Chapter 1 #2
He had accepted just one dinner invitation before the holidays, because the hostess flatly refused to let him off the hook.
The invitation was from their dear friend Isabelle Phillips, Gabby’s godmother.
She had been widowed herself for the past ten years, and had one daughter, Angela, who lived in Los Angeles and was married to the head of a TV network.
They had four children Isabelle adored. She had called Gabby, her godchild, to beg her to come home for Christmas, and she had flatly refused, although she loved her godmother.
“Dad and I will kill each other without Mom there,” she had said.
Isabelle knew it was true but thought Gabby should try anyway.
Helen would have wanted her to. “There’s no point, Aunt Iz.
We have nothing to say to each other. He said he’s going to the boat, which I hate anyway.
” John had a splendid sailboat, which he and Helen had loved spending time on.
He kept it in the Caribbean in the winter, and the Mediterranean in summer.
Gabby had suffered from seasickness all her life, which irritated him beyond words.
He always believed she was faking it so she didn’t have to go.
“He’ll be happy on the boat,” Gabby said coldly.
“He’s not happy anywhere right now, any more than you are, and this will be your first Christmas without your mother. Don’t underestimate how hard that will be for both of you.”
Isabelle was a kind, intelligent, warm, very attractive woman.
She had run a successful ad agency with her husband, Steve, for years, and had retired and sold the agency five years before, when she turned sixty.
She flew to Los Angeles regularly to see her daughter and grandchildren.
She led a full life, entertained a great deal, was on the boards of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera.
She liked surrounding herself with young people and invited them to her dinner parties, since her only daughter lived far away.
Angela, her daughter, was the same age as Gabby.
They were thirty-six years old, and had been best friends all their lives.
They were both only children, and were like sisters.
Angela had married soon after college and was happily married.
Gabby hadn’t married yet. Her medical studies had taken up all her time, and now her practice as an orthopedic surgeon did.
Helen worried that she would never marry.
Gabby’s worst nightmare was marrying a man like her father, since she saw none of his virtues and only his flaws.
She thought he was a coldhearted, controlling monster, a destroyer of men, and only interested in money.
She believed that he took pleasure in hurting people, crushing them to prove his strength.
She told him to his face that he was a narcissist, which didn’t sit well with him.
It was partly true. It was the reputation he had, and he had a strong ego.
But there were virtues that offset it, which Helen saw and his daughter didn’t.
He was a strong, deeply philanthropic man and a wonderful loving husband, and he loved his daughter too, although he admitted that he had expected a lot of Gabby.
She had lived up to all his dreams for her.
He had never expected her to come into his business, and didn’t ask it of her.
Shipping was a man’s world, and she was an excellent, dedicated doctor.
When Isabelle called John to invite him to her annual pre-Christmas dinner party, she knew he would decline, and she refused to let him.
“You can’t sit home by yourself all through Christmas,” she told him kindly.
“Helen wouldn’t have wanted that. In fact, she told me so herself, and I promised I wouldn’t let you.
You’re coming to dinner. You’ll know almost everyone there, except for a few young new add-ons, and you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.
You can sit next to me. But you’re coming, like it or not, and that’s it.
I’ll come and drag you out myself if I have to,” she said in her cheerful, upbeat voice that reminded him of Helen, who was always his antidote to sadness, and Isabelle was a good stand-in for the role.
She cared about him as her dearest friend.
“I don’t know where my dinner jacket is. Helen put it away somewhere and I can’t find it,” he said wistfully in a plaintive tone.
“I’m sure you haven’t looked. I’ll come over and look for it myself,” Isabelle said firmly, and he smiled.
Sometimes he felt as though Isabelle and Helen were twins.
They even looked like each other. They were both tall, slim, elegant blondes with blue eyes.
Isabelle was a bit more extroverted and flamboyant than Helen, who had been quieter and more conservative, which suited John perfectly.
And Isabelle’s husband, Steve, had been a terrific guy.
He owned the ad agency she worked for, and they fell in love and married.
They were an amazing couple, as beautiful as they were happy.
Isabelle had refused to give up living when Steve died.
She had gone everywhere with John and Helen, and spent time on their boat with them.
Unlike Gabby, she didn’t get seasick, and she loved the boat and was their favorite, most enthusiastic guest. She knew when to keep to herself, and was festive and fun at meals, interested in a million things, and had a busy social life.
She was fifty-five when she was widowed.
She had dated a few times, but she never met anyone who even remotely compared to Steve, so she had decided to be a chic widow, continued to work for five years after his death, and then sold the agency so she could travel more and visit her daughter frequently.
She traveled a lot after she retired, visiting friends all over the world.
“So we agree then,” she said about her dinner party, although he hadn’t agreed at all.
“I’ll send you a reminder, and if you need help finding your dinner jacket, call me.
” She was sure it would hang on him since he had lost a great deal of weight after Helen died, but he was still a very handsome man, and until his wife’s death, he hadn’t looked his age.
He had aged visibly since then. But he was still a powerhouse with boundless energy.
He stayed in shape and played golf and tennis regularly.
Helen and Isabelle had played tennis every week too.
The two couples had been a wonderful, handsome foursome, and Isabelle was sure that John would come back to life again.
He had too much life in him not to. It would just take time.
In the meantime, she knew he had a full schedule at the office to keep him occupied.
John had thrown himself body and soul into his business all of his life, and at times had sacrificed his personal and family life for it, which Helen understood and Gabby reproached him for vividly.
In her memory, he had never been home, was always working or flying around the world to check on his fleet in person.
He hadn’t come to any of her school events when she was a child.
Helen covered all the bases, operating as mother and father when she had to.
She didn’t work herself, so she was always around for Gabby, more than John was, but he had been around more than Gabby admitted or remembered.
It was true that he loved his business and was passionate about it, but Gabby considered him an absentee father for anything that had mattered in her life.
In her eyes, he had shown up for her graduations from college and medical school and not much else.
Helen had made excuses for him, but the fact was that he ran an empire and didn’t have time to go to school plays or birthday parties.
Men like John just didn’t do that. He was a titan in a world of industrial giants, and he was the biggest of all.
After they hung up, John smiled, thinking of Isabelle, and he knew that Helen would have been pleased that he was going to her party.
He had grumbled about it even when she was alive.
Dinner parties always seemed like such a waste of time to him, with ambitious people trying to climb the social ladder, and talking about nothing.
John was happiest in his office, negotiating, and acquiring new ships at the price he had forced the previous owners to accept in negotiation under duress.
Every win proved to him that he was the most powerful man in the industry.
He always had to be the biggest and the best. He couldn’t tolerate losing and rarely did.
—
John looked at the faces around the conference table, waiting for an answer from him.
With John, it was often hard to guess what that answer would be.
He liked to surprise his adversaries and his colleagues.
He was inscrutable as he looked at them, reached for a paper in front of him, and signed it.
It was his final offer letter. He filled in the blank with an amount.
It was a proposal that would break the owners’ hearts, but they had no choice.
They had taken too long to decide. They needed the money, and he knew it.
They were desperate by then. From his standpoint, the negotiation had been a victory.
He was buying seventeen ships in mediocre condition, and would be refitting them completely as container ships.
He was getting what he wanted for much less than he had expected to pay.