It takes a few frustrated attempts—grasping for faceless men and women, memories without much meaning; pushing away recollections of him;there’s this sound you make, when you’re close—to bring herself off before she gives up. Watching the rain lash against the windows, she falls asleep.
The next morning, the rain—torrential, dark skies dangerous—still hasn’t abated. But waking up, Lili stretches with a calm heaviness of rest. She slept the night through.
Her phone is almost dead on the nightstand. She needs to find a charger. But first, dry clothes.
She shouldn’t be surprised by his walk-in closet: a veritable room of its own, all walnut wood, recessed lighting. She runs her hands over the rows of suits, cashmere, wool, linen: Zegna, Brioni, Huntsman, Gieves & Hawkes. Gleaming Ferragamo and Lobb shoes, folded Loro Piana sweaters—she lingers there, soft fabric under her chipped black nail polish—dozens of crisp shirts, pressed with the smell of cedar.
She grabs one of the white dress shirts: Charvet, obnoxious and bespoke, a label of arrogant men, de Gaulle, Churchill, Kissinger, Lévy. The cuffs fall far past her hands; she doesn’t let herself feel guilty about the intimacy of it. They’re already sleeping together, he gave her his keys, she’s worn his shirt before. For the time that she has this, she won’t be apologetic.
There’s a small painting in the corner of his closet. As she rolls up her shirtsleeves, Lili looks over the lush reds, gilded golds, and iridescent greens, sincerely hoping it’s not a Giotto. But no, there’s more gold to it, more complicated intricacy to the haloes around the trinity figures.
Searching for socks, she opens drawers—silent, subtle glide, soft-close—and finds belts, cuff links, Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin watches, pocket squares, and a small selection of ties that makes her stifle a smile, already knowing how little he likes them. Finally, a drawer with socks. She grabs a pair, pulling them on. An unopened pack of Gitanes are hidden among them, which does make her laugh.
She finds a phone charger in his office. Lili eyes the Russian books by his desk, the inscrutable language. Touching their spines, she’s surprised to see English copies on the shelf below. Worn and dog-eared, the books have his handwriting in the margins—words underlined, heavily annotated with scribbles of Cyrillic, question marks. A younger hand. Old printing dates—the late nineties—in the copyright pages.
Taking a copy ofCancer Ward,Lili leaves his office. It’s Saturday, and it’s early; she can read a little, relax a bit, before working. Setting up shop in the kitchen again, Lili figures out his espresso machine. Unlike the night before, newspapers—The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Le Monde—are laid out neatly on the kitchen island. Lili frowns at copies ofLe Canard enchaînéandThe Guardian. The fruit bowl is full.
As she puts on coffee, Lili checks on her drying clothes, still wet in the guest bathroom. The rumble of the espresso machine mingles with thepatter of rain. There’s a record player in the corner of the living room, low shelves filled with rows of records: Buckley, Getz, Vysotsky, New Order, Gilberto, The Rolling Stones, Dutronc, Dassin. Thumbing through, she finds Gould’sGoldberg Variations. She rolls her eyes at Aleksandr having the 1981 recording, not 1955, but she puts it on.
It’s less defined, not quite as clear and intense as Gould’s 1955 version that she used to listen to while writing papers in undergrad. Less seemingly spontaneous, less overly virtuosic. There isn’t that impression of endearingly arrogant improvisation. Under the opening notes of the aria—slower, almost ponderous compared to the crisp, intense flutter of notes in his Moscow and Salzburg recordings—she can hear Gould’s hum, tracking to the notes. It’s comforting.
Curling up on the couch, coffee in hand, she watches as it pours outside, rain streaming down the large windows. Music, warmth, a book, safe while the weather carries on; it makes her stop, exhale. Settle her head against the white cushions.
Things feel stronger and brighter here. The airiness of the loft; the refined calm of Gould, the spaciousness of open hours. That specific slant of morning light. Books lining bookshelves, rather than in stacks on the floor. The edge of something inexpressible hovers—and it’s embarrassing, wanting that soothing protection of wealth.
Lili knows the trappings of money. Its language, its games of references and allusions, the differences between subtle gleams and garish flashes. She’s gotten very good at its codes, discerning its vocabulary, recognizing its garb—the brands, designs, habits that cloak wealth—able to pick out differences to better fit in, unable to fully access any of it herself. A protection mechanism to understand the language while not being able to speak it. Growing up in Marin, there were parties hosted by rich classmates with absent parents, weekends at Sonoma houses, empty San Francisco penthouses, followed by high school hangovers. Since undergrad in New York, she’s known the slow exposure to James’s old money and its sheer scale, the shinier immediacy of Amina’s new money trying to imitate it, although she has tried to keep it—the wealth of her friends—at arm’s length. They were born into it, she supposes; an accident of birth.
But this—this space to think? The heaviness of life lifted a bit, givensome room to be? Space to feel things gently, leeway to relax, a shiver of ease in the air, the security of steady ground—things that have run profound for her since she was young and parentless, suddenly needing to earn affection, stability, and her place in the world. Delicate, the sense—half-hidden, not welcome, politically hypocritical—of what she might want. It’s more than the material convenience and security afforded by his wealth; it’s breathing room afforded by the sense of him: Aleksandr, handing the keys to his home to her.
She does not want to want this. And she does not trust it.
Stability is defined in relation to insecurity; presence to absence, how fast it can be taken away. The breathing room afforded by such wealth makes her think of fairness and failure. How it has to be immoral for one person to have all this, unfair balances of blessing and misery; how it’s problematic for her to benefit from it.
But as she opens Solzhenitsyn, it doesn’t escape her notice, what she’s trying to ignore: how much she yearns for this type of ease, beauty, and space, despite its source. The release of struggle and striving, the profundity of that ache—how easily she’d relinquish so much of herself to have some of that, and how hesitant she is to just reach out and grasp it.
It’s Monday when hopeful blue sky peeks over the city. Water sloshes in the street gutters, the Tribeca cobblestones gleaming clean. Needing fresh clothes, Lili heads home, planning to keep working at the loft later.
She had stayed the weekend in Tribeca, waiting out the storm. It was a pleasure to just work, surrounded by quiet. As she wrote, she relished the stretch of her own focus, the chain of discipline she steadily built, crossing off comments, eliminating red lines, tackling edits. She let Jackie assume she was still studying at campus; she let herself ignore the itch to slide open her phone and text him.
Taking lunch breaks, she’d wandered the loft on bare feet, gnawing on an apple. Spare bedrooms, a wine room, home gym, another study. The press of floorboards was warm under her toes as she peeked through doors.
He really does seem to like art. What looked like a Basquiat hung in one of the three guest bedrooms, a Rembrandt sketch over the nightstandof another—intimate sketch strokes, expressive lines. Something that resembled a Kandinsky in the hallway, a Chagall in the spare study. Back in the living room, Lili had inspected the huge Twombly closer before getting back to work.
It remained surreal: the quiet, the space, the light. She’s so rarely actually alone in this city. In the loft, by herself, there was space for the slowness of thought, allowing endurable lucidity to cohere, room to write sentences simple enough to express her ideas with the heft of real intellectual power.
Wariness edged in, too. Over the weekend, she tried to read it as only guilt for benefiting from his wealth, regardless of how temporary their arrangement will be; as she unlocks the front door to her apartment now, she tries to interpret her eagerness to return to Tribeca as impatience to keep working.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Jackie immediately accosts her. She’s eating breakfast at their coffee table. One of the table legs is heavily duct-taped.
“And don’t say Ami’s place,” Jackie adds before Lili can speak. “She’s in the kitchen.”
Amina walks in, peeling an orange. Staring at Lili expectantly, she drops onto the couch beside Jackie.
“Tribeca,” Lili volunteers, picking at tempeh bacon.
“What’s in Tribeca?” Jackie asks.
“Just a friend.”
