“I think I’ll go talk to that man about sailing,” Tracey said. “I’m not good with affairs of the heart.” He clasped Pascal on the shoulder sympathetically, then disappeared.
“The world is full of women, Mark,” Robert said. “You’re rich, young. Go enjoy yourself.”
“Haven’t you figured it out already?” Pascal asked. “I don’t really know how to enjoy myself.”
It was true, Robert thought; he’d always been old, even in college. Pascal had relinquished his dream of journalism without much of a fight, and now Robert was taking away the last of his youthful fantasies. But even Mark’s fantasies were somehow old and practical—he’d dreamt of the only writing job that provided a regular paycheck, and of a woman he’d grown up with, of whom his family approved.
“I was too serious for her,” he said, lowering his voice. “She slept with me once, you know. She was seventeen and I was nineteen; she and my sister were counselors at that damned camp and I came up for visiting day —”
“Mark, shut up.” Robert took Pascal firmly by the arm, trying to lead him out of the crowded room but not getting very far.
“Afterward, she pretended like it never happened. Tortured by that for years—just once, and never again. She wouldn’t tell me what I did wrong —” He shook Robert off, grabbed two glasses of champagne, and careened off in another direction. With uncanny timing, Mark’s father found him, and the two disappeared down a hallway. Of course Trenton Pascal had recommended the detective. It was his last-gasp attempt to get his son what he wanted. Robert spotted his own family, sitting not far from the buffet, and felt strangely relieved to join them.
Having finished their dinner, his mother and aunt and uncle sat staring out at the view. Barry was gone again. His father’s cousin Miriam, the only Vishniak relative who had made the trip with them, sat in his place. The group was whispering in Yiddish. Always a bad sign.
“What do you think of the house?” Robert asked, sitting down.
“She grew up here?”
“No, this is where they came on the weekend.”
“Ooooh,” Aunt Lolly said, with a slow outlay of breath.
“You like the food?” Robert asked.
“Very fancy-shmancy,” Fred replied. Aunt Lolly added that the meat was done just right and that the guy serving it said they used beer in the marinade.
Crea came over. Robert jumped up to give her his chair, then grabbed a passing waiter and asked for another one. The waiter obliged quickly and Robert sat down again. “I’ve hardly spoken to you all day,” she said, taking his hand. “I don’t know if Robert told you, but we’re definitely having the wedding at the Plaza. My father was against it. Too showy, not modern enough. He wanted it here, but I thought we could have a dinner here Friday night, for the out-of-town guests, and that seemed to satisfy him. I loved the Plaza as a child, and so did my mother, and you only get married once.”
Robert doubted his aunt or any of them knew what the Plaza was, but everyone nodded. Crea began to talk rapidly, uncomfortably, about the wedding. Stacia, waiting until a pause, leaned over and said she had something for Crea. Then she removed from her purse a stack of three-by-five cards fastened with a rubber band.
“We put these together for you,” Stacia continued. The relatives smiled, and Crea looked to Robert, confused. “Me and his grandmother and his aunt. All Robert’s favorite recipes. We always did things from memory. Cece can’t write English. But we sat down together and wrote them out.” Triumphantly she held the stack out, and Crea took it. Robert looked out at the sky fading to a pale pink, the endless waiters and scurrying caterers and servers, plus Dinah and the uniformed help pitching in, grabbing what they could to take into the kitchen for washing.
“So nice of you,” Crea said, still holding the cards out in front of her. “The thing is, though, I don’t cook.”
The table went silent. Uncle Fred raised an eyebrow, and Lolly looked into her lap.
“You don’t cook?” Stacia repeated loudly. “You mean it’s like this all the time?”
“No,” Crea said, smiling. “Not like this, no caterers or waiters. Not for our little apartment. But I’ll hire a housekeeper who cooks.” And then she added nervously, “Someone very good. She won’t sleep in or anything.”
“Is this one of those feminist things?” Stacia asked.
Crea handed her back the cards, shaking her head.
“No, you keep them. Give them to your cook. Maybe she can use them.”
No one said a word and then, to Robert’s relief, Dinah came over and said that an old friend of Crea’s was about to leave. Crea excused herself, asking Robert to join her.
Not long after, his family thanked Jack Alexander in a flurry of words and then came at Robert and Crea with the traditional white envelopes, stuffing them in their hands and pockets, wishing them mazel tov and finally departing en masse.
“What are these for exactly?” Crea asked, holding three envelopes together in her hand.
“Cash,” he said. “They always give cash. No cards.”
“Why no cards?”
“They don’t like them,” he said. Just names and “with love” scrawled on envelopes. His mother believed cards were a waste of money, especially if they could not be reused. But he could not say that, not then. A handful of guests still lingered in the yard, but he and Crea took a few minutes for themselves in the back hall. Suddenly she bombarded him with questions. Why had his family left so soon? Why didn’t his mother smile? Why did she wear black; was she in mourning for his choice of wife? Was this about the cooking? And why had they shown no enthusiasm about the Plaza? Did they think it too extravagant?
Robert cringed, hearing in her tone that they would not be asked to pay anything, so the least they could be was enthusiastic.
“Why did she dwell on the Warhol, Robert? Does she think I’m not pretty enough for you?”
On that last one, Robert laughed out loud. “She doesn’t care what anyone looks like.”
That had come out wrong and now Crea began to cry. He took her in his arms. “She has Bell’s palsy, I told you, her face is frozen like that. And that’s her only good dress.”
Crea stared at him, incredulous. His excuse sounded flimsy, even to his own ears. Her son was engaged. For once she could buy a new dress. But knowing Stacia, she was saving her money for the wedding weekend, which would require two dresses and a very nice gift. That would be enough of a shock to her system.
But how to explain his mother? How to explain that when she asked questions, sometimes with a negative inflection, it was because she did not know something and wanted to understand, and not because she was discounting the information? When she stood at attention, not coming forward to kiss Crea, it was because, well, she had not come forward to kiss Robert, either. Kisses and hugs were distributed with extreme discretion. When her face occasionally went slack, showing neither the smile nor the frown—as it had when she walked into the house and met Crea—that was a rare expression. He’d seen his mother like that only a few times in his life—eight months before, when his father entered the hospital and the doctors were reluctant to operate; seven years before that, when Robert showed up on her doorstep looking like a scarecrow; and the day he left for college. “That’s terror,” he said. “She’s terrified.”
“Of what?” Crea said. “Weren’t we as kind to her as we could be? I don’t know how I’m supposed to act with them.”
He could not explain anymore, he was tired, and suddenly it felt useless to even try.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Prenuptus interruptus
Weeks went by, and then months. Robert passed the bar—he’d had so much else to worry about that it did not even occur to him he wouldn’t pass, and perhaps because of that attitude he succeeded on the first try, while some of his more focused colleagues were stuck taking it again.
The winter holidays had ended and the wedding date drew perilously close, but for Robert and Crea t
he social hubbub never seemed to end. The night before, a Thursday, they’d been out at a benefit for the restoration of the Old Merchant’s House on East Fourth—she was a donor on the project. As Crea’s evening plans went, this one was on the quieter side, but then they’d stopped in SoHo at a gallery opening and weren’t home until almost 1:00 a.m. Her public self at these parties now stood out to him in bold contrast to the awkwardness and insecurity he’d seen when she met his family. How was she able to exist so easily in this intimidating world, yet go to pieces when confronted with the terrified Vishniaks?
He was having trouble sleeping through the night. In a distant corner of the living room was a wall clock that chimed on the hour and half hour. It was something called a Jugendstil Regulator made by Gustav Becker. Admittedly, the clock was beautiful, with an austere walnut cabinet, and the bobs and weights inside were ornately engraved. Though the apartment was large and the walls thick, late into the night he found himself listening for that soft chiming, which sounded to his ears like Bonn-Bonn-Bonn, as if the clock were homesick for its country of origin. She said he would get used to the sound over time, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her to get rid of it. The clock served a purpose, too; his alarm, with its cheap drugstore beep, went off at a quarter to seven, and if he was not out of bed, then the wall clock took over on the hour.
When Crea heard Robert’s alarm that morning, she rolled over and groaned, though in minutes, he knew, she’d be asleep again, getting up around ten. Robert made his way quietly to the bathroom, feeling hungover and anxious, not unusual after one of their late evenings. The alcohol, the lack of sleep, the powerful new asthma medication—his system was a test-tube experiment gone awry. This uneasiness would stay with him until he bought a giant cup of coffee on the way to work and forced himself to eat a muffin at his desk. But the first hour was always hell. He looked at his face in the mirror, wishing that he didn’t have to shave. Days like this, with his hands shaking, he feared cutting his own throat. Could a man who billed in fifteen-minute increments really keep up with a woman who had nothing but time? Sometimes he wondered.
He dressed quickly and rushed out the door before the clock hit seven fifteen, then hailed a cab at Park Avenue. Falling asleep in the backseat, he was awakened at his destination by the driver—the fare was high but he paid it, glad for the extra sleep, though he now had less than twenty dollars to get him through the week. The day before, the arrival of a notice from his bank had alerted him to a bounced check. This year’s Christmas bonus of five hundred dollars had gone toward the engagement ring. They were having her mother’s ring reset, adding an extra diamond. The rest of the money came from what he could pull together from his paychecks and the very last of what he had left of the money he’d saved from driving a cab. Her engagement ring was long overdue.
Living at her apartment, he had not, this time, made more than the cursory attempt to talk about what he should pay in rent. Seeing her disinterest, he’d dropped the subject. She owned the place and paid the bills, not her father, and if she didn’t want to talk about money, then he wouldn’t, either. Instead, he simply paid bills as he saw fit—leaving her checks for the phone or utilities, leaving cash for the maid when he remembered, picking up groceries when he was home early enough to go shopping. Unlike Gwendolyn, Crea accepted his money with a smile and a nod, or the money simply disappeared from the perch where he’d left it. And he always paid when they were out in public. For once, he had hit the right note. But even paying for a portion of Crea’s lifestyle was pricey.
At 8:00 a.m. he found the usual assemblage of associates gathered around the coffeepot. Jack’s secretary was not in yet. Secretaries generally made the coffee at A, L and W, but the first young associates in the office were always desperate—a small crowd now waited for the water to percolate through the filter. Their shoulders slumped, their skin sallow and dry from lack of sleep and sunlight, they grunted hello or nodded at him; an attractive brunette from litigation complimented his overcoat. But unlike when he was part of the summer program and no one knew he was dating Crea, now real conversation always stopped as he drew near. It was the same in the men’s room, used exclusively by associates, where surprisingly long conversations went on, but not in front of Robert. Everyone assumed him to have Jack’s ear, which showed that they were not very observant. After the engagement party, and from the day Robert started at the firm, Jack had been as oblivious to him as he was to every other first-year associate.
Wilton Henry, real estate wunderkind, walked with him to his office. The two were neighbors. “Off to fill in loan applications,” Henry declared. “I’m so damn bored.” He loved to laud it over everyone that he worked three times as fast and was always out the door by six, while the rest were still struggling.
“Saldana has me working on a few things,” Robert said. “Not too bad.”
“The Latin Beau Brummell?”
“You’re so hip with those nineteenth-century references,” Robert replied. “Reading Lord Byron again?”
“I’d be a lot more interesting if I were,” he replied. “Didn’t he sleep with his sister?”
“Have we uncovered some dark childhood fantasy?” Robert asked, stroking his chin as if it were a beard.
“All I’m saying,” Henry asserted, and then waited to continue until Robert had taken some papers from Lola, the secretary they shared. “All I’m saying is that there’s something strange about that guy.”
If there was anything strange about Saldana, it was that he bothered to explain assignments and treated Robert like a person, not an idiotic underling or Jack’s privileged son-in-law. Robert felt grateful to him.
“Saldana’s not in yet, by the way,” Henry added over his shoulder, as he and Robert went to their own doors.
In Robert’s windowless room, so small that the desk had to be placed perpendicular to the entrance, he took off his trench and hung it on the hanger behind his door, then ripped the month of March off the calendar. In two weeks the invitations to the wedding would go out. Somewhere in Chinatown, a group of women sat at a long table writing names on the thick, cream-colored envelopes using an ornate calligraphy. Soon they’d be assembling the pieces for the two-day event. In TriBeCa, a similarly strange ritual went on around the lace on Crea’s gown. His wedding was a cottage industry from another time, employing workers by the hundreds.
Robert’s secretary arrived at eight forty-five, and by then he was on his third cup of coffee and a shot from his inhaler, nervous energy and adrenaline pushing him along. He’d spent the past month doing nothing but preparing ancillary closing documents, reviewing title reports and surveys, reading and rereading tiny print until his eyes ached. But Mario, recognizing his frustration, and knowing his interest in landmark preservation, had just asked him to do some research for a client who had bought a run-down hotel that he planned to demolish, not realizing that it shared a party wall with a building that was up for landmark status. Robert was in the firm library all morning. When Lola knocked, he was sitting behind a stack of books and his notes, surprised to discover that it was past noon. “Are you going to lunch now?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Lola said. “Selene called. Mr. Alexander wants a few minutes of your time.”
“He does?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Now,” she said, smiling encouragingly.
“Any idea why?”
She shook her head. “Comb your hair.”
Though Robert had worked at the firm for a little more than seven months, he’d never before been invited into Jack’s office. Was this a lunch invitation? An assignment? Work filtered down through the food chain. He received it from higher-level associates, not partners.
Jack’s secretary, Selene, was not what he’d expected. Each time he saw her, he was reminded all over again of his future father-in-law’s inscrutability. No longer young, Selene dressed like a floozy. Women in the office were not even allowed to wear pants, but t
here was no caveat on miniskirts or see-through blouses, at least for Jack’s assistant. Whenever he passed Selene in the hall, Robert wondered what exactly went on, or had gone on, between those two. There was never any gossip about Crea’s father’s personal life, not at the firm or in the news. But Jack had been single a long time,and before that unhappily married. Was Selene the answer? Or did he put up with her cheap taste only because she was good at her job?
“Go right in, Robert.” Selene’s hair was done up in a high, lacquered style, her freckled cleavage pushed up above the deep V in her sweater. “He’s expecting you.”
Jack, seated at his desk, got up and shook his hand. Robert looked around at the enormous rectangular office with its low white couches, white carpeting, and three white walls. The fourth wall, a blue-gray color, was lined with white paintings in narrow chrome frames. Thin lines of red or black zigzagged and danced across the white canvases. Between the two couches was a round glass coffee table with an enormous blue marble on top. On the other side of the room was Jack’s glass desk, held up by legs so narrow that it seemed to hang magically in the air.
Jack motioned for Robert to sit down on the couch, though he remained standing. “How are your parents?” he asked.
“Fine, sir, looking forward to the wedding.” They exchanged small talk about Jack’s favorite topic—Crea. She looked tired, she thrived on busyness, all the usual, until Robert began to wonder why he’d been summoned. Then Jack walked to his desk, returning with a thick manila envelope. Was Jack giving him work? Was this the beginning of some new professional confidence between them? Jack, holding the envelope, now walked back over to Robert and lowered himself, awkwardly, onto the couch. “I need you to look this over,” he said, sliding the envelope across the table. “Consult someone if you like and get it back to me.”
“How long do I have?”
“I’d suggest you deal with it right away.”
Robert picked up the envelope. It was heavy. He was a first-year associate, just getting good at the most basic of tasks — what could he possibly do for a founding partner? A, L and W was big on the pecking order—none of this made sense, yet he wanted badly to be favored.
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