’
She was quiet for a few moments as she thought about this, knowing she didn’t actually want to have more sex – not now, not being this tired – but that she wanted him to want to.
‘Did you lock the front door when you came home tonight?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ he murmured without looking up. He was reading an article on the best guitar techs in America. She knew he had zero recollection of whether he’d locked the front door or not.
‘Well did you or didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I definitely did.’
‘Because if you’re not sure, I’ll get up and check. I’d rather be inconvenienced for thirty seconds than dead,’ she said with a deep, dramatic sigh.
‘Really?’ He snuggled deeper under the covers. ‘I couldn’t disagree more.’
‘Julian, seriously. That guy on our floor died just last week. Don’t you think we should try to be a little bit more careful?’
‘Brooke, sweetheart, he drank himself to death. I’m not sure that could’ve been prevented if he’d locked his door.’
She knew this, of course – knew every single thing that happened in the building because the super was a constant talker – but would it kill Julian to give her a little attention?
‘I think I might be pregnant,’ she announced.
‘You are not,’ he replied automatically and continued to read.
‘Yeah, well what if I was?’
‘But you’re not.’
‘But how do you know? Mistakes happen all the time. I could be. Then what would we do?’ She managed a faux sniffle.
He smiled and finally – finally! – put down the magazine. ‘Oh, sweetheart, come here. I’m sorry, I should’ve realized earlier. You want to cuddle.’
She nodded. Beyond immature, but she was desperate.
He shimmied over to her side of the bed and enveloped her in a hug. ‘And did it ever occur to you to say, “Julian, oh loving husband, I want to cuddle. Will you pay attention to me?” rather than picking fights?’
She shook her head no.
‘Of course it didn’t,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Are you really concerned about our sex life or was that all part of the plan to get a reaction?’
‘Yeah, just going for the reaction,’ she lied.
‘And you’re not pregnant?’
‘No!’ she said, a little louder than she intended. ‘Absolutely, definitely not.’ She resisted asking him if it would be the worst thing in the world if she actually were pregnant. They’d been married five years, after all …
They kissed good night (he suffered the spackled-on moisturizer, but not without a nose wrinkle and a highly exaggerated gagging sound), and she waited the requisite ten minutes until his breathing steadied before pulling on her robe and padding out to the kitchen. After checking that the front door was locked (it was), she headed over to the computer for a quick surf.
In the early days of Facebook, she’d been content to confine her online time to the all-encompassing world of Ex-Boyfriend Stalking. First she searched out her handful of longer-term boyfriends from high school and college, plus that Venezuelan guy she dated for a couple months in graduate school who fell somewhere between a fling and a relationship (had his English been just a touch better …) and brought herself up to date on their lives. She’d been pleased to see that each and every one of them looked worse than when she’d known them, and she repeatedly wondered the same thing that was on the minds of so many twentysomething women: why was it, exactly, that nearly every girl she knew looked far better than she had in college when every guy looked fatter, balder, and much, much older?
A couple months had passed like this until she became interested in anything beyond pictures of her senior prom date’s twin boys, and before long she began accumulating friends from every era of her life: kindergarten in Boston, while her own parents were still doing their graduate work; sleepaway camp in the Poconos; high school in suburban Philadelphia; dozens and dozens of friends and acquaintances from undergrad at Cornell and her master’s program at the hospital; and now, colleagues from both jobs at the hospital and the Huntley School. And although she’d forgotten the existence of many of the early friends until their names resurfaced in her Notifications folder, she was always eager to reconnect and see what the last ten or even twenty years had brought.
Tonight was no different: she accepted a friend request from a childhood playmate whose family had moved away in middle school and then hungrily scanned the new profile, registering all the details (single, graduated from UC Boulder, currently living in Denver, appears to love mountain biking and guys with long hair), a
nd sent the girl a quick, cheerily bland message that she knew would likely be the beginning and the end of their ‘reunion.’
She clicked the Home button and was transported back to the addictive Live News Feed, where she quickly scanned her friends’ status updates on the Cowboys game, their babies’ daily milestones, their Halloween costume ideas, their happiness that ‘TGIF!’ and the photos they’d posted from various vacations they’d taken all over the world. It wasn’t until she’d scrolled to the bottom of the second page that she saw Leo’s update, in all caps, of course, as though he were screaming directly at her.
Leo Walsh … GETTING PUMPED FOR JULIAN ALTER’S PHOTO SHOOT TOMORROW!! SOHO. HOT MODELS. MESSAGE ME IF YOU WANT TO STOP BY …
Yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Thankfully, her regular e-mail inbox pinged with a welcome distraction before she could dwell on the grossness of Leo’s update.
The new e-mail was from Nola. It was the first (well, really the second: the very first had merely read: ‘SAVE ME FROM THIS HELL!!!’) Brooke had heard from her since she’d left, and she opened it eagerly. Maybe there was a chance she was having fun? No, it was impossible. Nola’s vacations trended more toward the skiing in the Swiss Alps/sunning in St. Tropez/partying in Cabo types. They were generally frequent, expensive, and almost always included a man extremely fond of sex whom she had only just met and most likely wouldn’t see again once they returned home. Brooke literally hadn’t believed Nola when she announced that she’d signed up for a group tour of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos … alone. Staying in two-star hotels and guesthouses and traveling by bus. A single backpack for three weeks. A comprehensive lack of Michelin-starred restaurants, Town Car services, or hundred-dollar pedicures. Zero chance of partying on a new friend’s yacht or wearing a single pair of Louboutins. Brooke had tried to talk her out of it by showing Nola her own honeymoon pictures to Southeast Asia, which were replete with close-ups of exotic insects, house pets as dinner, and a collage of all the squat toilets they’d encountered, but Nola insisted it would be fine right until the very end. Brooke wouldn’t say I told you so, but judging from the e-mail, things were going exactly as expected.
Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection Page 132
