AS ADRIAN TOWNSEND DROVE AWAY FROM THE supermarket, her thoughts were full of Steven waiting for her at home. She hadn't seen him in four days. He had been stuck in meetings at a client presentation in St. Louis. Steven Townsend was the bright shining star of the ad agency where he worked, and she knew that one day, if he wanted to, he would run the L. A. office. At thirty-four, he had come a long, long way from humble beginnings in the Midwest, and she knew just how much his success meant to him. It meant everything to him. He had hated everything about poverty, his childhood, and the Midwest, and in his opinion he had been saved sixteen years ago by a scholarship to UC Berkeley. He had majored in communications, as Adrian had three years later at Stanford. Her passion had been TV, but Steven had fallen in love with advertising from the beginning. He had gone to work for an ad agency in San Francisco right out of school, and then he'd gone to business school at night and earned his MBA once he got to southern California. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Steven Townsend was going to succeed, no matter what it took, or cost him. He was one of those people who were determined to get where they wanted to go, who planned things out in great detail. There were no accidents in Steven Townsend's life, no mistakes, no failures. He would talk to Adrian for hours sometimes about clients he was going to get, or a promotion he had set his sights on. She marveled at him sometimes, his determination, his drive, his courage. It hadn't been easy for him. His father had been an autoworker on the assembly line in Detroit, with five kids, three daughters and two sons, of which Steven had been the youngest. His older brother had died in Vietnam, and the three girls had stayed close to home, perfectly content not to go to college. Two of them had been married while still in their teens, both pregnant, of course, and his oldest sister had married at twenty-one, and had had four children before her twenty-fifth birthday. She had married an autoworker like her dad, and when there was a strike they all went on welfare. It was a life Steven still had nightmares about, and he seldom talked to anyone about his childhood. Only Adrian knew how much he had hated it, and how much he had come to hate them. He had never gone back to Detroit once he left, and Adrian also knew that it had been more than five years since he had communicated with his parents. He just couldn't talk to them anymore, he had explained it to her once when he'd had a little too much to drink and they'd come home after an office party. He had hated them so much, hated their poverty and despair, hated the look of constant sorrow in his mother's eyes over all that she could not do for, or give, her children. But she must have loved you all, Adrian had tried to explain, sensing the woman's love for them, and her sense of helplessness in the face of what they needed and she couldn't give them, in particular, her youngest child, anxious, ambitious Steven.
“I don't think she loved anyone,” Steven had said bitterly, “she had nothing left in her …except for him …you know, she even got pregnant the year I left, and by then she must have been almost fifty …thank God she lost it.” Adrian felt a twinge of distant pain for her, but she had long since stopped pleading their cause to Steven. He obviously had nothing in common with them anymore, and even talking about them was far too painful. She wondered from time to time what they would have thought of him, if they could see him now. He was handsome, athletic, outspoken, well educated, intelligent, bold, and sometimes even a little too brassy. She had always admired his fire, his ambition, his drive, his energy, and yet from time to time she wished that it were only a little tempered. Perhaps that would come in time, with age, with love, with kindness from those who loved him. Sometimes she teased him, she said he was like a cactus plant. He wouldn't let anyone come too close, or touch his heart, except when he decided to allow it.
They had been married for almost three years, and the marriage had done them both good. Steven had continued to rise in the agency meteorically in the past two and a half years, after moving to Los Angeles twelve years before when he finished college. He had worked in three different ad agencies over the years, and he was known in the industry as being smart, good at what he did, and more than occasionally ruthless. He had taken over clients from friends, and wooed them from other agencies in circumstances that occasionally bordered on the improper. But the agency where he worked never lost out from his maneuvers, nor did Steven. They were growing day by day, and so was Steven's importance.
She and Steven were very different, Adrian knew, and yet she respected him. Most of all, she respected what he had come from. She knew, just from the little she had heard, that surviving his early beginnings must have been brutal. Her own were at the opposite extreme, from an upper-middle-class family in Connecticut, she had always gone to private schools, and she had one older sister. She and Adrian didn't see eye to eye, and in recent years, Adrian had drifted away from her parents, too, although every few years they came out to California to see her. But it was too different from their comfortable life in Connecticut, and the last time they had come, her parents hadn't gotten along with Steven. And Adrian had to admit he'd been difficult with them. He'd been openly critical of her father, and his genteel pursuits. Her father had never had a great interest in pursuing a major career. He was an attorney, and he had retired early on, and for years he had taught at a nearby law school. She'd been embarrassed by Steven's almost grilling him, and she'd tried to explain to them that that was just Steven's way and he meant no harm by it, but after they went back, her sister, Connie, had called Adrian and given her hell about the way Steven had treated her parents. She'd asked how Adrian could “let him do that to them.” Do what? she'd asked. “Make Dad feel so insignificant. Mom said Steven humiliated him. She said Dad says he'll never go back to California.”
“Connie … for heaven's sake …” Adrian was upset to realize how hurt her father had been, and she had to admit Steven had been a little …well …exuberant when he pressed him, but that was just his style. And she tried in vain to express that to her sister. But they had never been close. They were five years apart, and Connie had always somehow disapproved of her, as though she didn't quite measure up. Which was why, in the end, after college, Adrian had stayed in California. That, and the fact that she had wanted a job in TV production.
Adrian had gone to Los Angeles to take graduate courses in film at UCLA, and she had done very well. She had had several extremely interesting jobs, and then Steven had come along, and he had seen different career opportunities for her, and in some ways, that had changed things. He thought the milieu of film or even films for TV was far too arty, and he kept insisting she should be doing something more hard-edged, more concrete. They'd been living together for two years when she got the offer to work in TV news, and it was certainly more money than she'd earned before, but it was also very different from anything she'd ever dreamed of. She'd agonized over whether or not to take the job, she just felt it wasn't “her,” but finally Steven talked her into it, and he'd been right. In the past three years she'd come to love it. And sixmonths after she'd taken the job, she and Steven went to Reno for a weekend and got married. He hated big weddings, and “family ordeals,” and she had agreed with him so as not to upset him. But that had been upsetting for her parents too. They had wanted to do a beautiful wedding at home for their youngest daughter. Instead, she and Steven flew east, and her parents had been anything but pleased to learn that they were already married. Her mother had cried, her father had scolded them both, and they had both felt like errant children. Steven had been really irritated with them, and as usual, Adrian had gotten in a big fight with her sister, Connie. Connie had been pregnant with her third and last child by then, and as usual, she made Adrian feel inadequate somehow, and as though she had done something really awful.