“Why’re you so clumsy,” she moans.
It’s this stupid loft. She feels shitty here, so she takes Buck for a walk, but every time he lifts his leg, she waits for a shopkeeper to yell. Women walk by, stupendous with tall shoulders, stilettos, briefcases. Elise dodges them and gawks.
And when she comes back, she realizes her keys are in the jean jacket in the bedroom.
And it starts to pour.
She and Buck huddle under an awning next door. Rain seeps into her high-tops.
A guy unlocks the building, avoids looking at her, and pulls the door shut.
Elise fumes at herself.
A woman with freckles, grocery bags twisting off her fingers, rambles up like a mailman in Denmark who’s delivered letters in the snow for decades.
“Aren’t you staying here?” asks the woman.
“Yeah,” Elise says, mortified.
The woman unlocks the front door. “Go ahead.”
Elise mumbles a thank-you. “Can I take a bag?”
“Sure.” The woman is panting a little. “You’re on three too, right? You can get into your place?”
“I’ll just wait in the hall,” Elise nods, awkward.
“I’m Gretchen,” the woman says.
“Hi.”
“And what’s your name?” Gretchen finally asks.
“Oh, Elise.”
In five minutes, Gretchen gives Elise a mug of tea. Winks. Closes her door.
Elise hopes Gretchen isn’t looking out her peephole, and she stares at her own feet. What’s wrong with you? she thinks scornfully. You’re out of practice. She knows very well how to accept love from strangers.
Once he gets home every night, she stops freaking out and trying to guess what he wants, and just savors every minute they get to spend together. A Chinese food menu is slipped under their door so they order from there. They watch a show about gorillas on PBS. They eat powdered cookies she bought at one of the Jewish bakeries. She puts her wet finger in his asshole as she sucks his cock, and he comes in a great epiphany.
Elise looks through the house one day when she’s bored. In the bedside-table drawer, under the almond hand creams and white Cartier fountain pens and notepads from hotels in Japan, she finds a tiny vial of cocaine. In the bookcase is an album of photos, people looking serious in dark, tailored clothes—they seem grown-up in a terrifying way. Martine’s dildo is in an underwear drawer, but Elise doesn’t know what it is at first. Even the sex toy is couture. Pale glass with gold beads—it looks like an angel’s penis, or like something that fell out of a museum and landed here, among the palest pink slips and bottles with French prescription labels. Elise cradles it like an egg, then places it back in its nest.
Clark holds the idea of sex away from himself like it’s a baby who just pissed its diaper. He often drinks martinis at lunch, and after that his mouth is sort of askew, his grin hanging like a door off one hinge. He sometimes speaks terrible German or even worse Italian on the telephone, and is really fun—to everyone but Edna the intern.
Clark sends Edna on coffee runs. She’s an art-history wunderkind from Vassar. When she leaves, he mutters under his breath for everyone to hear: Little exercise can’t hurt anyone.
Summer employees aren’t supposed to lunch with senior staff, but Clark always brings Jamey along. Normally favoritism would make someone unpopular, but in this office, where Clark is king and the code is beauty and cynicism, it makes Jamey popular. They eat Dover sole and drink Chablis at La Grenouille, suck down chilled oysters at the Plaza, sip milkshakes at Rumpelmayer’s in the Hotel St. Moritz.
The offices are domestic with Oriental rugs, mahogany desks, maritime art, and Arabian textiles on the walls. The staff are dealers who get high on their own supply. A silk curtain hangs between office and showroom floor, between artifice and reality, the buyer and the bought, the pitch and the truth. The auction operation seems to Jamey an upending of civilization, all the articles that normally convene to create homes are spilled, removed, undone from their worlds, separated from one another.
Ever since Lady Esperanza Von Laighton Phillips was rumored to have a cough, Clark has been daydreaming about her estate, and once her obituary ran, it was Christmas and his birthday rolled into one. The trucks are arriving today, and he’s even managed to excite Jamey about the incoming crates of sterling silver and ceramics and oil paintings.
Clark is over the moon; he loves objects as if they were alive. He loves the chain of people who loved the objects, the story of ownership and inheritance. He’s good, too, with grieving families, like a morgue keeper who can slide the rings off a corpse’s fingers in one chic swipe.
Saturday morning: cinnamon rolls and black coffee with the windows open. Elise is putting on her shoes to walk Buck when Jamey sees the holes.
“You need new shoes!”
“They’re fine,” she says.
“Stop lying,” he says, half-kidding.
At Henri Bendel, a guard welcomes them into the chocolate-brown-and-white canopy.
They see their twins in the mirrored walls: a man in lime-green shorts and espadrilles, hair tousled like he just walked out of a Paris disco all-nighter, and the girl, tapping a long nail on the escalator railing, rhinestone jeans creased, braids pulled back in a rubber band so her eyes are catty.
“What else do you need?” he says casually.
Jamey’s in a funny mood. This thing he always had—money—was never anything besides an abstract truth, but today it’s a silk trick pulled from his wrist. He has accounts and credit cards (which are massive but tiny compared to the trusts) that no one watches; he could buy a house, and the family’s manager wouldn’t blink.
“Try something on at least,” he chides. “Humor me.”
She awkwardly collects jeans, looking at him over the racks with a twisted smile of discomfort and glee.
Jamey sits on a loveseat while she’s in the changing room.
“Is thut Jamey Hyde?” trills a voice.
Alastair Waddingford’s mom appears in a trench coat and massive sunglasses.
“Hi there, Mrs. Waddingford.”
“You know you must cull me Joan,” she says. “How ah you, darling?”
“Never better,” he answers while his mind bursts in a constellation of social connections, the friends and friends of friends Joan will tell about the girl she saw with Jamey Hyde at Bendel’s—if Elise comes out right now.
“Are you in New York awl summer, darling?” she asks.
“Pretty much. How about you? What’s the family got planned?”
She turns coy, mewing to him about this and that.
“Is that right?” he says occasionally.
His voice has a soothing, loving, everything-will-be-okay growl to it, like the favorite uncle who spends half the cocktail party in the kids’ bedroom telling stories, lulling the children into dreams, capable of this magnanimous and lazy lavishing of his adult time in a nursery seeing as he has no hope for his own life, and can give it all away.