“And who is the client, exactly?” Robert asked.
“Excuse me?”
Robert opened the envelope. The edges were sharp and he got a small paper cut, watched the tip of his finger as the blood slowly came to the surface and he placed the finger, momentarily, in his mouth, switching hands so as not to dirty the papers.
“I asked Crea to talk to you months ago,” Jack said, “but she keeps putting it off. So I’ve decided to deal with this myself. You’ve always struck me as a levelheaded young man.”
Pulling out the papers and looking through them quickly, Robert realized that this was not a piece of work to be completed and billed for. This was a prenuptial agreement. He cleared his throat and pushed the papers back down into the envelope. It wasn’t that he hadn’t expected it—he was a lawyer, knew what a prenuptial was, understood that one applied to his situation, if to any, but a person can understand the logic of something and still feel shocked by its arrival. Before this, the only prenuptials he’d seen had been the long-outmoded ones used as examples in his matrimonial-law class. He stood up, uneasily, while Jack remained seated.
“You look that over carefully,” Jack said. “On your own time, of course.”
“Of course,” Robert said. Of course I won’t take a moment away from your precious billable hours, you son of a bitch. He could not help but feel that he’d been sucker punched. For the second time. First the detective and now this—what else had to happen before he realized that this man would not be his friend, let alone his family? He was going to make Jack extract himself from that low, awkward couch and he was going to watch. No matter how long it took, no matter how difficult it was for him to get up. And indeed it was difficult; Jack huffed and puffed, and Robert stood, smiling slightly, with his arms folded over his chest. Just as Crea’s father finally heaved himself up with a slight groan and was standing erect, Robert thanked him and walked to the door. “No need to walk me out,” he said, and left.
As soon as he got back to his office he closed the door and spent the rest of the afternoon studying the information inside, billable hours be damned. He tried to look at the papers as he might have for a client, but could not. This was why lawyers could not be their own advocates; staring at the lists of assets, he could hardly think straight, had to stop to use his inhaler again, which gave him, for some time afterward, a slight tremor. Who on earth was this person he was about to marry? It was one thing to be rich, but Crea Alexander’s level of wealth was stupefying. There was the apartment in New York, a winter place in Aspen, and a beach house on the North Carolina coast. There was a property in France, but that had been occupied by some cousins for generations. Still, the rent went into a trust and she could take possession of the place at any time. She owned a townhouse, too, on the East Side, which had been her grandmother’s and was rented to an art gallery. Her Gramercy apartment had a large mortgage, but this was likely for tax purposes. There were stock portfolios and endless investments in the U.S. and abroad, plus art, so much art, paintings and sculptures on loan to museums and universities. She had art in storage, photographs at galleries, drawings on her walls, totaling millions of dollars. Technically Crea owned much of the art in Jack’s Manhattan place. Though successful in his own right, he was not half so wealthy as his daughter, who had inherited a fortune from her mother.
Robert already knew that Jack had come to the marriage with less. His father had been a doctor, a GP in Rye, New York, who put three sons through Columbia and then retired to Florida to fly-fish and die in his sleep. Crea told Robert this information early on in their courtship, as if to imply almost a tradition of women in her family marrying men with less money, who then went on to make their fortunes. She had no doubt Robert would be equally successful.
When Crea had first brought up the subject of her father’s middle-class background, his humbler beginnings, Robert had wanted to say, but did not, that the son of a doctor in Westchester County was very different from the son of a mailman in Oxford Circle. Perhaps, having met his parents, she understood this now, but he doubted it. His level of debt was higher, his obligation to his parents in old age larger; the family capital did not get passed on but rather was eaten up by living. But just as she lumped together all people in the center, he had lumped together those on top. He saw now how naïve he’d been, or maybe just deluded. Why was she at so many parties with the very rich or famous, and how could she write so many checks? He was a man with nothing marrying a woman with far too much. Some part of this must have bothered her, too—having him see all this, acknowledging the vast gulf between their resources—because she had given the task over to her father. Or had she? The act was uncharacteristic, cowardly. Or maybe this was who she really was. The contract protected her completely and ceded virtually nothing to him. Even gifts, if they divorced, were to be returned.
He called Stanley Dunphy, his pal from law school who’d gone into a matrimonial-law practice with his father. Divorce, an inflation-proof industry, was always booming. In fact, his friend was so busy that it took some time for Robert to get him on the phone, and when he did, Stanley apologized—he had back-to-back appointments. Robert explained a few things over the phone.
“To start with, we’re going to ask for a lump-sum payment up front,” Stanley said, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. The man loved his job.
Robert told him that he didn’t want such a payment—the idea was humiliating.
“You believe you’re being noble, but really you’re being impractical,” Stanley replied, as a series of beeps sounded and someone called his name over an intercom. “They expect us to negotiate. Bring in the contract tomorrow morning. I’m here at seven a.m.” And then he hung up.
* * *
UNABLE TO CONCENTRATE, Robert left work early and went to the law library at NYU to research recent precedent on ante-nuptial agreements. Generally, it was the woman who came in with lower assets, and then the contract involved just what Stanley mentioned—cash up front, property in some cases, plus additional money after each child. But he was a man, and to accept money for marrying Crea felt degrading, unmanly. Not that anyone was offering. He felt like he was back at college. Back to Gwendolyn and, before her, Tracey. How had he gotten here again?
Being in the endless corridors with their smell of ancient books, disinfectant, and anxious graduate students, he was reminded of his last three years of training, of all he’d been through. Law school did nothing if not discipline the mind—certainly it didn’t prepare you for practice; that much he’d learned already—but in the library he calmed down, got hold of himself. This was a contract. He knew how to approach a contract. If Crea wanted a nineteenth-century marriage, one founded on property mergers and dowries, then why shouldn’t he play the game? His heart was not truly at stake, not as it once had been. He could admit that to himself. What he felt for her was as much as he expected to feel for any woman who was not Gwendolyn, but it had never, ever, been enough to make him lose control.
Her father had set him up. If he asked for too much—asked for anything, for that matter—then Jack could point out the obvious to Crea and Pascal, and God only knows who else: Robert was a social climber, a gold digger, a money-hungry Jew. If he asked for nothing, then he’d be endlessly beholden to his wife. He had seen what she was used to—she was not going to turn around and live on his salary.
Hours later he left the library, aware that he had not called Crea, as he usually did when he was going to be home after eight. He took a cab and then walked up the steps, plugged in the alarm code, and entered the apartment he’d lived in now for over a year. The walls were white with dramatic overhead lighting. Crea’s collection of photographs was scarce here; instead, the place was decorated with bodies. In the center of the hall stood a somewhat emaciated female body in bronze on a pedestal, a late work of Wilhelm Lehmbruck. In the living room hung an oil painting by Oskar Kokoschka—a nude woman with long hair sat on the ground, legs bent in front of her, h
ands grasping her head in distress. Crea had told him it was a portrait of the artist’s great love, and muse, Alma Mahler, and that she broke his heart. Over their bed hung a series of drawings of another somber nude, early work of Gustav Klimt. He understood why a home decor magazine wanted to do a profile; he lived in a museum. Then there was that damned clock, chiming now for nine long counts.
She loved the German and Viennese secessionists and the bridge they formed into expressionism. Her cultural history, she’d told him. But all the artists went insane, didn’t they? Killed themselves or went into exile? There was something sad in these faces around him. Their eyes looked into a tragic future that they could not see… or could they?
He thought again about Gwendolyn, of how little she cared for decoration, how carefully she’d arranged his books on her empty shelves because it had meant something to him—for herself, she needed almost nothing. He knew it was not fair to contrast the two women so starkly. Crea would always come up wanting. No one could compete with a ghost, or a saint. And Gwendolyn did not have the luxury of romanticizing pain; she had lived it, at the mercy of her brain chemistry. He poured himself a scotch and sat down at the dining room table. On it was a note telling him that Crea had gone to a restaurant nearby, the romantic site of some of their early dinners. He changed and left the apartment quickly, as if it were haunted.
The restaurant was close enough for him to walk. He passed the Players Club on the corner, lit by streetlamps, though he could still make out its ornate Victorian Gothic molding—the dripping gewgaws, she called it. Crea had taught him how to classify and categorize beauty, and how to see. There was much he did not want to lose, yet he would if need be. She loved him, he knew, more than he loved her.
The streets were crowded along Lexington, the restaurants full—people wandered aimlessly in pairs. A mother walked in front of him, wheeling a stroller toward the supermarket as if it were three o’clock in the afternoon, except that it wasn’t; it was past nine in a city that lived in the eternal present, while Robert still wrestled with the past. As he entered the restaurant, the staff greeted him warmly—everyone knew them here—and then he was taken to the back, where Crea smiled at him as if he were all that she needed. Women had always responded to him, but no woman had ever looked at him the way she did. She had called him at the office but he was gone. Yet she did not scold. Perhaps she’d wanted to, but when she saw him all was forgiven. Maybe she was used to waiting for men; her father had come home late all her life.
They ordered and ate quickly. He was silent, biding his time, and then he paid and they decided to walk home; it was still warm out, felt almost like spring. On the way, she asked him more than once if anything was wrong and he said no. As they stood in the doorway of the apartment, she pointed out, gently, that he had not set the alarm before he left. He did that too regularly, and it was not a good idea.
She put down her purse in the hall and walked into the bedroom, where he was already yanking at his tie. She came over and asked him for help undoing her outfit, a kind of one-piece jumpsuit with a halter top that tied at the nape of her long white neck, which she offered him, while he stood behind her, his fingers fumbling. “I’m going to leave the firm,” he said.
She turned around, so he had to let go of the fabric. “After eight months?”
“I want more independence.” He took off his jacket, hung it in the closet.
“Why?” she asked casually, reaching behind to her zipper and finishing the job, making him wonder why she’d asked him for help in the first place.
“Your father called me into his office today,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. “I thought he was giving me work, but instead he slid a prenuptial agreement at me and told me not to waste company time reading it. He also said he’d been waiting for you to do it, but you took too long.”
“The subject,” she said, turning around, pink-faced. “I knew it would be hard for you.”
“So you sent Jack to do your dirty work?”
“He’s done this all my life, interfered. I told him to let me talk to you first.”
“I have an appointment with a lawyer in the morning.”
“You’re seeing a lawyer?”
“No, of course not,” he replied. “I’ll just sign on the dotted line.”
“Don’t take this out on me, Robert. I don’t read contracts. I don’t know anything.”
Anyone with assets like hers knew more than a little. She was not a fool; she used her father to divorce herself from any unpleasantness or responsibility. That was how she played it. “My lawyer will reject the prenup as it is now. If I sign, I’ll be a virtual guest in your house.”
“We can sell this apartment, find our own place. You’ll be my husband, not my guest.”
“First, it will be years before I can put a down payment on an apartment comparable to this, or whatever it is you want to live in next, which I assume will be larger. Those are my means—are you prepared to live on them? I suspect not. Second, I’ll never sign that contract as it is. Stan Dunphy will draw up something else, your father’s lawyer will respond, and on and on it goes.” He said all this casually, calmly, as he’d prepared himself to do. “It’s nothing personal, right? Our lives are now in the hands of lawyers.”
She’d been standing there in only her underwear and now went to the closet and put on a silk robe, a beautiful one in a pinkish peach. She was not wearing it for warmth—Crea never got cold. He imagined she wanted something around her, some bit of beauty as ballast against all this ugly conversation. “This isn’t what I wanted,” she said softly.
“What did you want?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I guess I figured we’d talk about things just between us.”
“Then you shouldn’t have brought in a contract like that,” Robert said. “The list of assets alone goes on for ten pages. I appreciate your being so honest about what you have. So I’ll be honest, too. I have nothing. Only debt. That’s what I bring to this marriage. The potential to make money. But only potential. Now, what are we going to do about that?”
“You really have nothing?”
Had she not met his parents? Had she thought, when they began dating, that he’d refused to bring her to his place because it was just too sublime? “I could get the contract right now,” he said. “We could burn it in the fireplace and pretend this never happened. We don’t have to marry at all; we could live together. I know I said I wanted to do things right, but maybe doing things right in this case is not getting married. Free love. Emphasis on the word free.”
“But I want to be married. I’m almost thirty and I want a family.” She sat down in the corner, curled up in a chair like a little girl. “Explain it to me again. Why can’t you sign?”
It was alternately charming and exasperating, her ability to squint at him as if she’d just arrived out of nowhere and then ask what exactly they’d been arguing about all along. “The issue is that I have no money,” he said, “and you have piles of money, and no matter how much I make, even if I make partner, we’ll never ever be equal in this marriage.”
“Sure we will,” she said. “What does money have to do with equality in a marriage?”
“Everything,” he said, unbuttoning and removing his shirt, then throwing it over a chair. She got up and began to smooth it out. She had taken him to get that Charvet shirt, custom-made to his proportions, the cotton so fine it felt like silk. A perfect shirt. “If we divorce and that family you want so much falls apart, how will I keep our children, even for weekend visitation, in the style to which they’ll become accustomed?”
“We haven’t gotten married yet and you have us separated with custody problems!”
“Lawyers, Crea, we’re trained to look at every contingency. Every miserable, rotten, horrid possibility. We’ll likely have children and we could divorce.”
She walked into the living room, expecting him to follow. He found her pouring herself a drink, another for him. �
�Money is our only problem, it seems to me,” she said. “And that’s easy. If you’re so self-conscious about your situation, I’ll simply give you some.”
He had not expected this. She was endlessly surprising, had taken the argument to its logical conclusion without even the slightest prompting. She did the hardest work for him.
“Father never has to know,” she continued, “better if he doesn’t. And it’s my money. Serves him right, surprising you at the office like that. He needs to learn to keep his nose out of things.” She took a sip from her drink and her voice grew stronger. “You could pay your debts, and we’d consider it an engagement gift. I was going to buy you a Cartier watch, you know, from Father, it’s tradition, but —”
“I don’t need an eight-thousand-dollar watch, Crea.”
“How much debt do you have, exactly?”
“About fifteen thousand, give or take a thousand.”
“Well, you lawyers like to be so specific, so I’ll give you a hundred thousand. How is that?”
“Half a million,” he said.
She laughed, though he wasn’t sure why. Nervousness? Or was she somehow enjoying herself? “One hundred and fifty thousand,” she countered.
“Four hundred and fifty thousand,” he said.
“Two hundred.”
They haggled on like merchant and customer, finally settling on $275,000. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asked, yawning audibly. “Is that what you lawyers do all day? You could have asked me for what you wanted in the first place. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
Endlessly surprising. For so many years, he had wanted to talk about money in the open, to not hide behind code, or legal negotiations, or his own shame. Now, with Crea, he’d finally had that conversation, and he felt a little sick. Maybe it wasn’t Tracey or Gwendolyn or any of them who had the problem. Maybe it was him.
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