Chapter 1 #2
The child was entirely cared for by a series of nannies.
Liam was a bright boy and an undemanding child, who learned early on to be self-sufficient.
He expected little of his parents. Faye insisted on sending him east to boarding school at Andover, where her father had gone.
When Liam left at fourteen, Charlie missed him, but he knew from his own experience that it was already too late.
They had missed the boat, and like both his parents, Liam was an only child.
Charlie knew when Liam left that he would never be home again for long.
The years had flown by. Liam had just graduated from Yale, was going back to Yale for graduate school to study architecture, and was leaving for Europe in a few days with friends to visit chateaux in France and castles in England, as a prelude to his graduate studies.
Amazingly, Liam was good-natured, forgiving, and independent, and never seemed to hold Charlie and Faye’s neglectful parenting against them.
He wasn’t close to them, but he didn’t resent them either.
He was mature and philosophical about their failings and accepted them as they were.
—
Charlie was a strikingly handsome man with a full head of dark hair, tall, with a well-toned athletic body, and electric blue eyes.
Faye was a very fair blonde with skin that hadn’t aged well, and she paid little attention to her looks.
She was fifty-four now, and looked slightly older.
She had spent a lifetime working among men, and had played down her feminine side to compete with them.
Liam looked like his father, with his mother’s blond hair and his father’s blue eyes.
Both Charlie and Faye dove into their careers with a vengeance as soon as they left grad school.
It left them little time to spend with each other, and once Liam was born they seemed to drift even further apart.
Charlie was aware of it, but did nothing about it.
Faye seemed not to notice, or mind. She’d become a partner of the firm very early, and all her energies were spent there.
For a moment, when Liam left for boarding school after fifteen years of marriage, they thought that their relationship might have a renaissance, and they might recapture a warmer time long ago.
Instead their lives seemed to get busier than ever, and without Liam’s presence as the prime reason for their staying married, they found that they had drifted too far apart and there was nothing left.
Their marriage was dead. It was a turning point for both of them.
They discussed it one night over dinner in their kitchen.
They rarely had time for dinner together and hadn’t had dinner as a family in years.
The housekeeper cooked for Liam. Faye was out most nights with clients, and Charlie was either out working late, or in another city acquiring another company to add more restaurants.
He had built an empire which he ran himself.
Their decision, after several glasses of wine, was to stay together and continue as they were.
Faye pointed out that divorce would be costly, inconvenient, time-consuming to work out the finances, and maybe even embarrassing.
They stayed together, but once they made the decision for practical reasons, there was no pretense of it being anything more than that.
Charlie was never sure if he had ever loved her, and Faye had long since concluded that she didn’t love him.
Even Liam understood by the time he was in his teens that his parents had a loveless marriage, and there was little in it for him.
He loved spending time with his friends’ families rather than his own.
Other mothers who observed the Taylors with a keen eye saw that they had everything but love.
They felt sorry for Liam, but he did well anyway, like a flower growing between rocks, and got what he needed to survive, wherever he could.
He was astonishingly self-sufficient for a boy his age, and mature.
He had grown up among adults, and he was as bright as his parents.
Charlie and Faye told themselves that they stayed together “for Liam’s sake,” without the pretense of being close.
Their lives were on separate paths, with the occasional social appearance, usually for Charlie’s business or hers.
Liam wasn’t close to either of them. When he wanted advice, he went to teachers or his friends or their parents, not his own.
They didn’t have time. They were responsible parents—they fed and housed him and paid for his education and holidays, and gave him nothing more.
Charlie felt guilty about it sometimes, but Faye never mentioned it.
They were three strangers living under the same roof who barely knew each other, each pursuing their own life, and the thread which bound them to each other was very thin.
Charlie had sought amusement and distraction from a wide variety of women over the years, without getting close to them.
Something always stopped him, possibly the fact that he was married, although that never discouraged him from dating.
Being married relieved him of making any other commitments, which suited him.
He made no promises he couldn’t keep and didn’t wish to.
He wanted no complications in his life, nor did he want to mislead anyone.
He didn’t want or need more than he had.
He had never been faithful to Faye, but he respected her as a good friend, even if he didn’t love her, and probably never had.
He conducted most of his affairs in other cities, to avoid complications, rather than in San Francisco, where he spent the least amount of time.
The affairs lasted a while, and he didn’t try to prolong them.
He was careful to pick women who didn’t expect more of him than he was willing to give.
Now and then, he made a mistake, but not often.
When he did, and spent time with a woman who had big expectations of him, or was needy, he ended it quickly.
He was an expert at ending his affairs smoothly.
All of his passion went into his business.
The rest was entertainment, or a distraction.
Faye was equally discreet, and neither of them asked the questions they didn’t want answers to.
Their marriage was a choice, and suited them both.
Faye liked the status and comforts it afforded her, regardless of the man.
Charlie was a decent person and she admired him enough to stay married to him, no matter what he did on his own.
They were a habit neither of them enjoyed or wanted to break.
—
Charles stood at his father’s funeral, looking heartbreakingly handsome, thinking of the practical aspects of his father’s death, the things he had to do now.
There were two houses his father owned that he had to sell, and art and objects to send to auction or put in storage for Liam later.
Faye didn’t like the house in Tahoe and neither did he, or he would have kept it.
Once fashionable among the rich, Lake Tahoe was full of tourists now, and people in the camping grounds.
And the traffic to get there was terrible. It was overcrowded and overrun.
The strength of Charlie’s career had been to think outside the box, solidified by the skills he had learned at Harvard, with his own unfailing instincts and magic added.
His work life had all the passion and excitement that his personal life didn’t.
He loved his work, and his companies were his children and mistresses, the recipients of all the emotions he had never shared with another person.
Because of the absence of his mother since the age of thirteen, and his cold father, Charlie had never been shown how to love another human.
It was the one instinct he didn’t have and what he feared.
He preferred to give his heart to what he could control.
His father’s death wasn’t painful for him, except for the duties he would have to undertake and didn’t want, like being chairman of the board. He thought Faye would have done it better. She was more traditional and a better team player, but it was his responsibility, not hers.
Patrick had been an austere, severe, often harsh critic of his son. The two men had never understood each other, nor tried to. Charlie had early on taken pleasure in being a maverick in business—he was good at it and it had served him well.
After the service at Grace Cathedral, which ended with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Charlie greeted as many of the seven hundred people who attended as he could on the way out.
His striking good looks made him stand out in the crowd.
He was wearing a perfectly tailored black suit made by his tailor in New York, where he kept a Fifth Avenue apartment he used when he did business there.
He still traveled most of the time, checking on his offices around the country and the world.
He was forty-nine and looked years younger.