Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

“Is there an art to using a vacuum cleaner?” He was worried. “Do I need lessons or a license for it? Don’t I just plug it in and it does its job?” He was panicked.

“Yes, but there are different things it can do, depending on the attachments you use.”

“Can it do dishes and sort through old laundry? I don’t think I’ve cleaned my house since I moved in. Not seriously anyway. I buy new socks and underwear when I run out.”

“That sounds frightening. You’d better check out what’s under the bed.” He appeared anxious when she said it. He’d only been kidding with Bill.

“Oh my God…good thought…probably the underwear of half the women on staff.” He never ventured far for his dalliances, he didn’t have to, they fell into his lap.

“We’re going to have a lot of sad nurses and interns around here,” she said, shaking her head. “So is the love of your life French?”

“Very much so, and the sexiest, most gorgeous woman you’ve ever seen.”

“Twenty-two to twenty-five years old, I assume,” she said, knowing him.

“Forty-two, never married and doesn’t want to, no kids. She’s a shrink with emergency services there.”

“She sounds perfect for you. You’d better get that vacuum cleaner and learn how to use it, and check under the bed,” she said as he nodded, grabbed another chart, and headed to the next room.

By the end of the day, word had spread, Tom Wylie had a girlfriend in Paris. Those who knew him well didn’t take it seriously. He’d be on to the next one in five minutes, but the nurse he’d confided in disagreed, and said he was cleaning house for this woman. She suggested that the staff nurses in the ER had better claim their underwear before he threw it away. They all laughed at the idea, a few of them looked disappointed, but most of them didn’t care. He was fun to be with, and he would always be around, even if he was momentarily off the market for some French girl. Whoever she was, they knew it wouldn’t last.

That night, he did what Maisie had suggested and groaned as he pulled out a dozen forgotten thongs from under his bed. “Thank you, God…and thank you, Maisie….” He waited until midnight, and called Valérie on her cellphone. She was on her way to work.

“I miss you! I’m trying to get my apartment looking decent for you before you get here. We may have to stay at a hotel. I just bought a Super Duper Extravaganza All Purpose Robotic Vacuum Cleaner. It costs more than my car, and I need an engineering degree to run it.” She laughed at the image of him cleaning house for her, and was sure it was a first.

“We’ll do it together.” The thought of that made him shudder, given what he had just found under his bed, along with dust balls the size of his fist.

They talked until she got to work, as he envisioned the office and missed it, and the people there. He wished her a good day, told her he loved her, and then they hung up, and he lay in bed smiling, and thinking of her. He couldn’t wait for her to come, even though he had exchanged his role from hospital roué and menace to housekeeper in order to impress her, which was all he wanted to do.

He described his activities to Bill when he had dinner with him, and Bill couldn’t stop laughing. “The nurses at Alta Bates must really be depressed,” Bill said, happy to see him. They had a delicious steak dinner and talked about the cases they had, and agreed that it felt strange to be back in San Francisco. Paris had been great for both of them, although for different reasons.

Bill was missing his daughters fiercely, and he was looking forward to the distraction when the French team would arrive. The two men made a date to play tennis that weekend. Tom had a membership at a club in Berkeley and it sounded like a nice change to Bill. Tom had fallen in love in Paris, but Bill had made a friend, several of them. He had thought of calling Wendy, but figured she was dealing with her difficult boyfriend, and knew he’d see her in two weeks. He didn’t want to intrude. It was easier having dinner and playing tennis with Tom, although he liked Wendy too, and so had his girls. They’d asked about her several times, and he said he hadn’t seen her since he got back. He had hit the ground running at SF General from the first day. Nothing had changed. And by the end of his first week home, Paris seemed like a dream.

—

The tension between Stephanie and Andy was palpable. She didn’t know how to manage it or break through it, and neither did he. It was as if they no longer spoke the same language, and the dissent between them when she left had grown to massive proportions in four weeks. And she knew something he didn’t. She had fallen in love with someone else. Andy’s resentment about her work and the trip to Paris was like a shroud he was wearing and clinging to. It depressed her and made her angry at the same time.

She half ached to tell him she wanted out of the marriage and get it over with, and was half determined to avoid the drama now. And something else was holding her back, but she didn’t know what it was. They both tried to be nice to each other, but most of the time it backfired, and one of them would start a fight. She was tired of his bitter resentment of everything she did, the disapproval, the comments, the guilt he tried to induce in her even when it wasn’t warranted. She felt guilty enough about Gabriel without Andy making it worse, but he couldn’t know that. Stephanie wanted to calm things down between them, but everything she did and said just increased the tension between them.

Once in a while, she saw glimpses of the old Andy, the one she had fallen in love with, when he did something nice for her, or tried to make peace, but within minutes one of them sparked the other, and they’d be locked in deadly battle again, with the boys watching them in dismay. Stephanie had no idea how to break the cycle, and neither did he. It was as if he was demonstrating to her all the reasons why their marriage no longer worked.

And Gabriel didn’t make the situation any easier. She missed him terribly, but he was new in her life, and their affair had created a potentially explosive situation for her. She had a husband and children, and if they truly ended it, she wanted to make a graceful exit. She didn’t want Andy to discover the affair. The affair had happened because their marriage wasn’t working, the marriage wasn’t falling apart because of the affair, although sometimes that was true too.

Gabriel was calling her a dozen times a day, to tell her that he loved her, or find out what she was doing. In Paris, it had seemed sexy and adorable. At home, with her husband two feet away from her and a child on her lap, it was stressful. Sometimes he sent her five or six texts one after the other, and Andy had asked who was texting her so insistently that she was running out of lies to cover it. She asked Gabriel several times to slow down, but he was ready and anxious to be out in the open. He thought Andy should know his time was up, and if it created a drama so be it. It seemed very French to her.

As soon as she went back to work, she realized how much she was going to miss it if she gave it up. The hierarchy and structure at UCSF had been so important to her, and still was. Without it, starting over in France, wherever she practiced she’d be a newcomer and outsider, and would have to rebuild her career from scratch in a foreign country. She would miss the stature and respect she had spent years to build at UCSF. She wondered if Gabriel truly realized what a sacrifice that was, or how affected her children would be by a divorce. His were older and had seen him and his wife lead separate lives for many years. For Aden and Ryan, divorced parents would be a tremendous loss and adjustment, not to mention moving to another country and hardly seeing their father at all. She remembered how pained Bill Browning had sounded in Paris about how little he saw his daughters, and now she would be doing that to Andy and their sons.