Free Food for Millionaires

by Min Jin Lee

“Daddy said to get out.” She was too grown up to say “Daddy,” but it was too late to call him anything else.

  “Why didn’t you just say you were sorry? Do you know how hard your father works? Everything he ever did was for you girls.” Leah shook her head briskly, upset by her daughter’s stubbornness.

  Casey could almost hear Jay’s steady breathing in the kitchen.

  Leah bent over her purse beside her shoes. She pulled out her Bible, zipped open the cover, and withdrew the white envelope. In her rush and shock, she’d forgotten to say her thanksgiving prayer when she’d reached Casey’s apartment. She’d neglected to praise God when it was He who’d led her here. And she felt awful for lying to her husband. Leah wanted to leave then, get back to the store.

  “Here.” She handed the envelope to Casey quickly, avoiding any contact between them.

  Casey stared at the thick packet. “No. It’s okay. I have a job. I’m fine.”

  Leah turned to leave. Casey wanted to hold her back, to touch her. It amazed her how much she wanted her mother to touch her, too, and the more persistent this desire grew, the more Casey pulled back, because this need felt dangerous, as though the touch alone might burn her alive. Her mother had come to give her money (what else came in these envelopes anyway except for tidy stacks of twenty-dollar bills scrounged by immigrants?)—and Tina would need this money for tuition, and there was her father’s retirement to consider.

  “Umma will go now.. . . Ahpa ga—” Leah stopped herself.

  Casey nodded. Her father didn’t know about the visit. “Is he okay?”

  Leah nodded. Ahpa is just okay. You have broken his heart. He has given up on you, and now it is your turn to fight him for his love. Don’t you know, Leah wondered, that you cannot live well without your father’s blessing? In Genesis, Rebekah had encouraged her younger son, Jacob, to deceive her older son, Esau, and their father, Isaac, so her favored Jacob could receive the blessing. Rebekah was wrong to use trickery, but she had understood something essential about the difficulties of life and the protection of a father’s blessing.

  You are my favorite, Leah wanted to say. Instead, she zipped up the Bible with care, making sure to tuck in the frayed ribbon page holder. The day she left Korea, her father had taken a bus from their distant country town to Kimpo airport to bring her this Bible. In the crowded terminal, they’d sat beside each other, knees touching on bucket-shaped seats, and he’d held her hands in his. He’d prayed for her. Once she was seated on the plane—her girls all settled in with their apple slices and sock dolls for the long trip ahead—Leah had loosened the knot of the dark blue fabric-wrapped package. The Bible’s brown leather cover reminded her of her father’s tanned face—wrinkled and thickly mottled, like the bark of a tree. Later that year, he died suddenly, and Leah felt that it violated nature for a child to live so far from her home.

  The clatter of a dish came from the kitchen. “Uh-muh,” Leah said in surprise, but Casey wasn’t startled. Seconds later, a young American man stepped out of the kitchen and walked toward her, wearing gray sweatpants, smiling, his wavy hair tousled, his eyes puffy from sleep. He held out his hand to greet her, and Leah didn’t know what to do.

  Casey had fully intended to come for him. He just couldn’t wait. Her mother was stunned by his appearance.

  Leah turned to Casey, hoping her daughter would calm her somehow—to explain this away. But Casey looked irritated more than shocked. Then Leah figured out that she must’ve been living with this American. Her daughter, who’d gone to college but never had any money, would’ve needed a roommate. The place wasn’t fancy like Ella’s, but the rent would’ve been at least fifteen hundred or something high like that. Her customers were always complaining about rents in the city. The man would think Casey must be some sort of whore. Was there more than one bedroom? Leah clutched her coat lapels and tried to look less disturbed than she felt.

  “This is Jay. Jay Currie,” Casey said. Her mother didn’t have to say another word. Casey could read her thought bubble. “He’s my fiancé. We are going to get married. I was going to—”

  Leah nodded quickly, still unable to shake the man’s outstretched hand. She turned to leave—it felt as though her shoulders were frozen, and she had to tell her feet to move.

  “Umma, you should stay and have coffee. With us. Can’t you?” Casey bit down on her molars.

  Leah faced the door with her back to Casey.

  Casey stared hard at her mother’s long shoulder blades beneath her coat.

  “I don’t understand. Maybe your umma is not so smart, but. . . How? I didn’t raise my daughters to—”

  “What? Sleep with white men?”

  “No. I didn’t raise my daughter to lie to me.” Leah turned to face Casey. She felt lost.

  Jay rubbed his neck with his left hand. Casey’s mother had white hair and possessed the face of a pretty child. She spoke Korean with a gentle dignity, and though he didn’t speak the language, it was possible to comprehend that she was unhappy. He felt foolish for having forced this. But Casey’s refusal to introduce him to her mother and father was offensive. His friends’ parents universally adored him. “Charming” was the word most often used to describe Jay Currie by that set. He loved Casey. She had agreed to marry him. Casey was curious, bold, and smart. Quirky in her thinking. She could be very funny, sometimes petulant like a child. In bed, they were magical—it wasn’t a word he would have used comfortably, not something he’d say out loud, but when they made love, the world was ordered in a better way. During sex, he believed in whatever she thought of as God. Was it adolescent to view sex as a manifestation of divinity? He could have written about that during college. Regardless, those sorority girls had shown him how unsavory it was to be that way with women. Some guys could do that without regret, fantasized of such things, but it turned out that he was old-fashioned after all. Love. Yes, he actually wanted to love a girl to sleep with her.

  He looked down at what he was wearing; his feet were bare except for a sprinkling of pale hair on the knuckles of his toes. His mother called him her tall, fair hobbit. He must’ve made a terrible first impression. All his life he’d won people over, collecting every vote that was needed, gaining every inch of coveted territory. I’m not a bad person, Jay wanted to tell her. He wanted to make Casey happy. Would it be impossible for him to make Casey’s mother like him?

  Jay cleared his throat. “I wish you’d stay. I would love to invite you to breakfast. We can go anywhere. There’s a wonderful hotel on Madison. I’d need only a minute to put on a tie.”

  Leah said nothing, still dazed by what she was saw. Her daughter was living with this man. Her daughter was getting married.

  What do you do with silence? Casey wondered. It was easier to yell back at her father. It was impossible to beat a person who refused to fight, who’d never had a wish to win. She tried to give back the envelope, but her mother said no. Casey held on to it.

  There was no obvious resemblance between them, Jay noticed, except for how intensely they stared at things. Sometimes the way Casey looked at a thing was as if she were putting an object through heat, so focused was her gaze.

  “I can call now to get a table,” Jay said. “The Mark has a delicious brunch.”

  Leah turned to him. It was only after he’d spoken for a while that she realized he was younger than he looked. There were soft pouches under his eyes. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. He was probably Casey’s college boyfriend.

  “Thank you. I have to go back to the store. It was nice meeting you, Mr.. . .” She halted, unable to remember his last name.

  She gave up trying and decided to leave. This was too much for her.

  Casey stared at her mother’s small white hand resting on the brass doorknob painted dove gray, trying to remember the sensation of her mother’s warm palm. They must have held hands long ago. Wasn’t that right? Back in Seoul, her mother used to walk her to kindergarten in the mornings and pick her up
at the end of the day. Where was Tina then? There had been a yellow beret and a matching satchel with a shoulder strap for kindergartners. Funny how certain things were so clear in her mind. Yet the outline of the squat concrete school building was more shadowy. The school was behind the town clinic run by a female pharmacist who gave her Charms sour balls whenever her mother went to fill a prescription.

  Her mother would drop her off at the school, then walk away hurriedly, as if she were being followed, and Casey would stand at the school gate to smell the warm scent of her mother’s hand in her own palm, wishing she could run fast and catch up with Umma.

  Leah opened the door and left. Jay sat on the sofa, still wanting a cup of coffee but feeling too exhausted to get up again. Casey couldn’t speak to him, so she went to shower.

  14 HOLD

  SABINE JUN GOTTESMAN HAD NO CHILDREN of her own. Her husband, Isaac, who was twenty-five years her senior, had four children from his two previous marriages, and although he could have afforded private school tuition fees, weddings, and legacies for many more children, he chose his third wife on the basis of her intelligence and devotion, taking into favorable consideration that for Sabine, her career was her greatest creative act. From the beginning, her policy had been no children, and at his age, he preferred to enjoy his twin grandsons during brunch on the first Saturday of the month with his third daughter and favorite son-in-law. Neither Isaac nor Sabine had ever felt comfortable around infants.

  Isaac’s adult children—three married girls and a boy who was taking over his business—liked Sabine. He’d anticipated some resistance about her age, but they approved of her, refraining from calling her the usual names. All four children were exhausted from years of distrusting their half-siblings from the other marriage and were merely trying to hang on to the attentions of their charismatic father, who was sensitive to criticism. They were relieved that there would be no more heirs, and to boot, Sabine possessed a fortune of her own. Their father’s third wife was treated as a chic aunt who sent birthday gifts from Asprey and Hermès. They did not discuss Sabine with their respective mothers.

  If young people preferred Sabine, she also preferred them and took to employees who were floating through a life in retail. She adopted their shapeless hopes, sent them through FIT, Parsons, or the School of Visual Arts, and they became buyers or managers, and a couple of them owned notable boutiques on Elizabeth Street. Tonight, Casey Han, a Korean-American and a great favorite of Sabine’s, and her fiancé, Jay, were coming to dinner.

  Before company came, it was Isaac’s habit to check the bar—an enclosed space in the gallery-style living room behind a pair of rosewood paneled doors. This was something he preferred to do himself, having tended bar while going to business school. Once, a comely benefactor of the ballet asked Isaac for a kir royale at his home, and after tasting it, she’d scrutinized her host, unable to believe that Isaac Gottesman—the charming mogul who owned dozens of blocks of prime Manhattan real estate and served as trustee of both the Columbia Business School and the New York City Ballet—could mix her favorite cocktail better than Yanni, the barman at the Oak Room. Isaac was a man who enjoyed knowing how to do things like that. He could pull coins out of children’s ears and make a clean three-point shot.

  Sabine entered the living room fresh from her shower, scented richly with her vetiver perfume. She wore a long Nehru jacket with slim matching pants. The shrimp color of the fabric made her dewy complexion even prettier. She kissed her husband’s just shaved cheek and asked him for a neat whiskey. Each night, she had an aperitif before dinner, and with her meal, she drank two glasses of red wine.

  In a wonderful mood, Sabine carried her drink to her reading chair near the solarium to enjoy the last bit of April dusk. She sipped her whiskey slowly and opened a book about Diego Rivera resting on the Giacometti coffee table. Before meeting Sabine, Isaac had never met anyone who actually read the text in these coffee table art books.

  His wife was only forty-two, and in their marriage, she’d grown more refined. They’d met twelve years before when she came to a lease closing at his offices. That morning, Isaac overheard a young Asian woman tell the receptionist in her accented English that she was the new tenant for one of his buildings in Chelsea—a thirty-thousand-square-foot raw space on Eighteenth Street. Back then, her voice was louder and her tone more insistent. A speech therapist had since cured her of these inferior qualities. Out of curiosity, Isaac sat in on the closing, and the leasing broker who worked for the man whose name was above all the doors and engraved on the letterhead stammered, not knowing if his tack should be carrot or stick with the tenant Mr. Gottesman could not stop staring at.

  At the closing, Sabine was far more intelligent than her broker or expensive lawyer. While she signed the six copies of the telephone-book-size lease, she evinced no fear at entering into a three-million-dollar, ten-year, triple-net lease with Gottesman Real Property. That morning, Isaac gave her every term she’d asked for. She was thirty years old then, he found out at the closing dinner—a meal he’d contrived—and three months later, she agreed to marry him. When he brought up a prenuptial agreement, she said without blinking, “Isaac, I have found you, and I will never leave you. I intend to make you happy. Never, ever again insult me with your talk of money.” Against his matrimonial lawyer’s advice, Isaac married her without one.

  From the beginning, he’d been attracted to her toughness, and even now he admired no one as much as he admired her. His Italian mother had been prone to rages, and his Jewish father had been soft-spoken and muddleheaded. They had been barely middle-class, and he and his sister had never had the things they wanted. His parents died before his first divorce from Kate, a kindhearted WASP who felt at best neutral about sex, and his second marriage to Carla, a mean beauty from Venezuela who cuckolded him with his business partner. A few years shy of seventy, he wondered what they would have made of number three, his Korean wife—the retail tycoon.

  True to her word, Sabine had become indispensable to his well-being. She bought him vitamins. Every morning, she snipped squares of wheatgrass they grew in a long flat pan on the sill of their sunny kitchen window. They were Park Avenue farmers, he joked. She fed the clippings into a juicer, then served him a double shot, resulting in grassy burps for the rest of the morning. His cardiologist was delighted—Isaac had shed forty pounds, his blood pressure medication was no longer necessary, and his sexual vigor was excellent. Yet he felt deprived.

  Semiretired, Isaac worked only four hours a day, and he had a great deal of time to think. And in his leisure, he thought about love. In the pursuit of his ambition, he had neglected Kate; and after he became rich, he’d sported Carla around like a fine race car; and with Sabine, he saw that he did not know how to love her because she did not show him any need. Sabine was an ideal partner, and he’d never leave her, but Isaac found himself sleeping with other women. At sixty-seven years old, what he wanted more than anything was romance, and it flabbergasted him that this would never be possible with his wife. Sabine was incapable of loving him in the way he wanted to be loved—with a desperation or a sloppiness. He had married her because she would never fall apart, but he saw that all he wanted now was to care for a woman, and Sabine’s self-sufficiency made him obsolete.

  Casey and Jay arrived.

  Sabine kissed Casey, her left cheek and then her right, and then she kissed Jay. “My darlings, my darlings,” she said, her arms open like a conductor’s, her fingers spread apart.

  Isaac hugged Casey. When he let her go, she took in the spectacular sight of the enormous white dogwood branches in Ching vases at the opposite ends of the room.

  Sabine’s designer had recently made over the apartment. Long tailored sofas were upholstered in shades of white wool, and armchairs in oxblood velvets dotted the room like scarlet blooms over fresh snow. Their collection of ancient Chinese furniture was precious but inviting—the dark wood adding warmth to the cool Palladian-style interior. It was a room a pers
on felt lucky to be invited to—this having been Sabine’s goal.

  “Congratulations,” Isaac said.

  “Thank you,” Jay said promptly, and Casey smiled at Isaac warmly.

  “No ring?” Sabine glanced at Casey’s left hand.

  “Later,” Casey said, thinking it was rude of her to ask. They were planning to choose it together next weekend.

  “Soon,” Jay said.

  Isaac went to the bar and brought them glasses of chilled Vouvray and for himself a glass of seltzer. The four of them raised their glasses. “To love,” Isaac said.

  “And prosperity,” added Sabine.

  The dinner was served by the housekeeper: spring pea soup, John Dory with salsify, cheese, and for dessert, poached pears and ginger yogurt. During the meal, Jay explained the plot of King Lear, which was playing at Lincoln Center, and Sabine paid careful attention to what he was saying.

  “So he gave everything away before he died?” she asked. Even as a generous person, she found it hard to accept such foolishness.

  Jay nodded—his wide-eyed expression matching her sentiment. He was pleased to exploit his English major for some useful purpose. At school, he’d carefully read over twenty of Shakespeare’s plays and most of his sonnets. In his senior year, he’d written about Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare. If prompted and encouraged, he would’ve recited sonnets after the coffee.

  Isaac preferred ballet—introduced to him by his daughters. He’d never been much of a reader. However, he was impressed by Jay’s exuberance for the play.

  The coffee was served with petit fours from Bonté, and Isaac tapped his head, remembering the champagne. “Not much of a bartender, am I?”

  He brought over a bottle of vintage Krug sloshing in an ice bucket and four flutes.

  “So have you set the date?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Jay said, turning to Casey. “I’m still waiting to hear about B schools.”

  “So we don’t know where we’ll be or our schedules exactly.” Casey had no idea what kind of wedding they’d have. Neither her parents nor Jay’s had any extra money. Whatever bonus Jay had would go toward housing and tuition when he stopped work. Even so, they’d have to take out loans. Also, her parents wouldn’t attend anyway.