Free Food for Millionaires (16 page)

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

S
ABINE 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 person 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.

Sabine turned to Jay. “Casey said you were wait-listed at Columbia.”

Jay smiled. “Yes.”

Sabine raised an eyebrow at Isaac, and he nodded as a matter of course. He would make a call. As a trustee, he might be able to arrange for another interview. His son-in-law had needed calls, too. It would be easier to help Jay than his own son-in-law, which had seemed a bit pushy at the time.

They raised their glasses. Sabine drank hers quickly. She adored champagne. With her left hand, she brushed the hair away from her face. The gesture looked seductive. “Jay, have you met Casey’s parents?”

Sabine’s face was flushed from the alcohol. She appeared cheerful, but her gaze was unyielding. Jay had met her several times before at the apartment for dinners: Up until last year, Sabine had been Casey’s boss, but now she had power over his life as the trustee’s wife.

“Yes. I’ve met her mother,” he replied, half smiling.

“Leah Han,” Sabine said aloud in a kind of dreamy voice. “I went to school with her, you know.”

“Yes.” Jay nodded. “She looked very young.”

“She is young,” Sabine insisted, rapping the table softly with her fist. Leah was three years her junior. She, too, had married an older man. But Leah had married a Korean, and Sabine sensed that Joseph looked down on her for having married an American. “And so am I,” she said, giggling.

“Yes, of course. But her hair was gray,” Jay said.

Sabine laughed out loud, then caught herself by covering her mouth. Her hand grazed over her raven hair, cut and tinted by a celebrated stylist with a hidden shop on Charles Street.

“Leah grayed early,” Sabine said, her voice filling with sympathy. “Stress.”

Casey’s neck reddened. Jay was complimenting Sabine at her mother’s expense. A few days before, Casey had stopped by the store to have a cigarette with Sabine. There, she’d mentioned the engagement and Jay’s wait-list status at Columbia. Sabine had then asked her and Jay to come to dinner. She hated Jay suddenly. He had every right to feel hurt by her parents’ refusal to meet him, but it didn’t seem fair for him to display his resentment at the Gottesmans’ coral-lacquered dining room with its heavy silverware, the white ranunculus and lysianthus arranged in crystal globes. The fineness of the linen napkin on her lap brushed beneath her fingertips. Casey felt like a serf at the queen’s table.

Isaac saw Casey tuck her lower lip into her mouth. This was the face his children made before he went on a business trip when they were small. Disappointment looked exactly like that, he thought.

“Whenever I pass by your parents’ shop,” Isaac said, “I see your mother working on the sewing machine, and if she sees me, she waves hello.” He mimicked a shy wave. “Your mom is a very beautiful woman.”

Casey smiled at him, grateful for his kindness. “Everybody says that. My younger sister looks just like her. You’ve never met Tina. She’s studying to be a doctor.” She said this last part proudly.

Sabine reached across and touched Casey’s bare forearm. Her fingernails were oval shaped and buffed to a high sheen today.

“You could have the wedding here in the winter or spring or sooner in Nantucket if you want a summer wedding. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“But,” Casey replied, taking a breath. “That’s very generous of you.. . .” This was classic Sabine. Her gifts were legendary. Sabine did nothing that was less than triple-mint (Isaac’s term), but Casey could not imagine incurring that kind of debt.

“I don’t have a daughter of my own, Casey,” Sabine said, her pretty fingers still holding on to Casey’s forearm. Jay glanced over at Isaac, but the comment did not seem to affect him in the least. No one mentioned Isaac’s children.

“How smart of you to marry young. I got lucky with Isaac. To have found him when I was thirty. But the people back home are right. Girls should marry early. You’re more flexible when you’re young.” She drank the last of her second glass of champagne and tried to pour another, but the bottle was empty.

Isaac spoke up. “It’d be wonderful for us to have your wedding at our house. It’d be fun for us to do it. I’m an old man with half a job. I could be your wedding planner.” He laughed.

Jay looked jubilant, but Casey only smiled politely.

“If it would be all right with your parents,” Isaac said. Sabine had already told him that Casey’s parents would not attend, but he didn’t want to disregard them for Casey’s sake.

Jay couldn’t believe such an offer. The idea of such a wedding thrilled him. He’d been invited to many beautiful homes in his life, but the Gottesman residences—Park Avenue, Nantucket, and Aspen—took the cake. Casey told him there was also a large flat on the Place Vendôme.