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DeliriousSerious

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  1. Characteristically wonderful. What a fun scenario.
  2. OMG, thank you, you little darlings. Sorry 'bout not updating in the past week! I've been real busy with school, but once that's done (soon) I'll have new chapters for you guys! And some of the backstory about Renard's assistants shall be revealed!
  3. Chapter IV: Career Opportunities Renard’s house was still without electricity, so they spent the night in Andrea’s apartment. As soon as Renard walked in, he was shocked at its cramped quarter, and crowded atmosphere – she lived alone, but the rooms were loaded with boxes, clothes hanging over chairs, a general sense of domestic chaos. “How the other half lives,” he thought. “Forgive the mess,” Andrea said. “I just moved in. Eight months ago.” ****** One hour and one bottle of red wine later, the two sat on the floor of her bedroom, backs up against her twin bed. Andrea’s white Alice band had fallen to the floor by her feet. “I guess I didn’t have a real private childhood. I’ve got four brothers and sisters, all younger than me. I had to take care of them a lot, especially when my dad was sick. He’s better now. So now I just like to live by myself. But it makes paying rent hard.” “I can understand that,” Renard said. With a laugh, she quickly replied, “No, you don’t! You probably own a big building with your name on it, don’t you?” “Well, no. I don’t own the whole building. I live in the apartment with my sister.” “New York City?” “Manhattan.” “The rent would be insane. Be grateful you own it.” “I never said I owned it?” “But you do, right?” “Yes.” “See,” Andrea said, finishing off the last of the wine. “I’m a smart girl.” He smiled. “Yes, yes you are. Smart, smart girl.” He gently brushed aside some of the hair that had fallen in front of her face. She blushed a subtle red. “Do you like it when I do that?” he asked. She nodded. He leaned in for a kiss, but she was surprised when it landed not on her lips as she expected, but on her forehead. “And you like it when I do that?” There was a pause. He felt a fear grip him instantly. Had he made a mistake? This was going to be a night to remember regardless, but would it simply add to a series of painful Thanksgiving memories? She broke the silence. “I do.” The feeling of relief came into him, and converted to enthusiasm, even boldness. “I have a few things I’d like to ask you Andrea, and you don’t have to answer those questions tonight. But I would like to know soon.” She felt that strange paralysis of uncertainty come over her – one of those moments where you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to move or speak again. With courage, she summoned up the power to ask the question she wanted. “Can you ask me in the morning? Lots of times I’ve had guys ask me one thing in my bedroom at night, and then the next day they disappear. If you want to ask these questions, you have to ask me tomorrow, so I know you’ll be here.” He was taken aback. But he nodded and accepted. This one was more than he expected. That night, they slept side by side in her bed, fully clothed, in perfect silence, her mousy brown hair in front of his face, the scent of her shampoo lingering until they both were asleep. ****** Over coffee the next morning, he asked her his questions. The first: “Do you like your life here?” That question took her by surprise. “My life here? What do you mean?” “Do you like living in this town? Do you like living in this apartment? Do you like working at that restaurant?” “If you’re asking me if I’m angry at the world—” “I’m not.” “Well…I could use a change.” Upon hearing this, Renard felt a rush of emotions – excitement, amusement, even arousal. “Would you be willing to leave your job and this apartment – don’t worry, I’d buy out the rest of any lease – if you were offered a job and a home in New York City, working for me?” Andrea didn’t believe what she heard. “Wait, you’re offering me a job?” she asked – a mixture of incredulity, gratefulness, and a hint of anger in the anticipation that it was all some kind of cruel trick. Renard nodded. “My assistant. I haven’t had one for a few months now. I require certain qualities in my assistants that I don’t always find in applicants. Sometimes I just find them out in the world. I think you’d be great at it. You and me have a connection, I think you understand a little bit of how I think. Not everyone does. You’d be compensated handsomely, of course.” Andrea rubbed her eyes and looked around to check that there were no hidden cameras around. “If you’re serious, that’s a yes, Mr. Wellfit.” “Renard, please.” “Well, then, YES, Renard, yes.” “Now hold on,” he said, “There are more questions. You might want to understand all of them before we continue any further.” Andrea knew it was all too good to be true. Here she was, 23 years old and without a college degree, living in a crappy apartment, and some millionaire swoops in to offer her a job out of nowhere? She didn’t know what exactly to expect, but she anticipated trouble. “My assistants don’t do…what normal assistants do,” he began. “My job is an unusual one. I’m an artist, not a businessman. And as an artist,” he steeled himself up by taking a swig of coffee. “As an artist I have to find inspiration for my art. Models, muses. It’s always been that way. It’s not all just imagination and sketchpads. I have to have a human touch. My assistant…my assistant doesn’t just make appointments or type up documents. My assistant is my inspiration. They have to be.” She was confused. His art? She knew he owned the Wellfit Company, but didn’t know what ‘art’ that consisted of. Did he design logos and advertisements? “What do you…” “It’s odd,” he interrupted. “Some people might be shocked by it. And it’s something that I wouldn’t want to do if someone was uncomfortable with it. Comfort is a big part of it. You see, I’m make clothes, outfits. Diapers, disposable and cloth. Training and swim. And pajamas, socks. All kinds of outfits. And I can only make them if I understand someone who wears them. If I can see the process they go through as they wear them.” “You mean you’re making…pajamas for adults?” “No, no. I mean, well…” he hesitated. “You make other…kinds of clothing for adults?” she asked. She wasn’t sure what he’d say, but had her suspicions. “Well…yes and no. Every product that I personally design I first make in adult sizes. It’s the only way to have someone intelligent and articulate model it and tell me what they think when they wear it. And, yes, that means diapers. They’re in my family history; they’re my source of income, my art. They’re very serious to me. That means they’ve got to be worn before I send them out to the factories to be made. And not just worn…lived in. Slept in. Used. Changed. I have to know what I’m creating. That’s why I make the best damn diapers in the whole world. I can talk to my models, my muses. I can understand what they’re thinking. I can understand…” he looked her straight in the eyes when he said this – “I can understand what you’re thinking.” Andrea felt like she was a contestant on the world’s strangest game show. On the one hand, so many of her problems could be solved right here and right now, it seemed. She’d get out of this dead-end town and the lousy job with the asshole boss. But on the other hand, this seemed like the set-up to some story written by perverts on the internet. “Can I…can I think about this for a moment?” “Of course.” Over several minutes of quiet, she looked out her apartment’s only window. She looked at the trees, trees that a few months earlier were full of green leaves, now filled with bright colors – orange, yellow, red. “Change,” she thought. Sometimes you just need a change. The apartment around her was cluttered, messy. The coffee was cheap drip coffee that she didn’t even like. She was expected back at The Grey Fox in a few hours. Change. After a few minutes she asked her own question. “Is this, like…a sexual thing?” Renard Wellfit’s fingers gripped his coffee cup – “I’m not sure how to answer that. I don’t have sex with my assistants if that’s what you’re asking. That would be unprofessional.” She closed her eyes. She remembered the conversation they’d had the day before, where she talked about how she’d probably worn more Pampers than any other brand of clothing. “Is this so weird?” she thought. “I mean – you’ve done it before. For years. Maybe just do this for a few years, get yourself on your feet. Shit, it’s better than waiting tables.” She thought about her youth – years spent when she could’ve been out having fun with friends, but instead spent at home, babysitting, helping her siblings with their homework, potty training the youngest. In those days, at 16, ignoring texts and calls from her friends begging her to come out, she never thought she’d wind up here. Maybe that was a good thing? Maybe she needed to do something totally crazy, totally unexpected. Maybe that was what her life needed – a change from the mundane, from the boredom. She needed change in her life. And maybe that’s all this was, an opportunity for the greatest change of her life. “Mr. Wellfit—” she began. “Renard.” “Renard…I think you have yourself an assistant.”
  4. Chapter III: Thanksgiving Andrea Renard woke up and found his room unusually dark. He’d left a light on for himself before he dozed off to sleep the night before, but it was out. He realized once he looked around that the electricity in his cottage had completely shut off – lights, clocks, radio, everything. Stepping outside, he saw policemen and a crashed car before realizing that what the car had crashed into was a power line. “Oh, hi there, sir. Happy Thanksgiving,” one uniformed policeman strolled up to him and said. “Sorry about the electricity. S’gonna be out for a few hours at least.” Renard looked around and realized his was likely to be the only residence affected, seeing as how there were no other houses for miles. “Is the driver—” “Oh, everything’s fine, sir. Someone just had a little too much to drink. They’re gonna be okay.” “Ah.” Inside the house, he thanked his lucky stars that the water was still running, and took a long, refreshing shower. In the darkness he dressed, and recognized that the lack of electricity was going to seriously dampen any meal plans he had. He was never much of a cook in the first place, and now, deprived of electricity, he would’ve had to content himself with lukewarm fruit or a peanut butter sandwich. Shuddering, he finished putting on his clothes and left to find a restaurant. “Thanksgiving in a restaurant,” he thought. “That’s a new one.” The Grey Fox restaurant was the nearest non-fast food restaurant that he could find, and he smirked upon realizing its name. “Appropriate, at least,” he thought. ****** The waitress was young, he estimated, 21 or 22. A pretty girl. Her hair was pitched somewhere between dirty dishwater blonde and mousy brown. Skinny. Eyes a deep brown. What caught his eye first, though, was the hair band. In England, they would have called it an ‘Alice band’. It was a simple, unadorned white band going across the top of her head, and perfectly framing her hair and face. The rest of her outfit was an unexceptional plain black uniform, but the figure of her face and body, combined with the black clothes and the pure white band made her a sight to behold for him. The nametag on her breast said “Andrea.” “Welcome, sir, to the Grey Fox, have you been here before?” “No, I can’t say that I have.” “Great! For first timers around brunch I always recommend the Welsh rarebit – most people haven’t tried it, but it’s—” “I’ll have that then,” he said with a slight smile. She pulled out her notepad. “A man who knows what he wants, that’s rare. One Welsh rarebit coming up.” “With a poached egg.” She jotted it down, but before she could finish saying “Got it,” he interrupted. “Bacon, of course.” “Bacon?” “And scones. Make sure you bring out butter, cream, and jam. But not strawberry.” Writing it all down, she said “A man who knows exactly what he wants. That’s even rarer.” “A pot of tea. And some sausages.” By the time Andrea had gotten it all done, she worried that her pen would run out of ink! “What, um…what kind of tea do you want?” “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Renard replied. “I’ll leave that up to you.” “Well, there we go. One Thanksgiving brunch feast coming up,” she said. Upon hearing the word Thanksgiving, Renard flinched a bit, but made sure to hide it until she walked away. When she began to lay out his plates of food some time later, she looked over the vast food empire he was preparing to conquer and remarked, “Now that is a lot of food for such a skinny boy. Sure you’re going to be able to eat it all?” “Trust me,” he said, taking her in his sight. “I am very hungry.” She chuckled and took a look around the restaurant. He was the only customer. “Look…you don’t mind if I sit with you for a moment. My feet are killing me and I’ve got a break coming up as soon as I finish with customers, which just means you. And—” she surveyed the plates again. “…it looks like you might be hear for some time.” “Not at all.” He ate his food without saying a word but only looking at her from time to time. She, on the other hand, sat across from him but mostly stared out the window at the autumnal scene outside. When he was done eating – and true to his word, he had finished all of it, down to the last bit of sausage – he sat sipping tea and regarded her with curiosity. “You’re a quiet one,” he said, teasingly. “Only when I choose to be.” In the few words they had exchanged to each other, Renard had detected in Andrea the traces of a lisp she had been trying to suppress. He looked at her nametag. “So,” he began, “is it ‘Ann-dree-uh’ or ‘On-dray-uh’?” She smiled. “Ann-dree-uh.” “It’s a pretty name. Over here. In Italy, it’s a man’s name.” “And what is yours?” “Something close. You rearrange the letters in your name and you almost get mine.” “You’re too clever for it to be ‘Andre.’ Or ‘Andrew.’ I guess that makes it…” she paused for a moment. “Renard.” He was impressed. She had even gotten the pronunciation right and everything, not the awkward, stomping ‘Rin-urd’, but the open, welcoming, French Renard. “Very good!” “That’s a pretty name. Over here. In France, it’s a fox.” He chuckled. She was witty. “Have you ever been to France?” he asked. “No. I’ve never been out of the country. But maybe one day. Have you ever been to Italy?” “Oh, yes,” he said. “Several times.” “Vacation, work?” “Both, actually.” “And what do you do for a living, Mr. Renard?” “Well, I am the creative director for a company that makes baby products. Mostly diapers.” “Oh, really – any one that I would know?” “How well do you know diapers?” She laughed. “I’ve had my experiences with them. I mean, doesn’t everybody for a few years? In terms of sheer articles of clothing, I’ve probably worn more Pampers than I have any other one brand of clothing, right?” He admitted she stumped him with that one. “Couldn’t say.” “Plus, I come from a big family. Lots of little brothers and sisters and baby cousins. So come on, what’s the company?” “Wellfit Diapers.” She took a moment. “Ah. Those are the expensive diapers. We never had those around my house.” “I recognize that they can be too pricey for some.” “But I guess that’s not up to you, is it?” He wondered if she knew more about him than she let on. He figured he might as well give the game away right now. “My name is actually Renard Wellfit. I’m the primary owner of the company, along with my sister. It was my parents’ company first.” “Oh, I didn’t mean anything by—” They were interrupted by a stocky, balding manager. “Excuse me, sir, is Andrea here bothering you? She can get a little chatty.” With the last comment the manager directed his eyes towards Andrea. “Not at all. In fact, I was enjoying her company quite a bit.” The manager was befuddled, “Oh, I see. Well, I hope she knows that her break is ending pretty danged soon.” “Yes, Mr. Minnelli,” she sighed, and lifted herself from the chair. “Andrea, wait,” Renard said. “What time do you get off work?” “Oh, um…five o’clock.” Renard shifted around his pockets until he found a business card. He handed it to her. “If you’re not doing anything, feel free to call the cell phone number I have on there. We’ll figure out something we can do together.” His heart briefly stopped when she let out a smile while looking over the card. “Well, Mr. Wellfit, I am not doing anything later. Or at least, I wasn’t.”
  5. Chapter II: Thanksgiving Eve It was November 21st – the day before Thanksgiving – and Renard Wellfit wished he was in his cottage in the countryside, instead of surrounded by people in Manhattan. Even in the confines of his Upper East Side penthouse, protected by a doorman, security guards, and his devoted sister Cecilia, he still felt too exposed. He enjoyed New York’s culture, its art, its ease of access to so much of the world, but he was a loner at heart, and especially around this time of the year, he mostly wanted to be left alone. As he put on his coat and made his way into the hallway of his apartment building, he wondered if he could just skip going into the office altogether, but he knew that Cecilia would insist on it. So, he quietly and grudgingly made his way to the elevator, then down to his chauffeured car. Along the ride to the office, he pored over his sketches. His newest designs were supposed to be ready in time for Christmas, but he was cutting it awfully close by not having submitted his sketches yet. He looked over what he had to show – tasteful green “holly” lining around the leg gathers and cartoonish red “reindeers” in the front. He smiled, feeling a satisfaction in his work. He had taken his time on it, and the results seemed to be worth it. When he arrived at the main office, on the 53rd floor, the CEO of the company, Jeff Linkhorn greeted him with an unctuous grin. “There he is, our genius! Make yourself at home, after all, your name IS on the door!” Renard forced what passed for a smile and took his seat. “Everyone, I believe you know Renard; Renard, this is…everyone.” Some seemingly nameless corporate lackeys sat around the boardroom table. Cecilia was already there as one of the principal stockholders, having left much earlier in the morning than Renard did. “So,” said Jeff, taking his place at the head of the table. “What are you going to blow us away with this time?” Renard pulled his sketchpad out of his bag and slid it over to Jeff, who opened it and silently looked it over for several seconds. “Good. Good stuff. Real good stuff.” An old executive towards the rear of the table shouted “Are we gonna get to see?” Renard sat quietly as the sketchpad was passed around, and his latest diaper design was judged and evaluated by a group of executives who he mostly did not recognize. “I don’t like it,” said one bespectacled woman with her hair in a bun. “I thought we talked about candy canes last time. Candy cane designs. Everyone loves candy canes.” “Plus,” added another executive, a young man with curly hair, “Why is the reindeer red? I get Christmas colors, but reindeer should be brown.” Renard tried to hide the rolling of his eyes. He responded: “Brown…is not a color you want to see on a diaper, Mister…” “Um, Herkimer. I take your point. Wish I had thought of that.” “But what about the candy canes? Candy canes are cute, and they tested well in our focus groups,” the other executive interjected. “Candy canes are cute,” Renard replied, “and I think we should include them in some of our other products. In fact, I have designs for baby socks on the next page that feature a candy cane design. But I noticed that some of our competitors have begun using candy cane designs. And I don’t wish to have my work be seen as unoriginal.” “Oh, to hell with originality, who do you think you are,” the executive said. “Picasso?” A silence fell upon the room. “May I have my sketchpad back please?” said Renard, quietly but firmly. More silence. Jeff Linkhorn butted in. “Now, Renard, let’s be reasonable here. She’s just saying, these designs are ephemeral by nature. I mean, think about what we make here. Diapers. Your designs are cute, original, even beautiful, but think about what they’re used for, Ren. They’re waste-catchers. They get thrown out. Several times a day, per person. Maybe we can use a focus-tested design for once.” “If that’s what you think about my work, Mr. Linkhorn, perhaps you’re in the wrong company. You go work for Pampers and make ‘waste-catchers’ but I make clothes, clothes for a very particular client, a client who can’t tell us what they think, but a client just the same. And I take this seriously.” He shot up from his seat, reached across, the table, and grabbed the sketchpad. “We use my designs. Now I am done for today.” Without saying another word, he tore the sketch of his latest design out of the sketchpad, slammed it down on the table, and walked out. Cecilia followed him. “Hey—” she managed to say, catching her breath trying to catch up with her younger brother who was angrily striding to the elevator. “Cecilia.” “Renard. There’s no need for you to act like that in there. They all know who signs the checks, who keeps the money coming in, you don’t need to throw a tantrum to get them to do what you want.” “I don’t care if they do what I want – I know they will anyways. But I need them to respect what I do.” “Those are the people who respect what you do. And they want a design they can sell and they can make money off of, and maybe you should listen to them at times. At you certainly won’t gain their respect but throwing your toys and acting like a big baby.” Renard suppressed a chuckle at her use of simile. “Cecilia, you don’t really think they’re right, do you?” “They’re idiots, for the most part. But they are right that are primary target aren’t going to even know the difference. We work with baby products, Renard. Our clients are discerning, even if they’re parents are, and for the most part, they just want something that’s cute, not something that’s original or creative.” The elevator door dinged. Before the doors opened, Renard said “I think they know. The babies. The ones who wear. I think they know what they want. Even if they can’t say.” The doors opened, and he stepped inside. “Come on, Renard—” “I’ll be upstate, Cecilia. See you later.” As the elevator doors closed and he was gone, she quietly mumbled under her breath a quick "Happy Thanksgiving, brother." ****** He gave the chauffeur the rest of the week off and drove upstate himself. During the lengthy, quiet drive, he played no music, no talk radio, was alone with only his thoughts and the road. He hated Thanksgiving. November and December competed for the inauspicious title of “Renard’s Least Favorite Month” year after year, soaked as they both were with the dew of bad memories. He looked forward to January at least. Cecilia was always cheerier around his birthday, and the idea of a new year promised new starts, away from the pains of the past. But 47 would be an odd year, he had no doubt. He wished he could skip from 47 over to 48, just so he wouldn’t be pestered with the reminder of his mother. He pushed the memory aside as much as he could, and focused on the colors of the leaves on the trees. “Interesting colors,” he thought. “We don’t use orange enough in our designs. It’s an expensive dye but it should be worth it.” He made a mental note for a future sketch, and drove on. By the evening he was settled into a quiet night at the cottage, just himself, his sketchpad, and nature. After hours of silence during his drive, he played a record. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Rich, emotional music. He let the music fill him inside as he drifted off to sleep. The record stopped playing and soon only the sound of the wind shaking through the limbs of the trees could be heard.
  6. Hey you beautiful people ❤️. I've been gone for a bit, but now I'm back and here with a story that I hope you'll like. I started two in the past but they both got swallowed up, I guess! This one has kind of a sad beginning, I think, but I hope you'll really like it. It began as a kind of homage to a recent movie I liked quite a bit, I wonder if you can guess which one! WELL-FITTED ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter I: An Important Man Renard Wellfit was an important man. He employed thousands of people, and his products were sold across the world. People's livelihoods depended on him -- and not just employees and family members, but people who had never even met him, people who couldn't tell you him first name. Every aspect of his life he approached with an identical level of attentiveness and care, as he saw it all as equally important – his job, his family, his private life, all of it. In fact, to separate those three aspects – the job, the family, the private life – provides a misleading picture of his life. All were interconnected. And everything other aspect of life sprang originally from the job. He was tied to the job since before birth, it was in his family. His father was an Englishman who moved to the U.S. as a young man, and the founder of the Wellfit Company. The Wellfit Company made a number of products aimed at babies and small children. By the time of the 21st century, their products included rash creams and body washes, shampoos and conditioners, pacifiers and teethers, bibs and wipes, and all manner of bodysuits, rompers, and bootees. And then there were diapers. Diapers were the Wellfit Company’s raison d’etre. They began making them in the early 1970s, when Pampers (and soon Huggies) began making the first mass produced disposable diapers. Wellfit Senior, then a junior executive for a Manhattan consumer goods firm, saw room for profit, and moved accordingly. Wellfit Diapers were never as widely sold or as popular as Huggies, Pampers, and Luvs, but they remained a solid seller nevertheless. Wellfit Senior was a more-than-capable businessman, but he was had not even an inch of a creative bone in his body. He was a blunt, unromantic man, pragmatic to the point of lacking imagination. He demanded perfection but didn’t know how to achieve aesthetic perfection except in hiring the most accomplished of artists and designers. And he had one in Renard’s mother. She was a Frenchwoman of peasant stock, from a rural farming family that couldn’t manage to tamp down her dreams of greater things. In Paris she became a model, and then a fashion designer. She lived through the age of chic, Coco Chanel, and the Swinging Sixties. At the age of 33, after fifteen years in the fashion game, she met Mr. Wellfit, an older divorced man on the verge of starting his own business, at an Upper East Side cocktail party and the two bonded quickly. They were married in 1971, the same year Pampers changed its industry forever by replacing diaper pins with tapes. Within nine months, the Wellfits were gifted with a son, whose mother chose to name “Renard” in remembrance of her French origins and in the hopes he would be as simultaneously cunning and cute as a fox. The boy was her life. Gone were the days of parties and photo shoots, modeling miniskirts, designing dresses, as the mother devoted herself totally to her baby boy, at times almost forgetting that she also had a stepdaughter, a precocious 5-year-old named Cecilia. Little Renard was her muse — when The Wellfit Company stumbled out of the gate trying to distinguish itself from the better-known Pampers, Mrs. Wellfit decided to take charge and begin designing diapers herself. She applied all the creativity and artistry she had previously reserved her dresses and lingeries, and created the design of Wellfit’s first successful diaper. She wasn’t content to just have plain, boring white diapers — she demanded color, decoration, everything that would make her baby undeniably the cutest on the block. Every design she attempted and considered she first tried out on Renard. And not just for appearance, but for delight as well. If Renard seemed uncomfortable or fussy, she throw out the design and started over until she had one he could wear with comfort, ease, and pleasure — at rest and at play. Her husband argued only one successful design was necessary, and that spending the time creating more would lead to higher costs, but when Mrs. Wellfit insisted, she insisted. Through Renard’s infancy to toddlerhood, his mother came up with new designs every few months. Wellfit Senior was right on one count — this was expensive. And the prohibitively high costs meant that Wellfits were never stocked as often as Huggies and Pampers by hospitals and daycare centers as the years went on. They were more expensive, a higher-quality diaper of an almost artisanal sort, for more discerning and well-to-do parents. But they sold well enough to keep Renard Wellfit, his sister Cecilia, and their parents in high society, with homes in England, France, and the United States. The two children were homeschooled by their mother and various hired tutors who came and went. They socialized little with other children, and Renard never developed a fondness for children, even at a young age. Their mother taught them the principles of design and craft, how to appreciate beauty and art, and how to expect it in both their life and their work. But Cecelia never developed the skills that her stepmother had, and was outshone by her younger brother whenever he had a sketch pad in his hand. At 13, Renard was sent off to an elite British boarding school, where his father hoped the quiet, sensitive boy would become “a man.” That day in late summer, when he saw the plane, the private jet flight from New York to London, that would take him away for the first time from his beloved mother, he cried. On the airport tarmac, she looked him over and through his tears he saw her move to kiss him on his forehead. "Mon petit renard," she said. "Everything will be alright." And punctuated those words with her kiss. He hated boarding school. He hated the stifling, uncreative atmosphere, where he had to spend so much time on Latin and calculus he could hardly find time for his sketches. He hated the forced sociability, all those boys with their strutting macho power games and hierarchal cliques. And he hated not being able to see his mother, and that she couldn't see him. When Thanksgiving came around, Renard begged his headmaster to let him go home, to be with his family. But the headmaster simply tut-tutted and told the young boy that he would not be giving him time off for an American holiday of all things. Renard sighed and accepted his fate, knowing he could at least count the days 'til Christmas holiday. But that December, with his first term at school over, when his plane landed at New York, he was met not by his mother, as he expected, but only by his father, dressed all in black. ****** Almost nine years after they buried his mother, Renard graduated from design school and took his first job at the Wellfit Company. Within a year, he was creative director, one of the youngest in the world. But after all, he was a natural, and born into it. And after a few more years, when Wellfit Senior finally succumbed to the high blood pressure that had plagued him his whole adulthood, he became primary stockholder and Chairman of the Board of the Wellfit Company. But he was never suited for business leadership, truth be told -- the boardroom meetings, discussion of IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, they all bored him. It was the craft he cared about, the product, particularly the diapers. He left the running of the stocks and the accounts to the lawyers and the MBAs while he focused on what his mother taught him: passion for your art. He kept up her commitment to producing new designs every few months, splitting his time between the corporate office, the Manhattan penthouse apartment he called home, and his cottage in the countryside, where he could go for quiet reflection. Cecilia shared the apartment with him, and kept his affairs in order, calling the office when he felt too ill or bored to come in, handling job-seekers and the occasional finance reporter, making sure everything got paid and stayed running. They had lived this way for 25 years. By now he had grown into a tall, handsome man. Despite his love of large meals, his fast metabolism (inherited from his mother) and his penchant for swimming had kept him trim, with long limbs that draped over the furniture as he rested. His hair was once dark, but had begun its transformation into silver. He combed it every morning in the same way, and used a pomade to make it stay the way he wanted. His face was unlined, unweathered. There was something oddly ageless about him. He looked neither young nor old exactly, but like a Roman coin dug up from an archaeological site -- at once ancient and new. He dressed immaculately -- never leaving the house without perfectly crafting his appearance for the day, and in chilly weather usually accompanied by a fashionable scarf. There was never a stain nor a speck of lint on his clothes. His voice was a quiet baritone, with the traces of his British father's accent clinging stubbornly to his natural American one. One day, while performing his ritual combing of the hair, he remembered that the next January he would turn 47. It was the same age his mother was when she said goodbye to him for the last time.
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