“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.”