Rogue

Maxine met Blake while she was doing her residency at Stanford Hospital. He had been working in Silicon Valley, in the world of hightech investments. He had been making plans for his fledgling company then, she'd never fully understood it, but was fascinated by his incredible energy and passion for the ideas he was developing. They had met at a party she didn't want to go to, but a friend had dragged her along. She'd been working in the trauma unit for two days straight and was half asleep the night they met. Blake had woken her up with a bang. The next day he had taken her for a helicopter ride, and they had flown over the bay, and under the Golden Gate Bridge. Being with him had been thrilling, and their relationship had taken off like a forest fire in a strong wind after that. They were married in less than a year. She was twenty-seven when they got married, and it had been a whirlwind year. Ten months after their wedding, Blake sold his company for a fortune. The rest was history. He turned the money into even more, seemingly without effort. He was willing to risk it all and was truly a genius at what he did. Maxine had been dazzled by his foresight, skill, and brilliant mind.

By the time Daphne was born, two years after their wedding, Blake had made an unheard-of amount of money, and wanted Max to give up her career. Instead, she became chief resident in adolescent psychiatry, gave birth to Daphne, and found herself married to one of the richest men in the world. It was a lot to adjust to and digest. And as a result of either denial or overconfidence in the ability of nursing her baby to keep her from getting pregnant, she got pregnant with Jack six weeks after Daphne was born. By the time the second baby came, Blake had bought the house in London and the one in Aspen, had ordered the boat, and they moved back to New York. He retired soon after that. And even after Jack was born, Maxine didn't give up her career. Her maternity leave was shorter than one of Blake's trips, and he was all over the map by then. They hired a live-in nanny, and Maxine went back to work.

It was a handicap working while Blake wasn't, but the life he was leading frightened her. It was too freewheeling, opulent, and jet set for her. While Maxine opened her own practice, and signed up for an important research project on childhood trauma, Blake hired the most important decorator in London to do their house, and a different one to do Aspen, and bought the house in St. Bart's as a Christmas gift for her, and a plane for himself. For Maxine, it was happening much too fast, and after that, it never slowed down. They had houses, babies, and an unbelievable fortune, and Blake was on the covers of both Newsweek and Time. He went on making investments, which continued to double and triple his money, but he never went back to work in any formal sense. Whatever he did, he managed to accomplish on the computer and phone. And eventually, their marriage seemed to be happening on the phone as well. Blake was as loving as ever when they were together, but most of the time, he just wasn't around.

At one point, Maxine even thought about giving up work, and talked to her father about it. But in the end, her conclusion was that there wasn't much point. What would she do then? Fly around with him from one house to another, hotels in other cities where they didn't have houses, or on the fabulous vacations he took, on safari in Africa, climbing mountains in the Himalayas, financing archaeological digs, or racing boats? There was nothing Blake couldn't accomplish, and even less that he was afraid to attempt. He had to do, try, taste, and have it all. She couldn't imagine dragging two toddlers along to most of the places he went, so much of the time she stayed home with the kids in New York, and she could never quite bring herself to let go and give up her work. Every suicidal kid she saw, every traumatized child, convinced her that there was a need for what she did. She had won two prestigious awards for her research projects, and at times she felt almost schizophrenic, trying to meet up with her husband on his jet-set life in Venice, Sardinia, or St. Moritz, going to the nursery school to pick up their children in New York, or working on psychiatric research projects, and giving lectures. She was leading three lives all at once. Eventually, Blake stopped begging her to come with him, and resigned himself to traveling alone. He was no longer able to sit still, the world was at his feet, and never big enough for him. He became an absentee husband and father almost overnight, while Maxine tried to make a contribution to bettering the lives of suicidal and traumatized adolescents and young children, and their own. Her life and Blake's couldn't have been further apart. No matter how much they loved each other, eventually the only bridge they had left between them was their kids.