Chapter 1 #6
The best of her children’s current partners by far was Violet’s energetic, enthusiastic, sincere boyfriend of the last two years, Jamie Madison, who worked for the sports bureau of the Daily News and loved his job.
He had turned down jobs at both the Post and The New York Times, and preferred the more popular newspaper he worked for.
He was an excellent writer who had gone to Brown and had a master’s from the Columbia School of Journalism.
He had a family he loved in Boston, and was an ardent Red Sox fan.
He had invited Dominique to a Yankees game and she’d had fun with him, eating hot dogs and drinking beer and slushies, and she enjoyed his sense of humor, which matched Violet’s, but he seemed more like a college romance than a life partner.
At twenty-eight, Violet still had time to spare before settling down, and Dominique really didn’t want her to marry Jamie.
She knew there was a serious side to him and that he had lost a younger brother to leukemia, so he was on the board of an annual fundraiser for leukemia and volunteered time to children with cancer.
But his many good qualities didn’t change the fact that the greatest passion in his life was baseball and almost every other sport, and he didn’t own a suit, other than the tuxedo he wore every year to the fundraiser, and most of the time he looked like he was on his way home from practice in the minor leagues.
He even coached a boys’ baseball team in Harlem.
Jamie had many virtues and a good heart, but no social skills.
And how would that play out when they were forty and fifty?
Dominique couldn’t see him in Violet’s life long-term, although she had her eccentricities too.
She’d had purple hair all through college at NYU, had floated around Europe aimlessly for two years after college, had spent a year in Paris living with her grandmother, much to Marie-Aurélie’s delight, and still traveled the world looking for unusual objects, from jewelry to vintage clothing, elegant Vuitton trunks, beautifully bound old books, and occasionally taxidermy or a Moroccan rug or African Masai jewelry.
Everything Violet sold was exceptional, and she had unusual and remarkable taste and a great eye for special things.
The store on Madison Avenue was called Objets, and she made a very healthy living at it.
But Dominique didn’t see how Jamie would suit Violet long-term.
Violet lived in the present moment and never worried about the future.
Dominique was proud of her children. They had been the joy of her life, and had filled it to the brim, particularly since Bill had existed on a very part-time basis, in the shadows of her life, and not at its center.
The little time they were able to spend together had been enough in the early years, but now, with the children gone, only work was left to fill her days and nights when he wasn’t around, and it no longer seemed like enough.
But nothing in their relationship had changed, and he was still just as anchored to his wife, even though they didn’t love each other.
As Dominique had known for a long time, it was her love and the time they did spend together that made his marriage tolerable.
It had taken her years to realize it. There was no great purpose or design to his staying married to Eileen, it was just easier for him not to deal with it, and it was only recently that Dominique had begun to notice that the time they spent together was as sweet as ever, but no longer seemed like enough.
It didn’t fulfill her. And for now, they had no plan to do anything about it.
There was never progress on any front. She and Bill were just coasting along as they always had, and they loved each other.
Maybe that was enough. Dominique didn’t know many couples who still got along and loved each other as she and Bill did after sixteen years.
She wondered if being married would have ruined it.
But she had no way of knowing. Bill had never lied to her, telling her openly from the beginning that he wouldn’t divorce, just as her own father had told her mother.
And his children were very young when their affair began.
He and Eileen had little in common, but he had felt duty-bound to stay married for his children’s sake, and now they were leaving the nest.
He had never changed his mind about getting divorced, even now with his children in college, and for sixteen years, Dominique had told herself that what they had was enough for her.
But lately, with his youngest son leaving home, she wasn’t as sure.
She never admitted it to Bill and rarely to herself, but she wanted more than a man she saw twice a week who belonged to someone else.
And she was afraid to ask him for more. What if he refused, or left her?
Two days a week was better than no Bill at all.
Or was it? She was afraid to answer that question to herself.
His son had left for college two months before, and nothing had changed, and probably never would, so she refused to listen to the voices in her head prodding her to tell him she needed more from him, and what they had was no longer enough for her.
Her heart had begun to ache every time Bill left her apartment and went back to his wife.