Rich Boy

by Sharon Pomerantz

  His new black penny loafers pinched his feet. Dressed for the part, he decided to treat himself to a taxi. He was off until seven the next morning, when he’d change identities, turning from a passenger in a cab to a cabbie. But it was already the beginning of rush hour, and a cold, windy evening, too. Half of Midtown was trying to hail a taxi and Robert, who as a driver had a map of the city streets imprinted on his brain, was suddenly less savvy on foot. The thick froth of bodies carried him along, and before he knew it he was on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street, across from Central Park and in front of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, perhaps the worst corner in the entire city for hailing a cab at rush hour. He was thinking about the bus when he saw, miraculously, a cab approaching Sixtieth, trying to get itself from the center lane over to the curb to deposit passengers. Robert raced up Fifth, then darted across on a diagonal, dodging the parking lot of cars and yelling to the driver, who was now dropping off a woman with a baby and a cumbersome stroller. As he ran, he became aware of someone just behind him. No way am I giving up this cab, he thought, grabbing for the door handle, just as a woman grabbed for the same handle, their hands brushing abruptly against each other. She removed hers quickly and he opened the door.

  “You together?” the driver asked. A car honked behind him.

  “In this traffic, we’d better be,” the woman said. She got in and slid over to make room for him to follow, which he did, shutting the door behind him. She had long, reddish blond hair and small, close-set, green eyes that turned upward at the edges, pale skin, a narrow nose, and dangerously long legs in high-heeled brown boots. She unbuttoned her tan suede jacket, revealing a pale yellow dress, the kind that wrapped around a woman, showed the curve of her hips and just a little cleavage. A silk scarf of navy, yellow, and gold was tied intricately around her neck, one end dangling just over her left breast. Carefully packaged, he thought, as she slowly removed a leather glove, then put out her manicured hand. “My name is Crea, by the way,” she said.

  “Robert,” he said. “Crea is an unusual name.”

  “Have you never heard it before?”

  “Actually, I think I have, but I don’t know where.”

  Crea reached into her purse for a cigarette, tapped the pack, and put one in her mouth, a feminine extrathin cigarette, the kind that he’d seen on a television commercial trumpeting the arrival of the liberated woman. She tilted her head toward him, seeming to need a light, but then revealed the tiny silver lighter in her hand; she lit the cigarette and took a long inhale, blowing the smoke slowly out her nostrils.

  “A direction would be nice,” the driver snapped, as the traffic inched forward again. “Not that I wanna interrupt you people’s getting acquainted.”

  Robert leaned forward, speaking close to the driver’s ear. “In this traffic, chief, where you gonna go? Huh?” He was paying for this ride and he deserved all the niceties he had coming to him. “Take a right here and go around the park to Central Park West. I’ll direct you from there. If you can’t manage that, then cut over now and go east, turn up Park Avenue, stay on it until Eighty-first, then go west and cut across the park, but for Christ’s sake don’t stay on Fifth Avenue. All right?”

  Crea turned from the window. “For a man in an expensive suit, you can be, uh, very down with the people,” she said.

  He had no intention of telling her that he had only one suit, which happened to be from Brooks Brothers, or that he’d gone there on the recommendation of another law student, having never spent so much on himself in his life. She looked him in the eye now, smiling, and he decided that though she was not beautiful, she was striking, sleek. With those upturned green eyes, that thick, reddish hair, she looked almost feline. He rolled down his window, then reached over and took the cigarette from between her fingers, threw it out the window, and kissed her, lightly, on the lips. “I have asthma,” he said. “Don’t smoke.”

  “If you don’t smoke, do you at least drink?” she asked. “We might get out here and walk to the St. Regis for a cocktail? I’ve always loved that Maxfield Parrish mural.” She must have noticed that he looked puzzled, because she added, “You know, Old King Cole?”

  “Old King Cole, the Merry Old Soul?” Robert asked. “Can’t say I’ve seen it.”

  “And you live in New York? Well, that settles it.”

  The driver sighed. He was about to make the turn. “Wadda you want?” he asked.

  They had gone just one block.

  “Let us out,” Robert said, and threw the man a five.

  Much later, after they’d each had a martini at the bar, decided to stay for dinner, ordered two steak frites, and drank two bottles of wine that she picked, they decided, stumbling arm in arm down the elaborate marble halls and past a private dining room, to take a room. “You sit over there,” he said, not wanting her to hear how much it would cost. She found the gesture charmingly old-fashioned and positioned herself by the uniformed bellhop who stood at attention near the stairway. Initially the man at the desk said they didn’t have a room, but then Crea came over to inquire, and another employee took the guy aside. When he returned, something had materialized. Was she a hooker? Robert wondered. A really high-priced one who often stayed here? He was too anxious to get upstairs, too tipsy to think much about it or about the bill, which would set him back considerably —the dinner alone had cost him almost a month’s rent.

  In the enormous room with the pink-and-gold-striped wall-paper, elaborate windows, and heavy brocade curtains, he stripped off her dress, unwrapping her body like a package. As he kissed her, he was aware of her quickened breathing, of the tiny line of sweat on her upper lip, and of the straight-backed way that she held herself, like some kind of queen, even as she took his hand and put it between her legs, asking him, over and over, to touch her, to please touch her.

  “Move closer,” she whispered, as they tossed right and then left, clinging to each other.

  “If I were any closer, I’d be behind you,” he replied. “That’s not original, it’s Groucho.” She laughed as he turned her over and mounted her from the back. Even then, even on all fours, she had that straight back, like a dancer, or a horseback rider, with a high behind. She was not what he’d expected, hours earlier, when he observed her posture in the bar and judged her rigid, unyielding. She didn’t make love like a woman with perfect posture; she made love like a woman who hadn’t been touched in months, though if he read the right pages of the papers, he’d have known that for the past year she’d been dating a local sportscaster, and before that a professor of art history at Columbia University who was also titled Italian royalty.

  Afterward they lay on the bed, her head on his shoulder. “You’re a very fast walker,” she said, “so I’m awfully glad you take your time in other areas.”

  “How carefully did you observe my, uh, walking?” he asked, twirling a piece of her hair around his finger.

  “Didn’t you notice? I chased you all the way from Alexander, Lenox and Wardell.”

  “Really?” he asked, recalling the sound of heels clicking behind him. “You a lawyer?”

  “God, no,” she replied. “I was there to speak to my father. It’s impossible to have a constructive discussion with a lawyer, you know? You’re all terrible at conceding anything.”

  Robert took a moment to realize that she was including him in this comment. That he was, in fact, a lawyer, or almost one. That interview had felt like years ago.

  “He was treating me, as usual, like an infant. We argued over money—what else do parents and children argue over? Only it’s my very own money that he’s keeping from me.”

  “You could sue,” Robert said, stroking her hair.

  “You be my lawyer.” She pressed close to him in the dark and ran her big toe up and down his calf. “I left without saying good-bye, left my father halfway through his sentence, slammed the door, and told myself that I was going to get the first plane out of New York, going anywhere, so long as it was as far away from him as possib
le.”

  “So why didn’t you?” Robert asked.

  “It was pure instinct, actually. I didn’t think at all.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  She rolled on top of him and placed her finger across his lips, moved it along his chin, her nail scratching lightly at the cleft, then traced her way along his Adam’s apple and down to his clavicle, ran her finger down his arm to his side and then to his outer thigh, until softly, ever so softly, she traced inward along his groin.

  “As I walked down the hall, I saw this man heading for the elevators, the handsomest man I’d ever seen,” she said, as Robert groaned softly under her touch. “Everything else went out of my head—my father, the argument, where I was. All I knew was that I had to have him.”

  A few hours later Robert got out of bed, leaving Crea asleep in the enormous, far-too-comfortable hotel bed. In only his boxers, he sat down at the desk by the window, wondering what excuse he might give for rushing off so early. He wrote her a quick note on hotel stationery: “Meeting at school. Must run. Love, R.” He added a PS with his phone number, realizing that he’d forgotten to get hers, that she might not be listed, and wondering, as he dressed, if he even wanted this to be more than a one-nighter. In the light of day, she struck him as an expensive, aggressively self-confident girl. She knew exactly what she wanted, that was clear, but he wasn’t sure he was up for the task. He was still discovering his future, and the city was full of women. One thing for sure, he thought as he closed the door softly behind him, even if he hadn’t left his number, Crea would likely track him down. Either way, he’d have to deal with her.

  There were three uniformed men on duty downstairs, two behind the desk and another at attention by the landing. The guy by the stairs tipped his hat to the tall, handsome, but bedraggled young man in the rumpled navy suit, a powder blue patterned tie hanging undone around his neck. As Robert walked out into the eerie quiet of Midtown, the streets shockingly empty save for the occasional cab or waitress leaving after the night shift, he thought of the portraits of the founding partners in the lobby at A, L and W, and Jack Alexander with his reddish hair, small green eyes, and narrow nose. He had not even gotten a summer job yet and already, he was almost certain, he’d had sex three times with the founding partner’s daughter. He shook his head in wonder, trying to sort out if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Descending into the empty subway, he decided that perhaps it was neither; perhaps it was simply an opportunity.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Robert learns about beauty and its opposite

  No woman had ever been quite so curious about Robert. Crea asked him questions about his upbringing, his parents, his brother. He answered her, sometimes honestly, as when he regaled her with stories of his father’s collection of scarves and umbrellas, or the enormous amount of food consumed by his brother’s friend Victor Lampshade. She thought that he was talking about himself in very honest terms and thanked him for it, finding his honesty alluring. But in reality, by then Robert had the telling of his own story down to a science. The ways he had learned to bluff and evade in college had been further developed since Gwendolyn’s death, which he still could not, would not, talk about with a single soul. He could tell funny stories and amuse, occasionally even holding his parents and his brother up for her enjoyment, though mostly he stuck to the oddities of his Oxford Circle neighbors for entertainment value; but when it came to the real details of his past he gave Crea a sanitized outline.

  Of course she also held back her own family details more than he liked, saying little about the subject that fascinated him most—her relationship with her father. Perhaps he was better off not knowing. Jack, after all, was technically his boss, though as a summer associate, he’d been welcomed by the man on the first day, as the others had—a few words to rally the troops—before they were sent on their way, and he never saw him again. Robert had asked for real estate work, but found himself first doing tasks for the corporate department. The woman who gave out the assignments to the summer associates simply said, “You all rotate. Your preference has been duly noted.” He was then directed to an associate who gave him a pile of documents and told him to write a case summary. “In the law library, red books are the cases and black books are the statutes. Now get moving.”

  In the decades to come the firm would woo its summer employees with dinners and booze cruises, baseball tickets and shortened hours, but not in 1977; he got little direction and less encouragement; jobs were in short supply, and this was clearly a test. The first time he had to do a contract, for a company that supplied artificial hair to doll manufacturers, he asked a young associate for help, and the man shrugged and told him he was too busy. What on earth was he supposed to do? The lawyer who’d given him the assignment was not even in that day. On the way back to his cubicle, he saw a man leaving his office and figured he’d have to try again. “I’m new,” he said in a low voice, “and I’m trying to figure out this contract. Can you help me out?”

  The man smiled, and even if it was a condescending smile, it was the first Robert had received in two weeks. He motioned Robert into his office. “I was about to leave for a fast lunch, but I can give you a minute,” he said. “I know what the first weeks are like.” He had only the vaguest trace of a foreign accent that Robert couldn’t place, and he wore a winter-white suit, a pale blue shirt with a yellow silk tie and pocket square, and brown and white wing-tipped shoes. Everything about him was so neat and pressed as to be either intimidating or just plain strange. His broad shoulders looked, under his suit, as if they’d been drawn artificially wide with a ruler. Maybe this was what a certain kind of European called fashion. He was from somewhere else, all right. What American had the nerve to dress like that for the office? But Robert was desperate. He explained his situation.

  “You’d be better off asking someone in corporate, my friend. I’m real estate.”

  “Oh,” Robert said, brightening. “That’s what I’d really like to work on.”

  “I came last year from another firm.”

  “You must be very good,” Robert said, “if they took you in this market.”

  The man shrugged.

  “What firm?” Robert asked.

  “Bernicker and Carlysle.”

  Robert whistled. “That’s impressive. Why on earth did you leave?”

  “It wasn’t my cup of tea,” he said, making it clear by his tone and the pursing of his lips that Robert had asked one question too many.

  “So any suggestions about this contract? I’ve tried people in corporate; they don’t seem to have any time for me.”

  He smiled. “Check the files. There could be a contract done for those two companies with regularity. Just find the old one and change the quantities and the dates. At least, try that first.”

  “Could it really be that simple?”

  “If it was complicated, they would not give it to you. No offense.”

  “No offense taken. I readily admit my own ignorance.”

  “Sometimes you’re better off asking one of the older secretaries. They know a lot and they’re more forgiving than the lawyers.”

  “I’ll try your suggestion. Nothing to lose. My name’s Robert Vishniak, by the way.”

  “Mario Saldana,” he said, shaking Robert’s hand with a firm, almost crushing grip.

  “Spain?” Robert asked hesitantly.

  “Caracas, Venezuela,” he corrected. “Tell me, Roberto, do you play rugby?”

  “No. Are you working on a lawsuit or something?”

  “You’re quite funny. How about soccer? Tennis? I want to organize a team at the firm.”

  “I don’t know how athletic these guys are as a group.”

  “All this sitting at a desk is not natural. Human beings need to move around.”

  “I’m only a summer associate. You may not see me again after August.”

  “We can always hope, yes?” he said, smiling. “And now, I must get some lunch.”
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br />   Robert thanked him again and went right to a secretary in corporate. As Mario had said he would, Robert found the contract from the year before. Crisis averted.

  NO MATTER HOW UNCOMFORTABLE he sometimes felt at Alexander, Lenox and Wardell, Robert knew he was lucky. He didn’t work on class-action suits—friends had gone to firms where endlessly complicated torts kept them going through boxes of documents day after day, doing little more than clerical work—plus he was encouraged to continue working one day a week at the law clinic. He found himself looking forward to that time; what a relief to know what he was doing.

  There was not so much work that he had to go in on weekends, and he spent his free time with Crea. She knew more about beauty than anyone he’d ever met, and also about its visual opposite, which was a kind of beauty, too. This was her gift to him, to teach him about what people bought when their only considerations were aesthetic or emotional, never financial or practical. She had helped her father and almost everyone she knew decorate their offices—though it never occurred to her to charge for these services. She was generous with advice and with pieces that she often bought for people, sometimes giving away valuable modern art and sculpture as gifts. “It’s not really generosity,” she said. “I just can’t stand bad taste.” But he knew that this was modesty—she was generous in a graceful, self-effacing way.

  Slowly, over time, she changed the way he saw things. She took him to galleries, holding his hand and whispering to him about the materials the painters used, and how to approach the work. Some of it, for Robert’s taste, was hopelessly abstract. Yet she seemed to understand all the layers of thought and technique that the artist had stripped away to get three perfectly blurred lines that formed a sort of primitive horizon. He began, through her, to understand negative space, to perceive how the taking away of something could be more powerful than any amount of excess.