R Is for Rebel (16 page)

The brasserie was quietly humming with the efficient bustle of waiters and the patter of many conversations. Parisian women never ceased to amaze her: their style seemed so inherent, impossible for a mere Briton like herself to really achieve. But Sarah James was doing her level best to make it happen. Sarah had spent several years living with her grandmother in Paris and managed to exude the same easy elegance.

Abigail finished her roquette salad, tried not to think about how many solitary meals she spent pondering Eliot, and paid the bill. She headed out into the brisk, sunny afternoon light, and checked her phone for new messages. She still thought of it as Eliot's phone, even though she'd unblocked the account and changed it into her own name over a year ago.

A couple of charms on a bit of black string and a scuffed-up cell phone. That's all she had to show for the love of her life.

What a fool.

Pushing her shoulders back and shaking herself into the present, Abigail looked to her right and left then crossed the wide avenue, setting her thoughts firmly to the pressing needs of the women of a small Ugandan village who lived every day under the weight of life-threatening disease and starvation.

After a few minutes, she reached the anthropology building with time to spare before her meeting was scheduled to begin.
Get
over
yourself
,
Abigail
, she snapped under her breath, then marched into the corridor leading to the esoteric university department.

Get over yourself, Eliot
, he snapped under his breath.

He was not angry, exactly, but he was almost constantly annoyed. And then he became exponentially more annoyed because he had absolutely nothing whatsoever to justify his state of perpetual annoyance.

Danieli-Fauchard was making so much money, with so little effort, he was embarrassed to look at the latest profit and loss statements. It only engendered guilt for how it was possible to generate millions of dollars in income with what amounted to a half-assed effort on a good day. He knew that seventeen years of solid, disciplined—some would say obsessive—attention to every aspect of the industry was probably paying off. It still bothered him. He was starting to feel meaningless.

The small flashing green light on his office telephone's private line was blinking patiently and he knew he ought to pick it up—that he genuinely wanted to pick it up—but he just didn't feel like it. He let his secretary get it and take a message. His assistant knew better than to poke his head in the office.

Or so Eliot thought.

He raised one angry brow when the etched glass door opened and the young Swiss man he'd hired several months ago poked said head through the narrow opening like a wizened tortoise emerging from his shell. At least he had a healthy look of fear around his eyes.

“What is it, Marcel?” Eliot asked in impatient French.

“I am so sorry, but Ms. Plataneau—”

“If I'd wanted to speak to her, I would have picked up the phone. I cannot impress upon you enough that I'm not to be disturbed when I'm busy.”

“I understand,” the near trembling man persisted in slightly accented French, “but she is quite insistent and—”

“Marcel. Please pay very close attention to what I'm about to say,” Eliot replied in razor-sharp Parisian French. “If you ever interrupt me again, for any reason, I will contact human resources and suggest you be transferred to another position in the company. I am quite insistent about this. Do you understand?”

Eliot hated the sarcasm and near cruelty that had seeped into his business demeanor in the past year or so, but he had adopted it gradually and now it was his normal affect. He might not have bedded all that many women since that stupid night at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, but he certainly had the rat bastard part down flat.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Marcel had almost shut the door completely, when Eliot called out the young man's name to stop him.

Eliot spoke in English, the language in which—for some reason—he tended to be nicer. “I know she can be hard to resist.” Eliot offered a slight shrug and a grimace of shared defeat instead of an apology. “I'll pick it up here.”

Marcel nodded his gratitude and shut the door quickly, before his mercurial boss changed moods again.

Eliot took a deep breath and picked up the receiver. “Marisa, darling.”

“Oh, Eliot. I know how you despise being interrupted when you're working, but I just couldn't resist. And please don't fire poor Marcel for disobeying you. He was just doing my bidding.”

Aren't we all
, Eliot thought involuntarily, then hated himself just a little bit. “What is it, Mar?”

“I got the grant for the research project in Tanzania!”

She was so excited and genuinely deserving that Eliot continued in his downward spiral of self-loathing. “That's so great! You totally deserve it.”

“I know! Isn't it the best?”

Initially, Eliot had been drawn to Marisa's stand-alone exuberance. She loved drawing people into her orbit of interest and shared excitement. She rarely let anyone, including Eliot, quash her enthusiasm. What had at first been an appealing independence, sometimes, lately, had a whiff of blind arrogance. But Eliot chastised himself silently, she was always being blindly enthusiastic on behalf of someone or something utterly honorable or utterly deserving, so casting aspersions bordered on heresy. “Absolutely. Congratulations! Let's go out tonight and celebrate.”

“Oh, I can't tonight, I'm meeting with some of the research fellows, but I'll stop by your place around ten so we can pop a bottle of champagne then,
bien
?”

“Perfect. I'll have a chilled bottle at the ready. And congratulations again. Well done.”

“It is well done of me, isn't it?”

She wasn't conceited, really. She was just agreeing with him, wasn't she? “It's great, Mar. I'll see you at ten.”

“Oh, and Eliot?”

“Yes?”

“Did you see the wedding announcement in the
International
Herald
Tribune
? It's so silly, really, but it's exciting to see it in print, isn't it?”

Eliot had tried to avoid the very real truth that his perpetual simmer of annoyance was even more pronounced since seeing their engagement listed in the
International
Herald
Tribune
. “I did see it. Yes.” His reply wasn't a lie, at least. Marisa had already shared her enthusiasm, which was usually the object of the exercise, so she did not even notice Eliot's less than joyful response.

“I'm so glad,” she added warmly, then quickly changed tone. “Sorry, Eliot, there's my other line. I have to run. Ciao!” Click.

Eliot supposed he should be grateful that the woman had no false reverence for his supposedly vaunted position in the business world. They were equals in nearly every sense of the word: intellect (keen), ambition (pronounced), and sexual drive (as and when).

While swearing off unrealistic romantic notions after parting ways with Abigail Heyworth a year ago had seemed a practical element of his own self-preservation, Eliot now realized that all such germinating decisions led, necessarily, to the propagation of certain consequences. Namely, in his case, it led to a primary relationship of the very
non
romantic variety.

On their first date, Marisa Plataneau had informed Eliot that she was the least romantic woman he would ever meet. She loved jewelry and flowers and chocolates as much as the next girl, but she had no interest whatsoever in twined souls or mystical joinings.

About six weeks after the debacle with Abigail, one of Eliot's friends from Harvard Business School put him in touch with Marisa. She had just moved to Geneva from New York to head up an NGO that focused on promoting industrial innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. She had been raised in Paris, the eldest of three children, to parents who made no secret of their expectations for their progeny: anything less than excellence was failure. Marisa attended INSEAD and then moved to the United States to pursue her interest in international relations at Johns Hopkins, where she earned her master's and doctoral degrees. She worked at the United Nations for eight years after that, biding her time until the right job presented itself. The Geneva position was the right job. As Eliot's father liked to say, “Marisa is no slouch.”

Despite their obvious drive, the Plataneaus were a joyful lot, if intellectually fierce, and Eliot welcomed Marisa's brutal wit and rapier honesty. He did not miss the torment that had assailed him for months (even now, occasionally) about what exactly had gone so terribly wrong with Abigail Heyworth—about whom he had felt so terribly right. The only person to whom he had been able to confide even a watered down version of events had been his mother. He was a thirty-nine-year-old man, for chrissake. Forced to confide in his mother.

Let
it
go, Eliot
, had become his constant internal mantra.

The private line started blinking again and Eliot figured it was Marisa calling with one last item she'd forgotten to mention. Then he looked at the caller ID and saw it was his mother.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, Eliot. Nice piece in the
Herald
Tribune
.”

“Thanks.”

“You never did like publicity, did you?”

“Not really.”

“Is that it?”

“Is what it?”

“You sound, I don't know,
ambivalent
.”

“We're just getting married, we're not curing cancer. I guess a part of me feels like it's sort of ridiculous to trumpet it about as if it has any real importance.”

“Eliot? What is it, dear?”

“Please stop being cryptic, Mom. What is
what
?”

“Forgetting the newspaper mention for now, why is it, do you think, that you don't think your marriage to Marisa has any real importance?”

“You're twisting my words to get me to enter into some sort of therapeutic discussion and I'm not in the mood.”

“It's not a therapeutic discussion, Eliot. It used to be called a conversation. About your feelings. Which you used to have.”

Eliot remained silent.

“Oh all right,” Penny Cranbrook continued in her kind Midwestern drawl, “we're not going to bother with emotions, I guess. They're messy and I know you can't stand that. So, what else is new?”

Eliot smiled at how well his mother knew him and how all of that squirmy, emotional-intelligence crap drove him crazy, even if he knew it was true, and that it might even be worth giving his full attention. He just could not do it. He and Marisa were getting married and that was the end of it.

“We're getting married and that is the end of it.”

“Of course. Fine. Yes. That part of the conversation is over. So, tell me what else is going on? Are you going to Paris for the shows? Do you want to meet up for lunch or dinner or will you be booked up?”

Her wholesale dismissal of his precarious emotional state was even worse than her inappropriate prying, but he opted for the shallows for now.

“I could probably squeeze in a meal. What works best for you? Will you be with Dad?”

“I don't think so. He's not as keen on short transatlantic trips these days. A month in Italy is one thing, a week in Paris, as you young people like to say, not so much.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Oh, I haven't decided. Jack and Sylvia asked me to stay with them, but as charming as it is, I think I'm getting too old to bunk in.”

“
Old
is one word for it.” He tried to stay focused on the conversation as his mind wondered if Abigail was a frequent visitor to Paris, now that her mother lived there with Jack Parnell. Eliot had become adept at not wondering such things aloud.

“All right, then. I think I am too
spoiled
not to have room service and a large private bathroom. I opted for the George V. What about you?”

“The marketing department always prefers for me to stay at the Ritz, so I reluctantly comply.”

“What a hardship.”

“Very funny. All right, which day? Which meal?” Eliot called across his office to Marcel and asked him to come in with the calendar for Paris Fashion Week.

Penny knew her son was probably rescheduling someone of far greater importance but she tried to sound passably clueless. “How about Thursday, February twenty-seventh? Breakfast at Hôtel Costes?”

“Let me check.”

Penny heard a bit of murmuring in French as Eliot covered the mouthpiece of the phone and shuffled his schedule with Marcel.

“Done. I'll see you then. Anything else? I've been avoiding these profit and loss statements for the past hour, and I really should deal with them once and for all.”

“Nothing else, honey. I'll see you then. Love you.”

“Love you too. Bye, Mom.”

Marcel overheard the fond parting words as he left Eliot's office, and supposed he should be grateful that at least one person on the planet was able to elicit a ray of humanity from his otherwise robotic boss.

Later that night, Eliot heard the bolt in the door to his kitchen slide free, then Marisa swung into the room in a flurry of happy self-congratulation. Eliot was sitting at the eight-foot long, reclaimed nickel table he had found in Provence several years ago. He stretched his neck and saw the stars were visible through the ceiling of the glass conservatory. He had added the room on to the kitchen shortly after he had purchased the house in Versoix eight years ago. It reminded him of home. He had pictured a family in it, a family of his own.

The property had been uninhabited for many years, but the structural elements were sound. It was a traditional lake house, made of white plaster and exposed rough-hewn beams, with a narrow spit of lawn that led directly down to Lake Geneva. At the time, when the estate agent commented offhandedly about the abandoned indoor lap pool that had fallen into disrepair, Eliot made an immediate aggressive offer on the place.

In addition to the classical Franco-Swiss architectural elements, the previous owners had also been art collectors in the mid-twentieth century and had commissioned Philip Johnson to design a small guesthouse. It was a beautiful, meditative miniature, a study, for the architect's future work in the freestanding glass houses for which he became famous. The low, modern structure served as a private sanctuary for Eliot. For the most part, he loved living in a big house that was warm and cluttered like the one in which he had grown up, but he also needed the occasional break from the lately oppressive feeling that every physical object he looked upon held the weight and importance and power to remind him of some other part of his existence. The Johnson house provided a haven from that.

If he had not been expecting Marisa, he would have spent the night out there tonight. His mind felt crowded with little splinters of thoughts and ideas. He had always prided himself on his ability to compartmentalize all aspects of his life: work, family, friends, athletics, what have you. Every element fit neatly into the appointed quadrant of his brain. He hated to admit it, but ever since he had met Abigail Heyworth, all of the various components of who he was, or what he did, bled together in a frustrating and composite mess.