Rich Boy

by Sharon Pomerantz

  Robert found that hard to believe. They claimed two chairs close to the pool and had barely sat down when Tracey suggested a race, just up and back. Robert agreed, realizing that it had been ages since he’d swam. “The most exercise I get these days is walking to the subway.”

  “Even better,” Tracey said, getting up, “you won’t feel as lousy when I beat you to a pulp.”

  “Don’t underestimate me,” Robert said, walking quickly to the edge and diving in, giving himself a few seconds of advantage. It felt good to move, to feel the power in his body, to blot out everything but each stroke as he moved toward the opposite edge.

  Even with his head start, it was not even close. “Don’t worry about it, Vishniak,” Tracey said. “I swim every day. And play tennis.”

  “Best of three?” Robert asked.

  “A glutton for punishment, as always.”

  * * *

  FOUR RACES LATER, Robert dragged himself, panting, out of the pool to lie on his back, arms splayed. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m having a heart attack.”

  Tracey kicked him lightly in the side. “Get up,” he said, “or the decorum police will have us arrested.” He stared down at Robert, who was unaware, as always, of what he looked like, his skin the deeper brown that it became in summer without his even trying, his hair saturated with water, so shiny black that it was almost blue, and his long legs still muscular despite so many years of sitting in a cab. Tracey reached for his sunglasses, left nearby on a table, but he dropped them and they hit the cement, landing just a few inches from Robert’s shoulder. Tracey bent over to get the glasses as Robert also reached for them, so that their fingers met for a moment. Robert pulled away abruptly, seeing Tracey’s expression, remembering that stare of Tracey’s like a familiar, vaguely unpleasant adversary. He stood up, walking a few steps to the dry spot where he’d placed the enormous bath towel provided by the club, and wrapped it around his waist. The two padded back to their seats as Tracey hailed the waiter and ordered a gin and tonic. Robert ordered club soda.

  “I feel like an old man,” Robert said.

  “You don’t swim like one. You did beat me twice. Where’d you learn to swim? Camp?”

  “Boulevard Pools,” Robert said. “Olympic-size swimming pool with diving boards, plus vending machines with all the soda you could beg your mother to let you buy. All thanks to the largesse of the city of Philadelphia.”

  “You won’t exactly see a representative sampling here, I’m afraid,” Tracey said. “No huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

  “No drunken Frankfurt boys looking for a fight either,” Robert said. “That was more my brother’s province than mine; he’d egg on the nerdy neighborhood Jews to take back the deep end from the football players from Archbishop Ryan, then sneak away when the sparks flew. You think the way I grew up wasn’t exclusive and gated in its own way?” He thought then about the pair of black kids, twin boys who’d come up from God knows where—North Philly, maybe? They left quickly. If not overtly kept out, blacks were not welcomed; they were ignored, or worse, depending on which side of the Boulevard dominated the pool that day. He was not going to be bitter on behalf of his people, or anyone else’s for that matter. He was a guest; he was with Tracey. “I’m having a very nice time.”

  Tracey nodded, raising his glass in Robert’s direction. “To our squandered youth,” he said, “and to your romance.”

  “It’s bad luck to toast with water,” Robert said. “Didn’t you tell me that once?”

  “Glad you’ve remained such a stickler, Vishniak. Anyway, countless men would sacrifice life and limb to be in your situation. She’s mad for you.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Anyone can see it.”

  “We’re trying to take things slowly,” he said. “Or at least I am.”

  Tracey laughed. “Good luck.”

  “Yes, Crea is a very determined sort of person, isn’t she? Almost a force of nature. I’ve never known anyone so self-confident —not even you.”

  “It’s all done with mirrors, in my case.”

  “I can’t make the father out at all, though.”

  “Don’t even try,” Tracey said. “The only thing you can count on is that he’ll be as protective as possible. Crea’s the original Daddy’s little girl.”

  “Yeah, I get that impression,” Robert replied. “She told me about the brace.”

  “I don’t know much about that. I was away at school, and my parents didn’t socialize much with the Alexanders; it was Mark’s parents who brought them around. But I do remember when they first started coming to Tuxedo. Crea was maybe ten, and Jack would come with her to the pool and spend all kinds of time coaching her on her swimming. Sometimes I’d see them walking hand in hand. I was terribly jealous. People didn’t do that back then, show their children such blatant affection, let alone spend time with them, especially fathers.”

  “No,” Robert said, “fathers were at work.”

  “Or off doing mysterious manly things,” Tracey said. “Ours couldn’t stand us. Anyway, you should ask Crea about it yourself. I feel like a gossipy old woman talking this way.”

  “Stay a gossip for a little longer,” Robert replied, glad for the opening. “Tell me what’s happened to the others. Cates? Van Dorn? They’re not going to pop up when I least expect it?”

  “Cates moved to France, to be near his mother. Married a French girl. He works in the diplomatic service.”

  “Perfect for him!” Robert said. “We’ll be at war with the French in no time. Van Dorn? Was it the National Guard?”

  “Spent a lot of time in Virginia then decided to stay there. Doing some kind of gentleman farming, not what you’d expect. Special cows or something, maybe they produce chocolate milk, who the hell knows? He sends one of those interminable Christmas letters every year, or his wife does, going on and on about which of their stock has calved. I hope they have children soon, for all our sakes.”

  “And Mark,” Robert said, “what happened to Mark Pascal?” It was safer to talk about Mark’s life, about the others, than to ask Tracey about his own, or to try to explain all that had happened to him, or even to continue their conversation about Crea, especially about Crea. Robert wasn’t sure he was ready to live up to the assumptions people were making—it was why he had been reluctant to come in the first place. Maybe Tracey was relieved, too, to talk about others. Something had opened him up, or at least had made him more communicative. Maybe, Robert thought, he’s lonely. Whatever it was, Robert found this new loquacity a relief. “For years all Mark talked about was journalism,” he continued. “He was always at the Crimson. All he wanted, I remember, was to go to Vietnam and write about the war.”

  “He got a job at the Globe after college,” Tracey said. “Started out as someone’s researcher, I think, then graduated to captions or punctuation, I don’t remember the details. But we were all relieved when they gave him Obituaries and let him write whole paragraphs.”

  “Probably everyone starts out that way,” Robert said.

  “I teased him as much as anyone—you know, obituary writer, graveyard shift, starting at the bottom, the way bottom; too many jokes came very easily. Perhaps we were all to blame, maybe even we were jealous that he’d stuck so thoroughly to his early ambition, or that he’d even had one. I was always on him for his grind of a job that kept him locked in the office late at night doing menial work, or got him sent to God knows what horrid Boston neighborhood at whatever hour because someone’s grandfather choked on a bone in his chicken sandwich, when the rest of us were up here together or out somewhere having fun. Did you know that newspapers write obituaries in advance for certain people, to be prepared?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s what a man gets for a life of accomplishment—a prewritten obituary. Pretty sorry stuff if you ask me. They’ve got one on file for each of the former presidents, major artists, celebrities. They probably had one on file for my father before
he kicked. He got a long tribute in the Times.”

  “I’m sorry,” Robert said. “I didn’t know. When did it happen?” There were years when he didn’t read a paper. It was Watergate that had brought him back to the news.

  “In ’seventy. Heart attack. Just past his fifty-eighth birthday. We Traces are not known for our longevity. Don’t look so sad, really, no love lost here. Like a weight was lifted, actually. He died before I could disappoint him any further.”

  “Are you in the business, too?” It was an odd way to refer to what Robert knew to be a kind of dynasty. There were office buildings in the city named Trace, and a cruise line. His question sounded like something Vishniak would ask about a cousin’s dry-cleaning business. But he’d never quite known how to talk about what Tracey’s family did—work did not seem the right word, or business. Those terms were too small, too simple.

  “My little brother graduated last year from Harvard, and I suppose he’ll step in eventually. He was too smart to look up to me, and he’s done well at school. There are very competent people running things anyway, though of course I’m involved when needed—mostly to attend very dull stockholder meetings. On the whole, though, I do exactly what is expected of me up here and that is, blessedly, not very much at all. I read a lot; I’m in the Tuxedo Park Association, which lately has been more trouble than I ever wanted. I dabble in the market. This is what I was meant for, Vishniak. Nothing in particular. Public intellectual, in a private sort of way.”

  Robert wondered how someone so young could live here full-time. Tuxedo was beautiful, but it was not dynamic or exciting. Tracey had retired from the world before he’d really begun. Certainly he looked relaxed, content, but that was no guarantee with Tracey; he was good at faking it, better than Robert. Tracey put his hand into a dish of peanuts on a table to his right and tossed them, one by one, into his mouth. No, Robert thought, there was no way he had changed that much, but still it was easier to talk about Mark. “Did Pascal ever actually cover the war?”

  “I gather a reporter has to work his way up to that. They’re not going to send some kid out of Harvard with a few clips. Well, maybe they would have if someone had put in a word, though the Globe was always a liberal institution, and a Catholic one; maybe that’s why Mark chose it, you know, outside anyone’s sphere of influence. And Mark’s father was against his taking the job in the first place, so he let him experience what it was to persevere without help.”

  “But Mark was getting what he wanted, I mean, he was writing, and he might have advanced further.” Robert still didn’t understand. Why did they all insist on making a tragedy, or a cautionary tale, out of what was just a first job?

  “There’s wanting and then there’s wanting,” Tracey continued. “Pascal, like me, has a low humiliation threshold. He made a few mistakes, had a few tongue-lashings from editors. Probably standard fare. It sounds like there are a lot of tempers in a newsroom, everyone thrown into those nasty little cubicles. I visited him once. The reporters were like rats in a maze.”

  “That’s how entry-level people work,” Robert said. “That’s life.”

  “That’s your life. You have a reason to want to get somewhere, and if need be, in the interim, or if your plans somehow fail, you can live on very little because you’re used to it.”

  Robert felt Tracey’s comment like a slap. He knew Tracey had not meant to offend him, but his words seemed to imply that by virtue of what Robert was used to, he would get less from the world and be contented with it. He signaled for the waiter; he would have a gin and tonic after all.

  “Who knows if Pascal would even have been a good foreign correspondent,” Tracey continued. “I can’t see him in a tent in the mud. He has position and respect now that might have taken him decades to build as a journalist. Not to mention the potential to make real money. Plus his father’s happy.”

  “But Mark doesn’t look very happy,” Robert replied. “And I doubt he needs the money. When did making his father happy factor in?”

  “You know, they get older, or they get sick. It starts to matter. I never gave a damn about my father, but I worry about my mother now in a way I never did before. Though the woman still has more energy than both of us combined.”

  “How is your mother doing?” Robert asked, remembering that awkward lunch.

  “Right now she’s at a spa in Cap d’Ail with Cates’s mother.”

  “My God, it’s a small world you live in,” Robert said. He was now back in it, like it or not, he thought, as if all roads led in this direction. Unfinished business, that’s what it was. He was not so different from Barry—he still had things to prove.

  “I’m lazy about making new friends. Real friends, anyway,” Tracey said. “Which is why your arrival is a godsend, Vishniak.”

  The waiter arrived with his gin and tonic, and Robert wondered if he was supposed to tip him. He doubted it. Not in this place.

  “Poor Mark,” Tracey added.

  “You just said that he’s got it so good.”

  “The rest of us, me and Cates and Van Dorn, we didn’t set out with such lofty ambitions. Less far to fall.”

  “You used to say things like that in college, about the uselessness of pinning your hopes on a goal. And I didn’t think you really meant it. But I suppose you do.”

  “More than ever.”

  The waiter returned with a fresh drink for Tracey and more peanuts. Nearby, a child cannonballed into the water, and cold drops hit the bottoms of both men’s legs. The water felt good, though moments later the child was screaming as a woman came and removed him, forcibly, from the pool.

  “And then you show up with Crea. That can’t be easy for Mark. He set out to get Crea years ago.” Tracey paused. “I think he imagines that if he hangs around long enough, he’ll wear her down. Or grow on her, like moss.”

  “In college, he was after Cates’s sister—salivated over her for years, I thought.”

  Tracey glanced behind him cautiously. “Crea was always the one, since she was in high school. But he got crushes on lots of girls, I think. The man is hopeless with women.”

  “Practically every guy was gaga for Cates’s sister, me included,” Robert said, conjuring now the memory of her at that dance, the way her legs looked in those lace tights, the point of her chin, her enormous eyes. “But she was off the market, if I remember.”

  “Married Charlie Webb. Those two were so madly in love it was almost sickening. He didn’t go to school with us, but we all knew him. Stupid tradition in his family, the oldest sons going off to West Point. Died in Vietnam, you know.”

  “That’s lousy,” Robert replied, though his mind was still in the past, at Smith College. “We had a little tussle once, Claudia and I. Some mixed signals there; maybe I deserved it, but she humiliated the hell out of me, like no other girl I’d ever met.”

  “Yes, Claudia’s quite good at that,” Tracey said.

  “So she’s around, too?” Robert asked, sitting up ever so slightly.

  Tracey nodded, then took another sip from his drink.

  “Did she remarry?” Robert asked.

  “You might say that,” Tracey replied. “She’s my wife.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Outdoor grilling

  At dinner that night they sat outside, surrounded by glowing yellow candles perched on tilted spears and stuck into the ground. The guest list had expanded since that afternoon. Now Tracey and Claudia were included, and Mark’s father, Trenton Pascal, as well as Mark’s younger sister, a surprisingly plain, tired-looking young woman named Mignonne—Robert could just hear Vishniak saying, Leave it to the rich to name a kid after a steak. Trenton Pascal was short and bald, with a strong resemblance between father and both siblings—Robert remembered him only vaguely from the time he’d taken all Mark’s friends to dinner. He shook Robert’s hand enthusiastically, and his manner and easy way of chatting reminded Robert of the way Mark had been in college, making him wonder if son and father had switched ro
les.

  Crea’s father and Mark’s father manned the barbecue grill, an ornate contraption at the end of the patio. A black woman in a dark dress and white apron, one of the two women who had been sitting in the kitchen when Robert arrived, moved back and forth between the barbecue grill and the table, then the table and the kitchen. Crea’s father called her Dinah, and Robert imagined that she must have been very warm—it was a hot evening and she was wearing stockings and polyester, and the barbecue gave off visible clouds of heat.

  Crea stood over in a corner talking with Tracey and Claudia, her face flushed with sun, while Mignonne Pascal remained on her own at the other end of the vast yard, throwing a stick with one of the dogs. Tuxedo was known as a community hospitable to wildlife. As Robert stood by the table, he noticed a possum limping along by a bush, and a wild rabbit, not four feet from the barbecue. Just an hour or so before, Robert and Crea, taking a walk, had seen three cars sitting in the middle of the road, waiting for a doe and her fawn to cross.

  Robert heard Crea laugh, a low, throaty laugh he liked, not too melodious, not too ladylike. She wore a white T-shirt and white jeans, flat sandals. Her muscled thighs looked good in the jeans, and the thin T-shirt was tucked in and clingy, making Robert aware of the contours of her body. Earlier that day, after riding for over an hour, she had shown up at the pool, Mark in tow, and quickly removed her shift to reveal a black bikini. She, too, had wanted to race him. Was everything a race with these people? Did they ever just get in and splash around? They worked awfully hard at their leisure. Tracey and he had just had a rematch—again Tracey beat him two to one—and he was tired of racing. So Crea suggested that they play volleyball; there was a floating net and balls available for this purpose, but Robert wanted to relax. She had pushed him playfully. So antisocial. Then she snapped her towel at him, and he picked her up and dumped her in the deep end. As she fell, she pulled his foot and threw him off balance, so both of them ended up in the pool. They trod water and she kissed him, pressing her body against his. “Let’s go home,” she said.