Turning Point(2)
Bill had fallen head over heels in love with her, and she had come to San Francisco a month later, to pursue their torrid affair. She stayed. He was working long shifts in his residency, and whenever he wasn’t working, they spent most of their time in bed, or doing the sports he enjoyed and introduced to her. She thought their romance exciting and exotic. Bill was different from any man she’d ever known. He was straightforward, honest, hardworking, and modest. She was wild, sexy, and a rare bird for him. She’d gotten pregnant with Pip six months later, and they flew to London over a long weekend to explain the situation to her parents. Bill proposed, which he wanted to do eventually anyway. It was just sooner than he’d planned. They were married in a discreet ceremony, and neither family was thrilled with their decision. Her family thought him too dull. His family thought her too racy.
Pip was born six months later, and Bill bought a Victorian house in Noe Valley, where they could become a family and begin their life together. Her parents sent over a nanny from London so Athena didn’t have to be tied down, and she went home to England frequently to see her sisters, parents, and friends, and then returned to Bill, their baby, and their San Francisco life, a little less enthusiastically each time. She felt like a fish out of water in sleepy San Francisco.
It had taken Athena all of five minutes to fall in love with Bill the night they met, and about a year to realize what she’d done, and how different they were. He was more of a detour than a destination in her life, and at the end of a year with him, she had begun to have serious doubts about the marriage. She was six months pregnant with Pip by then, and the baby brought them closer for a while. The life they shared was exactly what Bill wanted, a wife he loved and an adorable baby in a cozy little Victorian house in a family neighborhood. Athena was like an exotic bird trapped in a cage in a foreign land. It had taken her less than a year after Pip was born to fall out of love with him completely, and she got pregnant with Alex by accident after they got drunk at a party when Pip was fifteen months old. She spent most of the pregnancy commuting to London to see her old friends, and got increasingly depressed whenever she came back to Bill in San Francisco. His parents had never liked her, and were dismayed by what he’d gotten himself into, but he was still insisting that Athena would settle down and get used to married life. He had a long talk with her father, who suggested that Bill give up his career in medicine, move to England, and join him in the family shipping business if he wanted the marriage to work. Athena was never going to be a “California girl.” The only one who refused to see it was Bill. Three weeks after Alex was born, Athena took the two girls to England and spent the summer in the south of France with her sisters and friends at her parents’ summer home there. At the end of the summer she called to tell Bill she wasn’t coming back and wanted a divorce. He was devastated and tried to talk her out of it, but she was already seeing Rupert by then, and Bill didn’t have a chance. She and Rupert had had a summer fling in the south of France.
She and Rupert had grown up together. He was one of her own, and a British lord like her father. Rupert was as much a libertine and free spirit as she was, and her three years in California were over. She never came back. Bill lived in the house in Noe Valley until the divorce she filed was final, hoping she would change her mind. She didn’t. Eventually he sold the pretty little house and moved to a small apartment on the Embarcadero, with a view of the bay and the Bay Bridge and a second bedroom for his girls when they would come to visit. The apartment was stark and barely furnished, and he was still living there five years later. He had never bothered to decorate it, except for the bare essentials from IKEA, including a pink bedroom set for the girls. The rest of the apartment looked as barren and empty as he felt.
When his daughters visited him now in the summer, they traveled most of the time. He took them to Lake Tahoe, camping in Yosemite, they went on road trips, he took them to Disneyland, and did all the things divorced fathers do, trying desperately to establish a bond with his children in too little time. They were as British as their mother and stepfather, and loved their little half brothers. Bill tried to plant the seed of their going to college in the States one day, which Pip was mildly interested in, but it was still nine years away. In the meantime, he had his month with them in the summer, an occasional weekend when he could fly to London to see them, and Christmas every other year. The rest of the time he had his work. He firmly believed that he didn’t need more than that. There hadn’t been an important woman in his life since Athena, and he was beginning to see now how unsuited they had been for each other. He told himself it no longer mattered, and insisted he wasn’t bitter about the divorce. He hadn’t been in love with her for several years. She had broken his heart when she left with their daughters. The loves of his life now were Pip and Alex. He readily admitted he was a workaholic, and saw no harm in that.
The absence of a wife or girlfriend gave Bill more time to devote to his work, and to his children when he saw them. He didn’t want anyone interfering with his relationship with them, and a new woman might. He saw very little of his brother and parents in New York. They were part of a world he had never liked and had shunned since he’d entered medical school. His brother was an antitrust lawyer with political aspirations, married to an environmental attorney, involved in a multitude of causes. They had a booming social life. His parents were part of the old New York establishment, which had never interested him. He was happy with his much smaller life in San Francisco, spending time between the hospital where he worked and the outdoors. It was a choice he had made when he was young, and it still suited him.