“YOU KNOW, IF you hadn’t refused Dad’s money, you could be doing this disgusting little performance in your own penthouse.”
Maddox leaned lazily against his kitchen island, watching John take a bowl of preheated pasta straight to the dome. Despite the towel John had wrapped around his waist, water was pooling at his feet where it dripped from his bathing suit. He swallowed a huge bite and glugged half a glass of seltzer that Maddox had just made him in his seltzer-maker thingy.
John rolled his eyes at his brother’s words, but he didn’t deny them. When he’d first come back into his life, his father had repeatedly tried to reimburse him for the trust fund he would’ve gotten access to at age eighteen, like Maddox had. But John had refused over and over again. Maybe it was the same stubborn streak that Estrella had, the one that had kept her from marrying Cormac after all these years. But John had felt that taking the money would be too transactional. As if his father were paying to exonerate himself from the guilt of abandoning John and Estrella.
Besides, there was something symbolic about a trust fund. It was something you set up for a kid you acknowledged as your own. Like Maddox. It wasn’t just a blank check from an overstuffed bank account twenty-odd years later. The whole thing offended John.
Still, principles had limits and John’s stubborn streak didn’t stop him from coming over to his brother’s house and swimming in his saltwater pool and eating the food his housekeeper stocked the fridge with.
Finally, John finished his food and grabbed a dish towel to mop up the pool water at his feet. “Thanks, man. I needed that.”
“The food or the swim?” Maddox asked, his arms crossed lazily over his chest, his head lolled to one side.
“Both. All. It’s been a hell of a summer so far.”
“Big caseload?”
“Always. And my clients have had some shit luck with grand juries lately. Everything has been getting indicted. And I mean everything.”
“You’re seeing a lot of court time?”
“No.” John shook his head. “Lots of plea deals and kissing ADA ass to keep these kids out of court.” John sighed, suddenly feeling ten years older than he was. “Sometimes I wonder why I even do this whole Sisyphus thing.”
Maddox laughed. Now he was the one rolling his eyes. “John, are you kidding me? You’d never be happy if your job was even a smidge easier. You feel like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill? Well, did you ever stop to think of what would happen if you actually got to the top of the hill?”
John opened his mouth, closed it and cocked his head to the side, looking a lot like his brother in that moment. “Good point. I guess if you get to the top of the hill, there’s nowhere else to go.”
“Or you’re like Dad, and you make yourself a new hill.” It may have sounded like a compliment, but Maddox’s face was tight when he said it.
“You’re talking about ambition.”
“You don’t become the DA of Manhattan without it.”
“Yeah, well, apparently you don’t become the mayor of NYC with it.”
The two of them cracked into a grin. It was petty that they both still got so much joy out of their father’s mayoral disappointment. But yeah. As different as their upbringings had been, Upper East Side versus Crown Heights, they were both still New Yorkers to the core and neither of them had believed that their father’s proposed changes to policy would have been good for the city.
Plus, their dad was an ass who pretty much got everything he wanted, and it had felt good to see him lose one.
“So, that’s it? That’s the whole reason for your mood? Work?”
John shrugged and strode over to the small bag of clothes he’d brought to change into after the swim. Standing in Maddox’s living room, he started changing under the towel, thoughtfully looking out at Maddox’s—literal—million-dollar view of the East River, Queens and Brooklyn.
“I always thought it was ironic that the richest people in New York are forced to have the working class in their view at all times,” he said after a minute. “All the money in the world and you still live in New York City, surrounded by all walks of life.”
Maddox grunted. “You’re feeling philosophical today.”
John tugged track pants on and his T-shirt over that. He wore his nice work clothes almost every day of the week, wanting to look respectable and put-together no matter what he was doing. But it gave him a perverse thrill to look shabby and tossed-together whenever he visited Maddox’s penthouse.
“Do you know what negging is?” John asked, sitting down on Maddox’s couch.
Maddox looked slightly surprised, whether it was because John seemed to be extending their hang or at the question itself, John wasn’t sure.
“Um. Yeah.” He took his own seltzer and spread out on the far side of the couch. “It’s when you say negative things to a woman about her appearance or her personality. Backhanded compliments. Like ‘your hair is pretty, but it would look better long.’ That kind of thing.”
John screwed up his face. “What’s the point of it?”
“Well, I think the idea is that if you’re a little bit mean to her, it intrigues her. She seeks your approval.”
“That’s—”
“The dumbest shit you’ve ever heard? I know. It’s just some stupid pickup-artist shit. Misogynistic crap.”
John’s eyebrows rose. He’d never heard Maddox refer to misogyny before. But then his stomach fell as he considered the concept of negging. “I think I accidentally negged this woman recently.”
Maddox laughed, loud and boisterous, so unlike his brother. “John, you can’t accidentally neg someone. The whole point is that it’s a calculated move to knock her off her game and get her to lean on you. If you said something negative to her, it’s not because you were negging her. It’s just because you’re a—”
“Dick, I know. I’ve been told.” John leaned his head back and looked at Maddox’s high, perfectly white ceilings. No water damage for the penthouse. “I accidentally told her I thought she was old, when what I really meant was—Ugh. God. Never mind.”
Maddox laughed again. “Well, is she old?”
“No! She’s only five or six years older than I am.”
“And I take it she didn’t immediately seek your approval following the negative comment?”
John raised an eyebrow at his brother. “Of course not. She left the restaurant and I spent the next few weeks trying to convince her that I’m not an utter—”
“Dick.”
“Right.”
“And?” Maddox prompted.
“And now we’re friends.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.” John rolled his head and looked out at the view again, but in his mind’s eye, he was back at yesterday’s party. “There are a million reasons it’d never work out. I just expedited the process. You should see her apartment. Huge two-bedroom right on Court Street. Skylights in every room. Fancy furniture. Whole bunch of copper kitchen stuff. Candles the size of my head.”
“Rich?”
“Yeah.” John messed around with the buttons at the side of his crappy track pants that he’d had for a decade.
“Money isn’t everything, John,” Maddox said after a quiet moment. “It doesn’t have to draw lines in the sand the way you think it does.”
John rolled his head to look at his brother. That’s something rich people say, John’s face told Maddox.
Maddox read his expression, and his own tightened in response. No longer was he resting easily on his gigantic couch. He was stiff and uncomfortable, looking angrily away from John.
They’d been here before, with the disparities between their upbringings sitting between them like a rock wall.
It had taken years for them to see over it even enough for John to come and swim and eat spaghetti.
Once, Maddox had shouted at John, “You think I wouldn’t choose your life over mine, John?”
It had only fortified the wall between them. The idea that Maddox had romanticized John’s life with Estrella had infuriated John. Maddox saw their rented brownstone, Estrella’s artwork, John’s determination and drive in his career, and thought that all that simply came from good old-fashioned elbow grease. Thunderbird gang members snapping their way down the cobblestone streets of a plucky upbringing.
Maddox didn’t see the fact that both Estrella and Cormac had worked two jobs for years. That John himself had worked since he was twelve. He didn’t see the emotional toll that took on a family. He didn’t see the nights of worry over bills, the tears in Estrella’s eyes.
John’s work as a public defender perfectly positioned him to see what advantages those with money actually had. The kinds of advantages the rich come to view as rights. And maybe they were rights. But they were rights that the lower class had no access to. Maddox didn’t see that.
John supposed that he couldn’t see over the wall any better than Maddox could, but he wasn’t going around wishing to switch lives either. That was just naive.
Normally, this would be the part of the afternoon when Maddox got up angrily and said something about having plans and John would go home. John was surprised, then, when Maddox simply continued to sit there, his face drawn in lines of mutiny, but his dark eyes pinned on John.
“I’m just saying that the money thing probably isn’t the line in the sand that you think it is, John. Not for her anyway. There’s a chance that it hasn’t even occurred to her that there’s a disparity.”
John masked his surprise at his brother’s stolid attempt at reigniting the conversation. “At some point she’s going to notice that I only ever take her to restaurants with a single dollar sign on their Yelp pages.”
“And if she cares, then she’s not the right person for you.”
John’s eyebrows rose and then his eyes narrowed as he looked at his brother. His lawyerly mind started putting the pieces together. “Misogyny, wealth disparity, you didn’t storm off in anger just now... Maddox, did you meet somebody?”
Maddox pursed his lips, but there was a small smile to hide there. “You think a woman is the reason for my sudden self-improvement?”
John just waited.
Maddox crossed his arms and grumbled. “Fine. Yes. I met someone. She’s great. She cares a lot about social issues. She pushes me. I’m a better man now. Blah blah blah.”
John had mixed feelings about this. He would love for his brother to meet a good, steady woman, but Maddox had such a crappy track record with relationships that John couldn’t quite muster the mustard to get excited about it. Maddox had at least two epically dramatic and public breakups a year, the kind that catapulted him toward a bender of some kind.
“And, just like with your girl,” Maddox continued, a genuine frown on his face now, “she won’t date me.”
Now, that John could get behind. Women tripped over their Manolo Blahniks to date Maddox. Any woman who was lecturing him about misogyny and refusing to date him was bound to be a good influence.
“Really?”
“Oh, put that smug look away.” Maddox scowled.
“Who is she?”
Maddox winced, looking out the window instead of at John. “Sari’s new nanny.”
“Oh, Maddox.” John’s heart fell again. Sari was Maddox’s daughter, and though they weren’t estranged, they were definitely not regular fixtures in one another’s lives. Dating her nanny was not a good idea. In fact, it was an epically bad one.
“I know, I know. It’s terrible. And if Lauren ever found out, she’d castrate me on the spot. Apparently it took her a year to find somebody good enough with Sari that she could actually justify going back to work. If I screw this up for them...”
Maddox’s ex wasn’t exactly the kill-’em-with-kindness type. She was more the kill-’em-by-any-means-necessary-but-preferably-with-a-rusty-shank type.
Maddox finally turned back to John. “You think I want to be the deadbeat dad who resurfaces just long enough to date her nanny?”
“No,” John answered honestly. “But you have to admit, this kind of thing just sort of happens to you. Enough that it’s probably not a coincidence.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that your dating life reads like bad porn scripts, Maddox. Two years ago, you were screwing a widow who you met when she came to your door literally asking to borrow sugar. Before that it was the flight attendant in various exotic locales. Somewhere in there was your secretary—which you should have gotten sued for, by the way. And then there was—”
“I get it. My life is awesome, and you’re totally jealous.”
John couldn’t help but laugh. “Don’t date the nanny. Spend time with your daughter. Keep it in your pants until she’s not Sari’s nanny anymore. The kid’s already in fourth grade. How long does she need a nanny for?”
“That’s already the plan. I told her I’m going to ask her out in two years. Because that’s the length of her contract and that’s how long Lauren thinks that Sari needs someone to be around after school. And until then we can be friends.”
Now, that was a genuine surprise. “Really?”
“Really. Well, that was after I asked her out and she said no. Then I let her know about the two-years-from-now plan.”
“And what’d she say?”
“She rolled her eyes.”
“You’re fucked.”
They both laughed.
John rose and gathered his things, not wanting to wear out his welcome. Maddox followed him to the door, and the brothers quickly embraced. They made a plan to see one another in a few weeks, but John knew that there was a good chance Maddox would cancel in the meantime.
He walked to the train and thought about old money. How, like anything, if it was ever present in your life, you barely thought about it. Mary must have spent a couple hundred bucks on the food alone for her party. A party she’d thrown just because she’d wanted to have a party, celebrating nothing but summer and friends and life. He thought about the difference between Mary’s party and Estrella’s annual block party. Both parties were for the same reasons, and both were jovial and lively. And strangely enough, Mary had looked at home in both settings.
MARY’S HOUSE FELT empty after the Coateses left just shy of a week after they’d arrived. Their air-conditioning had taken longer to be fixed than they’d thought, and Mary hadn’t minded the company.
She didn’t want to feel vulnerable after the conversation with her mother and John’s words at her party. She wanted it to roll off her back. But for whatever reason, her mother and John had served up a one-two punch that was still smarting five days later.
Mary had taken the opportunity to give Jewel a million cuddles, to bring home dinners for Josh and Joanna, to laugh and fill her time with company.
But now they were gone, and her apartment felt much too large for one person. Mary was normally a good sleeper. Good enough that even after thirty-seven years of life, 3:00 a.m. still felt like an unfamiliar and vaguely creepy betrayal of the daytime. She wasn’t ever comfortable at the witching hour.
She rolled in her sheets and wondered whether John was a good sleeper or not. She could easily picture him as an insomniac, red eyes cracked and the sheets twisted at his hips. But then, he was so intense and focused in his waking life, maybe he was one of those people who just passed out cold the second his head hit the bed. She could also picture him dead to the world, his face finally relaxed and slack in the kind of sleep that restored a man.
And therein was the problem. Mary didn’t know John. She didn’t know him well enough to predict his propensities or inclinations. If she’d known him well, maybe she wouldn’t have been so shocked by his words to Tyler. So appalled. So embarrassed.
She tossed and turned for another hour before she started to drift.
A noise brought her back, dimly, to the surface of sleep. She sifted back down, warm and soft. But then the noise came again. She opened her eyes.
Sat up.
That sounded like it was coming from downstairs. From her shop. There! The tinkling of glass. Scuffling.
Mary scrambled to the end of her bed and grabbed her phone, tugging on her robe over her nightshirt, even though sweat had sprung up down her spine.
She was frozen. Call the cops? Go down there by herself? She walked carefully across her bedroom floor, avoiding the creaky spots. She stopped in her tracks and listened for more sounds. Nothing.
Then a crash so loud that she couldn’t help but yelp. She covered her mouth with her hands, staring into nothing, her heart’s fists beating against the glass pane in her chest. Oh, God. There was someone in her store and they were destroying things. She had to call the cops.
Mary made it to the kitchen, somehow feeling unsafe in her own bedroom, and once again froze solid.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs that led up to her apartment was unmistakable. Mary peered out toward her front door and saw that she’d pulled the chain and cocked the dead bolt before bed. They would have to break down her door in order to get in. Even so, she scampered back toward her bathroom, the only other lockable room in her apartment, and locked the door behind her. She sat down hard on the edge of the bathtub and called the police.