“Do you regret it?” she asked, and he hesitated.
“Sometimes. It’s a lot with my father’s business to run.” He still considered it his father’s and not his own. “I’d rather have a smaller office and deal with bigger clients. I’m slowly getting into investment advising full-time, which I like a lot better than accounting. My mother is opposed to it, and so is Tamar, but it’s a much more exciting and lucrative field for me, although it involves more risk.”
“Then you should do it,” she encouraged him. “You can’t live your life for everyone else.” He nodded, wondering if it was true. He had for years, and his family seemed to like it better than he did.
“What about you? Where are you thinking of going to school?”
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” she said, with a look of mischief in her eye that reminded him of when they were in high school, which he thought were the best years of their lives.
“I’ve always thought you were crazy.” He smiled at her. “Good-crazy. You do things, most people don’t and just waste their lives, like me.”
“Don’t be so tough on yourself. You do things too. You have four kids, what more do you want?” He didn’t say it, but he wanted his dreams back. Coco hadn’t given up her dreams, she had invented new ones. “Jeff says that Bethanie needs to be checked at a university hospital where they use the same protocols as he did, which means Boston, New York, or Paris. I’ve been thinking about doing my last two semesters at the American University in Paris. I’m tired of New York after the past six months, and I don’t want to go to Boston. But Paris might be fun for a year. I need to see what’s happening with my business, but Leslie seems to be doing fine without me. I could spend a year in Paris, and maybe go back to London then. I think I’ve become a nomad, like Ian. I’ll see what I decide when I go back.”
Sam couldn’t take them to the airport, and Coco and Bethanie left quietly the next day. Bethanie had been incredibly brave and she had come through it, and with luck she would never have a relapse. Coco had sent a text to Ian to tell him that Bethanie was in remission, and hopefully cured. He hadn’t responded, but at least he knew. She felt she owed him at least that. It was going to be strange going back to the house in London and not seeing him there, or Bruce lounging in the kitchen, waiting for Ian to come home or for someone to give him a meal.
* * *
—
The house in London was immaculate and silent when they walked in. Bethanie rushed to her room to check on her dolls and stuffed animals and they were all there. There was a note from Ian, that he had left on Bethanie’s bed, and it brought tears to Coco’s eyes when she read it to her.
“Miss Beth: When you read this, you’ll be home and all well again. Have a wonderful time in school, play with all your friends, be good to your mom, and remember to tell her how much you love her. I am going away to ride camels and write a book. Always remember that I love you. Bruce and I will miss you. A big hug and all my love, Mr. Ian.” There was no mention of his coming back or seeing her again.
And there was no note on Coco’s bed when she went to check. And what could he have said to her? She knew what they had shared and how much they loved each other. It was enough. But when she went to bed that night, she noticed the galleys of his next book on her bed table. She had read it when he finished writing it. She opened it to the dedication page, just as she was meant to. He hadn’t dedicated it yet when she’d read it. There was a lump in her throat the size of a fist. “To the four women I have loved and always will, Weenie, my mother, Coco, and Bethanie, with all my love, I.K.” And beneath it he had written in the familiar brown ink he used, “I love you, Ian.” He had put it on her bed table when he left, and it had waited for her for six months.
The last six months had been an incredible odyssey, through Bethanie’s leukemia, losing Ian the day they left, and now coming home to an empty house. She wasn’t sure what to do next, but tomorrow she would go to her office, find out what they were working on, and call the American University in Paris. She wanted to live her life now. She didn’t want to waste a moment of it, and Paris seemed like a suitable destination for a while.
She checked on Bethanie, who was sound asleep. She had put Ian’s letter on her bulletin board. As she slipped into her own bed, between crisp clean sheets, Coco wondered what chapters would come next. With Bethanie cured, she could turn her attention to the business of living again. And wherever Ian was now, she hoped he was happy. She knew that she would always love him, and that he would love her, as best he could.
* * *
—
Coco dropped Bethanie off at her school the next day, where they celebrated her. Everyone stood up and cheered when she walked in, and they had made posters welcoming her back. When Coco walked into her office shortly after, she hardly recognized it. Leslie had done some redecorating, and hired three new assistants, who were already busy. They had spoken regularly, FaceTimed daily, and Leslie had sent her frequent emails. The business was continuing to grow, and Coco didn’t feel as though they needed her desperately. She talked to Leslie that morning about going to Paris to go back to school, and Leslie smiled broadly at her.
“Do it! You’ve had a hell of a year, you deserve whatever you want to do.” Coco was feeling the same way about it. She wanted to celebrate life after going through hell in New York. Bethanie’s recovery was a major victory, the only one that mattered.
She spoke to the admissions office at AUP, and although she was applying late, they were willing to let her start in January. She promised to send them her transcript from Columbia, and then she marched into Leslie’s office with a grin.
“I have a new client for you.”
“Really? Who? A VIP?” Leslie asked.
“Of course! Me! I want you to find me an apartment or a house in Paris for a year. I don’t think I’ll stay that long. I’m going to take as many credits as I can, to graduate. But I’d rather take the house for a year, in case we want to stay a little longer after I graduate.”
“That’s a tall order. I don’t have great contacts there, and I don’t speak French, but one of the new girls does. I’ll see what I can do.”
She was beaming when Coco came to work a week later, and handed her a folder with a description and photographs of a house in it. It was very sweet, small, and on the Left Bank, with three bedrooms.
“The difficult we do quickly, the impossible we do faster. What do you think?” Coco looked it over and then smiled at her and handed the folder back.
“I’ll take it.”
“Just like that? Don’t you want to go over and see it?”
“I don’t need to. I trust you.” It looked a little like the house they had found for Ian when he was consulting on his movie when he first came to London. It had the same kind of quaint fairy tale feel to it. Coco wrote a check for the deposit. She had already filled out the forms for AUP. And the day before her twenty-ninth birthday in December, she got an email telling her that she had been accepted as a second semester senior at AUP and with the credits she had, she could graduate in June.
She looked into schools for Bethanie, and found a small bilingual school, which sounded perfect, and they had room for Bethanie.
Coco celebrated her birthday with Bethanie and Leslie. She had a new man in her life and seemed happy with him. At forty-five, she was no longer looking for Prince Charming. She loved her business and was content with someone more human scale. He was a talented furniture designer who had been one of their clients, and had moved to London from Copenhagen a year before. When Coco met him, she liked him a lot.
Coco bought a Christmas tree and she and Bethanie decorated it. She was grateful for every day they shared. And the day after New Year’s Day, they left for Paris. Bethanie started school a few days later. Coco showed up for her first class at AUP with a bag full of notebooks and pens, and she felt like a
kid again as she went from class to class, and enjoyed talking to the other students. She also felt like the old lady in the group. She was twenty-nine, and she looked just like one of them.
She dropped her books at the end of her second class, and a student in a blue and white striped sweater helped her pick them up. He looked like an overgrown boy, and said he was from Vermont. He had a mane of dark hair, and told her he was twenty-three years old when they had coffee together between classes. She told him she had dropped out of school eight years before, and didn’t say why, and she had decided to graduate now. He treated her as though she was his age, which was refreshing. He wasn’t a famous author, or a researcher, or a captain of industry, or a gigolo, he was just a boy and treated her like a girl. She invited him for dinner that weekend, and he brought two friends with him. They had fun playing with Bethanie, and he said he was the oldest of seven children.
They went to the movies together, and were in two of the same classes. Several students were older than she was. Being there was like diving into a pool of cool water. It woke her up. She felt alive. She was learning new things and remembering old ones, reading books that had new meaning now that she was older. It was like starting life over without tragedy, and they had long political discussions in cafés near the school. She felt young again, after the painful months they had spent at Sloan Kettering, and although she had promised herself she wouldn’t, she wound up sleeping with Jimmy one afternoon at her house when Bethanie was still at school. There was a freshness and simplicity to all of it. It wasn’t complicated. It was real. And she had found a babysitter Bethanie loved, a young French girl, which gave Coco freedom to go out sometimes.
“You’re the most exciting woman I’ve ever known,” Jimmy said to her. He had dark hair like hers. She was only six years older, but had lived several lifetimes. She told Sam about him, but didn’t admit to sleeping with him. She wasn’t in love with him, but she liked him enormously. His whole life was ahead of him, and he had everything to look forward to. He was some kind of computer genius, and wanted to get a master’s in physics at MIT after he left AUP. He had three roommates so they went to her house at lunchtime and made love, and sometimes he joined her and Bethanie for dinner in the evening. Bethanie thought he was her friend, and they played for hours sometimes. He had endless patience with her, and when they went to the park, all three of them rode the swings. Paris was just what Coco and Bethanie had needed. It was healing.
Leslie called her a few times to ask her advice about various new clients. She went back to London to help out during school vacations, and Jimmy came with them, and met up with friends in London. She hadn’t had such a carefree time since she’d been in college the first time. Going to school made her feel like a kid again.
She was startled when she got an email from Ian. She had stopped hoping to hear from him. He was still in Marrakesh, living in an old palace he had rented, and working on a new book. He wanted to know how Bethanie was doing, and if she was still in remission, which he said was the main reason for his email, but he wanted to know how Coco was too. He said he thought of her every day, but he didn’t ask to see her.
She told him that she was going to school in Paris and enjoying it thoroughly. It was the perfect counterpoint to their six months of hell in New York. Her life in Paris was a little piece of heaven. She said she was happy to hear from him, but didn’t ask to see him either. She thought it would be too hard to see him and not be with him, and it was clear that he didn’t want to open that door again, but he missed her. She had torn a scab off an old wound without meaning to, when Bethanie got sick and they were afraid they would lose her. He said he wasn’t strong enough to lose anyone again. He sent them both his love, and didn’t say anything about coming to England or where he would go next.
And after a week in London, she and Jimmy and Bethanie went back to Paris and went back to school.
Coco went to Giverny with Jimmy in the spring. They explored Versailles together. When Coco graduated, he looked at her mournfully. He was going to Scotland for the summer to stay with friends, back to Vermont after that, and then sailing in Maine, which he did every summer with his family, and then starting graduate school at MIT in the fall.
“Does this mean it’s over, Coco?” he asked her sadly, the night before he left for Edinburgh.
“I think so, don’t you?”
“These were the happiest six months of my life,” he said, as though he was being banished from Brigadoon.
“Mine too, and the easiest.” And then she realized something that made her smile. She was the flash for him. “Now you need to go and play with children your own age, and I do too.”
“Why? We’re good together.” He didn’t see why it had to end, except that he was going to Boston and she was going back to London.
“But we wouldn’t be good together if we tried to make it last. That was never our intention. It just happened, and it made everything more fun.”
“Do you want to meet me in Scotland?”
“No, I don’t.” She had never told him she loved him because she didn’t, and she didn’t want to lie to him. The truth was much sweeter, that they were special friends, and neither of them would ever forget the brief time they had shared in Paris. It would be a sweet memory for both of them with nothing to spoil it.
Saying goodbye to him was one of the more grown-up things she’d ever done. She didn’t try to stretch their affair, keep it or make it grow or drag it into her everyday life. She kissed him when he left and he cried. “Now go find a nice girl in Vermont and fall in love with her, and don’t go looking for the wild, exotic, exciting ones. They don’t last. That’s the best advice I can ever give you. If you chase that, it’s foam on the sand and you’ll wind up alone like me.” He waved at her as he disappeared into the metro to get to his train to Scotland at the Gare du Nord.
She left for London with Bethanie the next day. They gave up the house in Paris. Bethanie had liked her school there too, and was speaking French. Coco packed her diploma, and then they went home. She had allowed herself to be a child for a season, and now it was time to go home and be a grown-up. She remembered now that childhood and youth didn’t last forever, and it was just as well. She had begun to miss being an adult and working. She felt renewed and refreshed and ready to go back to London, to pick up the reins of her life again.
Chapter 18
When Coco came back to London in June, Leslie was happy to see her. There were changes in her life too. Her Danish boyfriend of the last two years had proposed to her. He had never been married before, and Leslie had been divorced for ten years. They were doing it at the beginning of July. She wanted Coco there to run the office when they went on their honeymoon for two weeks. Coco was delighted for her and happy to do it.
“Did you leave the Boy Wonder in Paris?” Leslie teased her. She had gone over to visit twice, and he had come to London so they’d met. “For a minute I thought you were serious, and then I realized you were just having fun.” She had assessed it correctly.
“He’s in Edinburgh now, and then he’s going home to Vermont.”
“Was he heartbroken when he left?”
Coco smiled at the memory. “Just a little. He’ll get over it. Things like that aren’t meant to last. Nothing does, except the real thing, but that’s hard to find. My friend Sam says that I fall for the flash every time, and I have.”
“We’ve all had our share of those,” Leslie said. She’d had her own good times. But this time she had found a good one, and had decided to grab it before she missed her chance. “We’ve had an interesting proposition I wanted to discuss with you. It’s from an investor in New York. He loves our concept, and wants to open an office there. He wants one of us to help him set it up. You know the city and I don’t. He wants to add to our operating capital, set up an office, hire a staff. It would increase our business exponentially. What
do you think?”
“Are you asking me to move to New York and run it? I wouldn’t want to do that. I’d rather live here,” she said. “I’m not ready to live in New York again.” She couldn’t wait to leave after her six months there.
“No, I think he wants us to help him set it up, show him how we work, and then we can go home. I thought three months might do it, till he’s up and running. Does that appeal to you?”
“I would do it for three months. I owe you for the last year, between New York and Paris. I’d have to put Bethanie in school in New York while I’m there, which is fine at her age. When does he want to start?”
“Mid-September, I think. He’s already found office space in SoHo, and he’s interviewing staff now.”
“You wanted to open a New York office when you started,” Coco reminded her. “This is our chance.”
“Will you do it?”
“Yes, I will,” Coco said, wondering if she’d regret being stuck in New York again for three months. But having a fresh influx of operating capital was appealing, and she could spend time with Sam. “I could go as soon as you get back from your honeymoon. That would give me two months to help him set up and stick around for a month after he opens. I’d be back mid-October. That should work.” And she had the house in Southampton where she and Bethanie could spend weekends. And Bethanie would only be in school in New York for six weeks, which would be an adventure for her.
“I’ll get to work on it, and tell him you’ll do it. Thank you, Coco,” she said warmly. “This is a great opportunity for us. We could use our model to open in a number of cities eventually, with the right partners. This one came highly recommended by our bank and a mutual friend.”
They were working on resource lists for the New York office four days later, when Coco got a text from Sam. He was coming to London to see an important investment client and he wanted to have dinner with her. He had successfully developed a whole new aspect to his business, and his firm had grown.
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