A Nantucket Wedding(21)

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Scott offered to pick Jane up at JFK, but she insisted on taking a cab. She didn’t want to bother him when he was so busy, she said. What she didn’t say was that she wanted one more hour to organize her thoughts. Plan her attack, more specifically.

She leaned her head back on the seat. The cab went over the Queensboro Bridge and entered Manhattan. Was she being impulsive, wanting a child? She’d certainly been impulsive when she’d kissed Ethan. This morning, she’d exchanged cellphone numbers with Ethan and agreed, quietly, standing in the upstairs hall of the Nantucket house, to let each other know when they were able to go to the island again. They hadn’t touched, but the electric pull between them had seemed as powerful as the moon on the tides.

Later, as Jane, Felicity, and Alison left for brunch, Jane had given Ethan a quick hug, keeping her body slanted so that only her arms touched him. Virtue triumphs! Jane told herself. But at the airport, Alison had handed a small foil-wrapped parcel to Jane. “You forgot this, darling,” Alison said. “I know you’ll want to share some of this delicious bread with Scott.”

Now, as the tall buildings and congested traffic blocked Jane’s thoughts of the gorgeous island and dropped her back into her real life, she thought the bread in her bag was like a little lump of guilt. She wasn’t one hundred percent certain that her mother hadn’t noticed the intense attraction between Jane and Ethan.

    And what did it all mean? She loved Scott, she did. She trusted his love for her. She knew he’d never be unfaithful to her.

And until this weekend she’d known she’d never be unfaithful to Scott.

Well, she hadn’t been unfaithful! She had only wanted to be.

She needed to be brutally realistic. It had been only a moment’s magic. In the grand scheme of things, looking down on a kind of calendar of the days and weeks and months of her life, the time she’d spent with Ethan was so minuscule, so insignificant, it was like trying to find a pebble on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from a satellite in outer space. In the vast expanse of her life, the yearning, the desire, was only a speck, something no one else could see.

And yet.

Maybe, she thought, her longing for a child was causing her to be more sexually, sensually awake.

The cab stopped in front of their building. She swiped her credit card and tipped the driver and gathered her purse and her briefcase (which she hadn’t opened once this weekend) and her suitcase and stepped out onto the sunny street.

She paused for a moment. May in the city was such a great month. No bitter wind howling down the long avenues, no dirty slush to slip in on the sidewalks, instead trees and flowers blooming, the air mild and sweet…okay, not sweet exactly, she was getting carried away. But the summer heat hadn’t yet arrived to intensify the smells of gasoline and millions of overheated people and their dogs.

She entered the building and leaned against the elevator wall as she rode up to the fifteenth floor. She felt like she was being transported from one life to another, and she knew the moment those elevator doors opened that Nantucket magic would evaporate like a bubble.

She found her keys in her bag and undid the locks. She stepped into their apartment. She set her suitcase on the floor and dumped her keys in the bowl on the foyer table and laid her bag next to it.

    “Scott? I’m back!”

“You’re early!” His voice came from the room they used as a joint office.

“I am. I missed you. But I had a wonderful time. David’s beach house is stunning. You’ll have to come with me to see it.”

As she talked, she pulled her small roller suitcase behind her down the hall and into their bedroom.

And she waited for Scott to come out of their office and give her a welcome-home kiss.

Nothing.

She sat on the bed, kicked off her heels, and massaged her feet. Walking in warm sand on the beach versus walking in stilettos on hard sidewalk: no contest.

“Did you miss me?” she called. She wanted him to come to her.

“Of course!” he called back.

On bare feet, she padded down the hall and into the office. Scott was at the computer, squinting at a chart, moving the mouse.

“You’re working hard for a Sunday.” She moved behind him and put her hands on his shoulders and smooched the top of his head.

“I didn’t think you’d be back until later. I’ve got to get this analysis done.”

“Okay.” She noticed, as if for the first time, how luxurious his hair was. “You’ve got beautiful hair, Scott, so dark and thick, like an animal’s pelt.”

He shook his head sharply, as if shooing away a fly. “That tickles.”

She removed her hands. “I’ll go unpack. And shower.”

At the door he called, “Hey.”

She stopped.

“I’m glad you’re home. But you are early. And I need to finish this. It’s important. Give me twenty more minutes, okay?”

“Okay.” She had to be fair. This was the way they were. Both of them. Finish the work first; she could cross-stitch it on a wall hanging. She shouldn’t, couldn’t, judge Scott by the few foolish moments she’d spent with Ethan.

    In their bedroom, she unpacked her clothes and sorted them: laundry, dry cleaner, shoe rack. She removed her flip-flops from the plastic bag she’d kept them in. They still had some sand on them. She took a long moment to hold them, remembering. Then she held them over the wastebasket and brushed the sand away.