“I want to sketch a portrait of you.” The words didn’t belong in the mouth of an eight-year-old.
“I guess so. Wanna come to my house before dinner?” she asked. “It’s meatloaf night. I’m sure you can stay. Mama makes too much. There’ll be pie too.”
His hair was slicked back and parted perfectly on the left side, and he had the longest eyelashes Janey had ever seen on a boy or a girl.
“I’d be delighted,” he replied.
From then on, Beau came over every day after school and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
“You’re my muse,” he told her.
She looked up the definition of “muse” in her daddy’s dusty old Webster and decided it was an acceptable thing for the pretty little boy to call her. He was sarcastic and funny and self-absorbed but also obsessed with Janey in a way that made her feel more special than her parents could ever make her feel. Her parents had to love her. Beau chose to love her, and when he turned his light on her she felt she could accomplish anything and be anyone.
At first Janey assumed Beau’s perfectly pressed khaki pants, starched white button-down shirts, and pocket squares were the result of his having a meticulous southern mother just like her own, Miss Lorna Sweet, a legend in Charleston society and a paragon of motherhood. Beau and Janey had been inseparable for six weeks when she learned the truth: Beau was practically raising himself. His daddy was long gone and his mother, who worked as a clerk in a gas station at the edge of town, spent nearly every night with a boyfriend. Each morning Beau ironed his own clothes and packed his own sack lunch.
The Sweet family were happy to bring Beau into their fold, due mainly to his undeniable charm. “I love that little pansy,” Reginald Sweet, Janey’s conservative southern father, said after his second sazerac. Reginald never realized you weren’t supposed to call little boys pansies, even if they liked to wear your daughter’s dresses and makeup.
Swiftly the two were a pair. That first Thanksgiving Beau’s mama took off for Knoxville to spend the holiday with yet another new paramour, leaving Beau with a neighbor she’d given a twenty-dollar bill and a frozen Sara Lee. Janey invited him to the Sweet house for the first of ten turkey holidays Beau spent with them. Janey was an only child, but the Sweets had a large extended family that stretched from South Carolina to Texas, and they hosted at least forty people each year. While Beau was quiet with other children, he was anything but around adults, especially adult women. He pulled Janey aside before the guests arrived that day and told her his plan.
“Let’s play a secret game of pretend all day. Only we know about the game. We can’t break character. We’ll be a very fancy lord and lady from the British countryside. We don’t have any children but we do raise excellent foxhunting dogs. For all of dinner we can only talk about our manor house, hounds, Victorian politics, and how difficult it is to manage the servants.” Janey hadn’t been able to keep a straight face when Beau spent most of the pudding course explaining the intricacies of hound breeding to her Aunt Lois from Lafayette, Louisiana. Their childhood fantasies of this ilk could stretch for days and sometimes weeks at a time.
When Lorna found out how much Beau liked dresses and design she insisted on showing the two children Princess Diana’s wedding, which she had recorded on a VHS cassette and kept in the bottom drawer of her nightstand. Royals, Miss Lorna insisted, weren’t any more interesting or special than regular folk, except for Princess Diana. That wonderful woman was something distinct, and Miss Lorna felt a certain kinship with the princess of Wales since they both married young and became mothers within a few years of each other. Beau curled into Miss Lorna’s side on their old chesterfield sofa, barely breathing for the entire ceremony. He wholeheartedly agreed with Lorna that Diana’s wedding dress was one of the most beautiful dresses ever created—though he’d later bitch with outrage over the crumpled taffeta.
Janey liked remembering Beau as a child because he’d been so much more likable then.
By the time they turned eighteen, half the town expected they’d just get engaged and elope somewhere exotic, like Hawaii, despite the fact that Beau was so clearly what wealthy conservatives below the Mason-Dixon Line liked to refer to as a “confirmed bachelor.” Besides, Janey hadn’t had a mess of boyfriends. She found the jocks and meatheads on the football team distasteful and boring.
Beau hightailed it to Manhattan the second he got his diploma with a scholarship to FIT. She went to Princeton, hoping proximity would keep them close, but the seventy-five-minute ride on New Jersey Transit proved too long for Beau’s rising star. Those were the days right before email and well before Facebook, which meant it wasn’t as easy to stay friends with someone who wasn’t standing right in front of you on a daily basis. Even though they didn’t speak often during those years, Beau remained her constant companion in her head. She’d see a plain girl from West Palm Beach wearing a poorly chosen beret in her economics class and create a wild backstory about how it landed on her head through an accidental affair with an elderly French tourist. She heard Beau’s voice instead of her own when she made wry asides about ironic facial hair to her girlfriends after drinking too much bourbon at speakeasy-themed parties. Beau made her funnier and more interesting, even when he wasn’t there.
She went from Princeton to Philadelphia, where she finished an MBA at Wharton with a thesis on the market penetration of the single-serving candy bar, the bite-sized treat that changed Halloween as America knew it. She’d been recruited by banks and consulting firms to do a dozen different things involving algorithms and spreadsheets, but none of them were appealing. She’d only gone to business school in the first place to make her daddy happy. “My little gal is smarter than every man in this county,” Reginald would tell anyone who would listen. His goal, she knew, was to groom her to take over the Sweet business one day, the first Sweet woman to be the president and CEO.
Meanwhile, with his thick southern drawl peppered with devious wit, perfect porcelain skin, and wedding dress designs that garnered attention from New York City’s most outrageous socialites and editors, Beau was the fashion world’s new darling. At twenty-four he won his first CFDA award and landed his first stint in rehab. He’d been having way too much fun to call Janey for those six years, but once again, he needed her.