Rich Boy

by Sharon Pomerantz

  If they were going to be stuck in the city, she informed him, they might as well keep busy. The social season in Manhattan was over, and yet she somehow dug up a series of small dinner parties and obscure fund-raisers, the kind she’d never had much interest in attending before. It was summer, and he had no desire to spend his evenings in strangers’ living rooms, listening to lectures on Italian pottery or antique wrought iron. But contrary to her behavior in the winter, she made it clear each time that she would not forgive him if he didn’t at least make an appearance.

  She needed him close, demanded it, and he acceded to her demands, hoping she’d finally relax and proceed with her usual plans. On the second Saturday in June, he was working at home in his study when Crea announced that they should have a family outing. Gwen needed a toy for a birthday party the next day, and Crea wanted to go to a gallery that was showing a collection of Max Ernst drawings. They would stop at FAO Schwarz and then go downtown.

  “Traffic will be terrible,” he said. “The tourists are swarming this time of year.”

  “You have a habit of sounding like a municipal worker.”

  “What’s a municipal whatever?” Gwen asked. She was six now, full of endless questions.

  “Traffic cop? Bus driver?” Crea smiled. “Meter maid.”

  “We should take the subway,” he said calmly, refusing to take the bait.

  “You’re not driving,” she said. “What do you care if there’s traffic?”

  THEY FOLLOWED HER PLAN, Crea and Robert and Gwen in back and Troy up front, with the radio on and the soundproof barrier up between then. Robert didn’t like to use it, but Crea preferred having privacy. It had taken Troy an hour to get twenty blocks, and Gwen was getting impatient. She moved from one parent’s lap to the other, too big, really, for either of them to hold her, and so she ended up sitting between them, chomping on a piece of bubble gum.

  “Where are we going after Schwarz’s?” she asked.

  “Max Ernst,” Robert replied.

  “Who’s he?”

  “He draws funny pictures,” Crea said, “interesting drawings. Sometimes people walk around without heads, sometimes they fly onto roofs. You’ll like it.”

  “Yes, another sunny summer afternoon spent with the refugees from Hitler’s Europe,” Robert mumbled.

  “Why do you always bring up biography and history?” Crea asked. “It’s all you care about. There is more to an artist’s work than where he came from.”

  “Why must you focus so utterly on aesthetics? It’s a shallow way to look at the world.”

  “Are you saying I’m shallow?”

  “Who’s Max Ernst?” Gwen interrupted.

  A string of cars honked as they finally turned from Sixtieth onto Fifth Avenue. The city was alive with people, and nowhere were the crowds as dense as here, in the center of the retail Bermuda Triangle that was Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman, and Barneys —the very same block on which Crea and Robert had first wrangled for a cab nine years earlier. At Fifty-ninth, Robert leaned forward and knocked on the glass, signaling Troy to let them out so they could walk. “I don’t know where he’s supposed to wait for us in all of this,” Robert said to Crea.

  “I swear, Robert, I think you worry more about Troy’s comfort than ours,” Crea replied.

  “Who’s Max Ernst?!” Gwen persisted.

  “A talented man who abandoned two ex-wives and a mistress in Germany to run off with Peggy Guggenheim and escape the Nazis,” Robert replied.

  “How on earth is she supposed to understand that?” Crea asked, as Troy opened the door. People swarmed around the car. A stranger took their picture. Two boys banged on the hood, until Troy, a former high school football player, told them to get the hell off.

  “Who are the Nazis?” Gwen asked, as they pushed their way toward their destination.

  “Look, sweetheart,” Robert said, picking up the child so as not to lose her in the pushing and shoving, “over there, see the giant robot? And the two-thousand-dollar stuffed leopard?”

  “Schwarz’s!” she said, clapping her hands together.

  “Yes, my dear, that’s our Xanadu.”

  Crea slipped her arm through his, less a gesture of affection than a desire not to get pulled away by the crowds as they walked. This was his day off. He sensed it would be a long one.

  The next night they had dinner alone because Gwen was at a friend’s. But even if their daughter was absent, they still talked about her allergies, her day camp plans, her tennis lessons, and what Crea had heard about next year’s first-grade teacher, talked and talked about the child who was not there, as if they could will her back. And then, having exhausted all topics relating to Gwen, they looked at each other across the lemon chicken and found that there was nothing left to say. He had no news of the office; she had no more rooms to redecorate or pictures to replace with other pictures that waited in the wings, and no parties for them to attend. They’d seen what shows they wanted to see on Broadway. All tributaries were dry.

  He listened to the quiet tap, tap, tapping of their silverware, the imperceptible sound of his wife swallowing her wine. She looked at him across the table, and he at her, but he did not wonder what she was thinking. He was too tired to wonder, too beaten into submission to care.

  “So, I was thinking we would leave next Saturday,” she said finally.

  “Yes, that’s fine,” he said, sounding as neutral as he could.

  “And you’ll come up every weekend?” she asked.

  “I’ll do my best,” he pronounced, feeling that he had won something, though really he had only withstood and persisted. It was a cold victory.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Sally gives an inch

  Three nights later, his wife and daughter gone, he sat in another tiny theater, this one on a floor of what looked from the outside to be a professional building, but on the inside was more a mess of boxes and dirty tables and dark curtains opening onto narrow hallways. At the end of one he found rows of old-fashioned velvet seats that curved slightly around a small stage. The house was half full when he came in, but it began to fill up quickly. If Sally wasn’t getting paid much, at least she was playing to larger audiences.

  The cast was all women, and the play was set at a women’s college in the early 1970s. First the characters appeared in a chaotic dorm bedroom, and then in a facsimile of an elegant but slightly shabby living room. The girls performed rituals—the drinking of tea and the eating of crackers with peanut butter, for instance, and the wearing of flannel nightgowns and pearls. The housemother was a bird-watcher, an old lesbian in the days when no one said the word.

  He thought of that first visit to Smith College over twenty years earlier, of those shoes stretched out on the polished floor, and the woman serving punch, the singing groups and Claudia, poor Claudia, at age twenty, as exquisite as a painting, waiting for a man to claim her. Watching a light comedy, he felt a strange foreboding, as if his grave were being walked over.

  Perhaps his brother was right and he just took things too seriously. The play, after all, wasn’t Chekhov. All the stereotypes of the college dorm were there: the rich WASP with a Protestant work ethic; the working-class Italian who talked too much about sex; the neurotic nouveau-riche Jew whose mother wanted only for her to get married; the insane girl who wouldn’t speak; and a comically annoying pair who communicated through a stuffed pig. Sally played the Italian, the tough girl, struggling with her grades and on the verge of flunking out. She cracked gum and wore short shorts and a man’s undershirt, used the word fuck a lot. She had all the funny lines, got all the laughs, yet injected her character with the only real pathos that the play allowed. And at the end, she stole the show, receiving applause that turned to cheers.

  Later, the cast filed out to waiting friends and relations, the makeup still smudged around the edges of their faces. Sally pushed through the crowd, smiling broadly. She had that same glow to her, the sparkle that he’d seen a year before in the lobby of anothe
r tiny theater. He reached out to touch her, wanting some of her energy for himself.

  “Whaddya think?” she whispered, as her fellow cast members crowded him out, elbowing him to the side, hugging her and squealing. A man claiming to be an agent asked for her number, though he looked more like a horny teenager than a legitimate businessman. Robert recognized a few shoe-shine girls and a pair of young associates from A, L and W, still in their suits, who shook his hand awkwardly and then rushed off as if the building were on fire.

  He watched Sally accept her praise, expecting to be forsaken again for a cast party or a bar celebration, but she walked over to him and said coyly: “I’m in the mood for that fancy dinner. You can wine and dine me now.” Surprised, he led the way and they went down, down, down in an old, rickety elevator to his car and waiting chauffeur.

  “You really want me to get into that?” she asked.

  “I don’t want you to ride on the hood.”

  Troy opened the door for them, his face implacable. “Thanks,” Sally said to the chauffeur.

  “You’re welcome,” Troy mumbled.

  “Let’s go to the Village,” Robert said, and gave Troy an address just off Perry Street, an area he loved because it felt so Old New York. There was a restaurant he wanted to try.

  “Do you tip him?” Sally whispered.

  “No,” Robert said, “I pay him.” He put his arm around her and kissed her, and she kissed him back. It was a long kiss, and he felt the warmth of her body next to his; her mouth tasted of spearmint, like she’d just brushed her teeth. She pushed him away and looked out the window. “You’re going to go places,” he said. “Someday I’ll lose you to the world.”

  “You don’t have me,” she said. “You can’t lose what you don’t have.”

  Troy pulled over to the curb in front of a tiny restaurant with a large vase of flowers in the window. Not waiting for him, she let herself out, walking to the front door.

  “Leave it to me to get the last principled actress in Manhattan,” he remarked, half to himself.

  The restaurant had only ten tables with romantic lighting. They ordered a bottle of wine and he told her to get whatever she liked; she picked a pasta dish with chunks of lobster. “The second most expensive dish on the menu,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t look at the prices anymore, Sally. I’ve learned not to notice.”

  “Wow,” she said. “I bet that took years to learn.”

  “Yes it did,” he replied, and sipped his wine.

  They talked about the play, about other plays, about her talent, her career. It occurred to him that he had never known anyone with real artistic talent before, the kind you sacrificed for and built a life around—there were the artists he’d helped at the law center, but that was different; he didn’t know them or their work. There was a quality of honesty about her acting —she was real onstage, and also, as he’d come to know her, he’d found an honesty about her in daily life. She did not pretend to know what she didn’t, or to like what she hated. Her pleasure was genuine and unrepressed, and so was her displeasure. All her emotions were visible on her face, and just then she looked as enthusiastic as a child, complimenting every dish to him as if he had fixed it with his own hands. He focused on her utterly and completely, something he’d always known how to do with women, though he was long out of practice. “Why’d you ask me to take you to dinner? When you were so against it last week?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time,” she said mysteriously. The waiter came and refilled her wineglass and water, and she thanked him extravagantly, as if no one had ever refilled a wineglass before, but the man remained poker-faced, much to Robert’s amusement.

  “You’re allowed to want a night out,” he said.

  “On your money?”

  “Happily, anytime.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” The waiter returned with the dessert menu, and they heard the specials; she ordered a sundae. “In a way I wish I’d never met you. Because then I wouldn’t have seen inside places like this, and gotten to ride in fancy cars, and, well, all of it. It’s not like my friends live like this, or that I went to places like this as a kid. I never imagined any of it would tempt me. But how can you be tempted by what you’ve never experienced?”

  “Good point,” he said. “It’s after you experience it that the temptation really kicks in.”

  “Before, I’d never even talked to anyone who lived in a house like yours.”

  “You’ve seen my house?”

  “I’ve walked around your neighborhood is all,” she said, finishing off her wine. “It’s a free city. I saw a picture of your wife in the Times, at that museum ball. She’s pretty. I know people who could live for a year on what her dress probably cost.”

  “So do I,” he said. “Don’t forget that.” He would not have her put him on the other side. Even if being there served him in some way. He wanted to take care of her, and part of her wanted it, too; he could feel it. No woman he’d loved before had actually needed him to pick up the check; they had let him do it, to spare his ego. Now, when he grasped the check, she looked at him gratefully and said it was the best meal she’d had, maybe ever. Tracey was the first to show him that there was another world, of elegance and simplicity and quality, a world he could touch and maybe even live in. He wanted to give her that feeling of expansiveness, and he wanted her gratitude as well, enjoyed the power of it.

  That night, after he’d walked her inside the building and up the antique marble steps to the second floor, the negotiations began. Before she could open the burgundy door of the apartment, he pushed her against it and kissed her again. She put her arms around his neck, kissed him back, her lips touching his so softly at first, tentatively, and then with more pressure. The kiss was far from indifferent; they moved inside to the hallway, the door slamming heavily behind them, and he undid the two top buttons on her blouse, turning on the hall light, caressing the impressive swell of her breasts, pushed up high in her dark bra. He inhaled the soft scent of talcum; she responded only momentarily, and then wiggled away. “Tea?” she asked, blowing the hair out of her eyes.

  “We’re adults here, Sally, you can’t put me off with milk and cookies.” He followed her toward the kitchen. “I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, picking up the kettle and filling it with water.

  “That means nothing to you?”

  “It means everything to me,” she said, setting the water to boil. Her hair was askew, the tops of her pale breasts exposed, her cheeks flushed. “But I’m still not going to sleep with you.” She pulled the top of her blouse closed and buttoned it.

  “Are you mortal?” he asked.

  She walked over and kissed him again, put her arms around his waist, pressed against him for a few exquisite moments, and then unwound herself from his grasp.

  “You’re playing with me,” he said.

  “No!” she replied, her eyes flashing. “You’re playing with me! You think because I have some talent, because I’m unencumbered and put on a cheery, joke-telling face at the office, that my life is so perfect? Nothing I do ever leads to anything. Do you know how hard that is? I let you take me out tonight, asked you to take me out, because for once in my life I wanted to feel successful. Instead of counting every penny and feeling fucking hopeless!”

  “You stole the show tonight.”

  “I always steal the show,” she said, taking out two mugs, slamming the cabinet doors. The dim ceiling lights, ten feet above them, cast a yellow glow. “I always get the most applause, the most attention. Tomorrow, if I’m lucky, a reviewer for some paper or another will review this play and say exactly that. And where will it go? What will it get me? Very likely nothing! You think I want to shine shoes forever? I’ve tried pilot season, but they keep saying I’m too tall for TV, or too conspicuous, or too God knows what. I finally got an agent and he sends me from one audition to another; sometimes I get the part, but always in the show t
hat’s going nowhere. That’s my life.”

  “You’re only twenty-four. You have all the time in the world.”

  “I’m twenty-five next month and no one has all the time in the world!” she said. “Only a man would say something so stupid! Women have a very short shelf life in this career. Every single action and decision we make is about beating the clock. You can go nowhere fast for years, then wake up one day with no health insurance, no money, and no skills that anyone wants. How many jobs call for a British accent or an ability to cry on cue? I can’t type, I don’t know computers, I’m lousy at math. This is all I’m trained to do. And now you want me to be with you and love you, so that you can feel good about yourself—so that you can touch a kind of passion for life that you know I have and that you probably left behind ten years ago—and I get to be in both a career and a relationship that’s going absolutely nowhere!”

  “Maybe it will,” he said, “go somewhere.”

  “I saw you with that kid. You’re not going anywhere.” She must have seen something in his face, because her voice softened. “I know you better than you know yourself. You want it all, and then you stand there, offering me nothing and telling me…” Her voice trailed off. She had begun to cry softly. Just a few moments before, in the theater, and then in the restaurant, she’d been ecstatic. Now she was sobbing. He put his arms around her.

  “I’m sorry.” He stroked her hair. “I don’t want you to hate me.”

  “Well I do!” she said. “I really hate you.”

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her softly. “I mean it when I say I love you, and I’m going to prove it.”

  “How?” she asked, sniffling.

  “I’m going to go home,” he replied, as the kettle squealed and they stood watching it, listening to the endless, high-pitched whistling, a sound half passion and half alarm, as the steam pushed up through the hard metal, filling the kitchen with vapor.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO