and eventually, after months of arguing, Nadine had issued the ultimatum that he had expected all along, and they had split up.
He knew Nadine hated him for it. She never believed he wouldn’t come back. She thought that he would realize what he had only when it was gone, and would come crawling back on his knees, diamond ring in hand. But he hadn’t. He couldn’t. He felt safe in a relationship, but marriage was terrifying to him. He couldn’t do it.
“It’s because she’s the wrong one,” his friends would say. “When it’s right, it’s right.” But he had a nagging suspicion that, for him, that wasn’t the case. That Nadine was possibly as right as it got, but that there was something wrong with him.
The holiday in Amagansett was supposed to have been a welcome break. He and Steve went there with cases of books, a leather-bound backgammon set and plans to play tennis every day.
He wasn’t thinking about Nadine, or about anyone else. He was hoping to immerse himself in relaxation, and stay as far away from the burgeoning Hampton scene as he could.
But Bee had drawn him out, or perhaps she had drawn him in. Women like Bee didn’t look at men like Daniel. Not that Daniel was unattractive, but he was . . . understated. He was sensitive, quiet. He liked parties that were small and intimate, where you could connect with people, hear one another’s thoughts, not parties with roaring music, meat markets where you couldn’t hear one another think.
He and Bee should have been chalk and cheese, Bee loving loud parties, loud music, surrounding herself with friends; but she also loved conversation, was thoughtful and curious, with an energy and vivacity that he had never encountered, that made him feel, for perhaps the first time, truly alive.
Bee made everything fun. She was extroverted, glamorous, always laughing. Daniel suddenly understood how opposites could attract, and if someone like Bee could want someone like him, how could he refuse? What must it say about him that someone as great as Bee, someone that every man wanted, only wanted him? He must be better than he thought. And it was true: when he was with Bee, he felt like a king.
So Daniel was seduced into a relationship, and once he was there it felt safe—safer, certainly, than being single. Another four years went by during which time they fell into a predictable routine, living together at Bee’s Upper East Side apartment, meeting friends for brunches and lunches and dinners, spending weekends in Central Park, or back in the Hamptons, until one night when Bee had been bitchy all evening.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Is your period coming?”
“God, that’s what it is!” she said, jumping off the bed and going out into the hallway then into the tiny bathroom. “I knew I’d been feeling off.”
But her period hadn’t come, and when she checked her diary it seemed she had made a mistake with the timing. Either that, or her period was two weeks late. A couple of months previously she had had a pregnancy scare, and she had bought a double pack of First Response. There was one left. Bee reached to the back of the medicine cabinet and pulled it out, calmly and quietly, knowing instantly, before the deep-pink line appeared, that she was pregnant.
She looked at herself in the mirror and a smile spread across her face. Bee hadn’t even known she had wanted a baby just yet, and certainly hadn’t consciously premeditated this as a means to trap Daniel. She had heard many times about the ultimatum Nadine had issued and wasn’t about to make the same mistake. But although only in her mid-twenties, all around her Bee’s friends were starting to have babies, her social life had become babyville, and she’d known that eventually she would want what her friends had—a big wedding and a honeymoon in the Bahamas, a baby and a house in Connecticut.
But at that moment Bee realized that she wanted the rest of her life now, and if it didn’t happen in the order in which she had always dreamed, well, so be it.
She came out of the bathroom clutching the stick behind her back, a secret smile on her face. “What’s the matter?” Daniel said, but he already knew, the fear was already in his eyes, disconcerting Bee only a little as she held the stick up for him to see.