True believer - Nicholas Sparks [8]
Looking back, Jeremy knew he should have taken it as the warning that it was, but at the time, he had a story to write, this one concerning Los Alamos. She wore an uncertain smile as he kissed her good-bye, and he thought about her expression briefly as he sat on the plane, but when he returned, she seemed herself again and they spent the weekend curled up in bed. She began to talk about having a baby, and despite the nervousness he felt, he was thrilled at the thought. He assumed he’d been forgiven, but the protective armor of their relationship had been chipped, and imperceptible cracks appeared with every additional absence. The final split came a year later, a month after a visit to a doctor on the Upper East Side, one who presented them with a future that neither of them had ever envisioned. Far more than his traveling, the visit foretold the end of their relationship, and even Jeremy knew it.
“I can’t stay,” she’d told him afterward. “I want to, and part of me will always love you, but I can’t.”
She didn’t need to say more, and in the quiet, self-pitying moments after the divorce, he sometimes questioned whether she’d ever really loved him. They could have made it, he told himself. But in the end, he understood intuitively why she had left, and he harbored no ill will against her. He even spoke to her on the phone now and then, though he couldn’t bring himself to attend her marriage three years later to an attorney who lived in Chappaqua.
The divorce had become final seven years ago, and to be honest, it was the only truly sad thing ever to have happened to him. Not many people could say that, he knew. He’d never been seriously injured, he had an active social life, and he’d emerged from childhood without the sort of psychological trauma that seemed to afflict so many of his age. His brothers and their wives, his parents, and even his grandparents—all four in their nineties—were healthy. They were close, too: a couple of weekends a month, the ever-growing clan would gather at his parents’, who still lived in the house in Queens where Jeremy had grown up. He had seventeen nieces and nephews, and though he sometimes felt out of place at family functions, since he was a bachelor again in a family of happily married people, his brothers were respectful enough not to probe the reasons behind the divorce.
And he’d gotten over it. For the most part, anyway. Sometimes, on drives like this, he would feel a pang of yearning for what might have been, but that was rare now, and the divorce hadn’t soured him on women in general.
A couple of years back, Jeremy had followed a study about whether the perception of beauty was the product of cultural norms or genetics. For the study, attractive women and less attractive women were asked to hold infants, and the length of eye contact between the women and the infants was compared. The study had shown a direct correlation between beauty and eye contact: the infants stared longer at the attractive women, suggesting that people’s perceptions of beauty were instinctive. The study was given prominent play in Newsweek and Time.
He’d wanted to write a column criticizing the study, partly because it omitted what he felt were some important qualifications. Exterior beauty might catch someone’s eye right away—he knew he was just as susceptible as the next guy to a supermodel’s appeal—but he’d always found intelligence and passion to be far more attractive and influential over time. Those traits took more than an instant to decipher, and beauty had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Beauty might prevail in the very short term, but in the medium and longer terms, cultural norms—primarily those values and norms influenced by family—were more important. His editor, however, canned the idea as “too subjective” and suggested he write something about the excessive use of antibiotics in chicken feed, which had the potential to turn streptococcus into the next bubonic plague. Which made sense, Jeremy noted with chagrin: the editor was a vegetarian, and his wife was both