Lucy didn’t respond.
“I mean, it was a nice place,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, I mean, if things ever came to that.”
“That’s not going to happen to Wyatt,” Lucy said.
“I’m just saying,” said Owen. “It’s nice to know places like that exist.”
“I suppose it is,” said Lucy. “But that place has nothing to do with our son.”
*
The weekend nanny whose name Gordon could never remember was standing by the front door, helping Rocco put on his coat. They were heading out for a walk.
“Tell the nanny not to let Rocco go near Fang,” Gordon said to Kelly.
“Maria. No Fang! No Fang por Rocco! Not safe. Muy dangeroso.”
“Okay, Miss Kelly,” Maria said. “Okay, no Fang.”
Fang, the Allens’ new Doberman puppy, was outside, tied to a hundred-yard zip line that zigzagged through the trees. The dog practically lost his mind each time an acorn fell or a squirrel scurried by or a bird flew overhead. Fang was not yet trained, not by any stretch of the imagination, although he was getting better at waiting to attack the dog guy until the dog guy was wearing the protective suit. Other than that, they hadn’t seen much progress. The next step was to send Fang away to Texas for six months to be trained in a controlled setting. The promise was, when he came back, he’d be the world’s best guard dog and yet gentle as a dove.
“Enjoy your walk, sweetie,” Kelly said to Rocco, and she tightened his scarf. Once the front door closed, she walked over to the couch and dramatically flopped down on it, groaning a big groan.
“God, I’m so bored.”
This was Kelly’s latest refrain. She’d just come back from Vegas, loaded down with shopping bags—that’s why Kelly went to Vegas, she went there to shop, whereas Gordon’s other wives had disappeared for weeks to Paris or Milan. It took him a while to realize Kelly’s shopping trips to Vegas weren’t signs of her thriftiness, or even of what Gordon thought of as her fundamental Americanness, but were in fact disturbing reminders that deep down, she was tacky and cheap. She’d put on a silver lamé minidress to go out to dinner with Jamie the yoga instructor and when Gordon told her, “You can’t wear that kind of dress around here,” she’d said, “Okay, Grandpa.”
Grandpa! The disrespect! The disrespect was mounting!
“This place is so boring. There are no movie theaters. There’s nowhere to shop.”
“Go to the city if you want to shop. And we have a movie theater in the house.”
“That’s not the point,” said Kelly. “I’m talking about Beekman.”
“Why don’t you volunteer at the school,” said Gordon. “I read in the paper that a bunch of the mothers get together to cook hot lunches twice a week. That would be fun.”
Gordon loved stuff like that. The women cooking the hot lunches. Volunteering their time, banding together, driving to the local big-box club to buy massive blocks of cheese and bags of baby carrots that were as big as actual babies. It was also a PTA fund-raiser—they charged five bucks for each lunch, and each lunch couldn’t have cost more than twenty-five cents. Hot lunch, cooked by an army of mommy volunteers raising money to do things like buy books for the school library and new equipment for the gym. And zero tax dollars involved! That was the America Gordon wanted to live in.
“With those busybody nobodies? No, thank you.”
“This is a community,” said Gordon. “That’s part of what we do. We give back.”
“You want me to be the lunch lady? And wear a hairnet? That’s what you want me to do for fun?”
“Okay, maybe not the hot lunches. But you could join a club or something.”
“Join a club? Am I in junior high? I don’t want to join a club. I want some kind of a life. I want to move back to the city.”
“Only animals raise their kids in New York City,” said Gordon without even looking up from his computer screen.
“Someplace else, then,” Kelly said, giving up easily.
“Like where.”
“South Beach.”
“South Beach? Are you kidding me?”
“There’s lots of art there. Culture. Good food.”
“I’m not raising my son in South Beach,” said Gordon. “Besides, I have to be near the city for my work. You know that.”
“Okay, the Hamptons, then. We could live there year-round. They have excellent schools.”
The last time Gordon had been in the Hamptons, Alec Baldwin had walked up to him at a farm stand and yelled at him about climate change. He accused him of being a climate-change denier, spitting it out like it was worse than being a Holocaust denier, and Gordon had said, “I am a climate-change denier. I deny climate change. I don’t think it’s happening. I don’t think the planet is getting hotter because of what man does or does not do. I am pro-fracking, pro–fossil fuels, pro-pipelines, pro-jobs, pro-America, pro-freedom. Drill, baby, drill, Alec! Drill, baby, drill!”
Gordon loved it, of course, and he dined out on that story for years, but he didn’t want to live in a place where there were people richer than him, more famous than him, who hated him and weren’t afraid to show it. Maybe twenty years ago, he would have been up for a dustup with a celebrity or a liberal billionaire every time he walked out the front door, but now he was getting tired. Gordon liked being the biggest fish.
“I’m not gonna live in the Hamptons, Kelly. We’ve been over this a million times.”
“Well, I’m going crazy, Gordon,” Kelly said, sitting up. “I’m thirty-one years old. I don’t want to count bald eagles and watch YouTube videos of a woman folding towels for the rest of my life.”
Enough with the mocking of Simka! Simka was one of the last legitimate pleasures in his life! Plus she didn’t just fold towels! She collected greeting cards and fancy journals and old library books and tapped her fingers on them while she talked quietly about them! And wrapping paper!
“You have a six-year-old son,” Gordon reminded her. “You could try spending some time with him. Why didn’t you go on his walk with him if you have nothing else to do? Lots of mothers find their children fascinating.”
Kelly rolled her eyes at him. His wife rolled her eyes at him! What was next? Giving him the finger? Gordon had to get things back under control. He had to. He could feel his control slipping away. The postnup! The missing fucking postnup! How was it that a man of his age and experience, a three-time loser in the marriage game, a goddamn billionaire, had married a woman less than half his age and hadn’t insisted on a prenup? It was one of the great mysteries of Gordon’s life, really.
“You can go to the city whenever you want. You have a car and driver at your disposal. You want a different car? I’ll buy you a different car. You don’t like Bo? I’ll get you a different driver.”
“Bo’s fine,” said Kelly.
“You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Don’t talk to me about bored. Look at this place. You live like the goddamn queen of England.”
Kelly flopped back down.
“I bet she’s bored too.”
*