Danielle Steel: The Kiss

The only things Cynthia was interested in, now that the girls were gone, were her own friends in Connecticut, going to parties, and playing tennis. And whether or not Bill was part of that life seemed unimportant to her. She had shut him out emotionally years before and led her own life, not without bitterness toward him. She had spent thirty years with him coming and going, and putting political events ahead of everything that mattered to her. He had never been home for graduations and holidays and birthdays. He was always somewhere else, grooming a candidate for a primary or an election. And for the past four years, he had been a constant visitor at the White House. It no longer impressed her, and she was only too happy to tell him how much it bored her. Worse than that, she had dismissed the man along with a career she detested. Whatever there had once been between them was long gone. She had had a face-lift the year before, and he knew that she had been having discreet affairs for years. It had been her revenge for a single indiscretion he'd committed ten years before, with the wife of a congressman, and never repeated. But Cindy was not long on forgiveness.

Unlike Isabelle and Gordon, he and Cindy still shared a bedroom, but they might as well not have bothered. It had been years since they'd made love. It was almost as though she took pride in the fact that she was no longer sexually interested in her husband. She was in good shape, had a constant tan, her hair had gotten blonder over the years, and she was almost as pretty as she had been when he married her thirty years before, but there was a hardness about her now, which he felt rather than saw. The walls she had erected between them were beyond scaling, and it no longer occurred to him to try. He put his energies into his work, and he talked to Isabelle when he needed a hand to hold or a shoulder to cry on, or someone to laugh with. It was to Isabelle that he admitted he was tired or disheartened. She was always willing to listen. She had a gentleness about her that he had never found in his wife. He had liked Cindy's lively spirit, her looks, her energy, and her sense of fun and mischief. She had been so much fun to be with when they were young, and now he wondered, if he disappeared off the face of the earth, if she would even miss him. And like their mother, his daughters seemed pleasant when they were home, but essentially indifferent to him. It no longer seemed to matter to anyone whether or not he was home. He was treated as an unexpected visitor when he arrived from a trip, and he never really felt he belonged there. He was like a man without a country. He felt rootless. And a piece of his heart was tucked away in a house on the rue de Grenelle in Paris. He had never told Isabelle he loved her, nor she him, but for years now, he had been deeply devoted to her. And Isabelle greatly admired him.

The feelings Bill and Isabelle had expressed toward each other over the years were officially never more than friendship. Neither of them had ever admitted to each other, or themselves, that there was more to it than simply admiration, ease, and a delight in the lost art of conversation. But Bill had noticed for years that when her letters didn't come, he worried, and when she couldn't take his calls, because Teddy was too ill, or she went somewhere with Gordon, he missed her. More than he would have cared to admit. She had become a fixture of sorts to him, someone he could count on and rely on. And he meant as much to her. He was the only person, other than her fourteen-year-old son, whom she could talk to. She and Gordon had never been able to talk to each other as she and Bill did.

Gordon was in fact more English in style than American. His parents had both been American, but he had been brought up in England. He had gone to Eton, and was then sent to the United States for college, and went to Princeton. But immediately after graduation, he returned to England and from there moved to Paris for the bank. But no matter what his origins were, he appeared to be far more British than American.

Gordon had met Isabelle one summer at her grandfather's summer house in Hampshire, when she was visiting from Paris. She was twenty years old then and he was nearly forty, and had never married. Despite a string of interesting women in his life, some of them racier than others, he had never found anyone worthy of a commitment, or marriage. Isabelle's mother had been English and her father was French. She had lived in Paris all her life, but visited her grandparents in England every summer. She spoke English impeccably, and she was utterly enchanting. Charming, intelligent, discreet, affectionate. Her warmth and her light and her almost elfin quality had struck him from the moment they met. For the first time in his life, Gordon believed that he was in love. And the potential social opportunities offered by their alliance were irresistibly appealing to him. Gordon came from a respectable family, but not nearly as illustrious as Isabelle's. Her mother came from an important British banking family, and was distantly related to the queen, and her father was a distinguished French statesman. It was, finally, a match that Gordon thought worthy of him. Her lineage was beyond reproach, and her shy, genteel, unassuming ways suited him to perfection. Her mother had died before Isabelle and Gordon met, and her father was impressed by him, and approved of the match. He thought Gordon the perfect husband for Isabelle. Isabelle and Gordon were engaged and married within a year. And he was in total command. He made it very clear to her right from the first that he would make all their decisions. And Isabelle came to expect that of him. He had correctly sensed that, because of her youth, she would pose no objections to him. He told her who they would see, where they would live, and how, he had even chosen the house on the rue de Grenelle, and bought it before Isabelle ever saw it. He was already head of the bank then, and had a distinguished position. His status was greatly enhanced by his marriage to Isabelle. And he in turn provided a safe, protected life for her. It was only as time went by that she began to notice the restrictions he placed on her.

Gordon told her who among her friends he didn't like, who she could see, and who didn't meet with his approval. He expected her to entertain lavishly for the bank, and she learned how to very quickly. She was adept and capable, remarkably organized, and entirely willing to follow his directions. It was only later that she began to feel that he was unfair at times, after he had eliminated a number of people she liked from their social circle. Gordon had told her in no uncertain terms that they weren't worthy of her. Isabelle was far more open to new people and new opportunities, and the varied schemes and choices that life offered. She had been an art student, but took a job as an apprentice art restorer at the Louvre when she married Gordon, despite his protests. It was her only area of independence. She loved the work and the people she met there.

Gordon found it a bohemian pursuit, and insisted that she give up her job the moment she got pregnant with Sophie. And after the baby was born, in spite of the joys of motherhood, Isabelle found that she missed the museum and the challenges and rewards it offered. But Gordon wouldn't hear of her returning to work after the baby was born, and she got pregnant again very quickly, and this time lost the baby. Her recovery was long, and it wasn't as easy afterward to get pregnant again. And when she did, she'd had a difficult pregnancy with Teddy, which resulted in his premature birth, and all the subsequent worries about him.

It was then that she and Gordon began drifting apart. He had been incredibly busy at the bank then. And he was annoyed that, with a sick child under their roof, she was no longer able to entertain as frequently, or pay as close attention as he liked to her domestic and social duties to him. In truth, in those early years of Teddy's life, she had had almost no time for Gordon or Sophie, and she felt at times that they banded together against her, which seemed terribly unfair to her. Her whole life seemed to revolve around her sick child. She could never bring herself to leave him, in spite of the nurses they hired, and unfortunately by then, her father had died, her mother years before. She had no one to support her through Teddy's early years, and she was always at his side. Gordon didn't want to hear about Teddy's problems, or their medical defeats and victories. He detested hearing about it, and as though to punish her, he removed himself almost instantly from any intimacy in their marriage. It had been easy to believe eventually that he no longer loved her. She had no concrete proof of it, he never threatened to leave her, not physically at least. But she had a constantly uneasy feeling that he had set her adrift and swum off.