The Girl Next Door (10 page)

But David wasn’t listening any more. Rachael was sermonizing, as much to herself as to him, and he was already converted. She was the grand master of doing the right thing. He’d have told you she would join the instant he saw the notice on the board downstairs.

He knew, because he’d married a woman who was just like his mother, and now he was living his adult life just the way he had lived out his childhood and adolescence – striving for perfection, and failing. Failing every day.

Rachael hadn’t looked like his mother, and for the first few years she hadn’t seemed at all like her. They’d laughed about her together, in fact. He was pretty sure he remembered her, at some point, making a solemn promise never to be like his mother. He hadn’t found out until it was too late.

They’d met when he was a senior, in his final year at college, and Rachael was a sophomore. She was one of those effortlessly pretty, glossy girls, athletic and popular. It was obvious she came from a wealthy background. Her perfect teeth and classic, expensive jewellery gave her away. A charmed‐life type. He knew the type well – it was exactly where he came from. Different coast, same deal.

David was Californian. The indulged youngest of three sons born to a mother with old money and a father who’d made his himself. Which always surprised him, since he was a hippie at heart, and had never really wanted any. He’d written a book – part fiction, part memoir – about his experiences in San Francisco in the Sixties, which had become a cult hit, and then a movie. David’s parents had divorced when he was seven or eight, and he and his brothers had lived with their mum in a vast house in Sausalito, mostly looking forward to weekends across the bridge in the relative squalor of their father’s walk‐up in San Francisco. His mother had remarried twice before he left home for college, and once more since, although she was currently single again, so far as he knew. David had sometimes thought he was fonder of each of his three stepfathers than he was of his own mother. He called them ‘the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker’, although they were the realtor, the screenwriter and the dermatologist. He was reasonably sure his mother had only married her last husband for the free Botox, and it had been hard to tell how emotionally damaged she had been by her third divorce, since by the time she rejected him, she’d had so many shots in her face that she could neither frown nor smile with any conviction.

She was relentlessly critical, and everyone – all of her husbands and her own sons included – disappointed her constantly. She had once refused to speak to David after a piano recital in the sixth grade at school where he had missed three notes on a piece he’d been practising for weeks. He remembered walking out of school behind her, ashamed, angry and humiliated – hating her almost as much as he hated himself for getting the notes wrong.

He told his children every single day that he loved them, and that they were wonderful. He could barely bring himself to criticize them for anything, to the point at which it was Rachael who had to correct spellings and admonish lousy table manners.

He had never really understood what had attracted his parents to each other. They were both good‐looking people. At least, his mother had been – although, before Botox, her face had taken on the countenance of a woman discontented with her life. But their value systems, their beliefs, even their ideas of life’s simple pleasures, had been poles apart. He’d asked his father once, before he’d married Rachael, what it had been between them. His father had taken a deep drag on his cigarette, and thought for a moment.

Smiling ruefully, he’d answered. ‘Before you boys were born? Sex and drugs, mostly.’ Then he’d laughed. ‘She never did like rock and roll.’

His father, his gentle, lovely dad, still vaguely surprised by life, and then by death, had died of lung cancer four years ago. He was diagnosed just after David had married Rachael, and died around the same time she found out their third baby was a girl. David had whispered that news to him as he lay close to death (not quite close enough, as it turned out – he lingered in a drug‐induced coma for four or five intolerable days). He hadn’t seen his mother since his father’s funeral. They weren’t estranged – there’d been no terrible row. But he knew she was bad for him, and he never sought her out. She, in turn, had no need of him, it seemed. His brothers and their families were both still in California – one in San Francisco and the other in the suburbs of LA – but they didn’t see much of her either.

Rachael, on the other hand, was classic East Coast. If you were permitted to call your own wife a type, then Rachael was definitely a type. The beloved only daughter, born relatively late, of a successful corporate lawyer and a speech therapist, she’d been raised in Manhattan, a few blocks from where they lived now, spending summers with her babysitters and her big brothers out on Long Island, in a big house in Southampton. While David had grown up in the shadow of his mother’s disappointment, Rachael had been raised in a world where everything was wonderful. (Even if it wasn’t – it had taken him a few years to work that one out. These were the type of people who’d smile and welcome a hurricane with a jaunty ‘what a refreshing breeze’.) She’d come to USC from an Upper East Side girls school, streetwise but naïve. It was no accident that she’d swopped East for West Coast, and put five hours between herself and home. She was spoilt, undoubtedly, and what his friends would call high maintenance, definitely, but she was also generous and funny and real. She’d apparently fallen for his carefully cultivated surfer dude persona, laid back and free‐spirited, mimicking his father, to his mother’s eternal disappointment. He’d fallen for her glossy, easy perfection and her laugh. That first year, he liked to sit at a slight distance, but where he could just watch her walking, her smooth dark hair swaying in time with her small round bum. That walk was sexy and sweet and entitled and confident, and that walk was what hooked him.

They’d flirted, as they both flirted with many others. Flirting was what passed for conversation in those days. They’d hung around in the same big, easy groups, the kind everyone else wished they could belong to. For the first year, it went no further. Neither one wanted to make the first move, although afterwards they both admitted to each other that it always felt as though there was going to be one. And then one day, on the first glorious day of real spring, he’d driven them both, alone, to Santa Monica in his beaten‐up old Chevy, and given her a surfing lesson. He’d surfed all his life, and she’d never been on a board. She didn’t know what was more attractive about him that morning. The way he looked on the board – strong and muscular and competent, like some gnarly Neptune – or the way he taught her – patiently, kindly, without laughing once, even though she could barely get on to her knees on the board before splatting sideways off into the white surf. They’d had their first kiss in that surf, after he fished her out from yet another unsuccessful attempt – cold and salty and delicious. And he’d been gone from that moment onwards.

It had taken Rachael perhaps a little longer. She was torn between their romance and her ambition. He’d had to work hard to convince her that she could have both. It had started then, that feeling. That he wasn’t quite good enough. He’d needed no convincing about Rachael – he’d been more sure and certain of her than of anything in his life up until that point. He felt like he’d had to win her, prove himself.

They’d been married in the St Regis in December, the year Rachael graduated. There’d seemed no point in waiting, and besides, Rachael’s family would have been furious if they’d suggested living together. Marrying Rachael had felt a little like winning the lead role in a new Broadway show. He was excluded totally from the planning process. Rachael’s mother had gone into overdrive – Rachael surrendering as twenty years of prior experience had shown her she should. Rachael had eight bridesmaids, and he was required to produce eight matching attendants. (Two brothers, four college friends, and two slightly bemused co‐workers from the law firm he’d joined in New York after they became engaged, qualified not so much by friendship as by their Jewishness, their photogenic qualities, and the fact that they were free that Sunday.) And show up. With a haircut. That was the extent of his involvement.

Snow had fallen to order (how would it dare not?) the night before, swirling around them appealingly as they left the smart rehearsal dinner at the 21 Club, obligingly stopping in time to allow a crystal‐blue sky and bright sunshine for the afternoon of the wedding. There had been a photograph – taken out at the Hamptons house by a photographer who shot for
Elle
and
Vogue
– and five paragraphs (including the story of the first kiss in the surf ) in the ‘Style’ section of the Sunday
New York Times
. A honeymoon on St Barts. He’d wanted them to go to South America, but St Barts was a gift from an aunt of Rachael’s. She’d seemed extraordinary to him on that holiday, in a tiny white bikini and an enormous broad‐brimmed straw hat. He couldn’t get enough of her, in bed and out of it, and he couldn’t believe how lucky he’d got. He watched her when she wasn’t watching him, and was amazed each time all over again that she was his wife. That
she
had chosen
him
. He was so very proud of her. She would take him into her gilded world, where everything was always wonderful, and he would live there forever.

He’d been living there now for ten years. And the strain of everything always being wonderful was beginning to be terrible.

Todd and Greg

They had their best talks in bed. The first time – the morning after the night before of their first, blind date in the East Village eight years earlier – they had begun, like an old married couple, and they were still talking now. They had their own shorthand, their own code, and they often finished each other’s sentences. They talked for hours on their 7ft pillow‐top mattress, read the
Times
cover to cover, watched CNN, ate bagels and drank Earl Grey tea. Some of their friends were having children now (Todd said that New York in the Naughties was like Harrods in the Eighties – there wasn’t anything you couldn’t buy there), but they were wise enough to know how much they would resent giving up their talks in bed for broken nights and early starts and chocolate milk stains on the 600‐thread‐count sheets. Most of the young parents they knew were lucky to finish a sentence, let alone a bagel with lox and the ‘Style’ section. They ‘loved’ their friends’ children (like they ‘loved’ their friends’ new upholstery, and their dogs, and their new exhibition at the gallery on Chambers) – from time to time, at a healthy distance.

Mostly Todd talked and Greg listened, but Todd said that Greg’s words were pearls of wisdom among the swine of his chatter. They lived great, fulfilling, independent lives, but they spent their evenings and weekends colouring them in for each other. Todd told funny stories about his clients, and their homes – their weird tastes and impossible demands. Greg’s stories were often more poignant – he was a paediatric anaesthetist at St Jude’s, the children’s hospital, and he spoke about patients and their families. They talked about art and film, about which they usually disagreed, and about politics, where they were always in perfect accord with each other, and about which restaurant they wanted to eat Sunday brunch at, which usually went 50/50. Tonight they were talking about their neighbours. More specifically, they were talking about Charlotte Murphy, and playing
Pygmalion
. Bickering, actually. Greg was Colonel Pickering, bickering.

‘She’s just so very uncomfortable in her skin. She wouldn’t let anyone get anywhere near her at Violet’s meeting. She actually stepped back when I spoke to her. I wondered if I’d forgotten to floss. And she couldn’t look you in the eye.’

‘She’s shy, she’s painfully shy. Agreed. And badly dressed isn’t in it… She needed a complete makeover. But I tell you, under all that, she could be cute.’

‘Hmm.’

‘And she came to Violet’s meeting. That means she’s open.’

‘Open to planting a few containers, not to the attack of the killer queens.’

‘I’m telling you – we should take her under our collective wings. I don’t mean attack – nothing like. When did you ever know me to attack?’

Greg raised an eyebrow.

‘Just, maybe, corner the girl. Have a chat…’

‘She doesn’t need a makeover. She needs a great guy. That’s all. Girls who wear dirndl skirts can find love, too, you know. They just have to find the guys in the stonewash denim jeans.’

‘You’re an old romantic.’

‘And you’re obsessed with appearances. It’s really just an extension of your own vanity, you know, judging the world that way…’

‘I’m not vain.’

‘Right. And I’m not gay.’

Eve

Did making doctor’s appointments as a way to fill the time count as desperate and tragic, or was she just taking full advantage of her new‐found free time and seemingly unlimited insurance policy to make sure she was in great condition, Eve wondered. A New Yorker would definitely go with option 2. They could spin (and not just in the spinning room at the Equinox). She was leaning towards option 1, spinning (of the stationary bicycle or the political varieties) not being a habit with her just yet. But it wasn’t her fault. It was her husband who had started this particular line of dominoes toppling. Ed had made the very first appointment with the first doctor, concerned (slash irritated, let’s be honest) by her persistent cough which was keeping him awake – a cough she had insisted was nothing to worry about. He’d booked her in with an internalist a girl at the office had recommended in their neighbourhood. No such thing as a GP, Eve had learnt. An internalist. Sounded invasive, right there. She knew her lungs, infected or not, technically
were
inside her, but did they have to be so… literal about it? She’d told herself it was good to have a doctor, just in case, even though she hadn’t been to her GP at home for… well, she couldn’t remember when. And it was something to do… get up, get dressed, hail a cab. Be going somewhere. Everyone else was, all the time.