Changes of Heart Read online

  “Pretty schlocky,” Zach agreed, flipping the thing open. The inside was even busier.

  “Awful,” Janie said. “And his old consumer campaign really wasn’t that bad. I’m worried he’s under the impression that American retailers like this sort of junk mail. That he thinks he should be one thing to the retailer … another to the consumer. Not a good idea.”

  “Janie, Janie …” Zach answered, shaking his head. “You’re beginning to think like a true marketing person. Who taught you to worry about this stuff?”

  “You, maestro,” Janie replied, pleased with his compliment. “And Michael, of course. But you see my concern?”

  “Sure, this is our first retail promotion for him,” Zach answered thoughtfully. “He may be expecting something quite different. Listen, I want you at the meeting Friday. I want you to contribute your thinking.”

  She’d never been invited to a creative conference before. None of the art directors were. Michael generally presented the work, Zach backed him up, and occasionally their media director sat in. She was being asked into the holy of holies. It was a major step forward.

  “But…” She hesitated, sensing Zach was about to leave.

  “Yes?” he said, turning back to look at her. A pity she was so overweight, he thought suddenly. Her skin was really quite lovely—creamy, given to blushes. And though he didn’t generally like redheads, her hair was that pale, silky, almost blond color that reminded one of fairy-tale princesses. Her eyes were really very nice too, greenish gray and direct, her brows feathery arches of dark brown. She didn’t wear makeup that he could tell, but then why would she? She made a point of downplaying all of her better physical qualities, as if a part of her wished no one could see her at all. Too bad, he thought, registering for the first time that he really liked Janie. And Zach ended up liking so very few of the women in his life.

  “Oh, nothing,” she muttered, turning back to the board. She wasn’t about to ask Zachary Dorn what she should wear. “I’ll be there. Thanks.”

  “Ohmygod! You, in the same meeting with Alain Chanson!” Louella squealed later that night when Janie spoke to her on the phone. Louella often called Janie at home to gossip about the office and go over the list of movies they might want to see that weekend. They had become friends. No, Janie admitted, more like weary soldiers fighting together in the grueling trench war of loneliness. Louella was shrill, often silly. She was overweight in an ungainly, permanently pear-shaped way despite her endless dieting. She had a thick, porous complexion, pocked with acne scars and slick with Ramona Naturelle Baseline Satin. Her wiry brown hair was constantly being colored, straightened, or permed into a fuzzy cone shape that reminded Janie of cotton candy. But Louella was kind. She seemed to like Janie for herself, laughing at her jokes, almost reverent about what she considered Janie’s great artistic talent.

  “Yes.” Janie sighed, accustomed to Louella’s hyperbolic reaction to any and all handsome, successful men. And on Louella’s ten-point scale of masculine desirability, Alain Chanson rated about a twelve and a half. “That’s what Zach told me. He wants me to quote contribute my thinking unquote. But dammit, Lou, I get so tongue-tied when I’m nervous. I blush like a tomato. And besides which, I don’t know what the hell to wear.”

  “Okay, in the first instance,” Louella answered knowingly, “all you have to do is practice just exactly what you told Zach—you know, your concern that Chanson keep its consumer and retail image consistent. You don’t have to say anything else, and they probably don’t want you to. Secondly, you look good when you blush, I think. I wish I had color like that. Thirdly, I say we go shopping tomorrow night—the department stores are open late—and just blow the little plastic brains out of a few of your credit cards.”

  “Is Alain Chanson really worth all that?” Janie asked.

  “Janie, believe me, he is…” Louella sighed, and Janie could just imagine her leaning back on her faded rattan couch and closing her eyes, “… such stuff as dreams are made of.”

  Chapter 5

  He was tired. He leaned back against the plush upholstery and closed his eyes, grateful that the limousine’s smoked glass windows cast a cleansing shadow over the filthy early-morning traffic inbound from Kennedy Airport. He was weary to his bones, despite sleeping through most of the transatlantic Air France flight. But he hadn’t slept well. The first-class seat had far too much give. The miniature head cushions too bouncy. And that damned stewardess—attractive to be sure, but hardly of his calibre—kept finding silly excuses to catch his attention.

  “A cognac, Monsieur Chanson?” she had inquired, just as he was starting to drift off after a far-too-caloric dinner. “We have an excellent selection.”

  “Non, merci,” he had told her abruptly, knowing all too well the limitations of their carte des vins. Not long after that, she’d woken him again, asking if he’d like a headset for some asinine movie. And this time he’d been almost rude in his dismissal.

  “Non, madame, non. Comprenez-vous? Non!” He was fed up with women hovering around him, brushing up against him, longing stupidly—like chirping birds waiting for crumbs to drop—for some small sign of approval. He was sick up to here with feminine wiles. Girlish flirtations. The dangerous lure of the opposite sex. He was, he knew, still disgusted by that final scene with Lisbeth. Lovely and soft-spoken, with a dark liquid gaze and a face borrowed from Vermeer, Lisbeth had first drifted into his life at a prestigious vernissage on the Left Bank almost six months before. In a desultory way he had been buying the artist’s works for several years, and he came to the gallery thinking he might add a few new pieces to his collection. Instead, he came home with Lisbeth, assuming she would spend the night in his town house on Avenue Victor Hugo and be added to his other, far more extensive collection of one-night affairs. But though she had eagerly sipped at a snifter of his finest Martel and listened with an attentive, melting gaze to his masculine patter, she had blushed and stammered that she had to go when he suggested they retire upstairs.

  The bitch! She had skillfully kept him on a string for months, pretending modesty, striking shy, girlish poses, putting him—ever so gently—off. And she was so beautiful! She had the kind of skin—like a fine Sèvres porcelain—that you were almost afraid to touch. She implied she was terribly young—perhaps even underage—untutored and afraid of men. Oh, yes, she had played directly to his deepest fantasies! And then, by chance, he had run into the artist at whose vernissage he had first met Lisbeth.

  “Alain! Ça va? And how is little Lisbeth?” he had asked. “Still playing her innocent tricks?” Of course, he immediately assumed the man was jealous, seeking some cheap revenge.

  “So you don’t believe me?” The artist had laughed. “Well, it hardly matters to me, except that you might think me a liar and I would prefer to remain in your good graces. Listen, ask Madame Thilhault,” the artist told him, mentioning one of the most successful madames in Paris at the time. Her establishment in the prestigious Septième Arrondissement was famous for the extreme youth and exquisite beauty of its prostitutes. “Lisbeth broke free of her about a year ago. Went free-lance, so to speak. Madame Thilhault is still furious.”

  What followed was a deeply embarrassing little talk with Madame Thilhault and an absolutely devastating argument with Lisbeth during which he struck her twice. Inexcusable behavior, he knew, anger directed as much at himself as that wily little bitch. How had he allowed himself to be tricked by her—a prostitute? It was absurd! She had actually had him believing that she was a virgin. What irony! And the terribly frightening thing about it all, a fact he was loath to admit even to himself now, was that he had begun to tinker around with the idea of marrying her! He couldn’t stand to dwell long on what his cherished maman, an absolute stickler when it came to geneology, would have said to him if he had gone through with such an alliance. The whole sordid business had shaken Alain to his core, forced him to look at himself and his life in a new, far from flattering lig
ht.

  The limousine turned down the F.D.R. and started its slow, skirting descent into midtown Manhattan. Trying to shrug off his wretched mood, Alain focused his attention on the wall of looming steel and glass on his right, the thrusting spire of the Chrysler Building and, much further south, the double battlements of the World Trade Center. It was a hideous metropolis, really, when compared even passingly to Paris. But now, in Alain’s current state of despair, New York’s raw, thrusting energy soothed some deeply troubled part of himself. Its lonely, anonymous rhythms echoed his own.

  He usually steeled himself against New York, scheduling his visits with the United States distributors of Chanson and the advertising agency to get in and out of the city in one day. But that morning, like a patient resigning himself to a certain course of treatment, he sighed and decided to stay a day or two longer. Perhaps he would even ask Zachary Dorn to dinner. There, Alain sensed, was a fellow traveler in cynicism and despair. He covered it up as well as he could with humor and typical American high jinks, but Alain felt a sympathy, an understanding from Zach that he rarely sensed in other American men.

  The day brightened for Alain after that. He met with his distributors at their corporate headquarters on Park Avenue, and they presented him with figures that showed a 7½ percent increase in sales of Chanson’s popularly priced label—Chanson Chateau—over the same period the year before.

  “And this during a slump in the wine craze, Alain,” the sales director told him. “The first flush of excitement over wine coolers has faded, and so many young people are dropping alcohol altogether from their diets. Chanson has weathered the storm beautifully. Good work all around, I think.”

  And though Alain was now used to the American knack for self-congratulation, he could indeed see that Chanson was finally making inroads across the country. Whether state-controlled or private, every outlet from Alaska to Maine showed elevated volume. Perhaps American palates weren’t made of Teflon after all, Alain mused, though he decided it was much more likely that Dorn & Delaney’s offbeat television campaign had turned the tide.

  The distribution brass took him to lunch at the Four Seasons’ Grill Room, one of the very few places in midtown Manhattan, Alain felt, where a Frenchman could find a palatable meal. They toasted the occasion with a bottle of Roederer Cristal and, though Alain rarely drank at lunch in New York, he couldn’t pass up a glass or two of the champagne when he noticed the vintage; 1982 was an excellent year. Consequently, he arrived at Dorn & Delaney for his three o’clock marketing meeting rather flushed and in far better spirits than earlier that day. He managed to remember the hideous receptionist’s name—Louella—which seemed to fluster her no end. But he had been able to captivate women for so long now that he no longer took much comfort from, or even notice of, the impression he made.

  Almost everything about Dorn & Delaney’s headquarters went against Alain’s highly refined sense of taste. The furniture was terrible, the layout of the offices unimaginative and cluttered. Even the fact that they let an unattractive woman act as the agency’s receptionist—all these things irritated Alain. But he far preferred Dorn & Delaney’s lack of style to the plush red and fake teak glitziness he found elsewhere in Manhattan. Despite being a corporate officer of, and heir apparent to, a multinational corporation, Alain, like all the Chansons before him, watched every penny. Since the Great War, his family had leveraged their three vineyards on a dusty hillside in Bordeaux into one of the most successful wine export corporations in France. The Chansons nurtured an excellent grape, it was true, but more than that they knew how to get the most out of every pressing, at what level to price each of their labels, and when to expand into foreign markets. Since Alain’s father, Guillaume, became nominal head of the company in the early 1970s, the Chanson Corporation had not taken one wrong step in its drive for international distribution. It had also not spent one extra penny in doing so. Therefore, Dorn & Delaney’s economical style held an appeal for Alain that far outweighed his momentary distaste whenever he actually had to pay the agency a visit.

  “Michael, Zach.” Alain nodded to the two principals as he stepped into Michael’s corner office. The windows needed to be washed, Alain noticed immediately. It took him another second or two to become aware of the overweight woman sitting on the far side of the worn leather couch next to Zach. She had red hair, the color of not-quite-ripe strawberries. Her large eyes were terribly serious, greenish gray, like the vineyards in the heat of summer. She was, like so many women before her, staring at him with the slightly stunned look of longing.

  He was, Janie decided immediately, the most exciting man she had ever seen. Not handsome in any conventional sense, and hardly an inch or two taller than herself, Alain Chanson nevertheless redefined, the moment Janie first saw him, the masculine ideal. He was lithe. He moved carefully, almost stalking, as though he were protecting himself from sudden attack. He was superbly dressed in a dark blue Saville Row tailored suit, a pale gray cotton shirt, a striped silk tie that somehow perfectly set off the rest of his clothes without drawing too much attention to itself. His hair was light brown, closely cropped, receding just enough at the temples to show off his high, patrician forehead. And that brought Janie’s gaze, once again, to Alain’s face. For, despite the athletic perfection of his physique, it was Alain’s face that women remembered, long after they should have forgotten it.

  His eyes were deep-set, the bluest of blues and—Janie felt her heart quicken—so alive! It was as if he could see right through the world, right through her, into her heart. His eyebrows were a shade or two darker than his hair, thick, seemingly stuck in a perpetually ironic Gallic arch. He had the unstudied tan of an outdoorsman—deep, worn into the skin through wind and exposure. His mouth looked slightly chapped, and deep clefts—dimples, if the word didn’t sound too absurd in connection with him—were etched on either side. It was a mouth she wanted to taste, she thought urgently, and then almost immediately realized how insane the thought was! She blushed, looked quickly from Michael to Zach, and saw that they were oblivious to the fact that it had taken Janie less than a minute to fall in love with Alain Chanson.

  “Alain,” Zach was saying as he stood up. The two men shook hands. Michael rose, too, and greeted Alain from behind the desk. “We’d like you to meet Janie,” Zach added, steering Alain toward the couch. Somehow Janie stood, shook his hand—his touch was dry and warm and stayed with her for many hours—and sat back down again without betraying her state of bewildered passion. How quickly she learned to study Alain with the appearance of casual interest when really she was trying to emblazon his image on her memory. “Janie Penrod, one of our art directors. She’s been doing a lot of work on your account recently.”

  “Delighted,” Alain answered pleasantly, smiling briefly at her. Pity, he thought, so many American girls ran to fat. This one would have been quite pretty—perhaps even beautiful—if not for her weight. He wrote her off immediately as a woman, though he remained alive to her possibilities as an artist. If Zach had asked her to this meeting, she surely would have to have talent. Though a multitude of cultural barriers kept Alain from fully appreciating Michael and, to a lesser degree, Zach, as people, he had developed a deep and well-deserved respect for them as advertising professionals. “And so,” Alain continued, angling a chair between Michael’s desk and the couch where Zach and Janie were seated, “what wonderful things do you have for me today?”

  Later that evening, when Louella questioned her mercilessly over an inexpensive Mexican dinner in the Village, Janie could remember very little of what was actually said at the meeting. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been following the conversation; in fact, rarely had she felt so intensely aware of her surroundings. But she was concentrating on a far more important level than mere verbal exchange. Janie had tuned in to the much higher frequency of unspoken communication: the way Michael kept taking off and then putting on his glasses, how Zach sat with both hands behind his neck and his pants riding
calf-length up his legs, the way Alain’s finely tapered fingers played with the crease of fabric at his knee. Janie could easily imagine that same light methodical touch grazing over her cheek, her neck, her breasts … she had to keep forcing herself to look away.

  “Janie, honestly, I’m not asking for total recall,” Louella complained, as she dug into her steaming order of chicken with mole sauce. “Just the general gist of the thing. Like, what happened at your part? Did you get to say your piece, or did Zach do all the talking as usual?”

  “No, I said a few things,” Janie replied, pushing a soggy tortilla around on her plate. Louella and Janie usually gorged themselves here on Fridays after work, but tonight Janie couldn’t drum up any appetite. Perhaps she was getting sick. She certainly felt odd, as though Alain had somehow gotten into her very bloodstream and was pumping up her temperature. It was a new, terrifying feeling for her; this man, this stranger, had simply taken control of her heart.

  “Such as?” Louella mumbled, her mouth half full. “Or is this twenty questions? Should I guess?”

  “I just repeated what we had rehearsed, Louella,” Janie answered irritably. In her mind’s eye, she saw Alain watching her, half-smiling as she somehow got out her little argument for a consistent approach to both trade and consumer advertising. She seemed to have done all right, though, as the conversation continued to flow around her, and the meeting concluded on a positive note.

  “And Alain?” Louella demanded, almost whispering his name. In the past Janie had found her friend’s adoration of Alain Chanson somewhat amusing, if a bit pathetic. Tonight it struck her as offensive. “Do you remember what he said?”