He was watching Simka.
She was Polish, she spoke very softly, and the first time he saw her, she folded towels. She was completely clothed. You couldn’t even see her face, not even much of her body—although she did have an impressive bust, quite impressive, quite, quite impressive—but she whispered and folded towels and licked her lips and sometimes tapped her manicured fingernails on the table. And for some unknown reason, listening to it gave him goose bumps. Mostly on his head, sometimes down his spine, occasionally all over. And it wasn’t just him, it was clearly a whole thing, these ASMR videos, and while he knew he could Google ASMR and find out in about five seconds what exactly was happening to him when his beautiful blond Polish girlfriend folded towels and crinkled paper and tapped her nails and licked her lips, Gordon didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to risk breaking the spell.
It was so relaxing. It was so relaxing. And it was Gordon’s secret place.
Kelly grabbed his feet and shook them hard.
“If you want to watch a woman fold towels, Manuela’s in the laundry room,” said Kelly. “I’m sure she’d whisper things to you if you paid her extra.”
Gordon snapped his laptop shut and swung his legs off the couch and sat up. Kelly and her yoga instructor/only friend in Beekman, Jamie, were standing there, wearing bright stretchy clothes, both covered in a sheen of sweat.
“I’d understand it more if she was at least naked while she did it,” Kelly said to Jamie. “At least that would be normal. Kind of normal. Weird, but normal.”
Spending time watching Simka online was one of Gordon’s last remaining pleasures in life, and Kelly treated it like it was some sort of perversion. Well, it wasn’t a perversion. It was just odd. He didn’t know why he liked it but he did, and by the looks of the number of views on YouTube, so did millions of other people. Perfectly normal people, probably. Some of them had to be normal.
Still, Gordon could appreciate the fact that people might think it was weird, and so he liked to keep it private, which was why he didn’t like Kelly yapping about it in front of Jamie. He was a public person! The last thing he needed was some dippy yoga twit telling one of the lefty journalists who was always sniffing around that Gordon Allen was into some bizarre towel-folding fetish.
“You really should throw away that sweater,” Kelly said to him on her way to the kitchen. “People your age can’t really pull off yellow.”
This is what he was up against. Kelly had no tenderness for him anymore. Had she ever? Gordon wondered. It was not something Gordon liked to think about. He’d been in such a froth during their courtship he could barely remember who he’d thought Kelly actually was. That’s not true. He did remember. Gordon had thought Kelly was a sweet, genuine, Catholic virgin who fell deeply in love with him against her will and did not want to break up his marriage to Elaine. Was it possible he’d been that wrong?
All he wanted now was tenderness. Not even sex, not that much, not the way he used to. He wanted a woman who would lie next to him in bed and stroke his head gently until he drifted off to sleep and be there when he woke up in the middle of the night terrified because his heart had skipped too many beats or his next breath didn’t want to come. He wanted softness, compassion, a cool silky hand to reach out and touch his forehead in the middle of the day to check if he was running a fever, to see if he felt flushed.
Instead, he had Kelly. And her contempt for him, and for their life together, and even for Beekman did nothing but grow. At this point, Gordon had settled on one objective, and that was to keep his son Rocco in his home, with him, raised under his own roof, for as long as humanly possible. And if that meant putting up with Kelly, and a life without tenderness, so be it.
Gordon had other kids, of course. His two grown sons were completely awful, a pair of rich, entitled assholes devoid of drive and character in equal measure, and his daughter, well, she was a lost soul who’d built her entire life around rejecting everything Gordon stood for.
Gordon had been busy building his empire while the three of them were growing up; he’d been traveling constantly, having affairs, divorcing or being divorced by their respective mothers—but still. They’d had every opportunity. They’d gone to the best schools. They’d seen and done and tasted and experienced more things by the age of eighteen than most people had in five lifetimes, everything from the Super Bowl to the aurora borealis, sleeping at the White House and being backstage with the Rolling Stones. What’s more, they’d been surrounded by kids who had every opportunity, and the truth was, their friends were awful too, hateful entitled little rich pricks. “Every opportunity” was not all it was cracked up to be.
Gordon and his daughter, Violet, were estranged. That was the word, estranged. She refused to talk to him or see him or answer his e-mails or come to visit. Even when he’d had his heart scare all those years ago, back when he was still married to Elaine, Violet refused to come see him in the hospital. He’d written her out of his will and then written her back in two weeks later, and then out again and then in. And then out. And then in.
Violet owned and ran a trendy dry-goods store up in Woodstock, Vermont, and drank, according to his private investigator, two and a half bottles of red wine every night. (“What the hell is a trendy dry good?” Gordon had asked his private investigator when he phoned in his report. Even though they weren’t on speaking terms, he liked to keep up with her goings-on. His investigator sent him a large box of items purchased from Violet’s store: a tea towel with a quote attributed to somebody named Margot Tenenbaum, a pair of hand-felted bedroom slippers priced at a hundred and sixty-five dollars, some wooden whirligigs and yoyos and slingshots, Bazooka gum and Charleston Chews, a flannel bathrobe, seed packets sporting sketches of lumpy purple tomatoes and warty hook-necked gourds, and a sack of pinto beans.) His two sons lived in Hollywood. They’d started a production company called Two Rich Guys Productions.
“Help me out with this, you two,” Gordon said to them every Thanksgiving. “What exactly have you done in your life to earn the label rich?”
“It’s supposed to be ironic,” one of them always said.
“It’s moronic,” said Gordon. “It’s not ironic, it’s moronic,” he said, laughing at this joke.