Chapter 5: An Interlude in Paris

While in New York Jonathan toyed with the idea of visiting NYU and seeing if he would by chance bump into Lydia, his art student one-night stand he picked up at a chic party of New York’s artsy-fartsy crowd. He knew though that was not a good idea, he had given her an open invite and she didn’t take him up on it, so he thought it best to let her be. He did, however, check out the website for the art department and found displays of their different students. Lydia O’Neil was her full name. Some of her paintings won several different awards and recognition.

When he returned home he decided to do something he never really considered before. He called the department and ended up speaking with the chair. She spoke very highly of Lydia, her work, her motivation, and her future. She needed one more year to complete her degree so Jonathan made a donation to the department to offer Lydia a special one-year full fellowship with a monthly stipend anonymously. It was bloody expensive, but at this point in his life, one hundred thousand wasn’t going to set him back much, it was less than he earned in a month from interest on all his money.

The next step was to get rid of his private company. Over the past ten years, Jonathan branched out on his own professionally, building up a company consulting on mergers and acquisitions, with a particular focus on the change environment and how to merge different teams of employees with very different cultures of work. He now had eight regular employees and a slew of people on contract and partnered with other firms on large projects. While he loved the work, managing his own company was more than he cared for. With his inheritance, he could sell the company and then work as an individual consultant for other firms when, and if, he wanted to. While in New York he had a few meetings with larger companies about the possibility of selling his. There was definitely interest, as he was based in the Silicon Valley and had working relationships with a lot of big tech companies that loved to eat up smaller start-ups. He worked with his lawyers, got a proper evaluation of his company’s value, and settled on an asking price. Given his locale, his client list, and the fact that over the past three years the company was growing, the value was higher than Jonathan initially estimated. With the divorce, work became his escape, so he put a lot of time into gaining new clients over the past year. He was astonished to find that there were a number of bigger firms interested in his, as a boutique set-up, leading to a bit of a price war between two companies. He ended up getting significantly more than he expected. While it was nothing compared to his inheritance from Chas, the idea that on his own he created over ten million dollars in wealth by the age of 38 pleased him.

Following on the heels of his largesse to Lydia, he decided to do one more good Samaritan donation. With the help of his financial manager and lawyer, he made a gift to Brie of one million dollars to help her set herself free. He felt for her; somehow over the couple of days they spent together, he saw a woman in need of a security blanket who was otherwise trapped in a number of troubling, if not outright abusive, relationships. He instructed them to give her the money anonymously, though didn’t have much hope that she would not figure it out. He only hoped that she would not think he was somehow paying for their time together or that he was giving her the money in the hopes of reconnecting. A few days later he received a call from Lynn.

Without even saying hello, she let him know “God if I was there with you right now, I would jump your bones! I can’t believe you did that. You know she has been crying in her room for a day now. She doesn’t even know how to respond, to thank you.”

“Well, hello to you too. And yes, if you were here, I’d let you jump my bones, Brie or not!” he replied, laughing.

“Yeah, well, we probably would be in your bedroom regardless, but, you know what I mean. If any of us knew where you actually lived, I know you’d be having an orgy with seven girls right now. How? Why? I’ve never heard anyone doing anything like that. She’s beside herself. You know she broke off the engagement. She actually did it. Before you gave her the money. It was the first thing she did. He’s furious and her mother is irate, but she felt so good. And now this. Now she can actually move on and not feel any regret. It was perfect timing. How can any of us thank you? This is unbelievable.”

“I don’t need any thanks. It just occurred to me that there was a need and the means to meet that need happened to fall into my lap. Brie has potential, she just needs the space. Hopefully, this will give her some so she can get herself on track. My few days with you all were amazing. It was eye-opening. It is I who owe you all thanks. And not just for the out-of-this-world sex. Especially you, Lynn. You are amazing.”

They chatted a bit more before saying their goodbyes. Jonathan asked her not to share his number with Brie, just knowing that she would do something productive for herself would be thanks enough.

It was now time to plan his trip to France and check out the villa where his uncle had been living for the past decade. As he sorted through the papers about the villa, he came across another note from Chas.

Once again Jonathan found himself tearing up thinking about the missed opportunities he had to connect and spend time with his uncle.

Included in the papers was Juliette’s phone number which he called immediately, feeling in the mood to get lost in Chas’s world.

They chatted a while, crying over Chas’s death, laughing over the hideous behavior of Margarete when she visited for the funeral and her anger over being excluded from the will. Juliette shared with him details of the villa and Chas’s life before he tragically died. They then talked on and on, about this and that, and soon, given the time difference, Jonathan realized that it was quite late for her. He told her he would inform her once he fixed his travel plans, but hoped to be there in about two weeks.

He first decided to spend a few days in Paris taking in the sights, a city he hadn’t visited since he was a kid and went with his mother. He tried to recollect some of the memories of her love of the city of her birth, but it had been many years and he was young at the time. Regardless, he felt comfortable being there, despite the tourists, despite some rude Parisians, and despite the overhype about the city. He spent time wandering the neighborhood where his mother spent her childhood, eating in very local places away from the tourist areas, and enjoying just sitting in different parks and watching the world go by.

Of course, he did the rounds of the tourist areas too, overtaken by loud Americans and highly consumeristic Chinese. In his fancy, and quite expensive, hotel, there were a number of Chinese tourists, including a group of young women, he assumed college-aged. He noticed them in the restaurant his first-morning having breakfast. He then, quite by chance, bumped into them around the Louvre. He approached them, mentioning the hotel and one of them recognized him as well. There were five of them, four were friends who just graduated from high school and their parents were providing them with a summer trip to France. The fifth was the younger sister of one of them. He was a bit surprised to find a group of 16-18-year-old girls being given free rein to travel on their own, particularly Chinese, but knew there were some extremely rich Chinese these days, and very spoiled. These certainly seemed to fit into that category. Particularly when they went on about needing to head over to Champs-Elysees to do some more shopping. He had done some work in China over the years, spending time in Shanghai mostly, but also in Hong Kong, and picked up a bit of Cantonese, but also some Mandarin, and forever getting them confused. He tried out his Chinese linguistic skills on them, eliciting a bit of laughter from the girls. Fortunately for him, they were all fluent in English, though didn’t know any French. For whatever reason, they were a pleasant distraction and he ended up walking around a little bit with them before they headed off shopping, something he avoided. He became a bit of a translator for them with his equally limited French.

The next morning at breakfast he found himself invited to join them and was quickly talked into taking them to some of the off-the-beaten-track places. Spending the day with five beautiful young ladies seemed daunting, but he found it refreshing as well. By mid-afternoon though, he was spent, despite the fact that the girls were ready to go back to Bon Marche for even more shopping. The youngest, Mai Lin, also said she was exhausted, so the two of them headed back to the hotel.

Along the way, Mai Lin chatted about how eye-opening this trip was, it was her first time in Europe, and she was obviously excited by all the things she had seen and experienced. She was certainly caught up in the myth, as Jonathan saw it, of Paris as the city of romance. She talked about the cafes, the bridges across the Seine, and of course the Moulin Rouge and the made-up red-light district. She also showed a lot of enthusiasm about French fashion and the women going braless and the short skirts, and all the amazing clothes she bought. Of course, she also shared gossipy information about all the girls, their boyfriends back home, the two that liked to sleep together, thinking none of the others would know, and their pact to all lose their virginity, or if they already had, to sleep with a foreigner. That certainly piqued Jonathan’s curiosity. Not that he had any interest in taking the virginity of an underage Chinese teen, but the insights into Chinese youth attitudes, at least among the filthy rich, were intriguing.