The Wife Between Us(19)
She couldn’t think of a way to explain it that wouldn’t make it look as if she was choosing her fiancé over her best friend.
“I just have to be home by six to get ready for the party,” she’d told Richard. “We’re meeting everyone at the restaurant at seven.”
“Always with the curfew, Cinderella,” he’d said, lightly kissing the tip of her nose. “Don’t worry, you won’t be late.”
But they had been. Traffic was awful, and Nellie didn’t walk into her apartment until close to six-thirty. She knocked on Sam’s door, but her roommate had already left.
She stood there for a moment, taking in the white Christmas lights Samantha had wound through the slats of her bed’s headboard, and the fuzzy green-and-blue rug the two of them had found rolled up by the curb of a posh apartment building on Fifth Avenue. “Is someone actually throwing this out?” Samantha had asked. “Rich people are nuts. It still has a price tag on it!” They’d lifted it onto their shoulders and carried it home, and when they passed a cute guy waiting to cross the street, Sam winked at Nellie, then deliberately turned so the end of the carpet swung into his chest. Sam ended up dating him for two months; it was one of her longer relationships.
Nellie had thirty minutes to make it to the restaurant, which meant she’d have to skip a shower. Still, she poured a half glass of wine to sip while she got ready—not the expensive stuff Richard always ordered for her, but she couldn’t really taste the difference anyway—and cranked up Beyoncé.
She splashed cold water on her face, then smoothed on tinted moisturizer and began to line her green eyes with a smoky-gray pencil. Their bathroom was so small that Nellie was forever banging into the sink or the edge of the door, and every time she opened the medicine cabinet, a tube of Crest or can of hair spray tumbled out. She hadn’t taken a bath in years; the apartment had only a tiny shower stall that barely afforded her enough room to bend over to shave her legs.
In the new home, the master bath’s shower featured a bench and a rain-forest spray nozzle. Plus, that Jacuzzi.
Nellie tried to imagine soaking in it, after a long day spent . . . doing what? Gardening in the backyard, maybe, and putting together dinner for Richard.
Did Richard realize that she’d drowned the only houseplant she’d ever owned, and that her cooking repertoire was limited to heating up Lean Cuisines?
As they headed back to the city, she’d stared out the window of the car, taking in the scenery. There was no denying her new neighborhood’s beauty: the grand houses, the blossoming trees, the pristine sidewalks. Not a single piece of litter marred the smoothly paved roads. Even the grass seemed greener than in the city.
As they’d exited and passed the guard’s station, Richard had given the uniformed man a little wave. Nellie had seen the name of the development on an arched sign, the letters thick and ornate: CROSSWINDS.
Of course, she’d still commute into Manhattan every day with Richard. She’d have the best of both worlds. She’d meet Sam for happy hours and drop by Gibson’s to grab a burger at the bar and see how Chris’s novel was progressing.
She’d turned around to peer through the rear windshield. She hadn’t seen even one person walking down the sidewalk. No cars had been in motion. She could have been staring at a photograph.
But if she got pregnant soon after the wedding, she probably wouldn’t return to the Learning Ladder in the fall, she’d thought as she watched her new neighborhood recede in the distance. It would be irresponsible to leave the children mid-year. With Richard traveling every week or two, she’d be alone in the house so much of the time.
Maybe it would make sense to wait a few months before she went off her birth control pills. She could teach for another year.
She’d looked at Richard’s profile, taking in his straight nose, his strong chin, the slim, silvery scar above his right eye. He’d gotten it when he was eight and tumbled over the handlebars of his bike, he’d told her. Richard had one hand low on the wheel and the other reaching for the radio’s button.
“So, I—” she began, just as he turned on WQXR, his favorite classical station.
“This piece by Ravel is wonderful,” he said, increasing the volume. “You know, he composed a smaller body of work than most of his contemporaries, but many regard him as one of France’s greatest.”
She nodded. Her words were lost in the opening notes of the music, but maybe it was just as well. It wasn’t the time for this conversation.
As the piano reached a crescendo, Richard pulled up at a stoplight and turned to her. “Do you like it?”
“I do. It’s . . . lovely.” She needed to learn about classical music and wine, she decided. Richard had strong opinions on both, and she wanted to be able to discuss the subjects knowledgeably with him.
“Ravel believed that music should be emotional first and intellectual second,” he’d said. “What do you think?”
That was the problem, she realized now as she dug through her purse, searching for her favorite Clinique soft-pink lip gloss. She gave up—she hadn’t been able to find it the last time she’d looked, either—and put on a peachy shade instead. Intellectually, she knew the changes ahead were wonderful. Enviable, even. But emotionally, it all felt a little overwhelming.
She thought of the dollhouse in her classroom, the one Jonah’s parents wanted to replace with a tepee. Her students loved to rearrange the furniture in the darling little home, then move the dolls from room to room, positioning them in front of the fake fireplace, folding them into chairs around the table, and laying them down to sleep in their narrow wooden beds.