First Sight

by Danielle Steel

  “What are you doing here at this hour?” she asked, as she would have of a friend, rather than her doctor. But doctors didn’t usually visit patients at eleven o’clock at night. They had developed a special bond and enjoyed each other’s company. They exchanged a warm smile as he sat down near her bed.

  “I was on my way home, and decided to check on you,” he said comfortably. “You’re a very important person, after all.” He was teasing her, and she laughed. She didn’t mind it from him now.

  “I’m a very bored person,” Timmie said, putting the magazine down, pleased to see him. “I must be getting better,” she continued, smiling at him. “I’m beginning to feel like I’m in jail. When are you going to let me out?”

  “Let’s see how you feel tomorrow. I suppose I could send you back to the hotel with a nurse,” he said, looking pensive. He was going to miss his afternoon conversations with her once she left. While she was in the hospital he could drop in on her anytime.

  He had rarely enjoyed as much interaction with a patient, and he liked hearing her thoughts on a variety of subjects about which she was knowledgeable and well informed. They had discovered that they both had a passion for art, and shared a great fondness for Chagall. She had one at the house in Bel Air. And he had begun to confide some of the details of his own history with her. He had told her the day before that he had gone into medicine due to the death of his sister from a brain hemorrhage when he was sixteen and she was twenty-one. Her sudden death had been a turning point in his life.

  “I don’t need a nurse,” Timmie complained as he sat down in the chair next to her bed and she silently admired his suit, and wondered whose it was. It was beautifully tailored, and had clean, masculine, elegant lines. It suddenly made her wonder if he’d be offended if she sent him one of hers. He was always impeccably dressed. She liked the way he looked when he was casually dressed too. He had shown up that morning wearing khaki pants, a striped pale blue shirt and blazer, and brown suede loafers. He looked well in his clothes, and his style of dress was more British than French. Everything looked great on him since he was tall and lean.

  “You do need a nurse,” he assured her. “I have a strong suspicion that if you don’t have one, you’ll start running around, or going out.” He had already told her that he wanted her on bed rest for a full week, which was beginning to seem like cruel and unusual punishment to her. She was feeling well enough to get up and move around.

  “I wasn’t exactly running down the hall this evening after dinner,” she assured him, and he returned her smile. She had washed her hair that morning, and her curly copper mane was cascading past the shoulders of her hospital gown. He noticed that the Plaza Athénée had sent her a huge bouquet of flowers. David and Jade had sent her another enormous bouquet that they had ordered by phone from New York. The room smelled like a garden. “What was the dinner party like?” she asked him, looking like a child who had been left home with a baby-sitter, and wanted to hear all about it.

  “Intensely boring,” he said with a grin. “It was very stuffy, the food was bad, and someone said the wine was awful. I couldn’t wait to leave.” She didn’t want to ask him, but wondered why he hadn’t gone home with his wife. She had gotten the impression once or twice that he wasn’t happily married, but he had never commented openly about it. He preferred to talk about his children. He had two daughters, Julianne and Sophie, who were respectively seventeen and fifteen, and a son, Xavier, who was in his first year of medical school and wanted to become a surgeon, which obviously made his father very proud. He had mentioned them to her several times, with undeniable pride. The girls were almost the same age her son would have been, and he had wondered more than once if it upset her when he talked about them. But as she inquired about them, he allowed himself to mention them when the subject came up.

  “I’m not very good about dinner parties either,” Timmie admitted to him, comfortably tucked into her bed as they chatted. It was fun having a visit at that hour, especially now that she was feeling better. She didn’t even feel the IV in her arm. “I’d rather spend time at my beach house, or in some little bistro with friends. Going to parties is usually too much work.” She worked too hard at the office to have much time to devote to her social life, although she sometimes got cornered into going to major Hollywood events. Particularly since her company frequently provided clothes for movies and dressed a number of Hollywood stars.

  “Where is your beach house?” he asked with interest, enjoying the conversation. She was much more fun to talk to than any of the people he had dined with that night.

  “In Malibu,” she said easily, as she told him about it, and the long walks she loved to take on the beach. She didn’t mention that she spent time with Zack there. He didn’t seem worth mentioning, and she had refrained from talking about him. He wasn’t important enough in her life to discuss with Jean-Charles. He was one of the compromises she made.

  “I have always wanted to see Malibu,” Jean-Charles said, looking pensive. “The photographs of it are beautiful. Is your house in the Colony?” he inquired, showing his knowledge of the area, and she smiled as she nodded.

  “Yes, it is,” she said quietly. “You’ll have to come out and see it sometime.” After she said it, they both fell silent for a minute, while both of them wondered if they’d actually ever see each other again. There was really no reason to, unless she came back to Paris and fell ill again. Or maybe after the exchanges they had had since she’d been there, perhaps they would actually become friends.

  “I haven’t been to Los Angeles in many years. I went to a very interesting conference and lectured at the medical school at UCLA,” Jean-Charles said as he stood up again. It was getting late, and she was his patient after all, and needed her sleep. He said as much to her and she nodded. She was tired, but she enjoyed talking to him. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow,” he promised, “and we’ll decide together when you can go back to the hotel. Perhaps Sunday, if you promise to behave.”

  “When do you think I can go back to L.A.?” She had been gone for weeks.

  “We will see. Maybe at the end of next week, or before, if you’re doing well.” Jade had offered to come back to fly home with her, and Timmie had insisted it wasn’t necessary, although even carrying her oversize travel bag right now would seem like heavy work. But she was determined to go back to L.A. alone, and let Jade fly back with David from New York. It made more sense. “Sleep well, Timmie,” he said, as he stopped for a last moment at the door, and she smiled at him from the bed.

  “Thank you for the visit, doctor,” she teased him, as he smiled at her, and then left.

  She fell asleep, thinking about him, and wondering what his wife was like, if she was as sophisticated and elegant as he was, and at the same time as candid and open. He was an interesting mix of alternately formal and warm. He had shown her photographs of his very handsome children, and it seemed a foregone conclusion to Timmie that his wife must have been beautiful as well, since he and his children were. Timmie couldn’t imagine him with anyone who wasn’t, although she had noticed that he said very little about her, other than that she had studied law when she was younger, but never practiced, and that they had been married for nearly thirty years. It seemed a long time to Timmie, and sounded impressive, but it was hard to determine from the little he shared about his marriage if he was happily married to her or not.

  Given the length of their marriage, Timmie assumed he was, but he was noticeably reticent about it, and made neither positive nor negative comments about his wife. He seemed very neutral about it, whenever the subject came up. That in itself made Timmie wonder about the status of his marriage, if he was happy or not. There was a noticeable absence of anecdotes about his wife. He either spoke of his children, or himself, but almost never his spouse.

  One of the many things Timmie admired about him was that despite their many and often philosophical conversations, with many points of view in common, she never had the feeling th
at he was flirting with her. He was always careful, interested, and respectful, and never crossed any lines. His lack of overt flirtatiousness with her made her suspect that he was still in love with his wife, even if he said little about her, which seemed admirable to her. He was an easy man to admire, for his skill, his dedication, his knowledge, his fine mind, his culture, his sense of humor, and his concern about his patients. She had never been as well cared for by any doctor, and she had already decided to buy him a gift before she left. But she couldn’t do anything about it until he let her out of the hospital and she got back to the hotel.

  And when he came back to see her in the morning, in casual weekend clothes, corduroy slacks, and a gray cashmere sweater, she broached the subject of her leaving the hospital again.

  “All right, all right,” he teased her. “I can see you’re going to harass me until I send you back to the Plaza.” She had been on the IV antibiotics for long enough, and he said he was going to give her the rest of what she had to take in the form of pills. He was very cautious medically, she had discovered, and extremely responsible. “I’ll send you back to the hotel tomorrow,” he conceded, “as long as you promise you won’t do anything and you’ll continue to rest. I suppose it’s more comfortable for you there.” It was, but she had no complaints about the service or her accommodations during her four-day stay at the hospital, and he had continued to stop in to see her several times a day. He was attentive, and he practiced medicine with care, and attention to every meticulous detail.

  He told her before he left that he was leaving for the night with his children. His associate would be covering for him, and he reminded her that she had his cell phone number, and if any problem arose, she wasn’t to hesitate to call him. It reminded her of when she had called him on Tuesday night in excruciating pain. It seemed aeons ago now, after days of talking and getting to know each other. He was no longer a stranger, he was a friend.

  “I’ll come by to see you at the Plaza Athénée tomorrow when I get back,” he assured her, and she knew he would. He always did exactly as he said. He was a man you could rely on. Everything about him exuded reliability and strength. “I’ll be in Périgord tonight, at my brother’s house. My children and I love it there.”

  After he left, Timmie realized that he hadn’t mentioned his wife, which seemed strange to her. Maybe she didn’t like Périgord as much as they did, or didn’t get along with his brother. Anything was possible after long years of marriage. People developed habits and concessions, or drew lines in the sand about friends or in-laws they disliked. Jean-Charles had offered no explanation as to why he hadn’t mentioned her. And Timmie somehow didn’t feel it appropriate to ask, although they had shared deeply personal views about many things, from politics to art to abortion and the raising of children, a subject about which she knew little, since her experience at mothering had been all too brief. When she thought about it, she realized she envied him the weekend with his kids. She thought they were lucky to have a father like him.

  It was quiet that night without him, and Timmie watched CNN on the television in her room. There were no shocking news events. And the reports from Jade and David in New York were good. They had two more days of meetings scheduled after the weekend, and were planning to be back in L.A. on Tuesday night. Timmie was hoping to be back with them by the end of the next week, and she was dreading the backlog of work that would have piled up on her desk in her absence, particularly while she was sick. She hoped she would feel equal to it by the time she got back. She was still tired after her ruptured appendix, and when she dressed to leave the hospital on Sunday, she found that she was exhausted by the effort, and almost sorry she hadn’t agreed with Jean-Charles’s suggestion to take a nurse with her. She had insisted that she would get all the care she needed from the hotel staff. Gilles had come to pick her up and take her back to the hotel. He said he was enormously relieved to see her looking so well, and he had brought her a huge bouquet of red roses wrapped in cellophane. She felt like a movie star or an opera diva as she left the hospital, on still slightly shaky legs with the flowers in her arms. And once there, she was surprised how nice it was to get back to the Plaza Athénée. It felt like a homecoming to her, as she walked into the luxury of her familiar room, and one of the maids helped her settle in.

  Timmie showered as Jean-Charles had told her she could, ordered lunch from room service, checked her messages, read some faxes Jade and David had sent her, none of them earth-shattering, just informative. And then Timmie happily got into her bed, between exquisitely pressed sheets. Being there again felt like the height of luxury to her. Although everything at the hospital had been efficient, comfortable, and pleasant, there was no place on earth as wonderful as the Plaza Athénée, in her opinion.

  She was happily tucked into her bed there late that afternoon, eating her favorite chocolates and sipping tea, when the concierge called to announce that Docteur Vernier had come to see her, and five minutes later, he came up. He looked relaxed and happy to see her as he strode into the room and told her she looked better already.

  “It must be the chocolates,” she said as she offered him one, and he resisted, with more willpower than she felt capable of. “How was Périgord with your kids?” she asked, without adding that she had missed him, but she was surprised to find she had. She’d had no one interesting to talk to since the previous morning when he came to see her at the hospital before he left.

  “Excellent,” he commented. “And how do you feel being back here? As well as you did in the hospital yesterday, or have you already exhausted yourself?” He looked almost stern as he questioned her, and she laughed at him, which made him smile again. Her laughter was always infectious, and he was satisfied to see she had regained her mischievous look. She looked very well to him, and he was pleased.

  “I haven’t done a thing. All I’ve done since I got back this morning was lie in bed and eat.”

  “That’s just what you need.” He had already told her several times he thought she was too thin, which didn’t entirely surprise him, given the business she was in. All American fashion people looked anorexic to him, although Timmie’s slimness wasn’t quite that extreme. But he could see that she had lost some weight that week, which was to be expected after her surgery. He could see easily that she was delighted to be back at the hotel, in the comfortable bed and surroundings, with her own nightgown on. She had even put on a pair of diamond earrings, and done her nails that afternoon. She was back in the lap of luxury again, and felt more herself than she had at the hospital in Neuilly. Now, as soon as he gave her permission to do so, she was going to fly the coop entirely. He hated to admit it to himself, but he knew he would miss her when she left. She was excellent company, and wonderful to talk to. Her anxieties that had been aroused the night of the surgery had dissipated days before, and she was confident and smiling again. She was now a woman of power back in her element. There was no question that after twenty-three years of remarkable achievement, elegant opulence suited her to a tee. He teased her about it as she offered him a glass of champagne, and he laughed and shook his head.

  “I rarely drink,” he said easily, not in the least bothered about it. The bottle of Cristal she held out to him held no appeal at all. “And I’m on call tonight.”

  “You don’t drink?” She seemed surprised. He was a man of good habits, a fine mind, warm heart, and was devoted to his wife and children. One couldn’t ask for more. She couldn’t help thinking again that his wife was a lucky woman. Men like Jean-Charles Vernier were rare, and didn’t come on the market often. Not in her experience anyway. They almost always stayed married to their wives. She couldn’t even imagine Jean-Charles single, or involved with one of the young women the men she knew hung out with. Most of them were starlets, models, or bimbos. The thought of it was laughable. He wouldn’t have put up with a woman like that for ten minutes. His standards were obviously so much higher, and he was truly a nice man.

  She offered him a cup o
f tea, which he also declined. He didn’t expect her to entertain him. He wasn’t a guest, he was her doctor, as he pointed out to her with a smile.

  “I thought we were friends too,” she said, looking disappointed, as he laughed.

  “That’s true. I think we are. I enjoy our conversations very much,” he admitted to her, and then he surprised her by what he said next. “I’m going to miss you when you’re gone.”

  He liked their philosophical discussions about the human race, their frailties and predilections, the politics of their respective countries, and he had been deeply touched by her confidences about her previous life. He had been greatly moved by the stories of her childhood at the orphanage and in and out of foster homes, which would have destroyed most people and had only made her stronger. And he was deeply saddened for her about her son. Given his love for his own children, he couldn’t imagine anything worse than losing a child. Yet she had managed to survive that too, and the betrayal by her husband. She had been through so much, and was still whole. She had won his profound respect in the days since her surgery, and he agreed with her that they had become friends, however odd that seemed at first. It no longer did now, even to him. He wasn’t in the habit of becoming friends with his patients. But there was something warm and unusual about her, which drew him to her, and made him want to share his thoughts with her. He was entirely comfortable sitting in the living room of her suite and chatting with her. She had gotten out of bed to sit with him, among the profusion of flowers that had been sent to her by acquaintances in the fashion world who had heard of her surgery. Word of it had spread like wildfire, with Jade and David in New York.

  “So what are your plans?” he asked her, looking relaxed. He seemed happier than he had before the brief weekend he’d spent with his children in Périgord.