Rich Boy

by Sharon Pomerantz

  Mostly she liked to venture below Fourteenth Street. The first time they went to SoHo, he felt nothing but dread. One of his artist clients at the law center had told him that when she saw well-dressed corporate types wandering through her neighborhood, she wanted to pelt them with rotten tomatoes. But Crea was welcomed in the galleries; she had both taste and money, was an ideal customer who both collected and promoted art.

  That summer, she was already obsessed with photography, considered a brand-new art form—the art form, she said, of their generation, of the revolution. Hearing her use such words made him laugh; she was no rebel, but he loved her passion. She collected the documentary work of W. Eugene Smith, including his famous photos of coal miners, and Berenice Abbott’s shots of New York in the 1930s—a series of her photos taken from underneath the Brooklyn Bridge hung in Crea’s study. Robert was shocked to realize that one of them was a version of the same photo that hung as a poster in his bedroom as a child. But hers was no poster.

  Her particular interest was in street photographers, people like Diane Arbus, who was on Crea’s radar before anyone else he knew had ever heard of her. She took him to exhibits, showing him Larry Chatman’s photographs of black men and women in urban bars; Roy Colmer’s focus on the lonely office worker in the crowd, and John Milisenda’s photos of his family posing over and over again with his retarded brother. What, he wondered, did these portraits do for her? Why was she drawn to portraits of the ordinary, the poor and disenfranchised, to photographs that intruded on people’s privacy, caught them in moments of sadness and vulnerability? Was this what she wanted to do to him, too? Dig for such moments? She told him that she found a photograph most effective if she had to fight the need to look away. Robert felt that need often, but the faces stayed with him all day, reminded him of his father, now sitting in his wheelchair, or of the friends he’d left behind in Oxford Circle who didn’t return from Vietnam, or the faces that showed up daily on the other side of his door, looking for Barry—their expressions haunted, hollow-eyed, hooked. There was so much sorrow and poverty in the world—why stare at it for hours? In those moments, he feared her voyeurism was heartless and empty.

  He preferred when she talked about architecture. Wherever they went, she had her favorite buildings, like the Italian Renaissance–styled University Club in Midtown, or the Neo-classical Washington Square Arch—which Robert had walked by countless times without really noticing. Six weeks into their relationship, she took him to the apartment where she had grown up, assuring him before they went that her father was at his summer place in Orange County; he wanted her to look in on things. The summer before, the family below had insisted that a pipe from the kitchen was leaking into their child’s bedroom; several nasty exchanges followed, and though no actual leak was found, her father could not sleep easily unless she checked in weekly.

  The apartment was on Park Avenue, one in a long row of tall, smooth white buildings in the East Seventies. They got out of the cab. Robert paid the fare, then remained on the sidewalk for a moment, his head craning skyward to take in rows and rows of perfectly spaced windows, some with interesting architectural detailing—pedestals and tiny faces of angels with wings popping up here and there, then the tall limestone base at the bottom and the ornate gold filigree front door with its intricate intertwining vines and leaves. There was a time when someone thought of all these details, and craftsmen made those leaves, or carved those angels’ wings, meticulously and by hand. At the very top, the high floors were stacked from widest to smallest, like the layers in a giant cake. Robert knew these were called setbacks, had studied some air-rights cases from the 1920s where the term was employed. They were used before the war, invented out of necessity by a brilliant architect named Rosario Candela at a time when no one apartment building was allowed to hog too much of the view. Manhattan zoning had strayed far from there since.

  “Hello, George,” Crea said to the doorman, who held the door and asked how she was, clearly not expecting an answer. George continued holding the door, staring straight ahead, waiting silently until Robert ended his mysterious revelry by the curb and came inside.

  A young porter stood at attention behind a small desk. As they proceeded to the back elevators, he came out from behind his perch and asked who they were. “You must be new,” Crea said, walking back toward him, her voice edged with impatience. “Alexander, we’re in —” George stuck his head in just then, interrupting her to say that this was Jack Alexander’s daughter. The porter immediately apologized.

  “What’s your name?” Crea asked the now-flustered porter.

  “Mohamed. Call me Mo,” the man said. “So sorry. I’ve only been on the job a week.”

  She waited longer than she should have to respond and the man stood at attention, looking half terrified. The moment felt important to Robert. A test.

  “No apologies necessary,” Crea finally said. She glanced over at Robert, who had moved closer to her so that his shoulder grazed hers. “I’d rather this than that you just waved us through.” Robert exhaled—he’d been holding his breath—and they walked quickly to a narrow elevator, one in a long line. Crea pushed a button and they waited.

  “This is a Candela building, isn’t it?” Robert asked, feeling proud of himself.

  “Yes,” she said abruptly, as the elevator doors opened to reveal yet another uniformed man. This one she greeted with some genuine enthusiasm, but after asking him a few cursory questions about his wife’s health, she was again silent.

  “There are only what, ten, twelve of his buildings in the whole city?” Robert asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she replied. Usually she would talk endlessly with him about architects and architecture, but he could tell by her tone that she was done. From the length of the elevator ride, they were going to one of those upper floors. Finally, the doors opened onto a private vestibule with a white and black marble floor, a brass umbrella stand, and a small wooden bench. The front door was painted red. The color of luck, and caution.

  Letting them into the apartment, she told him to look around if he liked, but this was no architectural tour—she had a checklist and was off to her tasks. A dog yapped in what sounded like a distant country, but was actually the maids’ rooms upstairs —two employees, a couple, had remained in residence. Walking through a pair of French doors into a long sitting room, Robert went over to the wall and opened the heavy brocade drapery to reveal a panoramic view that stretched across the park. The windows were set deeply so that when he took a few steps backward, it was like looking at a picture within a picture. Long beams of sunshine streamed across the Persian rug and across the furniture covered in white sheets.

  He did not see most of the duplex—many of the rooms were closed off, and he wasn’t going to tag along behind Crea like a child. He walked through a wide entranceway, past a group of pictures covered by cloth. Only one painting remained visible—a favorite of the help?—of a voluptuous nude woman reclining on an unmade bed. The frame was gold and ornate. Walking closer, Robert saw that it was a Bonnard.

  He walked from there into an enormous room with a grand piano and walls the color of the whipped lime in key lime pie. On one side of the room six hollows had been carved into the wall, the tops scalloped like giant seashells. Inside each one was a small, perfect white vase. On the ceiling, the molding formed intricate circles around two opposing glass chandeliers. He walked through an archway, surveying the dining room with its enormous oval table and chairs with backs upholstered in a striped silk fabric—at least thirty people could sit down to dinner, but he couldn’t imagine three or four ever doing so. Returning to the room where he’d started, he approached the fireplace, where a wide marble mantel was crowded with photos, mostly of Crea.

  In one photo, she was a redheaded baby resting on her father’s wide shoulders; in another, a toddler leaning against her mother; and in a third, she wore a school uniform and held her father’s hand. Then a girl of ten or eleven riding a pony, her chin
tilted defiantly in the air, her expression surprisingly serious. The rest were older and more giddy: Crea attempting to blow out the candles on a sixteenth-birthday cake; Crea throwing a square cap up in the air; Crea in what he assumed was her early twenties, water-skiing in a bikini top and tiny shorts. Robert felt somehow disappointed; it might have been nice to see her with braces, or something, anything, to mar the smooth surface of a girl who appeared to have been born attractive, smart, and pampered, and remained that way, growing into a glamorous woman without so much as a bruise. But there were no photos of her in adolescence, few of her as a teenager, really.

  When Crea came downstairs a few minutes later, she found him staring at a wedding photo of a very young Jack Alexander with his thin, dark-eyed, black-haired bride, her skin porcelain, her expression so serious next to Jack’s boyish grin. Crea’s mother was a classic beauty, prettier than Crea, though he felt guilty for thinking it. Crea looked more like her father. In the photo, her mother wore a lace dress with an enormous train that spun out airily around her feet in a wide circle.

  “My parents,” Crea announced, coming up behind him. “Totally different temperaments, as you can see.”

  “I can’t imagine growing up here,” Robert said, turning around. “I can’t get a foothold on imagining it. Who are you?”

  “What a strange question.”

  “Have you seen how most people live in this city?”

  “It’s just an apartment,” she replied. “We moved here when I was seven. My mother had always wanted to live in this building, grew up just down the block. I don’t know why Dad agreed to buy it, probably because it’s a hard building to get into, very exclusive, and he likes to prove himself in that way, but then he disliked the place from the minute we got here. He likes contemporary architecture and decor. I always thought he developed that aesthetic in reaction to my mother, who loved all things old-fashioned—her greatest desire was to create a place stuck in time, whereas my father is all about what’s coming next.” As she said this, she took up two fingers of his right hand, and he turned around and looked at her. “They fought a lot, though you’d never know it when they entertained. That was really their best time, and Dad still likes entertaining here —these big old places were meant for parties.” She dropped his fingers and walked over to the couch, adjusting the cloth cover on it, and then moved toward the window, drawing closed the heavy draperies, so that they stood in semidarkness. “I wish he’d sell it. The apartment is too big for him, and he hates the furniture. I never understood why he didn’t redecorate after she died, though there’s only so much variation you can force without ruining all the details. Anyway, the market is horrid.”

  “Why the gap in pictures?” he asked, smiling. “Where is the Crea in braces and pigtails?”

  She frowned.

  “I meant it affectionately, darling.”

  “I had a back brace,” she said. “Curvature of the spine, diagnosed at twelve and a half. Because of it, I couldn’t go away to school. I associate the brace with living here, to be honest, and it’s probably why I don’t like this place much. I hated that brace, like wearing a giant cage, a big contraption with a chin rest. The first time I had to put it on, my mother wept. Appearances were very important to her. You probably noticed how beautiful she was.”

  “No more beautiful than you,” he said, aware that there were times when a man must lie, and this was one of them.

  “My father never changed when he saw me in the brace,” she said softly. “He loved me the same, looked at me the same.” She was standing now, in the dim light, on the other side of the room, and he could barely see her, only hear her words. “Sometimes I think he saved me, Robert. That impartial, paternal love. People looked away, honestly, but Dad smiled at me, always, like I was the most beautiful girl in the world. He was working long hours at the firm then, building it, and still he found time for me. He took me to Broadway shows and art exhibitions, knew that I needed him more because my mother was so clearly unable to handle the whole thing. He knew I’d try to get out of wearing the brace, so he was very strict. Anytime I’d cry and whine and my mother would want to let me slide, he’d be very strong and tell me that someday I’d be happy I wore it. And he was right. Once I got the thing off, everything changed.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She moved closer, came and stood by him in front of the fireplace. She was nervous; he’d never seen her fidgety. “That summer, the summer I turned sixteen, I worked part-time at my old camp as a water-skiing instructor. It was a bogus job, really, an excuse to have fun, but for the first time boys noticed me. I went with the other girls to a Sears in town and bought a tiny yellow bikini, went from wearing all this fabric and metal to wearing almost nothing at all. It felt wonderful, powerful.” She pointed to the photo of herself on water skis in that same bikini. “All I wanted was be touched and looked at. A lot of boys fell in love with me that summer, I think; I was in love with life. And maybe I still am, maybe it comes from that awful time. Once I was out of the brace, my mother forgave me for being ugly those three years and bought me lots of clothes, but I never forgave her. We were not close, even when she became ill. There was a difference, I realized, between how Jack loved me and how she did, and I’d seen it up close. By senior year, I’d come into myself, more than that, even. I was a hellion, sneaking out of school, meeting older boys, constantly in New York, running around the Village.”

  “And you still like to be touched,” he said, taking her in his arms.

  “Being caged like that, you appreciate the feeling of skin against skin. I always told myself that I’d know the man for me by his touch.” She looked into his eyes, and he kissed her.

  “I don’t like to talk about this,” she said, “so let’s not again, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, of course,” he said. She was not a complicated person so much as a person with a story. Everyone came with a story. People revealed themselves as an act of intimacy; women did so to make sure that men felt protective and fell in love with them, or so he’d always thought. So why, after such a story, did he not feel more for her?

  A WEEK LATER, on the Friday after the blackout that had paralyzed the city for twenty-five hours and kept them, mostly, in Crea’s bed, they were finishing up dinner in a small French restaurant off Gramercy Park, when Crea put down the dessert menu and announced that he had to come to Tuxedo Park to meet her father. “Soon he’ll think that I’m making you up.”

  “I could almost say the same thing about him,” Robert replied. “Other than when he welcomed us on the first day, I’ve hardly laid eyes on him.”

  “He’s not in the office as much in summer,” she said.

  “Yes, well, he rules by reputation, and the occasional appearance when we least expect it,” Robert replied. On the few summer days that Jack was in the office, everyone knew it. The buzzing, from associates and partners alike: Jack’s in. Let me tell you what Jack said to me in the men’s room. Have you seen Jack? It was code to not linger in the halls, to keep your door open, to be on your toes. A, L and W’s staff and colleagues endlessly ran after him. And yet, the few times he’d observed Crea’s father in conversation in a hallway, he seemed always to be looking over his companion’s shoulder, as if waiting for someone better to come along. His patrician manner of speaking was legendary, but only in the worst of dive bars far from the office—where summer associates and the occasional first-years sometimes congregated—were imitations ever attempted. His fellow summer associate, Wilton Henry, was the best at these, although he, like the rest of them, had heard Jack speak only a few times. Henry, a former child prodigy on the violin, had an ear for sound, and an eye on the real estate department, and Robert considered him his stiffest competition. He didn’t know if he even wanted to spend his career at A, L and W, but he certainly wanted the offer, wanted the option to decide.

  “And it would be good for your career,” she added, “to spend a weekend with Jack.”

  �
��For him to know I’m having sex with his daughter would be good for my career?” he whispered. “How, exactly?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t care about that.”

  “I’ve never heard of a father who didn’t care about that.”

  “He long ago gave up trying to control me.”

  “When we met, you said he did nothing but try to control you. I think your words were, ‘treats me like an infant.’”

  “Can’t you be like other men and ignore most of what I say?”

  “Great,” he said, smiling. “We can spend the weekend in the city.” He slowly finished off what was left in his wineglass, saying nothing more.

  “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

  “You just told me to ignore you.”

  “I’m not that easily deterred, smart aleck,” she replied.

  No, he thought, easily deterred was not how he would describe her. Though she got what she wanted so sweetly, and with such good humor, that he wondered if she’d ever been refused by anyone. She leaned closer. “You need to come out to the house. I’m tired of arguing with Dad about why I can’t be there, or going alone and missing you all weekend.” She paused, twisting a curl fetchingly around her finger. “You said you like to swim. Or we could take the boat out. And some of my friends come up to see their families, so it’s not just old people. Like I said, it could be good for your career—don’t you want them to offer you a job after graduation?”

  He was ambitious, and she knew it. Amazing that she was willing to extend herself that way, dangling the advantages of her situation in front of him, as if he hadn’t already thought about it.