New York for Beginners

by Remke, Susann

  “So why didn’t he ever mention Vicky to me, then? Justus, you don’t just keep something like that to yourself. I felt like a complete idiot when that woman suddenly showed up in New York, accusing me of sleeping with her husband.”

  “He’d already filed for divorce before he left England.”

  “Divorce?” Zoe gasped. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Zoe postponed her discussion with Justus about Yearning to a later date, because her head was now suddenly completely empty and full to the brim at the same time. Tom had filed for divorce. Even before he’d moved to New York and had eaten breakfast with Zoe. So why in heaven’s name hadn’t he ever told her anything about it? Why hadn’t he tried to tell her sometime later when she was in Germany? None of this made any sense.

  After lunch, Zoe walked into the conference room as though in a trance and registered with a young lady whose nametag said “Speaker Liaison.” She was given a small black microphone to attach to the collar of her blouse and a cell phone–sized sender to hang on the back of her pants. Normally, she would have been frantically going through her notes one last time and trying to take deep breaths so as not to succumb to the urge to flee the conference room, but she was perfectly calm today. It was like she was on autopilot. She introduced Yearning with a short video clip, then rattled off her well-memorized answers in the Q&A session that followed. She presented the whole thing so well that she was received with applause, and also approached by two interested investors. They came up to her right after her presentation. But Zoe only wanted one thing: to get back to her bungalow as quickly as possible and to be left alone. She suddenly felt incredibly exhausted.

  “We could meet for breakfast tomorrow,” she told Investor Number One.

  “I already have three breakfast meetings,” he answered drily. “But I’ll be doing some yoga at 6:30 in La Jolla. You could come with me, and we can talk in the car on the way to the studio.”

  “Wonderful.” Zoe pretended to be happy about the plan. She quickly calculated that 6:30 California time would be 9:30 p.m. German time. “See you tomorrow then.”

  She handed one of her shiny new business cards to Investor Number Two and waited for him to finally hand out one of his own.

  “Business cards are so last year,” Number Two said, slightly amused, as though Zoe had just asked him for change for a public payphone. “Just message me on Facebook real quick and we’ll find something.”

  Back at the bungalow, she pulled off her lucky pants and threw them at a wicker chair. Had the pants only felt a sense of responsibility to her professional life and not her private life? Zoe dug through her carry-on bag, snatched out a T-shirt, and pulled it on as a pajama top, even though the sun hadn’t even set yet. She would skip dinner, despite the potential contacts that would be there. All she wanted to do was to pull the covers up over her head and disappear from the world. She fell into a dreamless slumber.

  After the sun had set and the palm trees wrapped in strings of lights in front of the bungalow were glittering in the darkness, Zoe was suddenly awakened by the deafening wail of a siren.

  “Fire alert! Please leave your rooms immediately! Do not use elevators, only the stairwells,” an urgent voice recording ordered.

  Zoe slipped out of bed, still half asleep, and padded over to the door that led to the patio. There was no smell of anything burning, nobody seemed to be in a rush, and in general, everything seemed peaceful. Even the hotel guest in the bungalow next to hers was sitting on his patio, apparently relaxed, with his feet resting on the railing. Zoe started wondering if she’d been dreaming when her neighbor self-consciously dragged his right hand through his hair and said, “Hi there, stranger.”

  Zoe felt as though the ground had been yanked from beneath her feet. She fell backward into one of the deck chairs. Her heart beat a double staccato. “Stranger yourself,” was all she could manage.

  Tom only grinned.

  Zoe pulled her legs up onto her chair, hugged her knees, and rested her chin on them. Her eyes didn’t waver from his for a second. “What are you doing here?” she asked quietly.

  “Hoping,” he responded, smiling that charming lopsided smile that should have been illegal.

  “So the fire alert was you.”

  He nodded.

  “Nothing like a little merciless creativity,” she said.

  “I thought it was a stroke of genius,” McNeighbor said, but his expression betrayed the fact that the Master of the Universe was a little insecure all of a sudden.

  “You sicced Justus on me, didn’t you?”

  “Only a little. He’s actually interested in Yearning.”

  “And you are, too?”

  “I’m interested in you.”

  Zoe shook her head faintly. “It’s too late for that now. You should have thought of that earlier.”

  Tom jumped up and took a step toward Zoe, but when Zoe raised her hand in warning—Stop! Not another step!—he stopped short and fell back into his deck chair, defeated.

  Zoe felt better, and also a little safer, with that distance and the garden fence between them.

  “I’m so incredibly sorry, Zoe,” he confessed and looked into her eyes. “I should have told you.”

  Zoe had been imagining this scene over and over again for the past few weeks. She’d pictured him coming back to her to apologize. In her imagination, she’d jumped up angrily, yelled at him, and thrown a vase at his head. But apparently that only happened in movies. Now all she could do was say again in a resigned voice: “It’s too late, Tom.”

  He looked at her searchingly. “It’s only over when it’s over.” Then he said urgently, “At least listen to me.”

  Zoe only nodded.

  “Our little adventure on that first morning was really just another hunting trophy for me,” he admitted. “Another notch in my imaginary bedpost. There was this attractive woman standing in front of my door—”

  “Dressed only in her underwear,” Zoe interrupted.

  “Exactly. And things just took their course from there,” Tom continued. “When I heard at breakfast that you were going to work for me, I didn’t care in the heat of the moment. I thought we’d manage somehow.”

  “But?”

  “But the more I got to know you, the more I started to like you. You were so different from the women I was used to dating. Self-assured, funny—and you weren’t trying so hard to make me like you.”

  “OK, OK, Romeo,” Zoe said, not really keen on belated professions of love. “Get to the point.”

  “And that’s why I avoided you from then on.”

  Zoe felt as if she had just missed the two most important minutes in the plot of a thriller because she’d gone to the kitchen to get a glass of water at exactly the wrong moment. “Huh? I thought you found me attractive?”

  “Not just that, Zoe. I thought you were too good for me. I’d just gotten over a terrible breakup and filed for divorce. I didn’t want you to get caught up in my emotional mess.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I did.”

  “Bull!” Now Zoe was getting angry. “You just kept blathering on, saying stuff like ‘Stay away from me. I’m not good for you.’ But you never told me the truth. You never told me that you were married, Tom!”

  “But that was just on paper.”

  “Your darling wife disagrees on that one. Otherwise she wouldn’t have come to New York to publicly announce that I’m sleeping with her husband, would she?”

  “Vicky has absolutely no right to an opinion on this.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Zoe asked.

  “We broke up because she cheated on me with my brother, Nate.”

  Victoria “Vicky” Lancaster Fiorino had, as Zoe now learned, had a relationship behind Tom’s back with his brother, Nat
e, the heart surgeon. Shortly after it had begun, Nate had switched from New York-Presbyterian Hospital to King’s College Hospital in London so as to finally step out of his father’s shadow. His relationship with Tom, the firstborn, had always been tense. Nate had never forgiven Tom for not switching to an elite boarding school in Connecticut, which would have been the expected move. Instead, Tom had followed his father to Switzerland, where Mr. Fiorino had worked and researched at Zurich Children’s Hospital. Tom and Chuck had always been the closer team. Nate and Kitty weren’t very close. Later, at the American School in Lugano, Tom met Justus von Schoenhoff, who became like a brother to him. In short: Nate apparently felt like he had a score to settle with Tom.

  And Tom? He had been cheated on for the first time in his entire life. But he hadn’t told anybody—not even his parents—about Nate’s leading role in the mess. Zoe thought at first that it must have been embarrassing for him to be put in the role of the cuckold. But Tom only said that it was a matter of honor that the three of them take care of the problem by themselves, without their parents getting involved. To Zoe, that all sounded a lot like Cosa Nostra, but she had to admit that she was impressed by Tom’s resilience.

  “When I got to know you better, when I saw you at Fashion Week and in Miami and when we went to IKEA, I realized that you were a breath of fresh air for me, Zoe, just as I was about to drown,” Tom said, trying to explain why he’d broken his self-imposed rule.

  The reason Vicky had let herself become involved with Nate could be explained by upper-class mating customs, Zoe supposed. In the upper social echelons, love seemed to be a negligible factor in a relationship. Marriage was a strategic move, it seemed, even today. In New York, museums, parks, and bridges were named after the Fiorino dynasty, who, according to their family tree, belonged to the branch of Whitneys who were related to the Rockefellers and the Tafts. In such marriages, everything was primarily about preserving the family’s inheritance, or about forging an alliance with a family of the same status.

  It wasn’t as though Tom and Vicky hadn’t been madly in love in the beginning, though. On the contrary! But their passion had never turned into a deep love, Tom told Zoe. He realized much too late that he was playing the lead role in a play that had been written by someone else. A play that looked so perfect at first glance that it almost had to be reality, Zoe mused.

  Tom had had no idea that there was more than familial affection between Vicky and Nate. Then, Nate’s girlfriend called Tom from New York one night, crying and asking if Nate was having an affair with another woman. She was sure that his mistress was at Nate’s apartment at that very minute. That had sparked Tom’s curiosity, so he decided to make a spontaneous visit to his brother’s place—not only finding the suspected mistress, but also discovering, to his surprise, that she was his scantily clad wife, who was supposed to have been at a spa in Switzerland. He handed in his notice with Plachette in London and accepted the CEO job in New York that Schoenhoff had already offered him multiple times. He filed for divorce before he even got on the plane.

  And so, Tom and Zoe sat and talked in their deck chairs on their respective patios for over an hour, neatly separated by the garden fence, until Tom finally got up and asked pragmatically: “My place or yours?”

  Zoe stepped over the railing, and Tom put the “Please do not disturb” sign on his bungalow’s door.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Zoe asked. She was lying on Tom’s bed, and he had made himself comfortable across from her in a wicker chair.

  “Somehow the moment never seemed to be quite right, and at some point it was just too late. Besides, I wanted to finally do something right with a woman. That’s why I was really intent on pulling off the whole friendship thing with you.”

  “At which you failed miserably.”

  Tom grinned. “And of course it had nothing to do with what you wanted.”

  Zoe laughed, but she still couldn’t quite grasp Tom’s train of thought. “And why, then, didn’t you take a flight to Germany to come and talk to me?”

  “Believe me, I’ve been to Germany so often in the last few months that Lufthansa offered me a Senator Card.”

  Zoe couldn’t believe her ears. “And what exactly were you doing there?”

  “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I saw you buying the computer equipment for your new project, full of anticipation. I saw you having dinner with your ex-boyfriend at that Italian place. And I saw you making a huge scene with the poor guy at the train station, in front of everybody.”

  Zoe could barely process the information. She didn’t know if she should feel flattered or file a restraining order at the next police station. “Tom, that’s called stalking. That’s prosecutable. You had no right—”

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here,” he interrupted with a serious expression, “if I didn’t know you were unhappy in Germany. I’m only sitting here because I saw with my own eyes that the escape into your past didn’t work.”

  “And what if you’d found me happy?”

  “Then I would have left you alone.”

  Tom got up and sat down on the edge of the bed next to her. “Zoe, I’m very glad that you weren’t happy. Please come back to New York and to Schoenhoff. And to me. Please!”

  Zoe looked at him for a long time and then slowly shook her head. “I can’t, Tom.” Then she left his room.

  26

  It was clear to Zoe that she couldn’t return to Vision in New York. That chapter of her life was closed. But she wasn’t as sure about things with Tom. Could she—or rather, should she—ever trust him again? He hadn’t lied to her, strictly speaking. He just hadn’t told her the entire truth.

  Don’t you sugarcoat it, too, you idiot, Zoe chided herself.

  For the most part, she was a little embarrassed to have left New York on the spur of the moment like that, without giving him the chance to explain himself. But in that instant, under the Chrysler Building’s awning, she was firmly convinced that she had fallen for one of those serial offenders she’d researched for her mistress feature.

  The crucial question remained: Could she ever trust Tom again? And if so: Would she spend the rest of her life fearing that he would deceive her again?

  A knock on the door interrupted her brooding.

  “Yes?” Zoe called out. She really didn’t feel like seeing visitors right now.

  “It’s me, Justus. May I come in?”

  “If you must,” Zoe murmured and opened the door.

  Justus scrutinized her. “We were going to talk about Yearning again tonight.”

  “I, personally, am yearning for some peace and quiet tonight.”

  “Did you talk to Tom?”

  “He talked to me.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t know. I can’t just go back to New York. I never quite got over Tom, but at least I’ve found a career path that I’m really certain about.”

  “Well, that’s a good start. Because I’d like to do Yearning with you. Your presentation was really convincing.”

  Justus held out a completely drafted contract. Zoe took it, sat down on the bed and began to read. “Partnership Agreement” was written in bold type above all sorts of clauses. It was signed by Justus von Schoenhoff. The contract specified a 49-percent copartnership of Yearning with Schoenhoff Publishing, including a second financing round of two million dollars. Zoe, Allegra, and Ben would divide up the other 51 percent among themselves. The only condition: Justus insisted that Yearning would not only be introduced in the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but also in English in the US. The location for their shared start-up was to be Silicon Alley in New York.

  This time, Zoe’s commitment had nothing to do with a man. With Yearning, she had found something she really believed in. Something she was passionate
about. Yearning was Zoe’s very own organic ice cream parlor/yoga school in a nature reserve in the Kenyan jungle. She didn’t need to think it over. She signed the partnership agreement while still sitting on her bed.

  She realized something else as she was signing. To the question “What would you do if you were not afraid?” Zoe had just one answer. It consisted of two parts: “I’d go to New York to start up Yearning. And I’d give Tom another chance.”

  She jumped up, left Justus behind in her room, climbed the fence to the neighboring bungalow, and knocked on the door.

  “Zoe,” was all Tom managed to utter when he saw her standing there.

  “I can come back, after all,” she said.

  The elevator doors opened noiselessly onto the Wooster Street loft. A real-estate agent in an Ann Taylor suit strode ahead of Zoe and Tom. She was trying, unnecessarily, to make the apartment tempting to them. It was so absolutely gorgeous that Zoe was dumbstruck. During their walk-through, Zoe kept surreptitiously knocking on the walls to make sure she hadn’t ended up on the set of some movie about young Wall Street moguls. But everything was real. Together, the living room and the Bulthaup stainless steel kitchen were about the size and height of a basketball court. The bathrooms, as the agent kept stressing, were equipped with “German fittings.” Hansgrohe here, Duravit there. In the open fireplace, a cozy fire was burning.

  “It’s perfect,” Zoe whispered to Tom. “Like Bermuda in January.”

  Tom grimaced. Apparently he didn’t find her joke very funny.

  “But I insist on subtenant status,” Zoe added quickly. “I can offer $2,500 a month. For that, I’d like one of the three bedrooms all to myself, as an office.”

  “It’s our apartment, darling. You don’t need to pay rent.”

  “But I want to!”

  “Don’t be silly. That’s so incredibly European and emancipated.”

  “But that’s what I am.”

  Tom laughed. Then he gave her a kiss. “You’ll be the most wonderful subtenant south of the North Pole.”