by Megan Mulry
“All right, all right. In the meantime, I’ll try to come over at Christmas, but it’s been pretty busy…”
Letitia let the poor man rattle on about how busy he was and gave her beautiful, sad, lonely granddaughter a conspiratorial eye roll as she pulled the telephone receiver away from her ear and mouthed a silent pantomime of blah-blah-blah to Sarah.
“Sounds lovely, Nelson. Please do come at Christmas. That would be divine. I think we are going to Fiesole, but I’ll let you know.” She paused to let him interject something urgent of no particular consequence that would excuse him from further conversation, then Letitia interrupted him with a brisk, “Of course, of course. Good-bye, Nelson.”
She put the phone back in its cradle and looked across the Louis XV living room. The afternoon light from the Seine shed that inimitable iridescent Parisian glow across the grand, fresco-paneled ceiling. Letitia never failed to take an extra moment to appreciate that.
“Look at the light off the river, Sarah,” Letitia ordered. “I don’t want you to become spoiled, so always take a moment to be grateful for things like that.”
Sarah was sitting casually in a priceless armchair that was upholstered in a priceless tapestry, one careless adolescent leg slung across the frail armrest. Lounging around in T-shirts and shorts in the south of France was one thing, but now that they had returned to Paris, Letitia realized, a shopping spree was the first item of business.
“Take your leg off the arm of the Louis Quinze chair, Sarah. Maintenant.” She snapped her fingers twice.
For the past three months, her grandmother had not made a single demand of Sarah. She had slept as late as she wanted; had eaten, or not eaten, as much as she wanted; had listened to her music with her headphones and spaced out and stared at the Mediterranean for as long as she wanted; and she’d read and read and read as many books as she wanted.
“Vacation is over!” Letitia proclaimed.
And that, as they say, was the end of that. Sarah moved into a chambre de bonne—one of the former maid’s quarters—above her grandmother’s apartment. It was a tiny two-room unit that overlooked the rooftops of the island in the middle of the river, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the world. It was almost painfully charming. The church bells chimed on cue. The angry building concierge snarled at her husband each morning while she swept the courtyard with brisk, efficient strokes of the broom.
Sarah began each day having breakfast with her grandmother and Jacques, then walked the two miles to school, reveling in her new wardrobe, her new shoes, her new self. It turned out that her grandmother’s version of a shopping spree had been utterly unlike the tortured journeys of the same name she had taken with her father.
Letitia Vorstadt Pennington Fournier knew how to shop.
“For better or for worse, you have inherited your figure from your father’s side of the family. Generations of Midwestern Gibson Girls. We’ll have to proceed accordingly.”
Sarah looked down at her flabby body with dismay.
“Why are you pouting? Women pay top dollar for what you have in abundance for free. You just need to learn how to carry it. Come with me.”
All of this painfully private conversation was taking place, alto voce, in the middle of the main floor of Galeries Lafayette. Sarah tried to “carry it” in some new way, then followed in lockstep behind her very motivated grandmother. Letitia moved through the store with military force, having to forego some of her own favorite designers (lanky, tubular classics like Mary McFadden, Halston, and Bob Mackey) in deference to the reality of Sarah’s zaftig figure.
To be sure, Letitia was throwing around the credit card (actually leaving it and walking away several times, easily distracted by some shiny, new thing, only to have the breathless attendant trailing after her to return it), but it wasn’t just the massive cash infusion that motivated the salesladies. These people seemed genuinely delighted with transforming Sarah’s appearance.
Her French was still pretty weak since she had—she now realized—squandered her time on the Cote d’Azur doing nothing more than sitting by the pool listening to American music and reading American books, but she could pick up enough to know that perhaps skeleton was not the only option when it came to feminine beauty. The clothes were beautifully made, perfectly tailored—and Sarah was no stranger to beautiful clothes after all the years she’d spent in her father’s department store. But for some reason, some very obvious reasons, her father had never gone in for haute couture. Sarah was his little girl. End of story.
This was something else entirely. Sarah thought she was in love. The silky tops against her skin, the warm cashmeres around her neck, the fine drape of a light wool peacoat. And lots of miraculous jeans that somehow managed to firm up—or at least contain—her unavoidably round posterior. The textures, the colors, the weight and sheen of all the different fabrics left Sarah feeling sensually excited. Not aroused, just hyperaware of all the luxurious and sultry pleasures that one could derive from beautiful clothes.
And then she saw the shoes.
It was one of those peculiar moments that fizzled and popped, then stopped altogether. Then—after that cosmic pause—everything rushed back into the fast-paced, blood-speeding present. Of course she’d passed through the shoe department at Simpson-James forever. Practical pumps. Ladies’ loafers with little bows or buckles on them. Accommodating salesmen with tools to measure and fit a comfortable pair of well-made necessities.
This was something from another realm.
The shoe department at Galeries Lafayette was more like the Temple Mount: a holy crossroads, a multicultural shrine to one of humanity’s great foibles. Namely, women’s shoes. It was not only vast, at a mind-boggling thirty-four thousand square feet, but it was also laid out—centrally, majestically—beneath the famous landmark Art Deco dome soaring overhead. These people had their priorities straight.
She might have had a brief fling with those bits of silk and cashmere against the tender skin of her neck, but when she slipped into her first pair of four-inch Christian Louboutins, Sarah was madly, butterflies-in-her-stomach, passionately in love. Letitia finally had to rein her in at her fourth pair.
Much to Letitia’s consternation, it didn’t continue as a healthy acquisitional pastime. Sarah’s burgeoning obsession with cobblery quickly escalated to the level of an astute collector. A connoisseur. She became like a glutton who needed to know everything there was to know about the history, design, color, heels, insteps, shanks, buckles, and soles of the lowly shoe. She spent all of her after-school hours feeding her imagination in the archives of Les Arts Decoratifs, a division of the Louvre that housed an entire collection about the history of fashion and design. Ultimately, Sarah applied for and won a coveted internship at Christian Louboutin’s atelier.
“It sounds as though you are employed and that is just too much,” Letitia despaired one afternoon in February over her glass of Marie Brizard anisette. “You don’t need the money… and… and you should be studying.”
“Nice try, Letty. You have no interest in my studies—nor do I, for that matter—and, God forbid, yes, I may want to work.” Her enthusiasm sped up her words.
Letitia cringed at the word and pursed her lips. “Work. Just the sound of it.” She shivered.
“It’s so satisfying. I mean, don’t you ever want to dump everything you have into a project and put it out there for the whole world to try—whether they love it or hate it or ignore it—it doesn’t even matter? Just the fact that you just have to do it?”
“Sounds ghastly. I would much rather have an enormous party on a stupendous yacht and make sure everyone has the best time they’ve ever had. All this talk of products, it just sounds so prosaic. But, as we used to tell your mother, she married into trade. You must have inherited that from your father.”
“I know you mean that in the nicest possible way.”
“Of course, dear. I suppose I was never inclined to inconvenience myself in that way. But,
if that is how you choose to spend your time, then very well.”
Sarah smiled and started to leave the cozy library where she had been talking with Letitia and Jacques after dinner.
“But Sarah, what about boys?”
Sarah turned back, amused at her grandmother’s disjointed, but predictable, train of thought. “What about them?”
“You do like them, don’t you?”
How difficult did she want to make this for the poor woman? She answered slowly, as if speaking to a foreigner. “Yes. Letitia. I. Like. Boys. But…” Then continuing at a rapid clip: “I am not going to wait around for some fast-talking smoothie to sweep me off my feet. I am the last person who needs rescuing. But thanks for asking.”
That Christmas, Letitia got her wish and planned the best party of the season. Nelson James was able to make the trip to Europe after all, and he was there to dance with Sarah at her debutante ball. The cotillion was a crush of strangers from the European demimonde of deposed monarchs and generations of their offspring. Sarah was escorted by the painfully shy Christophe de Villiers, a perfectly nice nephew of one of her grandmother’s perfectly nice friends. She danced the dance, made her bow, had a few glasses of champagne, and then counted the hours until she could get back to her drafting table at Louboutin’s studio. After she got her diploma at the age of seventeen, Sarah was promoted to a full-time position and worked in each of the departments at Louboutin, from corporate to distribution and creative. She had found her passion.
On the rare occasions when she wondered about her lack of age-appropriate lust, she merely rationalized that she was a late bloomer. She tried kissing a couple of times—one particularly adept middle-aged Frenchman came pleasantly to mind. But anything beyond that—anything resembling pawing—always felt rather robotic. Disjointed. The right man would come along, she told herself. Plenty of other things to keep one busy. Et cetera. Et cetera.
So her summer in France had somehow turned into five years of intense experience. At the age of twenty-one, she was back in Chicago opening her tiny boutique on Oak Street. Then she met Bronte, who helped her launch the second store in New York two years later.
In the midst of all that, men just weren’t on her radar.
Sarah looked up and realized her father’s chauffeur was pulling up in front of the Oak Street town house. Nelson and Jane had taken another car back to their home in Lake Forest after they’d landed at the private airfield near O’Hare.
“Thanks, Gus.” Sarah let herself out of the back of the car and apologized to the driver for her obscenely large steamer trunks.
She opened the door to the shop and let them both in. The ground floor was the store, with a small manager’s office, tiny kitchen, and large inventory storage on the east side of the building; the second floor was a private atelier and workspace for Sarah, a desk for her Chicago assistant, Stephanie Newman, and another office for her executive vice president, Carrie Schmidt.
The third and fourth floors were her elegant, out-of-this-world haven. The French antiques that she adored from her early childhood memories with her mother were scattered around the room; the walls were papered in a custom de Gournay chinoiserie. The place was hideously over-the-top and she rarely had anyone over, but it was a connection to her mother and she treasured it for that reason above everything else.
She listened guiltily as the chauffeur lugged the three enormous steamer trunks up all three flights. At some point, she was going to have to join the modern age and purchase a wheelie bag, but it just sounded so grim. Even the words: wheelie bag. No romance. No shipboard entanglements. No style. One day, she might be willing to give up that fantasy. Until then, she would cling to her impractical vintage trunks and think of her mother.
It was nearing dusk on Sunday and the place was dead quiet. Stopping in the airy white marble kitchen that overlooked the back of the town house, Sarah made a mental note to thank her assistant for stacking her mail neatly on the counter and leaving a fresh bouquet of simple flowers for her return. She picked up the pile of correspondence and began rifling through the papers. She looked up and thanked her dad’s chauffeur as he poked his head in to say good-bye.
“Sorry, Gus.”
He tipped his hat. “My pleasure, Sarah.”
“I don’t know about that”—she smiled and he smiled back—“but thanks just the same.”
He nodded again. “Good night, then.”
“Good night. I’ll see you soon. Say hi to Maggie for me.” She followed him down to the street level and gave him a quick hug good-bye before bolting the door and returning to the top floor to collapse into her bed.
The single bedroom was not very large, but like everything else Letitia designed, it was intimate and exquisite. The double bed was the perfect size for one good-sized person to sprawl out on without feeling like a ship adrift, as Sarah so often did when alone in a king-sized bed while traveling.
The closet-cum-dressing room (hidden behind wallpapered invisible doors that opened on either side of the bed) was designed with a woman’s wardrobe, jewelry, shoes, luggage, and linens in mind. It was a beautiful thing to behold. Sarah went in and enjoyed the silly thrill of all those shoes lined up with obedient precision, then toed off her suede half-boots and passed through the bathroom and into her favorite room in the home, what her grandmother fondly dubbed the boudoir.
The tiny room was about ten feet by twelve feet and—back in the day—Letitia had hired a designer to recreate an eighteenth-century French room: wood paneling, small fireplace, antique daybed piled with deliciously plump down pillows. Sarah had updated it with a flat-panel television above the fireplace, making it the perfect refuge. The idea that Letitia had basically created a solitary, private hideaway as a wedding present spoke volumes.
When Sarah had questioned her about it, Letitia had stared at her granddaughter and declared, “Just because you marry does not mean you are meant to forfeit your privacy! They are husbands, Sarah, not roommates!”
Chapter 7
Sarah turned to look out onto Oak Street. It was early evening. The flight in her father’s plane had been ridiculously luxurious, and she felt like a spoiled pet for even implying that suffering through eight hours of Jane’s veiled insults made it a trial.
Picking up her cell phone, she checked for messages. Nothing.
Sarah usually came to Chicago for at least two weeks per month, with an additional weekend thrown in to catch up and simply enjoy being in her own place. New York was exciting and exhilarating and inspiring, but it was also enervating. Her apartment there was a white box that she’d never taken the time to make her own. Chicago always gave her a chance to recharge. She decided to go for a long, leisurely walk in the brisk October night air along the lake, and then she spent the rest of the evening curled up in front of the TV, half dozing on the daybed in the boudoir.
Trying—and failing—to forget Devon Heyworth.
Monday and Tuesday were filled with meetings from eight in the morning until ten at night. Despite being exhausted at the end of each day, Sarah kept waking up at four thirty in the morning with plenty of physical energy and a logy mind. By Thursday morning she was wide-awake again.
She supposed she could go for another walk, but she didn’t want to turn into some crazy exercise nut or anything. Walking once or twice was one thing. Daily exercise sounded like a routine. She tried to snuggle deeper into her bed.
The problem was she could not stay in her bed for more than a few minutes after she woke up without being overcome with the desire to have strong, male hands on her body.
On Monday morning, she’d thought she could shake the residual desire of her vague, seductive Devon-dreams without having to actually get out of bed and brave the cold, dark morning outside. That had lasted about five minutes. She’d grabbed her iPad and tried to read the early AP feed, only to realize that her other hand was trailing down her abdomen. Her eyes started to close at the thought of Devon’s hands… it was always his hands o
n her… and his lips were good too… and the way that muscle on his upper arm curved? That occasionally came to mind… and his jaw…
Enough!
She’d finally forced herself out of bed, thrown on some approximation of a workout outfit, and walked along Lake Michigan. Now, for the fourth time in as many days, with her iPod blasting away her thoughts, she was trudging along the lakefront trying to pound the desire from her body. At night, she’d fall into bed, her body finally whipped into exhausted submission. Her dreams, on the other hand, were out of her control. Or entirely controlled by lust, more like.
She never remembered any of the details when she first woke up, but throughout the day, little snippets of a dreamy erotic still life would flash unbidden into her mind’s eye. During a particularly boring conference call with both Carrie and her assistant in the room, and the two head buyers from Bergdorf Goodman on the other end of the speaker phone double-checking their spring order, Sarah glanced out her office window and a vivid image of Devon’s mischievous face, with a devastatingly lascivious smile, materialized… rising up from between her own legs. She swung her attention back to the top of her desk a bit too quickly and tried to stare meaningfully at the innocent telephone.
After the call ended, Stephanie went back out to her desk, but Carrie hovered a bit. Sarah forced herself to erase the lewd image and stay on task.
“What’s up, Car?” Sarah asked without looking up.
If Carrie Schmidt had ever wondered about her boss’s sex life, it wasn’t something she would ever lob into day-to-day conversations. She and Sarah had always kept their relationship completely professional.
Carrie asked, “May I close the door?”
“Sure.” Sarah looked up and smiled. “Should I be worried? You’re not quitting, are you?” Sarah’s voice went an octave higher with each rapidly fired question.