They went down in the elevator to the second floor and into Richard’s studio, and Richard showed him what he was working on. “I call them misrepresentations,” he said, and let him hold what he had assumed was a white birch branch but was actually made from fired clay, and then a stone, round and smooth and lightweight, that had been whittled from ash and lathe-turned but that gave the suggestion of solidity and heft, and a bird skeleton made of hundreds of small porcelain pieces. Bisecting the space lengthwise was a row of seven glass boxes, smaller than the one upstairs with the wax honeycomb but each still as large as one of the casement windows, and each containing a jagged, crumbling mountain of a sickly dark yellow substance that appeared to be half rubber, half flesh. “These are real honeycombs, or they were,” Richard explained. “I let the bees work on them for a while, and then I released them. Each one is named for how long they were occupied, for how long they were actually a home and a sanctuary.”
They sat on the rolling leather desk chairs that Richard worked from and drank their beers and talked: about Richard’s work, and about his next show, his second, that would open in six months, and about JB’s new paintings.
“You haven’t seen them, right?” Richard asked. “I stopped by his studio two weeks ago, and they’re really beautiful, the best he’s ever done.” He smiled at him. “There’re going to be a lot of you, you know.”
“I know,” he said, trying not to grimace. “So, Richard,” he said, changing the subject, “how did you find this space? It’s incredible.”
“It’s mine.”
“Really? You own it? I’m impressed; that’s so adult of you.”
Richard laughed. “No, the building—it’s mine.” He explained: his grandparents had an import business, and when his father and his aunt were young, they had bought sixteen buildings downtown, all former factories, to store their wares: six in SoHo, six in TriBeCa, and four in Chinatown. When each of their four grandchildren turned thirty, they got one of the buildings. When they turned thirty-five—as Richard had the previous year—they got another. When they turned forty, they got a third. They would get the last when they turned fifty.
“Did you get to choose?” he asked, feeling that particular mix of giddiness and disbelief he did whenever he heard these kinds of stories: both that such wealth existed and could be discussed so casually, and that someone he had known for such a long time was in possession of it. They were reminders of how na?ve and unsophisticated he somehow still was—he could never imagine such riches, he could never imagine people he knew had such riches. Even all these years later, even though his years in New York and, especially, his job had taught him differently, he couldn’t help but imagine the rich not as Ezra or Richard or Malcolm but as they were depicted in cartoons, in satires: older men, stamping out of cars with dark-tinted windows and fat-fingered and plush and shinily bald, with skinny brittle wives and large, polished-floor houses.
“No,” Richard grinned, “they gave us the ones they thought would best suit our personalities. My grouchy cousin got a building on Franklin Street that was used to store vinegar.”
He laughed. “What was this one used for?”
“I’ll show you.”
And so back in the elevator they went, up to the fourth floor, where Richard opened the door and turned on the lights, and they were confronted with pallets and pallets stacked high, almost to the ceiling, with what he thought were bricks. “But not just bricks,” said Richard, “decorative terra-cotta bricks, imported from Umbria.” He picked one up from an incomplete pallet and gave it to him, and he turned the brick, which was glazed with a thin, bright green finish, in his hand, running his palm over its blisters. “The fifth and sixth floors are full of them, too,” said Richard, “they’re in the process of selling them to a wholesaler in Chicago, and then those floors’ll be clear.” He smiled. “Now you see why I have such a good elevator in here.”
They returned to Richard’s apartment, back through the hanging garden of chandeliers, and Richard gave him another beer. “Listen,” he said, “I need to talk to you about something important.”
“Anything,” he said, placing the bottle on the table and leaning forward.
“The tiles will probably be out of here by the end of the year,” said Richard. “The fifth and sixth floors are set up exactly like this one—wet walls in the same place, three bathrooms—and the question is whether you’d want one of them.”
“Richard,” he said, “I’d love to. But how much are you charging?”
“I’m not talking about renting it, Jude,” said Richard. “I’m talking about buying it.” Richard had already talked to his father, who was his grandparents’ lawyer: they’d convert the building into a co-op, and he’d buy a certain number of shares. The only thing Richard’s family requested is that he or his heirs give them the right to buy the apartment back from him first if he ever decided to sell it. They would offer him a fair price, and he would pay Richard a monthly rent that would be applied toward his purchase. The Goldfarbs had done this before—his grouchy cousin’s girlfriend had bought a floor of the vinegar building a year ago—and it had worked out fine. Apparently, they got some sort of tax break if they each converted one of their buildings into at least a two-unit co-op, and so Richard’s father was trying to get all of the grandchildren to do so.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked Richard, quietly, once he had recovered. “Why me?”
Richard shrugged. “It gets lonely here,” he said. “Not that I’m going to be stopping by all the time. But it’d be nice to know there’s another living being in this building sometimes. And you’re the most responsible of my friends, not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. And I like your company. Also—” He stopped. “Promise you won’t get mad.”
“Oh god,” he said. “But I promise.”