Until the End of Time (3 page)

A week later, he was driving to Boston to meet with one of their clients, about setting up trusts for his grandchildren, when he stopped to get gas halfway there. It was March, it had been a long, bitter-cold winter, and it was snowing again. He got out of his car, while the attendant filled his tank, when a rental truck lumbered in, and a woman jumped out impatiently waiting for service. He watched her for a minute, and as she turned toward him, squinting in the snow, he saw the Russian fur hat again. And this time he was absolutely certain that their meeting was fated. How could he run into the same woman twice? He had thought he’d never see her again. He was smiling when he walked toward her, and she looked up at him in surprise. He acted as though they’d already met.

“I left you a message,” he said, looking at her cautiously, “but I
don’t suppose you got it.” He was smiling down at her, like a kid at Christmas, and feeling foolish again. He felt fourteen years old, while she looked so cool and poised.

“I think I did.” She smiled back at him. “You’re a lawyer, right? I haven’t gotten into any trouble yet.” She still had his card somewhere in a coat pocket or on her desk. She remembered that his name was Bill Sweet. For some reason, it had stuck in her mind.

“What’s with the truck?” he teased her. “Are you driving away from a bank robbery, or moving furniture for a friend?”

“I’m doing a shoot in Massachusetts.” It was a story about an important socialite, being shot by a famous French photographer. “For
Vogue
,” she added for good measure.

“I tried to get in touch with you after I saw you at the Plaza. They wouldn’t tell me your name, which makes sense. I probably sounded like a stalker.” She laughed at what he said, and the earnest look in his eyes. He looked like a nice guy, and she could see he was nervous talking to her, which touched her. Most of the men she met were sophisticated and blasé.

“They’re used to stalkers where I work. Most of the time they’re after the models, not the assistants,” she said with a wry look. Her fur hat was covered with snow again, just like the first time. He couldn’t believe he’d actually run into her again. It was the best luck he’d had in years, possibly ever.

“Their mistake,” he answered her comment, as the attendant serviced her car. “When are you going back to New York?” he asked her, feeling breathless. What if she said it was none of his business? He was a stranger, after all. It was a Thursday afternoon, and he was going back the following night, for the weekend. He had a date
on Saturday with a girl he’d been seeing for a month, had nothing in common with, and didn’t really like, but she was the younger sister of his brother’s wife, and Bill had nothing else to do. He knew a thousand girls just like her, but not one like Jenny. He could already tell. Everything about her was exciting and different.

“It depends when we finish the shoot,” she said vaguely. “Saturday or Sunday. I’m driving all the props up to dress the set. I’ll be the last one to leave.” He was sorry he couldn’t offer to drive with her. He had a feeling he would have enjoyed it. She looked like she laughed a lot. There was a twinkle in her eyes.

“Would you like to get together next week?” he asked bravely.

“I would, but I’ve got three shoots back to back. That’s what I do. I style for the magazine, which means I’m in charge of a lot of their photo shoots, for the back of the book, the fashion section.” He nodded, trying to pretend he knew what she meant, but he didn’t. And he could hardly concentrate when he looked at her. All he could see were her beautiful big blue eyes, her smile, and her sensual lips. And he couldn’t tell if she was brushing him off or was as busy as she said.

“Do you get a day off?” he asked, looking hopeful.

“Once in a while. Not very often. It’s kind of like being married to your job.” She looked as if she didn’t mind it, which made him curious about her.

“Do you like what you do?”

“I love it.” She looked happy as she said it. “This is what I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Drive a truck, delivering furniture?” he joked, and she laughed.

“Yeah, something like that. You can come to one of the shoots if
you want. We’re doing two in a studio next week, and one on location in Harlem, at a nightclub called Small’s Paradise. We rented it for the night. I’ll probably get a dinner break around ten
P.M
. You can meet me there, and we can do KFC, or a funny Chinese place we eat at sometimes when we’re uptown. It’s a dive, but the food is terrific. I can’t take long though. I’ve got four big models that night, they’re flying in from London and Milan.” It sounded like fun to him. And he would have agreed to meet her on a subway platform, with or without food.

“Sounds good,” he confirmed, and she told him where to meet her on Thursday night, and said she’d call if anything changed. And then he thought of something he needed to know urgently. “What’s your name?”

“Jenny Arden. You can call me at
Vogue
if anything changes. I have a pager, but I only use it for work.” She never gave the number out.

“I won’t call, Jenny Arden. See you Thursday night. Have fun on your shoot this weekend.”

They both paid for their gas, and she opened the door to the truck and got in. “It’s kind of funny we should meet like this,” she said thoughtfully as she looked at him, and he wanted to say it was something to tell their grandchildren, but he didn’t dare.

“No big deal. I’ve just been following you for two months,” he said with a boyish grin, and she laughed.

“See you Thursday,” she said, and waved at him as she drove away in the snow. Bill was smiling all the way to Boston, and he could hardly wait to see her again. He felt like destiny had been very, very kind.

Their date the following week was typical of Jenny’s life while she worked for
Vogue
. Everything was moving slowly on the shoot. One of the models was sick, and the photographer had a temper tantrum. She didn’t get a dinner break till after midnight, and by then the Chinese restaurant was closed. Bill stood by patiently, and they went to Burger King for twenty minutes instead. He was fascinated by what she did, and stuck around for another hour, watching what happened on the set. He was impressed by how efficient she was. She had everything in control. He left around one-thirty in the morning, and when he called her the next day, to see how it went, she said they’d been there till four
A.M
. She said they worked all night sometimes, and as she and Bill got to know each other better, she explained that it accounted for the fact that she had no life except her work, but she didn’t seem to mind.

They dated haphazardly for the next few months, and they had a great time together. All other women paled by comparison, and he found he was learning everything he had never needed to know about the fashion world. But she made it interesting for him. And eventually, he admitted to her how little he enjoyed his own work.

“Isn’t there something you can do related to the law that would be more fun?” she asked sympathetically.

“Not in my father’s firm. They’re the best tax lawyers in New York. I thought I’d like to be a litigator at one point, or do criminal law, but my father would never forgive me if I left the firm. And it must be me—my brothers love what they do. I do as much pro bono work as I can, with the indigent, and the ACLU, and through the courts, but my father isn’t too thrilled with that either.” Bill was two
years older than Jenny, but she seemed so sure about what she wanted to do, and was on her path. Most of the time he felt lost in the woods and off course. It embarrassed him to be so much less certain than she. She loved everything about her work, even the long hours and crazy situations she handled every day. None of it bothered her, and she enjoyed the challenge.

They’d been dating for two months, when he decided to take a theology class at Columbia. It was something he had always wanted to do. He didn’t tell his father or brothers, but he told Jenny, and she thought it was a great idea. She was always encouraging and open to new ideas, and he admired that about her. In fact, he was crazy about her, and six months after they started dating, he was head over heels in love, and she admitted she was too. They had no plans to do anything about it—they just reveled in the time they spent together. And when he finished the theology class, he signed up for three more. He was taking them at night, so they didn’t interfere with his work. But he was having much more fun at school at night than at his father’s firm. By now he hated everything he did there. He had tried to question his brothers about it several times, but they both insisted they were satisfied and happy with what they did. They were both married, and their wives looked like all the girls they had grown up with. They were blond, blue-eyed debutantes, whose families had known their own for years. His older brother Tom’s mother-in-law had gone to Vassar with their mother. And neither of Bill’s sisters-in-law worked. And they’d each had two children. To Bill, they seemed like cookie-cutter lives, predictable from birth to the grave.

Jenny was so much more interesting and came from a totally different
world. Her early years in a mining town, with a coal miner father, only made her more intriguing to him, and he was impressed by her success. She had come a long way from Pittston, Pennsylvania. And he thought her mother and grandmother were lovely women who were dignified and brave. He had gone to Philadelphia with Jenny and met them both, and they had been warm and welcoming to him, unlike his own family, who couldn’t have been worse when they met Jenny. With considerable trepidation, he had taken Jenny to meet his parents at their Connecticut weekend home, over the Labor Day weekend, six months after they started dating.

His father was jovial with her at first, but Bill knew him better and saw something cold in his eyes. And his mother conducted the interrogation about where she had grown up, where she had graduated from college, and if she’d gone to boarding school. Jenny was open and honest and ingenuous with them. She told them about her father, and moving to Philadelphia. She said she had gone to public school there, then to Parsons, and she told them about her job at
Vogue
. To anyone else, it would have been a success story, and they would have been impressed. To his parents, her entire history was a crime, and dating their son made it even worse. His brothers looked at her strangely, and their wives had been incredibly rude to her and ignored her completely. As far as they were concerned, a coal miner’s daughter did not belong in their midst. If they had thrown rocks at her, their message wouldn’t have been clearer. Bill was furious and humiliated by the time they left after dinner, and he apologized to Jenny profusely on the way back to New York.

“Don’t be silly. They probably didn’t know what to expect, and they don’t meet people out of their own milieu very often. I deal
with people like that all the time.” Some of the socialites they shot for
Vogue
were truly nasty to her and treated her like a slave. Her feelings were a little hurt this time, but Bill was so upset about it that she felt sorry for him. Clearly, she was not welcome with his family—they had made that clear—which was embarrassing for him. “Don’t worry about it,” she reassured him as they drove home. “They were probably terrified you would say you’re going to marry me,” she laughed. Bill pulled the car over and turned to look at her.

“Jenny, that’s exactly what I have in mind,” he said in a gentle voice. “I don’t deserve you, and my family sure as hell doesn’t. I don’t care what they think, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I love you. Will you marry me?” Jenny stared at him with wide eyes. She knew they loved each other, but she had had no idea that that was what he was thinking. She knew the world he came from, and there was no way she could fit in. They would never accept her, and she was afraid that they would punish Bill if he married her.

“What about your parents? They’d be heartbroken if you married me,” she said sincerely with sad eyes. She didn’t want to destroy his life, but she loved him just as much.

“I’d be heartbroken if you didn’t marry me.” He was being honest. He had intended to ask her by the end of the year, maybe at Christmas. But he loved her so much, and wanted her to know how serious he was about her. His family’s shoddy treatment of her had made him want to speak up now. He kissed her then, even before she answered, and she looked at him solemnly.

“Do you mean that?” she asked him in a whisper.

“Yes, I do.” His eyes never left hers. “Jenny Arden, will you marry me? If you do, I will love you until the end of time.” She smiled when
he said it. He was so earnest, and such a good man. She had known from the very beginning that he was the one for her. And he had finally convinced her that it was destiny that they’d met. They were perfect for each other, they got along, and the fact that their paths had crossed twice seemed like more than just happenstance or blind luck. They felt made for each other, whatever his parents thought.

“Yes,” she said in a tiny voice, with tears in her eyes. “Your parents will kill you, though. I didn’t go to boarding school, or Vassar. I was never a debutante, and I’m not blond.” She was teasing him a little, but she had them nailed.