Heart of the Matter - Emily Giffin [41]
She stares into the darkness and tries to imagine what it would be like to have someone in bed next to her, tries to remember the feel of being entangled in another, sweaty, breathless, satisfied.
That’s when she closes her eyes and sees his face, and her heart starts to race again, just as it did in the hospital cafeteria over coffee and in front of his house.
She knows it’s wrong, having these thoughts about a married man, but she lets herself drift there anyway, rolling onto her side and pressing her face into her pillow. Who needs a man? she tries to tell herself. But as she falls asleep, she is thinking, I do. And more important, Charlie does, too.
11
Tessa
How’s the school search coming along?” Rachel asks me on Sunday morning as she sits cross-legged on the floor of our guest room and packs for their return trip to New York, It is the first we’ve been alone all weekend, and are now only because my mother had an early morning flight home and Dex and Nick are taking the kids out for a walk—or as Rachel called it after she peeled her girls off the couch, “a forced march outdoors.”
“Ugh,” I say, making a face, “What a pain in the ass the whole thing is.”
“So you’ve definitely ruled out the public elementary school?” she asks, pulling her shoulder-length hair into a ponytail with the everpresent elastic band she wears on her left wrist, seemingly in lieu of a watch.
“I think so. Nick’s in favor of it—probably because he went to public schools. . . But obviously Dex and I didn’t... I think it’s all what you’re used to,” I say, hoping that this is the actual reason for Nick’s public leanings—and not that he simply wants to get out of school tours and applications and conversations on the topic.
“Yeah. I was squarely in Nick’s camp—public school girl all the way—but didn’t think we could go that route in the city,” she says as she lays one of Sarah’s little floral blouses facedown on the floor, then neatly smooths out the wrinkles, tucks in the arms, and folds the whole thing into a neat square with the skill of a departmentstore clerk. I memorize her technique, but know I will never recall it—just as I can never quite remember how to fold our dinner napkins into the origami-like shapes Nick mastered while working as a waiter at a country club during college.
“I vowed not to let it stress me out,” I say, “but now that it’s upon me, I’m right there in the frenzy with everyone else.”
Rachel nods and says, “Yeah. I was more stressed out filling out those applications for Julia and Sarah than I was when I applied to law school. It’s one thing to brag about your own qualifications and credentials, but bragging about your five-year-old—it just feels so crass . . . Dex had an easier time with it. For our Spence essay, he actually dubbed Julia a ‘bubbly, brown-eyed wonder.’”
I laugh. “He wrote that?”
“Sure did.”
“So cheesy,” I say, shaking my head, consistently amazed that my banker brother, who appears to be so cool and dignified, can be such a colossal dork behind closed doors. At the same time, I think this is part of why his marriage works so well. At heart, he is cheesy, the polar opposite of slick, and having observed many relationships over the years, I have discovered that slick does not a good husband make—my own father leading that charge.
“Yeah. No wonder they rejected us, huh?” Rachel says with a sardonic smile. For a high achiever, she seems to wear this rejection as a peculiar badge of honor, as if it is their loss entirely, and it occurs to me that although she is unassuming, sometimes even downright shy, she is actually one of the more confident people I know—as opposed to April and so many other mothers who seem to strive for perfection as a way of dealing with their underlying insecurities.
She continues, “I knew I should have edited Dex’s essays. . . But deep down, I knew Spence wasn’t the