his cigarette, and thought for a moment.
Smiling ruefully, he’d answered. ‘Before you boys were born? Sex and drugs, mostly.’ Then he’d laughed. ‘She never did like rock and roll.’
His father, his gentle, lovely dad, still vaguely surprised by life, and then by death, had died of lung cancer four years ago. He was diagnosed just after David had married Rachael, and died around the same time she found out their third baby was a girl. David had whispered that news to him as he lay close to death (not quite close enough, as it turned out – he lingered in a drug‐induced coma for four or five intolerable days). He hadn’t seen his mother since his father’s funeral. They weren’t estranged – there’d been no terrible row. But he knew she was bad for him, and he never sought her out. She, in turn, had no need of him, it seemed. His brothers and their families were both still in California – one in San Francisco and the other in the suburbs of LA – but they didn’t see much of her either.
Rachael, on the other hand, was classic East Coast. If you were permitted to call your own wife a type, then Rachael was definitely a type. The beloved only daughter, born relatively late, of a successful corporate lawyer and a speech therapist, she’d been raised in Manhattan, a few blocks from where they lived now, spending summers with her babysitters and her big brothers out on Long Island, in a big house in Southampton. While David had grown up in the shadow of his mother’s disappointment, Rachael had been raised in a world where everything was wonderful. (Even if it wasn’t – it had taken him a few years to work that one out. These were the type of people who’d smile and welcome a hurricane with a jaunty ‘what a refreshing breeze’.) She’d come to USC from an Upper East Side girls school, streetwise but naïve. It was no accident that she’d swopped East for West Coast, and put five hours between herself and home. She was spoilt, undoubtedly, and what his friends would call high maintenance, definitely, but she was also generous and funny and real. She’d apparently fallen for his carefully cultivated surfer dude persona, laid back and free‐spirited, mimicking his father, to his mother’s eternal disappointment. He’d fallen for her glossy, easy perfection and her laugh. That first year, he liked to sit at a slight distance, but where he could just watch her walking, her smooth dark hair swaying in time with her small round bum. That walk was sexy and sweet and entitled and confident, and that walk was what hooked him.
They’d flirted, as they both flirted with many others. Flirting was what passed for conversation in those days. They’d hung around in the same big, easy groups, the kind everyone else wished they could belong to. For the first year, it went no further. Neither one wanted to make the first move, although afterwards they both admitted to each other that it always felt as though there was going to be one. And then one day, on the first glorious day of real spring, he’d driven them both, alone, to Santa Monica in his beaten‐up old Chevy, and given her a surfing lesson. He’d surfed all his life, and she’d never been on a board. She didn’t know what was more attractive about him that morning. The way he looked on the board – strong and muscular and competent, like some gnarly Neptune – or the way he taught her – patiently, kindly, without laughing once, even though she could barely get on to her knees on the board before splatting sideways off into the white surf. They’d had their first kiss in that surf, after he fished her out from yet another unsuccessful attempt – cold and salty and delicious. And he’d been gone from that moment onwards.
It had taken Rachael perhaps a little longer. She was torn between their romance and her ambition. He’d had to work hard to convince her that she could have both. It had started then, that feeling. That he wasn’t
Smiling ruefully, he’d answered. ‘Before you boys were born? Sex and drugs, mostly.’ Then he’d laughed. ‘She never did like rock and roll.’
His father, his gentle, lovely dad, still vaguely surprised by life, and then by death, had died of lung cancer four years ago. He was diagnosed just after David had married Rachael, and died around the same time she found out their third baby was a girl. David had whispered that news to him as he lay close to death (not quite close enough, as it turned out – he lingered in a drug‐induced coma for four or five intolerable days). He hadn’t seen his mother since his father’s funeral. They weren’t estranged – there’d been no terrible row. But he knew she was bad for him, and he never sought her out. She, in turn, had no need of him, it seemed. His brothers and their families were both still in California – one in San Francisco and the other in the suburbs of LA – but they didn’t see much of her either.
Rachael, on the other hand, was classic East Coast. If you were permitted to call your own wife a type, then Rachael was definitely a type. The beloved only daughter, born relatively late, of a successful corporate lawyer and a speech therapist, she’d been raised in Manhattan, a few blocks from where they lived now, spending summers with her babysitters and her big brothers out on Long Island, in a big house in Southampton. While David had grown up in the shadow of his mother’s disappointment, Rachael had been raised in a world where everything was wonderful. (Even if it wasn’t – it had taken him a few years to work that one out. These were the type of people who’d smile and welcome a hurricane with a jaunty ‘what a refreshing breeze’.) She’d come to USC from an Upper East Side girls school, streetwise but naïve. It was no accident that she’d swopped East for West Coast, and put five hours between herself and home. She was spoilt, undoubtedly, and what his friends would call high maintenance, definitely, but she was also generous and funny and real. She’d apparently fallen for his carefully cultivated surfer dude persona, laid back and free‐spirited, mimicking his father, to his mother’s eternal disappointment. He’d fallen for her glossy, easy perfection and her laugh. That first year, he liked to sit at a slight distance, but where he could just watch her walking, her smooth dark hair swaying in time with her small round bum. That walk was sexy and sweet and entitled and confident, and that walk was what hooked him.
They’d flirted, as they both flirted with many others. Flirting was what passed for conversation in those days. They’d hung around in the same big, easy groups, the kind everyone else wished they could belong to. For the first year, it went no further. Neither one wanted to make the first move, although afterwards they both admitted to each other that it always felt as though there was going to be one. And then one day, on the first glorious day of real spring, he’d driven them both, alone, to Santa Monica in his beaten‐up old Chevy, and given her a surfing lesson. He’d surfed all his life, and she’d never been on a board. She didn’t know what was more attractive about him that morning. The way he looked on the board – strong and muscular and competent, like some gnarly Neptune – or the way he taught her – patiently, kindly, without laughing once, even though she could barely get on to her knees on the board before splatting sideways off into the white surf. They’d had their first kiss in that surf, after he fished her out from yet another unsuccessful attempt – cold and salty and delicious. And he’d been gone from that moment onwards.
It had taken Rachael perhaps a little longer. She was torn between their romance and her ambition. He’d had to work hard to convince her that she could have both. It had started then, that feeling. That he wasn’t
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