Turning Point

by Danielle Steel

  She got up before he did, and was at the breakfast table when he came downstairs in his suit and a fresh white shirt he had brought in his briefcase. He looked impeccable, and she was disheveled and didn’t care. He read the paper, and at exactly eight o’clock, he got up, smiled at her, and said, “See you Wednesday, if not before.” And from there she veered off the script. She looked at him with sad eyes, and spoke softly.

  “Actually, no, Jeff. I’m done. I’m sure you’ll find another Wednesday night girl.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, frowning at her. People didn’t fire Jeff Hunter. He fired them.

  “It means just what I said. I wanted to see you one more time, but this is it. We should have stopped a long time ago, and I finally realized it. Somehow, I kept stupidly hoping that one day you’d leave Jane and end up with me. That’s never going to happen. It’s all so clear to me now.”

  “I never said that’s impossible, Wendy. In a few years…”

  “In a few years, I’ll be forty, and I’ll have wasted nine years with you. I’ve decided to quit at six. You’re never going to leave Jane, and I don’t want to be your Wednesday night piece of ass for the rest of my life, or until you turn me in for a newer model.”

  “That’s a disgusting thing to say.” He looked furious, and for once he wasn’t controlling what she did. He no longer could. She wouldn’t let him.

  “It was a disgusting thing to do to me, but I let you, so I’m as much to blame as you are. Take care, Jeff.” She opened the kitchen door leading to her driveway and he stared at her and didn’t move, which surprised her.

  “This is ridiculous. Let’s have dinner tonight, and we’ll discuss it.”

  “What are we going to discuss? How many more years you’ll stay married? We don’t even go out anymore. You just come here once a week for dinner, get laid, and drop by for a glass of wine once in a while, when you feel like it. I deserve a hell of a lot more than that, I need a man who loves me, for starters. You haven’t loved me in years, if you ever did. I’m just some kind of tune-up you give yourself once a week. I don’t want to be your tune-up anymore.”

  “What happened to you in Paris?” he asked, genuinely upset.

  “I woke up.”

  “Is this because of Aspen?”

  “That and a lot of other things. It’s the right decision for me.” He walked toward her and tried to kiss her then, but she didn’t let him. She couldn’t. She knew that if she did, she’d be trapped again. And this time she wanted to be free. Somewhere out there was a man who would love her seven days a week, not just once a week and then go home to his wife.

  He walked to the door with a bereft expression, and turned to look at her again. “If you wait long enough…” he started to say, and she shook her head.

  “Nothing’s going to change. We both know it.” He walked out the door then, and she closed it behind him. She heard him drive away a few minutes later. And after he was gone, she realized that he hadn’t told her he loved her for years while still trying to convince her to remain his mistress. She knew she had done the right thing, but she was suddenly panicked as she thought about what she’d done. What if she’d be alone forever? What if she never met anyone? What if she died all by herself one day? But it didn’t matter. Whatever happened, it would be better than what she had with him. She had nothing with Jeff except loneliness and grief. And she had done it. It was finally over. She felt sadness, but most of all relief.

  She felt whole again as she dressed for work, and proud of herself. And very brave. She was free.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tom Wylie looked slightly disheveled and arrived ten minutes late for his shift at Alta Bates on Tuesday. It was his first day back to work after the trip to Paris. He was as handsome as ever, as he stopped at the nurses’ station and glanced at the admissions board, without noticing the nurses, which had never happened before.

  “Well, look who’s back!” the senior nurse at the desk said, happy to see him. They had missed his stories and light touch for the last month. “How was Paris?” He smiled in answer to the question with a dreamy expression.

  “Fantastic. Much better than expected.” He looked like a happy man. “What have we got in the house today?” he said, reading down the list of recent admissions, without a single lewd remark or inappropriate comment, which were his stock in trade, to the nurses. They all noticed it, and mentioned it to each other when he hurried off to the first room. He was back half an hour later, with the orders he wanted filled, and a list of tests the patient needed. He wanted him to have an EEG for a concussion and an MRI as soon as possible.

  “What happened to you?” his favorite nurse, Maisie, asked him, looking disappointed. He usually propositioned her at least once a week. She was sixty years old and married with six grandchildren. He didn’t mean it, and neither did she, but it was fun working with him. Maybe he was jet-lagged, but he seemed in good spirits and looked terrific. “How many hearts did you break in Paris?” He grinned at her when she asked.

  “None. I met the woman of my dreams. I’ve spent the last two days cleaning my house because she’ll be here in two weeks. Speaking of which, where do I buy a vacuum cleaner?”

  She stared at him in disbelief. This was not the Tom Wylie she knew. “This sounds serious. A hardware store or a department store. Do you know how to use it?” She was laughing at him. The Great Tom Wylie had fallen. The women of Alta Bates were going to be heartbroken, but she was happy for him. He acted like a nervous kid with his first girlfriend. In fact, Valérie was the first woman he had loved. It was a whole new experience for him.

  “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.

  On the other hand, she didn’t want to stay in a bad marriage forever. It was a lot to work out. She didn’t want to end her relationship with Gabriel, far from it, but she needed to go more slowly, and she wanted to be sensitive to Andy’s needs too, which Gabriel thought was unnecessary and ridiculous. According to him, it was over, and Andy just had to be a man, move on, and get out of the way. He seemed somewhat insensitive to other people’s needs, and he told her she was being American whenever she talked to him about letting Andy down gently.

  And just when she wanted Andy to be sensitive and reasonable, he wasn’t and behaved like a jerk. And when she gave up on him completely, he did something sweet and reduced her to tears and intense guilt. It was all very bittersweet. She found a wedding picture of them in her closet and sat down on the bed holding it. Even at twenty-eight, they had looked like kids. They were so innocent and loved each other so much. He thought it was great that she was a doctor, and now it annoyed him every time she went to work, was on call, or stayed late. She could do nothing right, and the less well his freelance writing was going, the angrier he seemed to her.

  “Things aren’t going so great, are they?” he said in a soft voice one morning when he found her staring out the window with a sad expression. She turned to face him and there were tears in her eyes.

  “No, I guess not.” She wondered if the marriage would have been salvageable if she hadn’t gone to Paris. Andy wouldn’t have been as angry, and she wouldn’t have met Gabriel. But the truth was that Andy had been growing increasingly resentful of her work for the past year or two, which didn’t seem fair to her. They lived on what she made, which didn’t bother him. But her working long hours did.

  “What do you want to do about it?” he asked sadly and didn’t approach her. There was a glass wall between them with no door on it. They could see each other, but they never touched anymore, nor did their hearts.

  “I don’t know yet.” She was determined not to give him the bad news until after Gabriel left. “What do you think?”

  “Counseling? A break? Divorce?” Hearing him say it out loud sounded extreme to her, but so was their situation, and the truth was that she wanted out. But she didn’t want to say it yet.

  “Maybe we should wait till the French emergency commission has been here. I’m going to be very busy with that for four weeks.” They were due in a week. Her heart raced each time she thought of it. In seven days, Gabriel would be there.

  “I could stay at my mom’s,” he suggested and that sounded pathetic to h
er too. “It might give us a breather.” But they had just had a breather for four weeks when she was in Paris, and things were worse when she got home. But she’d been passionately involved with another man and she realized that skewed everything.

  “Have you talked to your mom about it?” she asked, curious. He talked to her more than Stephanie talked to her parents, but he was an only child with a widowed mother, who liked to get into his business. Her parents were always careful not to get involved and to let their children work things out for themselves, since they were adults.

  “She says we can work it out if we want to. It’s up to us. I hope she’s right, but to be honest, I don’t see how. Things would have to change,” he said, thinking about it, “if we want our marriage to work again.”

  “Change how?” She was curious about what he thought.

  “Maybe I need to get a job so I don’t feel so dependent on you. I hate to admit it, but I’ve been jealous of your work for the last year or two. You know what you want and what you’re doing, and you’re good at it. You go after your goals. I’ve been floundering. I don’t even know if I can make it as a writer, and I don’t want to work at a newspaper again. I feel lost,” he said, with tears in his eyes, and she felt sorry for him. His admission that he was jealous of her career was huge. “I need to pursue my dreams again. You’re going to be head of the department one day, and I’ll be nothing.” He sounded like a boy as he said it. But she needed him to be a man for her, not a child. Gabriel was an adult. And Andy’s boyish charm had worn thin and just seemed immature. She knew she shouldn’t, but she compared the two men constantly, and Andy was coming up short, and had for a while. It had left the door wide open for Gabriel to walk through and sweep her off her feet, just as he had. She had wanted to be faithful to Andy, but the lure of Gabriel was too great. Andy could sense that he had lost her, and he had a feeling that there was someone else, but Stephanie kept saying there wasn’t and he believed her. The constant calls and texts seemed suspicious to him.