August 2015
A fortnight after the piece in the New York Times, Fabienne came into the office early, as was her habit, and smiled at Rebecca who was already at her desk, studying something intently.
“What’s that?” Fabienne asked, setting down a coffee for Rebecca.
Rebecca pushed a robin egg blue magazine over to Fabienne. “The Blue Book,” Rebecca said. “The Tiffany catalog. I’ve been sent one every year since my mother bought me a Tiffany key for my twenty-first birthday. Look at this. It’s so beautiful. And it has your name.”
Fabienne read the title on the page: “The New Tiffany Collection: The Women I Have Loved.” And then, underneath in smaller font, the words: Dedicated to the women who have made an unforgettable impression on him, our Head of Design Will Ogilvie defies you not to find something in our latest catalog that is worthy of celebrating the uniqueness of the women you love.
A magnificent pendant, made of polished white stone, the skeleton of a seahorse suspended in the center, sparkled on the page. Just as a fossil survives for millions of years, its story caught in the bones it leaves behind, so too can the love of a lifetime survive beyond time. Fabienne pendant, $110,000.
“What’s wrong?” Rebecca called, puzzlement plain in her voice as Fabienne tore her eyes away from the page and raced into her office.
She slammed the door shut and picked up the telephone. What a fool she’d been. Yes, she wanted her collection to be a success. To put everything she had into a business that was one of the loves of her life. There was nothing wrong with that. But there was another love in her life.
She’d been so busy wanting to please Estella’s ghost, her father’s ghost, the newspapers, everyone, that she’d forgotten the only person she had the power to make happy was herself. And she wanted to do that with both Stella Designs, and with Will.
She dialed Will’s number.
“Hello?” His secretary answered. Fabienne asked for Will but was told he was in a meeting. She left a message.
Then she paced for ten minutes before picking up her phone and sending him a text. Can you meet me at Momofuku Ssäm Bar at 8? I need to talk to you.
Then she walked, with a newfound confidence in herself, down to the salon for the final fittings and spent the day watching models don her samples, tweaking, perfecting, having resolutely left her phone on her desk so she couldn’t check it every five minutes. When at last the final model was done, Fabienne returned to her office, picked up her phone, and thanked God that Will’s message, brief and impersonal as it was, had at least contained the word yes.
She dashed home to shower and change but, finding nothing in her own wardrobe to suit her mood, she opened the closet in the spare room in which her grandmother had kept, in defiance of proper curatorial practices, several Stella Designs gowns that she couldn’t bear to part with. One was a brilliant green dress, probably too much for Momofuku; it was the dress Estella had worn the night she won her first Fashion Award and Fabienne felt that she could do with some of the bravado that the dress must still hold in its seams.
She slipped it on, thankful that she and her grandmother had always been about the same size. Then she made up her face and stepped out into the night.
Momofuku wasn’t far from Gramercy Park so she walked, nerves increasing with her pace, as she drew closer to Second Avenue. She pushed open the door and saw that Will was already sitting at a table, the tiniest frown on his face, and she hoped it wasn’t because he was about to say something that would hurt her.
“Hi,” she said. She pulled out her chair and sat down.
“Hi.” He looked up from the menu. The restaurant was so dark it was difficult to see if he was still frowning but he certainly hadn’t smiled.
It would be best to launch straight in, Fabienne thought, before she lost her courage. “I’m sorry,” she blurted. “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy. I had to do it though, to learn something about myself. I’ve realized I need to design the collection for me, not for the media or the skeptics or to preserve the legacy of Stella Designs. I have no idea how you feel anymore after Melissa, after being away, after me burying myself in work but I’m going to say this anyway because, if I don’t, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. And too many people live lives of regret, or don’t live long at all.”
She took a deep breath. He hadn’t shifted his eyes from her face but neither had his inscrutable expression altered. “I love you, Will. I want to be with you. I want you.”
A waiter appeared, smiling brightly, asking if they were ready to order. “We’ve changed our minds,” Will said abruptly and stood up.
Fabienne stood too, even though her legs didn’t want to. In fact her whole body would rather just stay in the chair and order a warm sake, anything other than step out onto the street with Will, have him shake her hand or, worse still, kiss her politely on the cheek, thank her for her sentiments and say he didn’t feel the same way. She could feel her jaw tense as she followed him through the door and along the footpath a little, where he finally turned.
This is it, she thought. Grit your teeth, nod, say that you understand and do not cry. Not until he’s walked away.
But instead he reached for her hand. “Your place is closer.”
Fabienne shook her head. “What do you mean?”
He drew her in to him and whispered in her ear. “I love you, Fabienne. And I want you too. So much.”
As the desire kindled by his words tore through her, she understood.
Later, in her bed in Gramercy Park, Will kissed her gently and she smiled up at him. “I have no words to describe how good that was,” she said.
“I don’t either,” he said, kissing her again. He rolled off her onto his back, gathering her in his arms, resting her head on his chest, stroking her hair.
“It’s not exactly how I thought the night would turn out,” she admitted.
“Why?” he asked. “You don’t regret…”
“No!” she exclaimed, interrupting him. “No regrets at all. In fact,” she grinned wickedly, “I’d quite like to do it again very soon.”
He laughed. “I think we can arrange that. How did you think the night would turn out? I suppose you thought we might actually eat dinner. Sorry about that.”
This time she laughed. “I’d take this over dinner any time. No, I just didn’t know how you felt anymore. But then I saw the Tiffany catalog today…”
He leaned over the side of the bed, searching around on the floor for something, locating his trousers and removing a box from the pocket. A Tiffany box. “For you,” he said.
She tugged at the ribbon. Inside the box sat the Fabienne pendant, the fossil within its smooth whiteness seeming to suggest that there were always layers of beauty, even inside something long dead, that wonder and awe would always survive.
“It’s the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.
Will took the pendant out of the box and she lifted her hair while he placed it around her neck. She turned around to show him and he smiled. “It’s very distracting that you’re naked right now,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought about how it might look on you without clothes.”
“I can always put my clothes on,” she teased.
He took her hand. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”
Later, as Fabienne walked back into the room with the omelet she’d made for their dinner, she saw him looking at her grandmother’s box, which was opened on the bedside table, the piles of paper she’d already read sitting beside it.
“What’s all this?” he asked, propping pillows up for them to lean against.
“The answers to the mysteries of the past,” she said, filling him in on what she’d learned so far about her grandmother. “I think there’s one more letter in there. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read it but now I think I do. Do you mind?”
“No. Let’s see what it is.”
So Fabienne put her hand into the box and withdrew the last piece of paper, a letter written in her grandmother’s elegant hand. Then she began to read aloud.
My dearest Fabienne,
I put this at the bottom of the box deliberately. If you hadn’t been strong enough to read everything else, then you wouldn’t possess the resilience of spirit that you need to read this. I think you do; but I know you often doubt yourself.
You’ll know by now that Xander, your father, was my nephew rather than my son. That I had a twin sister, Lena Thaw, whose existence I knew nothing of until 1940. And you’ve seen in the letter from my mother how that happened.
The more difficult thing to explain is Alex, Xander’s father. I met him one night in Paris at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I fell in love with him as he fell in love with me. But circumstances took us our separate ways. When he met Lena in New York two months later, he assumed she was me. They spent one night together. Xander was the result of that one night.
After many, many months, I saw Alex for what he was. The bravest, most admirable man I’d ever met. I loved him in a way I didn’t know it was possible to love: unfalteringly, unrestrainedly. There was nothing in the world like the love we shared.
But he worked for MI9, a British spy agency. On his last act of duty, the car he was in drove over an unexploded bomb. It was set off and everyone was killed. Including Alex. My world ended.
But I had Xander to look after. Thank God. If I hadn’t had Xander…
A couple of years after Alex’s death, gently and kindly and unfailingly, Sam was there. He’d always been there. I didn’t fall in love with him the way I fell in love with Alex, spectacularly and breathtakingly and all at once. My love for Sam crept up on me by degrees, no less real for taking its time to reveal itself. He understood about Alex and he never wanted to compete, never wanted to be anything other than who he was. And what a life we had together.
I hope you forgive me for never telling you any of this. Lena forbade me to. She thought she wasn’t worthy of a child’s love and so she wanted Xander to think of me as his mother, not her. And he was only four when Alex died so his memories of Alex were lost. Which is why I registered Xander’s birth properly. I just wish Xander had had the courage you had: to ask me about it.
Even as I write this, I miss you so much, Fabienne. You are Alex’s granddaughter in every way. And I hope you, some day soon, find a love that melds the two I had. So I repeat my mother’s words to me, as they are the only legacy worth passing on: Be brave. Love well and fiercely. Be the woman I always knew you would be.