“Do you think we’ll ever have more children?” she asked, as she lay in bed next to him. She couldn’t imagine how Ellen managed three, and she had been an only child, but she liked the relationship between her two half- sisters, and sometimes envied them that.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Let’s get this one out first.” It seemed like a big project to him. He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him. She was a woman who climbed mountains and was willing to conquer the world. Mike was a lot more easily daunted, but he was following her example and learning a lot from her. As he held her, he could feel the baby kick him, hard. It was difficult to believe that a month from now, they’d be parents. He was excited by the prospect, but if he thought about it too much, it still scared him to death. April was a lot calmer about it. And as he held her in his arms, thinking of all that lay ahead for them, he drifted off to sleep, and April looked at him and smiled. As it turned out, their crazy one-night stand had turned out to be a very good thing.
Chapter 19
After the initial shock of the fire at April’s restaurant, and being reassured that they weren’t needed at home, Jack and Valerie had a fantastic time in Paris. They both loved staying at the Ritz and had stayed there before. They enjoyed the same restaurants, although Valerie introduced him to some new ones, and April told them about others that were intimate and unknown. Paparazzi took their photographs occasionally as they went in and out of the hotel. Neither of them was major news in Europe, but they were both well-known. And they loved being with each other.
Jack was astonishingly generous with her, and bought her a gold bracelet, and a fur jacket she saw and fell in love with. He surprised her with it at the hotel, after saying he had to go out and get some air. Life with him was a constant series of thoughtful, loving gestures, and Valerie was discovering a side of herself she had never known existed. For once in her life, she wasn’t thinking about work, but only her man.
They played “what if” games that Jack invented sometimes at dinner. If the network asked her to choose between him and her job, just how much did she love him, and what would she do?
“That’s easy,” she teased him. “I’d keep my show, and meet you on the sly in cheap motels in New Jersey.” And what if he had to give up sportscasting for her, or his place in the Hall of Fame, would he do it?
“Sportscasting, yes. Hall of Fame, not so easy. I worked my ass off to be in it in the first place,” he said sensibly. And there were times when they both talked seriously about what they wanted to do about their jobs as they got older. They were in an industry that prized youth.
“Barbara Walters has always been my role model,” Valerie said to him. “She has stayed on top for her entire career, and never slipped for a minute. She had to compete with men, her peers, younger women, and she’s still the best and the biggest in the business, and what’s more I really like her.”
“Is that what you want? To stay in the business forever? It’s a hell of a fight to stay on top the way she has, and I’m not so sure it’s worth it,” Jack said, as they finished dinner in a cozy restaurant on the Left Bank that April had recommended. Their joint favorite was still the Voltaire, on the quais along the Seine, but that night they hadn’t been able to get a table. Everyone in Paris wanted to go there, and only the cream of “le tout Paris” got in.
“I used to think so,” Valerie said in answer to his question about staying in the business. “What else is there?” And then she corrected herself, “Or what else was there before you? April is all grown up and has her own life, now more so than ever, with a restaurant, a husband, and a baby. What am I supposed to do with the next thirty years, if I’m that lucky? Or even the next ten? I always thought work was the answer. But I thought that when I was thirty too. I guess I’m just a workhorse. But I have to admit, sometimes now I’m not so sure.” She was happy with him, happier than she ever had been, but she also couldn’t give up a career for him, nor would she want to. What if either of them decided to move on, or things didn’t work out for them? It could always happen. Sometimes things changed, even in the best of relationships, and this was just the beginning. She wasn’t willing to put her career on the line for him, and he knew it. She had worked too hard to get there to risk it for any man, and she didn’t think she should. But she was willing to accommodate him to the best of her ability, within the framework of how she worked and lived.
He asked her a surprise question then. It had crossed her mind once or twice, but she didn’t have the answer to that either. “Do you suppose we should think about getting married eventually?” They were both old enough to know what they wanted, and who. She had always thought she wanted to get married again, but now she wasn’t as sure. She loved him, without question, but did they need the papers to go with it? They weren’t going to have children. They both had interesting careers. They loved each other. But just how much did they need to prove? And to whom?
“I don’t know. What do you think?” she said, smiling shyly at him. It was a big subject, and there was still the factor, and always would be, that she was older than he. What if he fell in love with a younger woman one day? She didn’t want the heartbreak of divorce again, especially at her age. Losing him would have devastated her. “I’m of two minds about it. Basically, I believe in the institution and what it stands for. I always did. But at this point in our lives, sometimes I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Do we really need the paperwork to tell others what we feel? And it’s like any other contract, the day one of you wants to get out of it, there’s nothing you can do to keep them there. People who want to get out, do, and then it’s a giant mess.” He didn’t disagree.
“I’d get married if it was important to you,” he said generously, and maybe one day it would be, but it wasn’t yet, and she made that clear. “I’m open to it. But I don’t need it myself. And I agree with you about divorce. Mine was pretty nasty. But we’re good friends now. At the time it was a huge battle, over visitation with Greg, the property we had to split up since I had already hit the big time and was making a lot of money by then, and I was really pissed that she wanted out to marry someone else, and had cheated on me with the team doctor. And she was pissed about all the girls I’d cheated on her with. It was a pretty ugly time, and I’m surprised we wound up friends.”
“It was easier for me and Pat,” Valerie admitted. “Neither of us had any money, we were more than willing to share April, and he hadn’t met Maddie yet. He was pretty devastated. He wanted to stay married, mostly because he didn’t want to admit that our marriage was a failure, and I wanted out. I knew it was the wrong situation for me. His academic life and everything that went with it bored me to death. What made sense eight years before that, or we thought so anyway, no longer did. I grew into someone entirely different from the woman he had married. As the Brits say, we were like chalk and cheese. I felt like he was holding me back in my career plans, and he felt like I was dragging him behind the horse by his teeth. We were miserable.” She couldn’t imagine that happening to her and Jack now, they were both grown-ups and had established careers. If anything, they were both slowing down slightly, or said they were willing to, but she wasn’t sure that was true either. They had both been on the fast track for a long time and were used to it. Modifying anything in their public lives wasn’t going to be easy, and for now they didn’t need to. They had no conflicts about each other’s work.
“Maybe we just need to keep things the way they are for now,” Jack said reasonably. “There’s no pressure on us to get married. There’s no statute of limitations on it. We can always do it later, if we want to, as long as you’re not in any kind of hurry. I’m not. We don’t want to have kids.” He smiled at her. Everything about their current relationship worked for both of them, even the difference in their ages, which Valerie had almost stopped worrying about, and had never been a problem for him. The difference between fifty and sixty seemed negligible now to both of them, and everyone else. Who cared? They felt like equals in every way. “Don’t fix what ain’t broke,” he said, smiling at her. And she liked the fact that he was open to marriage, but didn’t need it, and neither did she. And their kids didn’t seem to care either way. The press had spotted them together several times, but no one seemed upset or excited or even shocked about what might be happening between them. They were reasonable options for each other, they worked for the same network, they were both important in their field, and they had a fabulous time together. What more did they need? “What about living together?” Jack asked as long as they were on the subject of future arrangements. “Is that something you’d ever want to do?” For the past many months they had been together every night, going back and forth between each other’s apartments, but neither of them really wanted to give their own place up, and they agreed that it was much too soon to make that decision. It was just nice to think about where they were going, and what they wanted to do, to discover what was off limits, and what might be a good plan for the future. He loved his apartment, and she loved hers. He wouldn’t have minded her moving in with
