A week later, Peyton held his phone to his ear, cupping his hand around the speaker so that no one walking down the hallway or in the apartments would overhear him.
He asked Raji, “Will you marry me?”
Over the phone, Raji said, “Peyton—”
The way she said it, drawn-out and sighing with regret, made his heart clench. He said quickly, “I’m sorry I just blurted it out in bed last time. That wasn’t the proposal you deserve.” Peyton chuckled. “It certainly wasn’t a story we could tell our kids or friends.”
This was the story they could tell their friends and kids: that when she said yes to him over the phone, she would open her apartment door and find him right there on one knee, holding a ring.
“That’s not it,” she said.
He rushed to say, “We’ve been dating for over two years. Every time I see you, it breathes life into me. When I’m touring, the first thing I do every morning, before I even get out of bed, is check our shared doc to see if you’ve updated your schedule so we can find some time to be together. When we video chat—”
“Oh, my God. Don’t bring that up.” He could hear the laugh in her voice, a good sign. Peyton could always get her out of her head, either by making her laugh at his jokes or by dominating her in bed.
“—I love every minute of it. It’s almost like you touching me, and I love to see you touch yourself.”
“The hotels have porn. I don’t know why you don’t just watch that.” She was still laughing.
He laughed softly as he stood in the hallway outside of her apartment so she wouldn’t hear him through the door. “The tour just got back from Germany. You would not believe some of the German porn. Shocking, I tell you. Those repressed buggers are always the ones with the weird fetishes, right?”
He fished the ring box out of his pocket. The brilliant-cut center diamond flashed reflection speckles on the walls from the morning sunlight that streamed through the hallway window. He had bought it down in New York’s diamond district and had the setting crafted by a jeweler whom his family had used for years.
As he had predicted, his parents had waived any pre-proposal meeting when they had heard that Raji was doing her residency in cardiothoracic surgery. His father had been particularly pleased that Peyton had managed to find a fiancée without a whiff of gold digger about them. Some of their friends’ heirs had recently been testing the strengths of their prenups, a sad situation.
He said, “I could take you to Germany and show you the really weird stuff. I figured out a couple of drinking games to go along with them.”
“Oh, God. Peyton. I can’t. I couldn’t.” Panic sharpened her voice. “That kind of time—”
“It’s okay,” he said, trying to gentle her. “I know you don’t have the time. Andy quit her residency, but you don’t want to. It’s important to you to be a cardiothoracic surgeon—” He had heard her say that so many times over the years that he pronounced it perfectly, Cardio. Thor. Ass! Ick! “—And I support that in every way.”
“I’m glad,” she said, “and that’s why—”
He spoke over her, desperate to get everything out before she made up her mind. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about quitting Killer Valentine. Most of the time while I’m on the road, I’m trying to talk myself into staying. Joining the band was an accident that I fell into. I’ve been looking for a reason to leave. I’ll make inquiries with the L.A. Phil to see if they have room for a soloist next year. If that doesn’t work out, I can talk to the Colburn School about whether they need yet another piano performance professor. I can work in California and be with you. Let’s get married.”
“It’s not that easy. In another couple of years, my residency will be finished, and I’m going to need to find a job. It might be anywhere. You’re not going to want to dump everything and go to some podunk city in Arkansas or Minnesota that needs a heart surgeon.”
He paused at this new information. “Are you sure it’s going to be Minnesota or Arkansas?”
“No. It could be Florida or Texas or Connecticut.”
“Nah, there is fucking nothing in Connecticut,” he said, laughing.
Raji laughed, too. “Even New Jersey is better than Connecticut.”
“We can manage,” he said. “We’ll figure out how to make it work.” He sank to one knee and held the ring box with one hand in preparation.
“Peyton, you’re an amazing musician, and your original songs are incredible. You’re not going to be satisfied with your life if you’re living in some god-forsaken middling town somewhere with no symphony, no orchestra, no conservatory, and not even any rock concerts, but that may be where I have to go. This idea is doomed.”
“Doomed,” he repeated, feeling the slow ache of decay in his heart.
“Let’s say we did get married and you moved here to California. In seven months, we’d have a newborn baby. And then what? It goes to daycare all day and night for hours and hours while we both work? And then we go home, sleep, and drop it back off at the nursery? That’s not having a life together.”
“But, you will get maternity leave,” he said.
“I can’t take more than two weeks off my residency without having the time extended.”
“Two weeks? That can’t be enough time to heal from giving birth.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how it’s done. That’s how everyone does it. Guys usually just take the afternoon off, and that’s relatively recent. The older attendings grouse about emotionally coddled men who can’t wait until their on-call is over to see a baby because they all look the same, anyway.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Peyton said.
“No, it’s punitive. It’s meant to punish people who have distractions and make it pretty much impossible to have a family during your residency because that’s what being a surgeon is like.”
“It must dissuade some very bright people from becoming surgeons, if they have to give up having a family.”
“It’s like being a rock star, Peys. When you’re on the road like that, you can’t have a family.”
“Actually, Killer Valentine is taking a six-month break, starting in June, because Xan and Georgie are having a child.”
“Georgie’s pregnant? Are you okay with that?”
“I’m fine with it. I’m happy for them. They had a tough time. Georgie had a miscarriage a few years ago, and it messed them up for a while. Georgie even cried with me, so I know she must have been truly heartbroken. Also, have you spoken to Andy lately?”
“Yeah, I know she’s knocked up. I didn’t mention my predicament.”
“Even when we do resume touring, we’re all slowing down. The tours will have longer breaks and shorter legs. We already have two kids on tour: Emily and Valentina. As soon as we land at a tour stop, while the technicians are unpacking the set and lighting rigs, Cadell and Tryp take the kids to the nearest park until the sound check. We’ve figured out how to make it work.”
“But I wouldn’t be going on tour with Killer Valentine. I will not quit my residency like Andy did.”
“I understand, but if a rock band that is lorded over by an insane, monomaniac frontman can make it work, anyone can.”
“Once I’m done, we would probably see each other less. I’ve been switching shifts around like a crazy woman to fly to meet you or to be home when you come here. You’d get tired of it, Peyton. You would want out. The divorce rate among surgeons is crazy-high, like eighty percent. Probably worse than for rock stars. Even we surgeons know it’s no way to live. It’s not fair to ask anyone else to live like that.”
“I’m asking you to let me share your life and to marry me,” he said. “I l—”
“You don’t even know what you want in life, Peys. You don’t know whether you want to stay in contemporary music or go back to classical. You don’t know whether you want to teach in a conservatory or to perform with the L.A. Phil or with Killer Valentine. You’ve been wasting time with Killer Valentine and hanging on Georgie Johnson for almost two years.”
“Georgie? Is that what this is about? I’ve explained to you—”
“Two whole years of your life! You don’t have any sort of a life plan, and you don’t know what you want.”
“I know what I want. I want you,” he said.
“This isn’t a game to me. I am almost half a million dollars in debt for my undergrad and medical school.”
“I don’t think it’s a game, Raji. I’m not playing with you.”
“Actually, I take that back. It is a game. I’m playing Russian roulette. If I don’t become a surgeon, if I don’t get an extremely high-paying job, I can’t pay off this debt. I have gambled everything on this. If you distract me too much, I’m done. If I get sick while I’m pregnant, I’m done. There are so many ways that I could shoot myself in the head with this.”
“Raji-lee, I would never do that to you.”
“I can’t take a chance on that.”
“You mean you can’t take a chance on me.”
“I have to make this work. I have responsibilities. I’m not some trust-fund kid who can go mooning after his ex for two years because he was an ass in high school. There are people whom I need to help. You don’t know everything that’s going on with me.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t fuck up my life for this. I’m sorry, Peyton, but I just can’t. I’m going to just take care of it, and I’m going on with my life. I can’t do this.”
Peyton closed the ring box and stood. The glittering spangles disappeared from the corridor’s white walls. “If you need any help, whatever kind, any help at all, my offer stands. Anything, from financial help to taking care of you while you rest. I mean it.”
“I’m fine. I’ve got some girlfriends here who can take care of me. One of the OB/GYNs here takes care of this for staff and doesn’t record it anywhere, so it never gets billed, either. I don’t need money or help from you. I need some time, Peyton. I’m sorry. A lot has happened with us. Let’s take a break from it all for a while, okay?”
His throat burned inside. “I’ll do whatever you want, Raji.”
“Write some more songs for me, will you? You’re an amazing songwriter. The world needs you as a musician out there writing and performing, not cloistered as a glorified music teacher in some conservatory. I can’t do that to you, either. When I see you next, play me some new songs. I’d love that.”
“I will,” he said.
“Good. Good-bye, Peyton.”
“Good-bye, Raji-lee.”
Peyton considered knocking on her door and having it out with her in person, but Raji had made her decision. He was a progressive, modern man who respected women’s decisions about their lives, not a caveman who would beat down her door and demand that she marry him, trapping her with him forever, merely because a condom broke and—
—and she was carrying his child, a squirmy little bundle of humanity and the only heir to the Cabot fortune.
But she was right. If things didn’t work out between them, having a child always hurt the woman more career-wise, and he had always known that Raji was balanced on a knife’s edge of what she could handle. Her willingness to submit to anything he had wanted so that he would distract her from the stress had proven that to him repeatedly.
No, Peyton Cabot wouldn’t force a woman to abandon her dreams of being a—he sighed—cardiothoracic surgeon.
He walked out of Raji’s building and called for a ride back to the airport with the ring box weighing heavily in his pocket.