Chapter 8 #2
“I have to admit, I don’t think about it a lot anymore, but it was a combination of a lot of things, and who we are.”
“Maybe the Elvis cape in Vegas was cursed,” he said with a grin.
“To be honest, I was very drunk and my recollection of that moment is pretty dim. But my impression was that you looked more like Liberace than Elvis,” she said, and he laughed.
“What brought all that up again?” She was curious.
The die had been cast long since—it was way too late to be thinking about what went wrong for them.
They had gone on with their lives, and most of the time were at least friends.
She hadn’t expected more than that from him in years, and she was content, not with him, but with herself.
He seemed to be thrashing around, rehashing the past, and tormented over it, if that was really what was bothering him.
“Maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe you don’t want to work like a maniac anymore,” she suggested.
“It takes a toll. I took my foot off the gas more than usual this summer, and I came back from Aspen feeling great. I’m older than you are, but you’ve lived ten lifetimes with your business.
Maybe that doesn’t matter as much as we thought?
” He was shocked to hear her say it. She usually worked even harder than he did.
“It’s hard to have a life and work the way we have until now.
Kids leave, marriages end, or your partner dies, and when you retire, what do you have?
Nothing, if you have put everything into your business.
Don’t you want more than that?” she asked him honestly.
“Maybe. But I’m not ready to slow down yet.”
“Wait another five years,” she said knowingly. “You may get there yet. The people you’re running your ass off for now won’t remember you twenty years from now.”
“I do it for myself,” Charlie said firmly.
“That’s the trouble. All you have left in the end is you, if that’s all you do.
That’s starting to scare me.” It was scaring him too.
Everything was these days. Devon, work, his future, his past, the ghosts he had run from for thirty years, and himself.
Faye sounded like she was in a much better place than he was.
She seemed peaceful, and Charlie was anything but that.
He felt as though he had a thousand important decisions to make and had none of the answers.
He was at a crossroads, and didn’t know which way to turn.
He could still have a life, a good life with Devon, or he could keep running and chasing his success, and wind up the way Faye was describing—alone.
And if he didn’t get back to see Devon soon, that was what would happen.
It was inevitable. He was feeling anxious and confused, and running was exhausting.
“It seems like Aspen is good for you,” he said kindly, glad that he had run into her, like an old friend.
“It is,” she admitted. “I can breathe there. My work here squeezes the life out of me sometimes. It’s exciting and exhilarating, but at a hell of a price.
At a certain point, how much more money does anyone need?
I’m thinking of spending more time in Aspen and working remotely, not all the time, but more than I do now. ”
“That’s a big decision.” He was surprised.
But she was fifty-four years old, and maybe she wanted to slow down.
He was only forty-nine, and at a different point in his life.
He wasn’t ready to give up the rat race yet, and couldn’t imagine it.
He loved the high wire and the excitement of what he did.
And the power. He was addicted to it, and everything that went with it.
In part it was keeping him away from Devon, but what was really keeping him away from her was himself, and his demons.
The demons of loss and of closeness and of emotional risk that if you loved someone, you could lose them, just as Devon had.
And he had, as a boy. You could lose someone you loved at every age. That’s what he was afraid of.
“Well, let me know if you’re moving to Aspen,” he said. They were more like housemates than husband and wife.
“You’ll be the first to know. It’s just an idea for now. I really enjoyed the summer. It was hard to come back.” It was a first for her.
“Yeah. Me too. Maybe that’s why I’m crabby,” he said, but she suspected it was something deeper than that, and she had a feeling he knew what was bothering him and he didn’t want to tell her. She didn’t pry, and pretended to be satisfied with what he told her.
“Any news from our gardener son, by the way?” she asked him.
“He’s happy in France. He loves working with the earth and planting something that grows that he can control.
You should let that go. He’s got to do what he loves, whatever that is.
My father never understood that. We know better, we’ve had careers we love.
Not everyone is made for a law career, or a career based on chasing money.
He might turn out to be a famous garden designer one day.
” She couldn’t make her peace with it. It was a lot to ask.
She was sure he’d regret the decision one day and he was throwing his life away, and his future.
“You can talk to him when he comes home for Thanksgiving. I get the feeling he’s met a girl he likes in France. ”
Faye rolled her eyes. “Then we’re screwed. He’ll never come back.”
“He will. He’s young,” Charlie said indulgently.
“That’s what they said about us,” Faye added cynically. They were so different but at least they were friends, Charlie mused.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said, standing up, and put his plate in the dishwasher. She had eaten hers out of the plastic box. She never bothered to set the table.
“Try not to worry about all of it,” Faye said kindly, as he left the kitchen. “Most things take care of themselves.” He wished that were true as he went upstairs to his rooms. Faye’s were at the opposite end of the house. They had built two master suites years before.
He thought about Devon again as he closed the door to his suite. He missed her, more than he wanted to. She had lodged herself in his heart in a short time, from the very first time he’d seen her. She seemed light-years away in New York.
—
Devon had been busy from the moment she came back from the Hamptons.
She had two days to prepare for her first commission of the fall.
He was a famous British actor who had been recently knighted after a long and distinguished career.
The portrait was to be hung in his London club and was being paid for by a number of associations.
He was well into his seventies, with a distinguished reputation which was well deserved.
Sir Reginald Brooke was being painted in white tie, wearing his decoration prominently on his tailcoat.
Devon expected him to be stuffy and pompous, and instead found him to be bitingly funny with a keen sense of humor.
He was an extremely knowledgeable man on a multitude of subjects.
He told her that he researched all his parts intensely for months, and knew the background and history of the characters he portrayed and the kind of lives they would have led.
He had been a Shakespearean actor in his youth, and admitted that he hated Shakespeare with a passion and found him a dead bore.
He arrived for the sittings in jeans, a leather jacket, and motorcycle boots, and looked good in them, and changed into his more formal garb in her dressing room.
He was funny and eccentric, brilliant and outrageous.
He made the sittings fun. She was painting him with a mischievous smile, almost wicked, with a knowing gleam in his eye, which was how she experienced him while they talked.
“I look a bit naughty, don’t I?” he said proudly, when she let him take a look at her progress.
She was never mysterious about the work, and didn’t mind the subject’s feedback most of the time.
Now and then it was annoying. She had called him Sir Reginald when they met, and he had said immediately, “ Reggie, please!” His father, Sir Archibald Brooke, had been a famous Shakespearean actor as well.
Reggie had played difficult roles for most of his career, and had won three Oscars in the U.S.
His acting was brilliant and as sharp as his mind.
He had a quick wit, and told mostly dirty jokes that made her laugh.
He didn’t attempt to seduce Devon, in spite of her beauty.
He had a twenty-eight-year-old wife and two young children.
She was Indian, from a very wealthy family in New Delhi, and stunningly beautiful.
Reggie told Devon at the first sitting that he would have found her irresistible and felt honor-bound to seduce her, except that he was completely besotted with his wife, Dahlia, who had him under her spell.
He said he felt compelled to explain it so Devon didn’t get the incorrect impression that he was gay, which he assured her was not the case.
“Old and foolish, and delusional perhaps, but quite straight.” He made it all seem funny, and said he had married his wife when she was twenty and he was sixty-eight, and he was the luckiest man in the world.
When his wife picked him up after one of the sittings, she was every bit as beautiful as he had said, and appeared to be just as crazy about him.
They had just spent a year in New Mexico, while he was shooting a film.
They were going back to England for a few months, and then he would be shooting another film in L.A.
Devon loved working with him. He had so much personality that the painting was a rich combination of his expressions and the things he had said to her. It came alive the moment one saw it.