Now Victoria is working less, and I handle the cases she doesn’t want. And when business is slow at Denham and Greenfield—and it’s generally slow in the fall because Wall Street wives who have made it through the summer without filing for divorce tend to hang on to their marriages until their husbands collect their bonuses—she takes a few extra weeks at the beach.
But she isn’t really away. The first phone call of the day? Victoria, always.
“Da-vid.”
My name is always two words with Victoria.
I could hear her steady strokes and metronomic breathing through the cell phone clipped to her waist, and I smiled. A world that has a seventy-year-old woman with more than a passing resemblance to Vanessa Redgrave rowing steadily toward Europe—I call that a good world.
“How’s the water today, V?”
Her name is always reduced to an initial in my mouth.
“Flat enough to walk on. And slated to continue.”
“Happy to hear it. Staying on?”
“Depends,” she said. “What’s new?”
“Mary Arnold’s husband announced he’s moving the family to Umbria for a year.”
“What did Mary say?”
“She’s going with him.”
“She can’t think there’s a hunky Italian lover waiting for her.”
“She left a message. I don’t think she wanted our opinion.”
“Better yet. What else?”
“Amanda Carpenter called in.”
“She made weight?”
“Ninety-nine.”
Amanda Carpenter married a man who can’t be seen with a woman who weighs more than a hundred pounds. Every Monday morning, by the terms of their prenup, she goes to her husband’s doctor and weighs in. She always makes it. You would too if you ate cotton balls for lunch and downed a dozen Diet Cokes a day. But she pays a price. Because no fat passes her lips, she’s estrogen-deprived and her chin has sprouted dark hairs, and because she’s bulimic, the acid in her vomit is stripping the enamel from her teeth. Why does she submit to this? Although she looks as if she were born in purple, her father is a firefighter and her mother has a chronic disease. Like a character in an Edith Wharton novel, she sacrificed herself on the altar of money. Her husband is rich and social, and, dammit, he wants a wife who looks the part. Amanda knows her marriage is in no way secure, so she hired us to look over the doctor’s shoulder.
“Also, Reboot tracked down the manager of that club in Paris. The guy remembers seeing the Stonebachs. He’ll give us a deposition.”
“Excellent.”
Better than that, really. Richard Stonebach is a big-shot political fund-raiser. His new wife—his fourth—came to us right after the honeymoon. As she tells it, his idea of a good start to a marriage was to take her to Paris, bring her to a sex club, and let her watch him get a blow job. Now she wants an annulment and—prenup be damned—a settlement. With a deposition from the manager of that club, Stonebach’s choices are a generous good-bye or a story on Page Six.
“What’s your week like?” Victoria asked.
“The biggest thing on my calendar is an opening at an art gallery.”
“Who’s the artist?”
“The Greta Garbo of photography.”
“How’s her marriage?”
“Trolling for clients, V?”
“As a matter of fact, I went out for dinner over the weekend and came back with one.”
“What’s she like?”
“In addition to sixty million dollars, she wants half of the frequent flyer miles. Very adamant about that.”
“Oh, dear,” I said, because I’ve seen enough vengeful women to know them as unbearable and, in our partnership, always mine to represent. Revenge starts with the frequent flyer miles; it doesn’t end until she gets a share of the apartment where the husband meets his mistress.
“So … Garbo with a camera … Blair going?”
“No.”
“Watch yourself, young man.”
And Victoria was gone. She hates good-byes.
Chapter 3
Jean Coin’s photographs are monumental: five feet by five feet. At that scale, a picture of rolled hay bales is close to life-size. Larger objects—rock formations, waterfalls, the edges of a slate roof in rural France—come at you in such sharp focus you feel they want to push through the surface of the paper. I can understand why some people are threatened by these images; they’re stark, black-and-white assaults.
I’d love to own one of Jean Coin’s pictures, but even the smallest is so big it would dwarf everything in our living room. And even the smallest is expensive. So I enjoy them, every few years, at her dealer’s gallery.
The opening was mobbed. I bobbed and weaved through the crowd, snatching a glimpse of a picture, shaking hands, and getting air-kissed by casual friends and former clients. Years of experience at gallery openings led me toward the back office, where, more often than not, you can see the multiples stacked up or find a few pictures that didn’t make it into the show. There were people here too, but the groups were smaller, the conversations less buoyant. The crowd cleared out, and for what seemed like an entire minute, I stood alone with a photograph of cliffs in the Dordogne.
And then I wasn’t alone. Joining me at the picture was a seriously attractive woman in a starched white shirt, faded Levis, and moccasins. She wasn’t lightly bronzed but actually tanned, with hair lightened by the sun. She looked as if she’d spent the summer in a sailboat and had docked just five minutes ago.
There are no more than a dozen photographs of Jean Coin and fewer interviews. Anyone who knew anything about her would have said she was probably half a world away. But here she was. Not happy. Oh, very much not happy—scowling.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” I said. “All these people …”
“I’m leaving as soon as I figure out what to do with this picture.”
“I’m going to guess: You only see the flaws?”
“Cavemen once made their homes there,” she said, pointing at a terraced area on the cliffs. “You should feel their presence. Or absence.” She pointed lower. “Down here … a river to fish in. Do you sense anything swimming? I don’t. Farther over are fields where deer grazed, fruit trees growing wild … but the picture indicates none of that. It’s a dead landscape. And that was not my point.”
“How many of these pictures miss the point?”
“Really, only this. It’s just … wrong.”
I’m not awestruck in the presence of artists—a few of the most successful have been our clients—but I would have expected Jean Coin to be remote, even hostile. So far, she was accessible and engaging. I pressed on.
“Your fans disagree.”
“Marketing,” she said. “Image.”
“Why aren’t you out there?” I asked, gesturing toward the crowd in the next room.
“You think I came to see how they’re selling?”
“It’s only natural.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “My mission is last-minute quality control.” And then, almost whispering: “I never know if people think my pictures are worth owning.”
Was it possible that Jean Coin had self-esteem issues?
“You set the bar high.”
She didn’t find that worthy of a response. A change of topic seemed smart.
“Why are there never any people in your pictures?”
She laughed. “Are you going to kiss every cliché on the mouth?”
“Seriously, why do you think that is?” I asked.
“Seriously? What is this—an interview?”
“I’m not a writer.”
“You collect?”
“School bills.”
She gave me a look that said, I’m not kidding around here, I’m taking you for someone
of intelligence. That intensity aimed directly at me made me feel something—a perceptible change in the conversational climate, like a blast of oxygen.
“Seriously,” I said. “Tell me why there are no people in your pictures.”
She gestured to a bench, and we sat. The gallery opening seemed far away.
“What’s your theory?” she asked.
“I don’t think it’s that complicated. People who live in cities crave the natural world. And here it is. Beautiful. Wild. Wild, but contained. Thus, safe. And for sale.”
I had stumbled yet again into the blur between art and commerce.
This time, there was no mistaking her sarcasm. “You think I’m that calculating? That I make these pictures to satisfy a … commercial need?”
I hesitated, considering whether to cross the line, and decided. Oh, why not.
“Actually, I think you’ve made a different calculation. You choose these images because you don’t want to reveal yourself.”
“Jean Coin, woman of mystery?”
“If you don’t want to put your emotions into your pictures, you have to find another way to reach people. You smartly chose distance. It’s a powerful position.”
I was afraid she’d slap me or storm off, but this seemed to please her.
“You could be a critic,” she said.
“I appreciate the candor.”
“That’s only sort of a compliment.”
Some people recognized Jean Coin and came over. Gears shifted.
“Well. A pleasure. Not that it matters—I’m David Greenfield.”
“Got a card?”
“Sure.” I produced one. “You?”
We traded the Japanese way, bowing slightly.
I thought I’d never see her again.
Chapter 4
I skipped the twentieth reunion of my class at Columbia Law because I’m just not nostalgic. Now I only go uptown when I’m asked to lecture. Every time, memories flash. Not the pain of torts and the Saturday nights in the library or the struggle to make law review. Only the pleasant memories: the ritual purchase of a Shetland sweater in the fall, plotting to separate Blair from her rich B-school boyfriend, Blair wearing my sweater as we talk over late-night coffee.
Barnard is as foreign to me now as it was when I was in law school. But Blair was—for the first time—leading a First-Year Class symposium. At dinner, when she summarized The Wilder Shores of Love, she made its profiles of four nineteenth-century English women come alive. They weren’t head-in-the-stars dreamers; they were “realists of romance” who correctly understood that the epic lives they wanted weren’t available in England’s rigid social structure, so they fled to Algeria, Turkey, and Arabia. There they found men, adventure, and what they described as freedom.
When she talked about the book, my attendance felt compulsory.
Blair wasn’t pleased.
“You’ll be the only man,” she said.
“Don’t Columbia guys show up with their girlfriends?”
A sigh.
“And others come to meet the new girls?”
“Such things have been known to happen,” she said.
“Essentially it’s like a kegger with a brainiac overlay.”
“Do you not understand that this is the most selective college for women in the country?”
“I do,” I said. “And I get that this will be a hot ticket—in every sense of hot. And in that stew of ideas and nice-to-meet-yous, no one will notice the old duffer in the back row.”
“You’ll make me nervous.”
“Maybe I’ll come, maybe I won’t—you’ll have no idea if I’m there.”
I wore a work shirt and jeans and sat in the back row near a gaggle of frat boys who’d come to scope out the new prey. I was noticed by a few Barnard students, who looked askance—what legit reason did an old guy who wasn’t a professor have for being here?—until I held up my hand, patted my wedding band, and pointed to Blair.
“Context is key,” Blair was saying. “You have to remember what England was like in the nineteenth century. In the upper class, marriage was a property deal, a merger of social equals. Women were expected to be faithful to the man they married, and they could be ruined if they were caught having an affair. But that wasn’t the whole story, not nearly—at any house party at a country estate, guests were popping in and out of each other’s bedrooms all weekend. These women rejected that hypocrisy. To them, love mattered.”
“It still does,” a young woman called out.
“But not as a first priority,” another shouted.
“What is your first priority?” Blair asked.
“Paying off my student loan,” a student said, to applause and laughter.
“Getting a job at Goldman,” another said.
“Isn’t that the same thing?” Blair asked.
The quickness of Blair’s response took the students by surprise, and there was some laughter.
“I’m not joking,” Blair said. “Seventeen percent of Columbia Business School graduates get hired at McKinsey, and eight percent get hired at Goldman, and the average starting salary at those shops is well over a hundred thousand. So your student loan may not be your first priority for long.”
Blair paused.
I knew what she was doing: pretending to think. She knew what she would say next as surely as she knew, as far back as last week, she’d wear a thin cashmere sweater, a blazer, gray flannel pants, and no jewelry to this gathering.
“I get that you want professional opportunity and personal success,” Blair said. “What I’m not getting is why your focus is so single-minded. What do you see yourselves doing at night?”
“Working late,” a student said.
“The gym,” another said.
The first student corrected herself. “Working late and hooking up.”
“What’s your number?” a Columbia kid shouted, prompting laughter and applause.
“Really?” Blair asked when the room quieted. “That’s it?”
No one had more suggestions.
“Jane Digby wrote to one of her lovers: ‘Being loved is to me as the air that I breathe.’ I grant you, very mushy. But did anyone identify with her?”
Silence.
“Agree with her?”
Silence.
“Like her?”
A young woman stood, notebook in hand. “In 1799, Jane Digby’s father seized a Spanish treasure ship. His share of the gold established the family fortune. So Jane, with no need to marry for money or earn a living, had the luxury of putting love first.”
“They were all rich,” the student next to her called out, “and all obsessed with men.”
“I want their numbers too,” the comedian from Columbia shouted, and, again, the room gave him the approval he craved.
Blair ignored the disruption.
“The author wasn’t rich,” she said. “Early in her career, she was supporting her parents.”
“Doesn’t matter.” The student with the notebook opened her copy of The Wilder Shades of Love. “She aspired. Look at what she wrote: ‘Admiration and love are the best beauty treatments.’ The whole book is shot through with this stuff. It’s totally male-centric.”
“Isabelle Eberhardt dressed like a man and used a man’s name,” Blair countered. “And she married a soldier—how aspirational is that?”
Now it was a Barnard student who interjected: “She married a man.”
There was no mistaking the derision in that student’s voice.
Blair looked at her watch.
“Let me reframe the issue, okay? We asked you to read this book because it was about women who shattered expectations. Out of the box? They kicked a hole in it and ran for daylight. Glass ceiling? They didn’t look up; they looked inward. Career path? None. They were
on what you might call”—a small private smile—“a journey. And that’s the implicit question of this assignment: What’s your journey? How long is its arc? How high? In your wildest dreams, how aspirational are you? I’m not hearing that yet.”
Silence. This was one of those moments when everyone has an answer—who doesn’t have a dream? —but no one wants to speak first.
A voice emerged from the middle of the room: “You start.”
“Fair enough,” Blair said. The slightest pause. “I’m married. I have a child. And I spend my days here with you. Freud said, ‘Work and love.’ Well, I’m with him. That’s what I’ve got. That’s what I cherish. I’m not saying you can have it all, because I don’t and I know I can’t, and I think that’s the wrong conversation. But finding work worth doing and having people in your life worth doing it for … doing the best you can every day … that feels honorable to me.”
These were not new ideas to these young women.
They were, in the main, their mothers’ ideas. They were ideas their mothers had passed on to them. They had come to Barnard to reject these ideas, to find better ones, and what they were being told, by a woman they wanted to like and respect, was that these ideas were as good as it gets.
Unhappiness washed over the room.
Then, as Blair hoped, they began to say what they felt.
Chapter 5
If I didn’t know she wanted half of her husband’s frequent flyer miles, I might have thought Nancy Robb Russakof was irresistible. Eyes as gray as Nantucket fog. Bare, tanned legs. Black linen shirtwaist.
She wore an unidentifiable perfume that suggested the lavender fields and cypress trees of Provence, but whatever it was, her real scent was money—massive money. We had many clients like her. Their teeth were whitened, their toes and nails were glossy as Bentleys, their bodies were so kneaded and massaged that Kobe beef would be jealous.
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