If the Shoe Fits (10 page)

Michael Ryman rarely stepped foot in the Specifications Department—it was seen as a necessary, but hardly creative, back office function of the business—so he was unacquainted with Devon.

“Excuse me, may I come in?” Devon asked with an attempt at respect, standing in the doorway of the senior architect’s office. He thought that most of the lead architects were arrogant pricks, but if they were getting laid as much as those statistics suggested, maybe they were confident for good reason.

Ryman looked up from the paperwork he was scanning and waved Devon into his office. “Sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

“No worries. My name is Devon Heyworth, from the Specifications Department. Nice to meet you.” Devon reached across the cluttered black desk to shake the small, bald man’s hand. Ryman took it but did not invite him to sit.

“So… Devon… what brings you here?”

“Well, I saw the email about the Fullerton museum project in west Texas and I had been working on some temperature-resistant polymer alloy ideas—on my own time, I mean, well, in any case…” Devon stopped. He paused for a second, annoyed with himself for actually caring what this pompous, impolite little man thought of him.

The silence rested around them.

Then, Ryman asked Devon to close the door and take a seat.

The silence resumed. Ryman had to lift himself a few inches off his own chair to peer across his desk and down into Devon’s lap to see the piece of shiny metal in his hands.

Ryman finally conceded. “Are you going to show it to me or make me beg?”

Devon smiled and handed it across the desk.

Since then, Ryman had offered Devon every possible inducement to leave the Spec Department and work full-time on his design team, but Devon always shrugged him off. He did not want to be beholden to Ryman or anyone else for that matter. Having other projects always pending was a practical and efficient way of fending off any long-term commitment to any one particular project or designer.

Narinda’s voice penetrated his concentration. “Do you want me to pick up an extra sandwich for you?”

Apparently four hours had passed while he was working out the details of a plastic-infused concrete block that was being tested in Shanghai. “Sure. That’d be great. Oh, Narinda, by the way, have you ever heard of Sarah James shoes?”

Narinda smiled.

Devon noted that it wasn’t even a provocative smile; it was perfectly matter-of-fact and even more seductive for being so. They’d fooled around a couple of times after the Christmas party a few years ago, but both happily agreed that office romance was for the foolish.

Narinda was no fool.

“You planning a little cross-dressing weekend out at one of your fancy house parties, then? Looking for a little stiletto to go with your strapless dress?” she taunted.

She always enjoyed ribbing him about his swanky social life, and he gave her a wink.

“Something like that,” he said.

“Come on, tell me why a rake like you is interested in Sarah James? I haven’t seen any in London yet, but I got my first pair when I was in L.A. a few months ago.
Très chic
. They’re a bit much for the office, but I’ll wear them for you some other time if you like.” She winked and gave him a little curtsy. “Seriously, what about the sandwich?” She was turning back toward her desk to get her handbag, the light banter finished. He liked that about her. Fun. Then over.

“Sure, I’d love one.” He handed her a fiver and returned his attention to the screen.

A few hours later, the half-eaten sandwich was sitting next to his computer and he found himself Googling Sarah James.

Narinda again. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked over his shoulder.

“I think Frank Lloyd Wright was an ass for coming up with that open-plan office scheme for SC Johnson. Mind your own business.”

With one hand on Devon’s shoulder, Narinda was leaning over his desk and looking at the banner of images that came up with the search. A mix of studio shots of individual shoes—including a picture of brown, suede, thigh-high boots that gave Devon an unexpected wave of pleasure—and a few headshots of a very glamorous Ms. Sarah James.

“Oooh, baby!” Narinda gave a little whistle.

“I know, right?”

“I think the boots are my favorite, maybe the fetish-y patent-leather stilettos, but if I had to choose, under duress, it would be the suede boots. Yum.”

Obviously, Devon had been admiring Sarah James the Person, while Narinda had been admiring Sarah James the Product. Win-win.

“All good,” Devon murmured.

Narinda wandered back to her desk and answered a call from São Paulo.

Devon clicked away from the Internet and logged into his company’s high-security in-house website. He clicked on current projects, then clicked on North America, then clicked on Illinois, and then scrolled through the list of four projects that were underway there, trying to figure out a way to make his presence at one of the sites a necessity. The restoration of a midcentury glass house a few hours west of Chicago might work. They’d come upon drainage issues he could probably work on, but November in the sticks looked about as romantic as dishwater.

The next project was perfect. It was a Ryman design that had run into trouble because the rivets Michael had insisted on using were causing degradation of the original sheathing. The building was right in downtown Chicago and—if they corrected the mistake quickly and quietly—they might be able to stay on schedule and avoid the negative press that always hovered over expensive publicly funded schemes. Devon would be a prince.

“I think I have to go to Chicago.”

Narinda had finished her call from Brazil and swiveled her chair to look at Devon. “Really?” she asked suspiciously. “I don’t recall you ever
having
to go anywhere. Is it the Ryman rivet fiasco? You just want to go rub his face in it, I presume.”

“Well, you can’t blame me for trying. I told him they weren’t right but he had his little vision.”

Narinda could never get enough of Devon the pedantic genius. The way he said “little vision” made it sound like Ryman was a small child who had built a mediocre mud pie and not the award-winning, internationally renowned architect he was. She wished she and Devon had been able to make a go of it when they’d hooked up a few years ago, but the basic truth was that they were just too much alike: hard core realists.

“Devon, you are priceless. What else is in Chicago? I can’t imagine you
inconveniencing
yourself for the very real, but small, pleasure of smacking Ryman’s nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Fess up.”

Devon had clicked onto the full plans for the project and was already making mental calculations for the new, nonferrous, precision-turned screws that should have been used in the first place. Narinda knew better than to try to continue the conversation. Once Devon was running analytical comparisons, he could be mentally AWOL for hours.

***

The private plane began to make its descent into Chicago. Sarah looked through the small oval window and felt the familiar kick of excitement when she saw the Sears Tower and John Hancock rise like the Tetons at the edge of Lake Michigan. It was late afternoon and the early winter sun cast a magical golden glow across the city skyline. It felt like home.

When she had first decided to put her flagship store in Chicago, Sarah had never imagined that it would end up in her mother’s nineteenth-century town house. Some of Sarah’s fondest childhood memories were the mother-daughter weekends the two of them would spend Christmas shopping or going to the theater and then enjoying high tea at the Drake. After, they would spend those nights in the elegant, precious jewel box on Oak Street. Other than those occasional holiday visits, however, the building had really been more of a museum than a home, especially in the years following Elizabeth’s death.

After looking at every possible space from modern to historic while she was scouting for a location for her first store, Sarah finally realized she was living right on top of the best option. Just before her father had married Jane, he had transferred all of Elizabeth James’s former assets into a trust for Sarah, including the town house on Oak Street that had been a wedding present to Elizabeth from her eccentric mother, Letitia.

Even then, Sarah’s grandmother, Letitia Vorstadt Pennington Fournier, had been… formidable. The town house was clearly designed for a single woman, a fact that Letitia never denied. It was not a wedding present that celebrated marriage, but rather, one that offered a wife refuge from matrimony. Spindly, feminine French antiques. Impractical silk wallpaper. Over-the-top chandeliers and satin curtains. A narrow double bed. The message was loud and clear: this is
Elizabeth’s
wedding present,
not
Nelson and Elizabeth’s wedding present. Letitia had never disapproved of Nelson exactly—he was too upstanding to be disapproved of in any case—it was just that Letitia painted life in bold, independent strokes and she regretted that her daughter had chosen such a conservative, predictable man.

A few years after Elizabeth married Nelson, the recently widowed Letitia sallied off and married a Frenchman she’d met a month before on a beach near Cannes. Sarah was still very young at the time, but she had a vivid memory of sitting on her mother’s enormous bed (especially vast and mysterious to her little girl eyes), listening to her very practical mother argue with her very
impractical
grandmother. In Sarah’s squirmy four-year-old mind—the sweet pale scent of her mother’s sheets, the cool feel of her mother’s hand trailing absently along her small child’s back while she talked on the phone, Sarah playing with the big, chunky gold charm bracelet that always signaled Elizabeth James’s arrival into any room—these morsels of remembrance were just as lasting as the words that were being barked across the Atlantic cable. Words from daughter to mother instead of the other way around, words like
infantile
,
immature
, and
foolish
, and phrases like
midlife
crisis
and
fortune
hunter
.

Elizabeth Pennington James had never understood that her idea of immaturity—frivolity—was her mother Letitia’s idea of blessed social liberty.

Jacques Fournier may or may not have been a fortune hunter, but it didn’t seem to matter, seeing as Letitia had many,
many
fortunes, more than enough to satisfy even the most avid hunter. More to the point, none of the said millions seemed to hold Jacques’s interest nearly as much as the particular angle of Letitia’s neck or the color of her hair when the sun set over their villa in Cap Ferrat. He was an artist, a bohemian, and a fantastic cook. Letitia used to infuriate Elizabeth by joking that she would give Jacques at least one of her fortunes for his
salade
Niçoise
alone.

That summer when she had been trying to escape her father—and the memory of her mother, if she was being honest—Sarah spent three months in the south of France in Letitia and Jacques’s enchanting company. After many weeks lounging under their shady veranda humming mashed-up Joni Mitchell lyrics about red dirt roads and people reading
Rolling
Stone
and
Vogue
, the sixteen-year-old Sarah decided she had no desire to return to Lake Forest to finish up high school. In fact, she decided firmly, she had no desire to finish up high school anywhere. But on that point, at least, her father took a tangential stand and informed Letitia that some sort of American school, tutor, or correspondence class was required.

Sarah and her grandmother returned to the Fourniers’—well, the Vorstadts’ really, since Letitia’s father had won it in a card game on the
Lusitania
’s maiden voyage in 1907—glamorous, palatial apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. With a few brisk phone calls in Letitia’s hilarious French (she probably knew almost every word in the Gallic language yet persisted in pronouncing it like the Boston Brahmin she was…
manger
came out like MAN-jay), her grandmother succeeded in securing Sarah a place at an international baccalaureate school in Paris.

Much later in life, Sarah came to the conclusion that the disastrous accent was Letitia’s personal act of daily defiance. If all these French women could speak English
wiss
zee
sexy
leetle
accent, then she was going to speak French in a way that let them know she was a sensational, independent American woman of a certain age.

Letitia winked at Sarah as she agreed with easy assurances to Nelson James’s vague demands on behalf of his only daughter’s high school graduation requirements.

“Fine, Nelson. She will be returned to you in June of next year with a
diplôme
and a smile.”

“Letitia. Please, try to listen to me. She has two years of high school yet.” Sarah could hear her father’s voice booming through the receiver from where she sat next to Letitia.

“Surely not. She’s a grown woman, Nelson. Open your eyes.”

Sarah gave her grandmother a grateful smile and thought,
Good
luck
getting
him
to
look
at
me
anytime
soon
.

“I do not make the educational requirements for the State of Illinois,
Letitia
,” he continued pedantically. “She has two years to go.”

“And I will not adhere to arbitrary miscellany,
Nelson
. She will be properly educated, she will receive her
diplôme
, and she will make her debut here in Paris. Seventeen is more than old enough to be finished with all of that academic foolishness. I met Elizabeth’s father when I was seventeen, come to think of it. Granted, we didn’t get married for several—”

“All right, all right. In the meantime, I’ll try to come over at Christmas, but it’s been pretty busy…”

Letitia let the poor man rattle on about how busy he was and gave her beautiful, sad, lonely granddaughter a conspiratorial eye roll as she pulled the telephone receiver away from her ear and mouthed a silent pantomime of blah-blah-blah to Sarah.