The portrait, p.5
The Portrait, page 5
She had noticed how his eyes clouded when he talked about his father, and why he wanted the portrait. She was shocked to realize that his father had died only days before.
“You must be mourning him,” she had said, instantly sympathetic, and he thought about it for a minute, wanting to be honest with her. If she was going to paint him, she deserved to know who he was, and what was true about him. He thought he owed the naked truth. He didn’t hide who he was from her. She was easy to open up to, warm and kind.
“Actually, I’m not mourning him. We never got along. He was a harsh man. He expected a lot. I was never the son he hoped I would be. I suppose it would be fair to say that we never understood each other. I tried for a while when I was young. The only way he could accept was his own. There was no other way with him. We were diametrically different. I don’t think he even liked me.” He looked sad when he said it. He seemed so open and unguarded for a moment that she wanted to reach out and touch him, but she didn’t.
“And your mother?” she asked gently.
“She died when I was thirteen. My father sent me away to school a few months later, and I never really came home again. Thirteen is too young to leave home. I made the same mistake with my own son. I let him go to boarding school too soon. He wanted to, as an only child. He wanted to be with other kids. But I wasn’t a big fan of boarding school. The only thing I liked about it was escaping my father. I was homesick for the first two years. By the time I was sixteen, I actually enjoyed it. And then I was off and running. You grow up faster away from home, especially with no parents.” Devon was easy to say hard things to, that he never said to anyone else.
“I don’t remember my parents,” Devon had said quietly. “I was five when they died. Once in a while, I think I have a memory, but I think it’s probably something my grandmother must have told me. I don’t actually remember it myself. My grandmother brought me up from five to sixteen. She was tough but wonderful. She was very strict, but she made it possible for me to go to the Beaux-Arts. She worked hard and saved the money for it, and left it to me.”
“It seems like a very good investment.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back at him. She had a beautiful smile and sensuous lips. If he had lost control of himself, he would have wanted to kiss her.
Charlie remembered all of it when he sat on his terrace, playing it all over in his head. The time he had spent with her was like a movie he wanted to see again. He hated the thought of waiting seven months to see her, and he was sure that he wouldn’t get bumped up on her waiting list. No one would cancel. He would just have to wait.
He slept easily that night, and woke up refreshed the next morning. He was flying out that day.
He sent Devon a text before he did. He was on his way to the airport when he sent it. “Thank you for seeing me yesterday. It meant the world to me.” He was intrigued by everything he had learned about her, and had seen for himself, while they sat at Luigi’s, exposing parts of their lives to each other, like a chess game they were playing, but it was real life. Her early life had been more difficult than his. Charlie had had every advantage in his life, but he had had a loveless childhood. There was no one to love and comfort him, which was the cruelest fate of all, as Devon knew only too well. She had been alone for so many years. There had been a brief moment of true happiness with Jean-Louis and Axel, but it ended all too quickly. And even with what he knew about her childhood now, Charlie didn’t see her as a tragic figure. She had too much fire and passion in her to seem that way to him. She looked peaceful and happy when she spoke of her grandmother. There had been no fairy grandmother in Charlie’s early life. There had literally been no one to love him. His childhood had been far more tragic than Devon’s, although most people wouldn’t have seen it that way. She did.
And she had told him just enough about herself to tantalize him and fascinate him even more. She had given him a lot to think about for the next seven months. It was all engraved in his mind now, along with her exquisite face and incredible all-seeing green eyes.
He thought about her as he sat on the plane, waiting to take off for Chicago. Right before the plane taxied down the runway, she answered his text, and he smiled as he read it.
“I’m looking forward to January.” That was all she said, followed by the initials DD. It was a start. She had just validated everything they had said and shared the day before.
Charlie completed everything he had to do on his travels, and he hit the ground running when he got back to San Francisco. He met with the two best realtors in the city to show them his father’s house and get an idea about the price he should put on it. Both came up with big numbers. It was a beautiful home, built by a famous architect. It was well maintained, in surprisingly good condition, with some modernizations that were direly necessary, to replace kitchens and bathrooms. A new owner would want to do that themselves, so Charlie didn’t make any major improvements. He drove up to Lake Tahoe on the weekend to meet a realtor and do the same at his father’s house there. In both homes he picked the things he wanted to keep in storage, some valuable furniture, a few paintings he wanted. A portrait of his mother in their city dining room, and one of his father. He didn’t want to get rid of them; Liam might want them one day. Charlie thought about putting the portrait of his mother in his own house, but decided it would make him too sad to see her every day. She was a gentle memory now, and he preferred to keep it that way.
He selected expensive items he didn’t want to keep and preferred to sell at auction, and had his assistant arrange to ship them to Sotheby’s in New York.
He ran into Faye in the kitchen the afternoon he came back from Tahoe. It had been a long day. He didn’t see her until he’d been home from his trip for several days. Once they gave up the pretense of sleeping together, they had bedrooms at opposite ends of the house. They’d both been out a lot that week, and their schedules were different. He came home late after business dinners, she went to bed early after long hours at the office. She rose hours before he did for the gym or early yoga classes. She was usually out by the time he reached the kitchen for coffee.
He had made a list of things she might want from the Tahoe house. He showed it to her and she declined them all. He was bringing all of his father’s crystal, silver, and fine china to the house in Atherton. He had no idea where to put it—their cupboards were all full—but he didn’t want to send it to storage.
“What kind of shape is the house in?” Faye asked him. She hated his father’s Tahoe house and hadn’t been there in ten years. It had always depressed her and she had no intention of ever going back there again. She had her own mountain home in Aspen and had owned it for a decade. When she acknowledged to herself that she and Charlie would never be a real couple again, she bought a house in a place she loved, with enough bedrooms for their son to visit from time to time, and to entertain her friends. She wanted to use it for vacations by herself, and the occasional weekend.
She loved Aspen, had researched the house market carefully, and found just the one she wanted. It was in easy walking distance from the heart of town, if she didn’t want to take her car out. In the ten years she’d owned it, Liam had been there a few times, and Charlie twice. Liam was an avid skier, but he had come in summer too. It was a peaceful, happy place for her. It was just the right balance of natural beauty and rural sophistication, which described her masterfully. It was Faye’s favorite place to be, and she was safe from any intrusion on Charlie’s part, since the altitude made him sick every time he was there, and gave him headaches and nightmares. She had bought the house with no intention of sharing it with him. It was her personal retreat, which he respected.
“The house is in decent shape, but old,” he said of his father’s house. “The new owners will want to remodel it and modernize it. It seems a little sad right now,” which didn’t surprise either of them.
They chatted for a few minutes longer.
“What have you been up to?” he asked her. They intersected like housemates and old friends. They didn’t even argue much anymore. They were cordial, polite, and distant. There had been endless heated battles, before they’d given up all illusions about it being a viable marriage.
“I’m packing. I leave tomorrow.” She smiled at him.
“Aspen?”
“Of course.” It made her happy just thinking about it. She spent six to eight weeks there in the summer, and worked remotely. She went hiking in the mountains, rode horses, and enjoyed the cultural aspects offered there every summer, and the skiing in winter. Buying the house in Aspen had been one of the best things she’d ever done for herself. “How was your trip?” she asked him.
“Long, busy, interesting. The board at the bank wants me to have a portrait done. I met an artist I want to do it,” he said, feeling a little foolish.
“That’s a new twist. It doesn’t sound like you.” Faye was surprised.
“It isn’t, but she’s a terrific artist. I think it’ll be great.” Faye went back to her packing then. He was leaving in a few days too.
Charlie rented the same house in East Hampton every summer. He loved the sea. It was a beautiful old New England-style home on the beach, owned by a family who no longer used it but wanted to keep it. He kept a sailboat there that he could sail alone. It was a magnificent wood boat. Faye got seasick just looking at boats. Once in a while they laughed about how incompatible they were. They were a textbook case.
Faye marveled at the fact that they were still married after twenty-three years. They hadn’t vacationed together in a dozen years. Their last attempts to do so had been disastrous. Liam was ten and they had argued constantly. After that, they sent Liam to camp for two months in the summer and vacationed separately.
“I don’t know how we managed to have so much fun together at Harvard,” Faye had said to him once. “If we’d met on a game show, we’d have been disqualified in the first round.”
“A lot of sex,” Charlie answered her with a grin. “I don’t think we ever talked to each other.”
“Oh that,” Faye said vaguely. They hadn’t had sex with each other in ten years. It was a part of their relationship they had given up when they realized that their marriage was dead.
He didn’t see her when she left for Aspen the next day. She left him a note about some house repairs her assistant had scheduled while she’d be away. Charlie was leaving for the Hamptons three days later.
He was wrapping up at his desk the afternoon before he left when Liam called. He was good about checking in. He’d been having a fantastic time, exploring châteaux and traveling with his friends. They had gone to Venice for a few days and loved it, and were back in France. They had stayed at a sixteenth-century palazzo that had been turned into a hotel.
It was five in the afternoon in California, and two A.M. in France, late for Liam to call, but he didn’t sound drunk.
“What are you doing up at this hour?” his father asked him. When Liam answered, Charlie realized his voice sounded strained. He said they’d been walking in a forest somewhere in Normandy, he had stumbled over a tree root and had broken his ankle, and it hurt like hell. He was calling from the hospital, and sounded like a little kid. Charlie listened, and hesitated. “Did you call your mother?” he asked him. Liam usually addressed medical issues to her. Charlie was better with work, travel, and school.
“Yeah, she has friends staying with her. She said to fly to Aspen and I can stay with her.” Charlie knew Faye’s reactions, and her theories about motherhood. Nurturing was not her strong suit. She had mistakenly believed that the parents’ job was over when the kids turned eighteen and left for college. From what Charlie observed among his friends, the hard part only started then.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow,” he said decisively. Instead of flying to New York, he would fly to Paris, pick Liam up, and take him to the Hamptons for as long as he wanted to stay. He’d enjoy having him there. He sounded like he was in pain. “Are you on crutches?”
“Yeah. I can’t put my weight on it. They had to put a pin in it.” Liam had been gone for four weeks, and was cutting his trip short by a few weeks, but he sounded ready to come home. It wasn’t going to be fun traveling with a broken ankle. He had left time in his schedule to see his friends before he left for school, but it would be hard for him to get around now. It was his right ankle, so he couldn’t drive, which would be very inconvenient.
After he spoke to Liam, Charlie called his pilot and told him of the change of plan for the next day.
“I’ll book a space at Le Bourget airport.” It was where people kept their private planes. They would only get to the Hamptons a day late, and Charlie hoped that Liam would stay for a while. It would be a good chance to have some father–son time and catch up before Liam went back to Yale, and Charlie had no big plans for the moment. He tried to slow down for a few weeks in the summer to recharge his batteries. That way he could attack all his currently pending projects with new energy in the fall.
As Charlie had asked him to, Liam texted him when he got back to his hotel. His text told his father that he was safe and sound, and would try to sleep for a few hours. He was exhausted after the injury, the shock, and the anesthesia and surgery when they set his ankle. His friends had gone on to the next stop without him, and were visiting a little known château with splendid gardens in Normandy. Liam had told them his father was coming and he was leaving with him.
Liam was lying in bed when Charlie got there. One of the maids had brought him a sandwich on a baguette, and he was eating. His face broke into a broad smile when he saw his father and they hugged. Liam clung to him for a minute. It had been scary having surgery in a foreign country, and the pain had been agonizing. He had a knee-high orthopedic boot to wear for the next six weeks, in lieu of a cast, but at least he could take it off to shower or bathe, and eventually, when he could put weight on the ankle, walk into the ocean. Charlie believed in the healing powers of the sea.
Charlie helped him off the bed, and lent a hand while Liam gathered his things. They didn’t spend time in the city at all. It was hard for Liam to get around on the crutches, and he was still in pain. They headed straight back to Le Bourget, where Charlie’s relief crew were waiting for him, and they had already been given approval for their flight plan to New York. Charlie assisted Liam to the bedroom on the plane, helped him into bed, turned on the TV for him, and handed him the remote, which Liam took gratefully.
“Try to get some sleep,” Charlie suggested gently. Liam was looking pale, and still shaken. Charlie brought him some food after takeoff, and Liam was already sound asleep. Charlie closed the door softly and went back to his seat. He had brought work to do on the flight. But once he got to the Hamptons, he never worked, except if there was a crisis somewhere in his business that required his attention. He needed time to unwind, and he was looking forward to spending time with Liam. It would be a rare treat for however long he stayed, even if only a few days, until he felt better. His parents’ lack of attention to him growing up had made Liam independent. With kids that age, in their early twenties, Charlie had learned to be grateful for whatever time they got together. It was never enough now, but it was better than not seeing him at all. He loved his son and regretted the time he hadn’t spent with him when he was younger. He tried to make up for it whenever he could. And he was happy to help him now. Liam slept for the entire flight, and his father woke him when they landed back at Teterboro.
A customs officer met them at the plane and cleared them. Charlie helped Liam into the waiting SUV, and they headed for the Hamptons. Liam looked better already after sleeping for the whole flight, and Charlie glanced at his son with fatherly pride. He was a good guy in spite of his parents’ mistakes and inattention. He was grateful that Liam didn’t seem to hold it against him.
Charlie couldn’t wait to get to the house and see the ocean in East Hampton. He was glad that Liam had come with him. It made the broken ankle seem like an unexpected blessing, if it gave them some time together. Charlie was grateful to have a son like Liam. He was sensible and intelligent and kind. It made up for everything else. He knew he was a lucky man.
Chapter 4
The house in East Hampton was impeccable when Charlie arrived, as it was every year. It was a big, rambling family home, with many bedrooms, and a couple who lived there year-round and kept it in excellent repair. Charlie loved it and had tried several times to buy it from the owners. They had inherited it from their parents. They lived in Boston and had a house in Maine that they preferred. But they wanted to keep the house in the family for their children, and as an investment. Charlie was their only renter, and since their children were young teenagers, he figured that he was still good there for several years, and he hoped they would relent and change their minds eventually and sell it to him. The owners weren’t part of the old-guard snobbish Hamptons social scene. They were avid sailors, and preferred the boating life in Maine. The Hamptons were the only place where Charlie got some respite from his intense business life and constant travel. He stopped everything when he stayed there every year. The owners had even let him stay there a few times in winter, when he was in New York and needed a break for a few days. He loved it in winter too. And he loved having Liam there with him now. He gave him a big sunny guest bedroom on the main floor, where the kitchen, dining room, two living rooms, a cozy den, and guest suites were located, so Liam didn’t have to negotiate the stairs. Charlie’s master suite was upstairs at one end of the house, with a charming balcony and a widow’s walk, where he could see far out to sea. He stood there every morning, watching the ocean. He kept his beloved sailboat at a marina nearby, and left it there all year. Unlike his mother, Liam shared his father’s love of sailboats, although it would be tricky getting him on the boat this year, with the broken ankle. Charlie doubted they could do it, and Liam couldn’t walk on the beach, but there was plenty to do in the Hamptons, and they wouldn’t be bored. There were restaurants and shops, places to explore. He had books to read, games to play, and Liam was good at entertaining himself with video games and his computer. Charlie was happy to be his chauffeur for the duration of his stay. There was a terrific bookstore in town, which Charlie always visited and where he bought a stack of current books he hadn’t had the time to read.
