Forbidden French

What do I remember most about Lainey Davenport? Her eyes. Everyone back at St. John’s was obsessed with them. They called them haunted and scary because they feared their beauty, feared her. She was cunning, or better yet, astute, like she could strike to the very soul of someone if she paid close enough attention to them. She used to be quiet, shy, young; she seems to be none of those things now. Younger than me still, yes, but a woman, so different than the last time I saw her at St. John’s.

It’s been a week since the gallery show, and I’ve pulled up the Morgan Fine Art Gallery website more than once. It’s muscle memory, typing in the URL, clicking the About page, then Staff. Her professional photo is in black and white and doesn’t do her justice. Her pale green eyes don’t pop like I want them to.

The need to see her again started as a curiosity, and now it’s festered into something hungrier, an itch that needs scratching.

Unfortunately, I’ve been busy; I’m always busy.

Just as my father wanted, I work for GHV. I’ve seen how he operates. He’s a shark. Over thirty years, he’s grown GHV from nothing. Now, we control nearly 50 subsidiary companies that each manage a small number of prestigious brands. Every top French and Italian fashion house, world-famous luxury wine and spirit companies, watches and jewelry…the list is always growing.

In fact, that’s why I’m in Boston. Even though nowadays I live primarily in Paris, work takes me everywhere. I’m in town for the next few weeks so I can assist with GHV’s acquisition of Leclerc & Co., the American luxury retailer headquartered here. The company sells everything from jewelry to sterling silver, china, crystal, stationery, fragrances, watches, and leather goods. It’s also a household name in the United States, and we’ve had our sights set on it for a while, though the purchase is not coming easy.

Last November, we offered Leclerc & Co. $16.8 billion for the buyout. The deal was expected to close by July of this year. However, during an audit of the company’s financials, our team found that they were paying millions in dividends to shareholders despite sustaining financial losses of over $40 million in the last year.

The media’s been hungry for an update, so last month, GHV issued a statement indicating that the takeover would not proceed and the deal was invalid because of Leclerc’s handling of their business during the last year. Subsequently, Leclerc filed suit against us, asking the court to compel the purchase or to assess damages. We planned to countersue, alleging that mismanagement had invalidated the purchase agreement, but we’ve pumped the brakes because the goal hasn’t changed. We still want to acquire Leclerc & Co., but there will have to be new terms and a reduced buyout price. So here I am, trying to get us out of this shit storm.

Beyond that, GHV is also opening a headquarters in Boston. For now, our North American offices are based in New York City, but we’re unhappy there for a few reasons. The building’s facilities manager is lazy and has let the building go to shit. Our employees have been anxious for a change for a while. We broached the subject of relocating the branch to Boston, and most everyone was on board. Those who would like to stay in New York City will swap to working remotely and can commute to Boston on an as-needed basis.

Boston fits our needs for a multitude of reasons. We were able to purchase a building outright here, centrally located downtown between Boston Common and Post Office Square. Our plan is to renovate it while preserving the historical architecture, which is costly and slow but will be worth it in the end. Alexander is supposed to be spearheading the renovation project, but he’s more interested in other activities, as evidenced by the party I’m currently walking in on.

His apartment is a penthouse overlooking Boston. He sits pretty up on the top floor, not a worry in the world. The life of a second-born son…

You’d think I’d envy him, but it’s the opposite. I like the weight I carry on my shoulders. Responsibility suits me. Alexander has too much free time, a perfect example of idle hands being the devil’s playthings. I know he’s using again, chasing women, avoiding my calls.

The party is worse than I expected. He’s let in half the city. I get the impression he might be performing a social experiment: leave the door open and see what oddities wander in. At this very moment, someone is fucking in his bedroom. I know it. If it were me, I’d pull the fire alarm and clear this place out. He doesn’t know these people. If I asked one of them Alexander’s last name, they’d fumble for a response.

I slice through groups of partiers, ignoring everyone. I don’t feel like wasting my time with them, not when I have an objective. I’ve told myself I’m here tonight to talk to Alexander, but there’s a nagging hope in the back of my mind.

Lainey could be here.

It’s more than possible. There will be other St. John’s alumni in attendance, friends I’ve half-heartedly kept up with since boarding school, some more than others. I search through crowded room after crowded room, hunting for dark hair and green eyes. I trick myself into seeing her a thousand times. A head of hair a shade too light. Another not dark enough. A woman two inches too short.

When I spot two friends from St. John’s, I feel my first pang of hope because one of them is Collette. I know she works with Lainey at Morgan’s; I saw her listed under the staff tab on the gallery’s website beside Lainey. How convenient.

She and Harrison are in a sitting room, having carved out a quiet place among the chaos. Harrison’s out on the patio smoking and Collette looks like she’s already a joint in, so to save myself the excruciating task of talking to them stone-cold sober, I offer a short wave then head toward the kitchen to make myself a drink.

Unfortunately, that’s where I find my brother. He’s making out with a girl, acting as if he’s about to take her there against the cabinets.

Thoroughly disturbed by the sight, I head to the bar in the corner.

“This has to be against fire code,” a gruff voice chides, and I don’t bother turning around to confirm it’s my old friend Jonathan.

He’s in Boston now, a partner in an architecture firm that specializes in historical preservation. He’s not the only ghost from my past to re-enter my life as of late. It seems everyone has convened in Boston for the time being. Even Emelia, the half-sister I used to despise so much in my youth, is in the city, working at Jonathan’s firm. I’ve come to see she’s not the monster I made her out to be. She’s even friends with Alexander. I spotted her here tonight at the party. I could have gone over to talk to her, but brokering peace with my past will have to wait.

More determined than ever, I start to root through Alexander’s bar cabinets. I need a cup that will hold a decent shot of bourbon.

“No, c’mon, it’s a small group,” Alexander argues.

The music in the living room hits an all-time high, contradicting him.

“Right, maybe I should rein it in a bit.”

So maybe he’s not completely past saving…

“Your neighbors have probably already called to report a noise complaint,” Jonathan warns.

I turn in time to see my brother groan and push away from the girl he’s so caught up with, hurrying into the living room to turn down the music. He meets my gaze as he passes by, and I do nothing but stare. I might as well be a parent trying to convey that I’m not mad, just disappointed.

“What are you, like a dad?” Alexander’s girl asks Jonathan, clearly annoyed.

And that does it. It’s one thing too far, and I can’t help but bark out a heavy laugh.

Jonathan turns, notices me, and then in three long strides, he’s stealing the bottle of bourbon out of my hand so he can pour himself a shot.

I arch a sardonic brow. “You’re late. I’ve had to endure this party for the last half hour on my own.”

He’s unbothered as he hands the bottle back to me. “You could leave.”

He’s right, I could. I hate shit like this.

“There’s someone I’m waiting on.”

He looks at me curiously, waiting for me to elaborate, but I don’t feel like it.

“C’mon,” I say, nodding toward the hall. “Collette and Harrison are here.”

Once we both have a drink in hand, I lead him toward the sitting room where neither of them have budged. Collette’s chair sits right on the edge between the sitting room and the balcony, and she has it tipped on its back legs so she’s half outside. Her head is tilted up toward the night sky. I want to ask her about Lainey, but it feels too direct, too obvious.

Harrison’s standing behind her chair, working on lighting a joint when he notices us walk into the room.

“The king has arrived!” he says, aiming a dramatic bow at me.

“I’ve been here half an hour, asshole. I already said hi to you.”

Harrison shrugs lazily. “Well then, Jonathan, that bow was for you. Interested?”

He holds out his rolled joint, but Jonathan shakes his head.

He doesn’t even bother offering it to me. I’m not against pot; I just haven’t done it in years and want my wits about me tonight.

Collette takes the joint from Harrison and inhales a short drag before waggling her fingers in greeting at Jonathan and me. She exhales the smoke in a long steady stream then tips her head back and resumes her pondering. I’m almost curious what she’s thinking about.

I take a seat on a couch facing the unlit fireplace, suddenly wishing I had a cigar, something to take the edge off this nervous energy. Maybe I shouldn’t have turned down the joint. My foot is bouncing. My gaze keeps gravitating toward the door as if Lainey could walk by at any time.

I feel fifteen again, anxious and—strangely—hopeful.

I’m not paying attention to the conversation. Collette is rambling about the sky and how pretty it is and how she can see the stars. I don’t care about any of it and my patience has worn thin enough that I finally just ask what I’ve been dying to know.

“Where’s your friend?”

“Who?”

“Elaine.”

That’s Lainey’s real name, and I’ve never once called her by it. I do so now because it’s a subtle way of putting a little bit of distance between us, like I don’t really care about the answer to my question. I wonder if I’m fooling anyone.

She shrugs. “Who knows. She’s impossible to pin down.”

Harrison speaks up. “I haven’t seen that girl in forever. Is she in Boston now?”

“Elaine?” Jonathan asks, completely lost.

He never knew her.

“Lainey Davenport,” Collette answers, rolling her eyes. “She was at St. John’s while we were there, but she’s like six years younger than us, which means you definitely wouldn’t have known her, Jonathan.”

“How do you know her then?” he asks me.

I don’t answer. I sip my drink and stare into the dark fireplace, trying to keep this burning ache in my chest from showing on my face.

When the silence drags on too long, Collette answers for me.

“She’s cool. She was friends with my little sister. I didn’t know her well back then, but she and I have gotten closer now that we both work at Morgan’s.”

“Lainey was hard to miss,” Harrison interjects.

My fingers tighten reflexively around my bourbon glass. “I’d argue the exact opposite.”

Harrison laughs. “Are we talking about the same girl?” He mimes an hourglass figure.

That’s when it hits me that Harrison has no idea who he’s talking about. Like the idiot he is, he has her confused for someone else. Lainey never had an hourglass figure, and certainly not when she was barely thirteen.

Collette doesn’t care that he’s wrong—she still groans in disgust. “She was a kid, sicko.”

Completely unbothered, Harrison goes right back to puffing on his joint, and I’m left with the same questions as before.

I want to ask Collette more about Lainey, but I hold my tongue and let my bourbon sink in while my friends continue to talk. I have no interest in joining in. I have a single-track mind when I get ahold of something that interests me. It works well in my line of business, but it can be overwhelming too. I’ve always been like this, my brain constantly whirring. It’s why I like to swim. More than any other activity, swimming has the capacity to quiet my mind. If I go long enough and hard enough in a pool or a lake, like I did back at St. John’s, exhaustion never fails to drown out the noise.

It’s almost funny to look back at that time in my life and realize very little has changed since then. Sure, I’ve grown up in a lot of ways. I’ve put my nose to the grindstone for over twelve years, and I have the accolades and accomplishments to show for it. The stench of nepotism no longer clings to me the way it once did when I was younger.

And yet, at my core, the same issue that vexed me then vexes me now.

There’s not a man on earth more tightly bound by expectations than I am. I never was able to escape that feeling even when my passion for pleasing my father morphed into passion for growing GHV. I love the company outside of him, but still, there is no doubt I am chained to it in ways other men aren’t. I’ve learned to live with it, to compensate for it in a multitude of unhealthy ways.

In any area of my life where I’m allowed freedom, I go overboard.

Take relationships, for instance: commitment makes my skin crawl. The idea of someone owning my time outside of the office is enough to make me want to delete every female contact from my phone. I’ll be damned if anyone other than my fucking father is going to make demands of me.

I also travel a lot. I enjoy the life of a jet-setter. I keep a home in Paris, another in London, one in New York, and now here, in Boston. I only arrived in the city three weeks ago, but in that time I’ve worked with a broker to purchase a turn-key property downtown, walking distance from GHV’s future headquarters. Unfortunately, it didn’t come furnished. Or rather, it did, but the furniture didn’t suit me. I had everything removed, and I’m working with a team from Pierce Waterhouse to hopefully make it livable within the next month. Oh sure, they told me lead times were well over six months for the products they were trying to source for me, but I don’t live in a world where I have to wait for a single thing. Anything I want, money can buy. So, a few weeks it is. Until then, I’m in the penthouse at the Mandarin Oriental. It’s not ideal, but it gets the job done. They have a decent lap pool and gym, and so far, the service has been top-notch.

So it’s interesting, in some way, that Lainey has been able to capture my attention at all. The very fact that I’ve been taking time out of my schedule to look into her gallery, to come here tonight on the off chance she would be here is completely out of line. Sex is sex, and I’ve not been a good boy in the last twelve years since I left St. John’s, but I also don’t know what a crush feels like. The hallmarks of longing and infatuation are utterly lost on me. I used to make fun of my father’s assistant, Wilson, for acting like a cyborg, and now here I am, halfway there myself.

I’m musing over all of this and sipping my bourbon while the party continues on without me. It’s not until Collette comes to sit on the couch that I realize Jonathan left to go hunt down Emelia. It seems my old friend has a crush. Harrison, meanwhile, is passed out on a chair in the corner. Collette kicks her feet up to rest them on the coffee table in front of her and starts scrolling through her phone.

Here’s my moment, and I don’t let it pass me up.

“So you’re friends with Lainey but you don’t invite her to things like this?”

She laughs, and for a split second I think I’ve revealed my entire deck of cards. I was too obvious—it’s clear how curious I am about her.

Then Collette shakes her head, lays her phone down, and looks over at me like I’m crazy. “Absolutely not. The girl is a porcelain doll—you know, a pretty thing you look at but don’t touch. She wouldn’t be caught dead here. She wouldn’t be anywhere outside of the gallery, and she’s not even there all the time, just Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for like four hours. Besides that, she’s kept under lock and key by that old granny of hers. It’s fucking weird, if you ask me. In some ways she still acts like she’s a kid.”

“She’s younger than us…maybe you don’t know her friend group? Maybe she’s too shy to tell you what she gets up to on the weekends.”

She weighs this option before ultimately shaking her head.

“Doubt it. I’ve asked her stuff before, like trying to figure out what she’s into, if she parties or goes out, and it’s clear she has no idea how the world works.” She sees my deep-set frown and tries to ease up a bit, holding out her hand. “I feel bad. Truly, it’s not that strange. Just…she’s nice, but I don’t know…something’s off with her.”

God, my heart breaks hearing that.

Poor Lainey.

I think of how sad that thirteen-year-old girl would be if she realized even when she grows up, people will still misunderstand her and think she’s odd.

I know better though.

And now, I know exactly when and how I’ll be able to see her again thanks to Collette.