Даниэла Стил - All That Glitters

“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.