Chapter 5
5
They reached the open-plan kitchen and lounge area when Deedee’s mobile rang again. Gina gestured that she was heading off to the bathroom to take a shower, leaving Deedee alone to answer the call.
‘Come to Paris with me!’ Yiannis said to open the conversation, his American-with-a-hint-of-Greek accent incredibly warm and welcoming as always. Deedee dumped her yoga mat on the floor and leaned against the breakfast bar to enjoy the conversation. She always loved chatting to Yiannis, and reconnecting with her oldest and dearest friend was one of the main reasons for the trip, after all. She smiled to herself and took a grateful sip of the coffee from the cup that Rosie had also very thoughtfully written her name on with a super smiley face beside it.
‘Ooh la la!’ Deedee replied, not missing a beat as she bopped one of the birthday balloons, that were now floating around the kitchen, away from her face. ‘But darling, I’m here in the West Village, in New York, in case you had forgotten. I’m not going all the way back to Europe… not even to see beautiful Paris,’ she told him, loving how she always slipped into a comfortable groove when chatting to her best friend. Yiannis had a knack of starting each new conversation as if he was simply carrying on from the previous one; even when they hadn’t talked to each other for several weeks at a time, with perhaps only the occasional text message or voice note in between, it was always as if they been together mere moments earlier. Laughing and chatting and winding each other up as only old friends knew how to.
‘Haha, always the joker!’ Yiannis laughed smoothly. ‘I’m talking about Paris, the new French restaurant. A business partner has just invested and it’s on the twentieth floor of a place near The Plaza hotel with stunning views across Central Park. The food is some of the best I’ve ever had. I can arrange a table in one of the private dining rooms for us, if you fancy it. I thought it might be nice for us to have some privacy to chat and catch up without my big crazy family smothering you and taking over so I don’t get a look in… which you know is what would happen if I was to bring you to Athena for dinner. You’ll get enough of that at your birthday party. My mother is already way too overexcited to see you and the party isn’t until the end of the week.’ She heard him sigh.
‘Ah, you mustn’t be mean, Yiannis, you’re lucky to still have your wonderful mother around and I’m really looking forward to seeing her again. But a restaurant with a view of Central Park sounds incredible, so I most certainly do fancy it. Not today though, darling, I need to spend time with Rosie and Gina, as I abandoned them last night – I stayed in like a proper party pooper – I was missing Joe, and well…’ She let her voice tail off, before adding, ‘You know how it is.’ And he really did. Both New Yorkers, Joe and Yiannis had become great friends, after she had introduced Joe to Yiannis, and they’d hit it off right away. They shared a love of sailing and old Hollywood movies, with Yiannis a celebrity photographer and Joe a casting agent. There had never been any animosity or awkwardness from Joe, knowing that Yiannis had once been an old flame. Joe had always known that Deedee and Yiannis’s relationship was one of a deep, enduring friendship, nothing more. Any romance had fizzled out decades earlier, which Deedee reckoned had been a blessing in disguise, although it hadn’t seemed like it at the time as he had been her first love; it had felt as though it was the end of the world for a while, before they found their groove as ‘just good friends’.
But Yiannis had never been the settling down type, or even the going-steady type. In fact, he had actually been a bad boyfriend and she had been the one to end things, after having had enough of his shenanigans with the other girls. Much to the disappointment of Elena, his traditional Greek mother, who perpetually lived in hope of him meeting a nice woman to marry and settle down with to have lots of babies. She had even wrung her hands and said it was a sad day when Deedee and Joe announced their engagement in the family’s Greek restaurant, before chastising her son, loudly and very demonstrably, for wasting his chance and not putting in enough effort to make Deedee his wife when they had been dating. It had all been fine in the end though and Elena had pulled Deedee into her ample bosom for a big embrace and told her, Joe was ‘a very lucky man’ to be marrying the wonderful woman she had come to see as part of her own family after being in her son’s life for so many years, ‘even if Yiannis was a stupid fool to let you slip through his fingers!’ This was followed by lots of tutting, shaking of her head and formidable side eye action in his direction. Yiannis had stood there with the same old scolded puppy look on his impossibly handsome face that he did so well and had unashamedly utilised to his advantage numerous times over the decades to appease his many disgruntled girlfriends.
‘I know, honey. I miss Joe too,’ Yiannis told her, and Deedee let out a long breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. ‘He would have loved being here for your big milestone birthday.’
‘True. He would,’ Deedee agreed. ‘Although, sweetheart, can you please refrain from emphasising the word big in such an elevated way.’ She took another mouthful of coffee.
‘Why? It is a big birthday, huge! A milestone moment and one to be proud of.’
‘Hmm, yes, but I don’t like being reminded… that I’m getting old.’
‘What are you talking about? Deedee, you will never be old,’ he said smoothly. ‘You’re iconic. Young at heart always, and plus – seventy is the new fifty. It said so in the copy of People magazine I read just the other week.’
‘In that case, it must be true,’ she laughed, and then quickly added, ‘Hang on a minute… when did you start reading People magazine? You’ve never been a celebrity gossip kind of guy.’
‘Since they bought the last set of pictures I took of Jen!’
‘Jen? Do you mean Jennifer? As in Jennifer Aniston?’ Deedee marvelled, sliding onto a bar stool, intending on settling in to hear all about it.
‘That’s right. I just happened to be in the same place as her and well… the opportunity presented itself and so what kind of fool of a fashion photographer would I be to not take the shot!’ He chuckled. ‘Not that I’ve turned to the dark side of touting paparazzi pics around town to the highest bidder, I’m not that low. But Jen and I go way back, after I did a high-profile magazine shoot for her many years ago, so she was very gracious about it.’
‘I’m so pleased she’s nice in real life. It’s always a shame when you hear of A-listers being mean. It really bursts the bubble of glamorous starriness that you perceive them to be in.’ Deedee took another sip of the creamy coffee, enjoying the light-hearted chat with her old friend. ‘And is she as gorgeous in real life as she looks on the screen?’
‘One hundred per cent. Jen has true star quality, just something you can’t put into words. It’s like an aura, and the lens captures it perfectly, so she’s a dream for a photographer. Just like you were back in your modelling days, Deedee. True star quality too.’
‘Now I know you are just being kind. I only did a few photos for Biba and Chelsea Girl and a handful of the other women’s fashion designers and shops that were around at that time. I was hardly a star… or a supermodel. Just a spoiled girl with a wonderfully kind and wealthy father,’ Deedee said, fondly remembering the little pied-a-terre in London that her father had set her up in on the proviso that she at least got a job and paid for her own shenanigans, since clearly she wasn’t cut out for academia after being expelled from her Swiss boarding school. So she had worked as a model and cabaret dancer in nightclubs, spending many glorious evenings either gallivanting around London or unfolding herself from a giant Fabergé-style egg and generally having the time of her life.
‘It’s still true. Take the goddamn compliment,’ he puffed, and Deedee laughed.
‘But I’m British, we are very modest you know, and not like you gregarious, blunt New Yorkers,’ she teased.
‘It’s not blunt if it’s just the truth. You were a dream to photograph too – do you remember the first shoot we did together for Biba in the late seventies? When you wore those tight leather hot pants! Your legs went on forever and the inexperienced, na?ve young man I was then thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’
‘Yes, but didn’t the hot pants split along the seam when I bent over?’
‘That’s right. And you just stepped right out of them and carried on posing in your pink silk knickers. That was really hot! You know, I might still have the roll of film from that shoot, I’ll dig it out and you can show your friends at your seventieth birthday party. In fact, we should set up a projector and I’ll make a movie of you through the ages to show on a loop. What do you reckon?’
‘ Through the ages, ’ Deedee repeated, horrified. ‘Darling, you make it sound like I was born in the Jurassic era, and we are going to show how I’ve evolved over the hundred and fifty million years or whatever it is since then!’ She puffed and Yiannis laughed deeply.
‘Oh, come on, it’s not like that. It will be wonderful to show you off and for all your friends that love you to see what an amazing, glamorous and adventurous life you’ve had so far. And for you to see memories of all the incredible things you’ve done too – and your life with Joe – if you have photos or films from your holidays I can add those in. The places you’ve travelled to…’ His voice faded away.
Silence followed.
Deedee swallowed another mouthful of coffee, desperately trying to hold on to that buoyant feeling from earlier when she was up on the roof doing the sun salutations and feeling all serene and uplifted. But it was no use, the yearning feeling for Joe to be a part of this returned, and she could practically hear the wheeze of the air being released from her lungs as her mood deflated.
‘Dee, darling… what’s really going on?’ Yiannis asked gently, after what felt like an eternity to Deedee as still images of her riotous time at that stuffy boarding school – in black and white – because yes, she was that old, came into her head and were splashed onto a projector screen with meaningful music playing in the background. Followed by fun film footage of her and Joe riding camels in Egypt, or taking selfies on a gondola in Venice, or the petrified look on her face when she had stepped onto the Grand Canyon Skywalk bridge suspended high up in the air and made of glass! And she was certain to cry if the photo of her and Joe, arm in arm and laughing in the foamy surf of a Californian beach with a sunset backdrop, was shown. They were there for their honeymoon, and it truly was the happiest moment of her life, standing on that beach with her heart so full of love it was fit to burst right out of her chest. She bit down hard on her bottom lip to stop it wobbling, as Yiannis continued, ‘You never used to be bothered about your age… always citing that old adage of being as young as you feel. So how young, or indeed, old , do you actually feel?’ Yiannis asked, getting straight to the point as always and making Deedee wince.
‘It’s not about how old, or an actual age as such…’ she started. ‘You know, I don’t feel very much different to how I did when I was in my thirties, to be perfectly honest. But I do feel lone—’ She stopped talking, not ready to go there, not even with Yiannis, who she had known for a lifetime, since that Biba shoot and at the time giddy and in love with their whole lives ahead of them. And then as their relationship turned to one of an enduring friendship, they had been through so much over the years, always supporting each other. Him being there for her through two disastrous marriages before she met Joe, and then holding her up, literally at times, in the aftermath of Joe’s death.
And Deedee had been there for Yiannis too, when his younger brother had died in a motorbike accident. Before then, there were numerous times when Yiannis had broken some poor woman’s heart, and Deedee had listened sympathetically when they phoned her – as his female best friend – desperate to get some insight from her, someone who might understand and be able to shed some light – to try to work out where they went wrong with him. And Deedee had never known how to tell each woman that Yiannis was just a free spirit, a sailor at heart, happiest on the deck of his boat with the sun in the sky and the sound of seagulls soaring overhead. There was no magical code to break to win his heart, he just wasn’t the settling down type. Yes, he had a big heart and he loved everyone, was kind and charismatic, but he had always shied away from being upfront and honest with women, for fear of hurting them. But then he always inadvertently hurt them anyway.
She knew him inside out, and in return Yiannis knew her better than anyone else too. More so than Joe even had, in a way, because after being burned from baring her soul to her first two husbands, Deedee had always made a small part of herself a mystery to Joe, and truly believed it had helped to keep their infatuation with each other alive. Joe had been the same, there had always been a part of him that he had kept for himself too. They had never ‘lost’ themselves in each other and in return it had meant there was always something new and wonderful to discover. Another layer to unwrap. Whether it be an amusing story from their pasts, a childhood experience to share or a place they had visited to talk about that the other one hadn’t been to. Until Joe died, that is, taking all the undiscovered parts with him. And it was this that Deedee grieved for the most, the elements of her wonderful husband’s life that she never got to discover.
‘Dee, it’s me… come on, sweetheart. Talk to me,’ Yiannis coaxed gently, bringing her thoughts back to their phone call. But more silence followed. Deedee took another sip of her coffee. She thought of being seventy soon. Seventy years old. She still couldn’t get her head around it. It just felt… weird! Like it was happening to someone else, separate from her. But at the same time it felt like sand swiftly tumbling through a timer. And there was nothing she could do to slow the sand down. To make it stop. The top and bottom of it was that she simply wasn’t ready to get old. There was still so much more that she wanted to do in her life. And what if her health failed her and she ended up confined to one of those wipe-down, high-back chairs in an old people’s home? What if her mind let her down and her memory of the good times alluded her and she forgot all about her beloved Joe and the adventures they had shared? Yes, she had tried to take care of herself and was truly grateful for the good health she had enjoyed up till now and knew that getting old was a privilege, something to be grateful for, but what if those reckless years caught up with her? The copious cocktails. The joints she had smoked in her hippy era of the seventies. The ecstasy tablet she tried in the eighties when they were all the rave and she had ended up dancing till dawn on the deck of her then boyfriend’s yacht. It had sailed around the Balearics in a big bubble of love with everyone onboard pumping their hands in the air like they just didn’t care. She caught her breath and put the coffee cup down on the breakfast bar, trying to ignore the panic that was swirling and making her hands tremble slightly.
‘Do you feel lost… or lonely? Is that it?’ Yiannis asked, hitting the nail on the head and snapping her from the maelstrom of doomful thoughts.
‘Yes,’ she eventually admitted to Yiannis, keeping her voice low. ‘A bit of both. I thought being here would make me feel alive, energised, but all it’s done is make me miss Joe even more. And I hid away from my friends last night – I love their company, but they are both twenty years younger than me and do you know what…? I look at them sometimes, and truly admire their vivaciousness and carefree outlook on life but sometimes a dart of jealousy shoots through me. I’m not proud of it, and please don’t tell me off, but let’s face it, I could only have, like, ten years or so left! Isn’t the average life expectancy for women these days eighty-something? And even though I miss Joe and sometimes fantasise about seeing him again in some kind of afterlife when I die, there is still stuff I want to do down here on earth. So I’m not ready to leave yet,’ she shared, thinking too of the travel agency business and wanting to turn it around if she could and not have to put Molly out of a job. But she knew that it might take time. The top and bottom of it was that she just wasn’t ready to give up, sell up, retire or whatever, and be a pensioner. She needed to find a solution, and soon, before she got too old and maybe lost her mind. It could happen. Her vivacious, gregarious father had developed dementia in his seventies and the cruelty of watching, helplessly, as his shining light had diminished, both terrified her and broke her heart in equal measures.
‘Look,’ Yiannis jumped in. ‘I’m not going to tell you off, but I will say that you are being very hard on yourself, Dee, with all this leaving talk. You can’t think like that. Growing older is a gift. You have to have hope, otherwise what are we even doing here? We might all as well just give up now and shuffle off to God’s waiting room in a care facility down in Miami or wherever and watch trashy TV all day until we just stop breathing in and out.’ She heard him let out a long puff of air.
‘Oh, stop it! Who’s being dramatic now?’ she replied.
‘Well, that’s the reality if you give up and let yourself spiral into a swirl of bad thoughts. And besides, more and more people are living to be a hundred years old nowadays, easily. There was some guy on a Netflix doc the other day who was a hundred and three years old. Imagine that! You could have thirty years left in you yet.’
‘Darling, now you’re making me sound like a clapped-out old car,’ she laughed. ‘But, seriously, don’t you feel it too? The clock ticking? Mind you, you’re younger than me,’ she sighed, remembering his sixty-second birthday they had celebrated last summer, ‘plus it’s different for men.’
‘How is it different?’
‘Because society is cruel to us older women with the constant pressure to look a certain way. Look how the media’s always commenting about how “Helen Mirren looks so good for her age ” . Of course, she looks amazing, but it always comes with the caveat of being linked to her age. They simply don’t do that to handsome men like Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who are both in their sixties, though you wouldn’t necessarily know that as it’s not right there in every headline next to their name. Take you, for example, with all those twenty-something photography students on that masterclass you host every year, no doubt swooning over you with your head of thick, dark curly hair infused with salty grey and McDreamy good looks,’ she told him.
‘My what ?’
‘You know, Grey’s Anatomy , Dr Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd. He was the hot neurosurgeon.’ She paused, then added, ‘Aka Patrick Dempsey!’ Grey’s Anatomy was one of her all-time favourite TV shows. Joe had cast some of the actors in it, so they had often binge-watched it together. ‘Yes, Anthony, or maybe it was Karl, who first spotted the similarity several years ago, and then Rosie and Gina both said the same when they met you last summer in Kalosiros, that you look just like McDreamy, with your ridiculously blue eyes and stubbly, strong jaw, and I agree, you do. I hadn’t really thought about it much, you’ve always just been Yiannis, my oldest and dearest friend, but as soon as Rosie and Gina said it, I saw it again. You could be a McDreamy impersonator, you know, hire yourself out for parties, opening events and such like, turn up in sexy blue cotton scrubs with a stethoscope slung around your neck,’ she said, getting carried away with the light-hearted banter, but so pleased they were talking about something else now. ‘In fact, your new favourite magazine, Peopl e,’ she emphasised, ‘voted Patrick the sexiest man alive in 2023 so you could do very well out of this new business venture.’ They both laughed, and Deedee’s solemn mood lifted a little. Laughter always made things better; she vowed to try to remember this as she knew that Yiannis had a point… she needed to at least try to pull herself together and raise herself out of this slump that she had got herself into. If she lost hope, then who knows what would become of her? Hope is everything. It didn’t bear thinking about to live without it.
Shaking her head as if to banish the dark thoughts once and for all of dying any time soon and having regrets about not getting all the stuff done that she wanted to, she stood up from the stool into a kind of wonder woman pose, planting her feet firmly and nodding to herself. She felt stronger too. Yiannis was such a tonic. And coming to New York and spending time with him was a good idea after all, even if she wished more than anything that Joe was here too.
‘OK, enough of the McDreamy chat,’ Yiannis said, still laughing, ‘but I’ll take the Patrick Dempsey compliment, even though, he’s what… like four years younger than me.’
‘Well, there you go! We just knocked almost a decade off you.’
‘Hmm, and we can do the same for you! You easily pass for anywhere between thirty-something to fifty-something. And I see the guys looking at you. Dee, you’ve still got it going on, regardless of how you feel on the inside. Age is just a number, remember. What counts is how you feel in your heart and your soul.’
‘Oh, you are such a sweetheart, my love. Very flattering,’ she said, ‘but thirty-something is a very big stretch to say the least, even with the Botox tweakments I’ve had over the years on my face. But you’re right, I do need to perk up, and I do actually feel better already; you’ve really cheered me up.’
‘Good, and in answer to your question about clocks ticking,’ he said, ‘no, I don’t think about my own mortality. I think about today and making the most of being here right now. So let me get you out of this funk you’ve gotten into and take you for dinner while you are here – delicious food, fine wine, fantastic company.’ He paused to laugh.
‘Still as modest as ever, I see,’ Deedee teased.
‘Nothing wrong in backing yourself. We can have a proper face-to-face catch-up. Away from my mother chastising me and stopping me from having you all to myself. How does that sound?’
‘It sounds like just the thing I need. Thank you.’ She felt the feeling of panic dissipating and her hands stopped trembling.
‘Then it’s a date!’ he said firmly. ‘You could even wear hot pants and let me think all my dreams have come true again. How about that?’ He laughed harder. ‘But seriously, what do you say, me and you, just like the old days? Let’s go out together. I’ll come by to collect you and bring a fresh flower corsage for you to wear on your wrist and then lean in for a romantic snog, as you say in England, at the end of the evening,’ he added, bringing back memories of their first date after one of the photoshoots in London when he had been the perfect gentleman, the all-American boy on his best behaviour as per his mother’s instructions, no doubt.
‘I’d love that,’ she said, not really paying attention.
There was a beat of silence before he added, ‘ Really? ’ His voice suddenly sounding different, gentler and a little more intimate, somehow.
‘Oh, um…’ Deedee started, just properly realising the connotation of what he had said, ‘well, what I actually meant was—’ She laughed as a cover for the confusion she was suddenly feeling but Yiannis was already saying goodbye and ending the call.
Deedee stared at the phone momentarily, pondering on his words, before shrugging it off as light-hearted banter – then it’s a date – it was just a turn of phrase, nothing more. Yiannis and her were just good friends. That flame burned out decades ago. He’s being kind, trying to cheer me up, make me feel young again . Probably feels sorry for me. Plus, Yiannis and Joe had been very good friends too, hadn’t they? There was no way Yiannis would betray Joe by making a move on her now, and she certainly wouldn’t dream of doing that either. Absolutely not. No, she’d had her fill of flings, of frivolous love affairs and disastrous relationships, and with the experience of those terrible marriage mistakes, she could see what a good and wonderful and healthy relationship she had truly had with Joe. So why would she ever settle for something less after having had the best? Far better to cherish the memory of that relationship and think herself lucky to have experienced true love than risk trying to replicate it and just end up with regrets and unnecessary heartache. Besides, there was no space in her heart for someone new in a romantic way when it was still full of love for Joe.
Deedee sat with her thoughts for a while, contemplating the conversation before finishing her coffee and inwardly chastising herself for being way too melancholy earlier on. Yiannis hadn’t meant anything by it – proposing a date – he was just being kind. He was a player. A flirt. Always had been, she knew that, and she also knew that she would never jeopardise her enduring and valued friendship with him over some sort of a silly misguided fling designed to make her feel better about being seventy years old.