It feels too all-consuming to be love, too dangerous, too addictive, for that is exactly what she feels like—his addiction. He is living on adrenaline, the thrill of seeing her, the illicit meetings, the astonishingly fantastic, passionate sex.
He may love her, he certainly sees through the image she presents to everyone else—the glossy blond highlights, the tan makeup, the huge diamond studs and high heels—to the vulnerable little girl hiding behind the armor. He loves her best, and she is at her most beautiful, when she has just stepped out of the shower, her hair twisted into a ponytail, her skin naked and clean. She looks real, he tells her then, and too beautiful to cover herself up with makeup.
He would love to see her in jeans and a T-shirt, and not the jeans and T-shirts that she and her friends in Long Island wear: tight boot-legged jeans over high-heeled boots, enamel and gold chains snaking around their necks, huge gold buckles on their cowboy belts. He wants to see her in old faded Levi’s, riding boots, a soft white shirt, with no makeup and no jewelry.
For, despite his obsession with her, whenever Jordana starts talking about a future together—and she is spending more and more time talking about a future together—Michael starts to worry. Not because she is pushing too far too fast—he seems to be traveling at exactly the same breakneck speed—but because, however hard he tries, he doesn’t see how they could fit into one another’s lives, not when she is so concerned with status, money, keeping up with the Joneses.
The way she lives is just so very different from the way he lives. He has no desire to step into her world, and although she says she is fed up with the materialism in hers, he doesn’t think it would be that easy for her to leave it all behind. He doesn’t think she really wants to.
Jordana lives in a 9,000-square-foot colonial McMansion in Great Neck, with an apartment on the Upper East Side. She drives a Mercedes SL (silver, convertible), shops at the best shops in Manhasset (Chanel, Hermès) where they all know her on a first-name basis, and lunches with her girlfriends at Bergdorf’s at least once a week.
She has her hair colored every four weeks at John Frieda, and had been going to Sally Hershberger for cuts long before Sally Hershberger was, well, Sally Hershberger.
She wears full jewelry every day, 8-carat diamond studs being low key for her, and casually slips on an armful of diamond tennis bracelets every morning.
Jordana and Jackson vacation at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach every Christmas, where they go with a group of their best friends, and the women sit around the pool in Juicy Couture and Tory Burch resort wear, flicking through glossy magazines as the men talk sports and business, rarely looking up from their BlackBerries.
Jordana has never wanted anything more out of life. Certainly she never thought she wanted a man who lives in a small, shabby prewar on the Upper West Side, who rides a bike to work, who hasn’t bought an item of new clothing in years—the T-shirts he throws on when he’s not at work all have holes in them and fraying edges, they are faded and torn from years of washing.
But, to Jordana, there is something so fresh about him, so different from Jackson. Jackson who, like her, grew up with nothing, is constantly insecure about how he will be judged, and he needs the McMansion, the Mercedes, the money to prove to everyone that he is as good as they are, that he belongs in the club.
Michael doesn’t seem to want to belong in any club, and he is unlike anyone Jordana has ever met. He is a man who seems utterly comfortable in his skin, who doesn’t feel the need to prove himself to anyone, and when she is with him she feels a security that is new.
Like all women, Jordana is something of a chameleon, able to adapt to whoever her man wants her to be. When Jackson announced, all those years ago, that he liked blondes, she went straight out and got a full head of golden highlights. Now that Michael has admitted his penchant for the natural look, Jordana has started wearing less makeup, flatter shoes, trying to be the perfect woman for him.
But even with less makeup, flatter shoes, Jordana is still quite unlike anyone Michael has been involved with in the past, and