The first time he laid eyes on her was at a middle school dance. People thought they’d met at Odell, but no, it was earlier, just a few months after his mother left. He was in seventh grade at St. Alfred’s and she went to Miss Kent’s, and the two schools held mixers sometimes to justify the expensive dance lessons a lot of the kids still took. He’d been smoking cigarettes in the bathroom with a couple of buddies to avoid talking to the girls, and they got chased out by one of the chaperones. As he stepped back into the dimly lit gym, he had a vision that changed the course of his life. People moved aside like the Red Sea parting, and there was this girl standing alone, bathed in a white light. She was dazzlingly beautiful, and she looked bored. Of course, he later realized that Kate was by herself that night because she thought the other girls in her grade were beneath her. But at the time, Griff was enough of a romantic to believe she was waiting for him. He was a loner in a crowd even then, and desperate for a soulmate. But he didn’t tell her that. Instead he told her that he had a car and driver waiting downstairs if she was up for going to Brooklyn to get a slice of decent pizza.
“Do you have any rum?” she asked. “I’d love a rum and Coke.”
“The car has a mini-fridge. We can probably dig up something.”
They made out in the backseat all the way down the FDR and over the Brooklyn Bridge. The Manhattan skyline viewed out the back window of the car looked so beautiful that it made him want to cry. After that, they were never really apart. Except for weeks and months and years here and there, and all the time she spent with other men. But he didn’t count that.
The years Kate was in Europe were the hardest. He felt robbed of his Carlisle experience because he couldn’t spend that time with her. She never wrote to him and never called, so he stopped trying to contact her directly. Always he was missing her, longing for her, maneuvering to get information about her. When he did hear about her, it was worse, because of course Kate was fine without him. She’d been at some party, or gallery opening, with some handsome Frenchman (and they were always men, much older, sometimes married), and she’d—what?—said something impossibly witty, or looked incredibly chic, dyed her hair pink, or dropped a wad of cash on a crazy bet. She was always doing breathless and exciting things, it seemed, in Paris, without him.
For Griff, there was never anybody else. He’d been imprinted at too early an age. Oh, gaggles of girls chased him, of course; he was extremely rich and not bad-looking, and wherever he went, a party followed, because he paid for it. He never enjoyed it, though. He let other girls blow him to ease the frustration, a few he even fucked, but none of them did he really notice. He resented the loneliness, mainly because Kate’s absence seemed unnecessary. Something unfortunate had gone down at the bridge that night, but couldn’t they have paid the other family off? That’s what his father would have done. Really, was it worth giving up a Carlisle degree and ending up with some useless piece of paper from that place in Switzerland where the louche aristocrats of Europe sent their least promising children? Kate was never able to get a proper job after that, just PR things and fashion stuff through friends of friends, where her looks and pedigree were sufficient credentials. Forget the financial sacrifice; it was a waste of a fine mind. He thought she was one of the smartest people he’d ever met.
Griff graduated and went to work in New York. He had just about resigned himself to his hollow life when he literally ran into Keniston Eastman on the street. It happened downtown, during a hot June lunchtime, in the dark shadows of the skyscraper that they both worked in, about a year after his Carlisle graduation. They worked twenty-six floors apart, it turned out, for different firms. Griff was a junior analyst at a firm headed by a friend of his father’s, learning the ropes. (Griff’s dad had instituted an antinepotism policy the year Griff graduated from Carlisle, and refused to let Griff come work for him. It was only later that Griff realized this was done to protect him.) Griff exchanged pleasantries with Mr. Eastman. He asked about Kate, but then, he always asked everyone about Kate. Maybe something in his eyes as he said her name gave him away. They parted ways, and he thought nothing more of it. Then, a couple of days later, he got a call from Keniston’s secretary asking him to lunch. He thought at first that it was a recruiting call. Everyone was constantly trying to recruit Griff, since Marty Rothenberg was one of the most sought-after finance connections in all the world. He declined politely, saying he was happy where he was, and five minutes later, the secretary called back to say that actually, Mr. Eastman had something of a personal nature to discuss, and would he reconsider.
The executive dining room of Keniston’s firm was on the forty-seventh floor of the building, with harbor views. You could see all the bridges, and Lady Liberty holding her torch. It was a fine, clear day, but Griff couldn’t enjoy it, nor could he appreciate the trout meunière or the excellent white Burgundy, because he was waiting for Keniston Eastman to come to the point. This had to be about Kate, right? Finally, over coffee, once the room had cleared out, Keniston brought up his daughter’s name. And Griff got the opening he’d been waiting for for years.
According to her father, Kate was in a bad way. He’d done his level best for her, supporting her in a fine style in Europe ever since she left Carlisle. He’d sent her to the right school, let her spend time in Paris and the C?te d’Azur and places where she would be noticed, paid for her clothes and travel. Keniston had done all this, it became apparent, in the hope that Kate would make an advantageous marriage with some wealthy European. Now, Griff could have told him that idea was at least a century out of date. If that happened at all anymore, the Europeans were the ones preying on the rich Americans, not the other way around. But mostly people just fucked and nobody ever got married, which was why the birthrate in Western Europe was in the tank. But there was no need for Griff to tell Keniston this, since he’d already learned it for himself, the hard way. Kate had picked up a parasite. A Dutch musician named Markus Rijnders, who had a minor recording contract and a major heroin habit, which it was Keniston’s greatest fear that Kate might come to share.
“I don’t know why I don’t just give up on her,” Keniston said, and there was a haunted look in his eyes that Griff recognized.
“I do, sir. I understand why.”
“Yes,” Keniston said. “I thought you would.”
Keniston couldn’t go to Europe himself to reclaim Kate, for a host of complicated reasons. Kate would never listen to him. His wife had lost patience with Kate’s antics. Business obligations, social engagements, and so forth. But Griff was a young man of means, still carefree, whose employer surely valued his contributions enough to be willing to grant him a leave of reasonable if uncertain duration. And if not, Keniston would be happy to put in a word. His extensive business dealings with Griff’s boss made him think he had some influence there.