Olga Dies Dreaming(42)
As she had suspected, Dick, an ardent Libertarian, refused to fork over the $10,000 for entrée into the fundraising fete, sending Prieto a note to say that it was nothing personal, but he wouldn’t give him a dollar until he cut government spending and supported deregulation. When Olga read it, she rolled her eyes and almost raised the point that if he really wanted a relationship with her, he would need to see past policy and support her brother in ways big and small. Then she remembered that she didn’t want a relationship with Dick and that she therefore didn’t really care what he believed or supported. Besides, the entire point of this play, by design, was to ensure that she and Dick would not enter the Blumenthal party together, where surely a New York Social Diary photographer would be lingering. Instead she would walk in tethered to her brother’s shiny star, enabling her to attract Mrs. Blumenthal’s attention and rob Dick of the smug satisfaction of diminishing her to arm candy intended to impress some old white guys he liked to slap backs with.
Olga had helicoptered over with Dick on Friday afternoon. As she did not particularly like the Hamptons, or sleeping the night with others, it was her first time out to his house there, an impulse purchase he’d made in the wake of his divorce. It was a lavish bachelor pad, with a game room and movie theater in the basement, and glass walls that looked out on the infinity pool and the ocean just beyond. The kitchen was comically masculine. Walls of dark gray invisible cabinets, a massive wine fridge, and a marble countertop so long and wide she was certain that Dick would want to fuck on it, if only because it invited such unoriginal fantasy. It was a “sexy” house, in the way that pornography is sexy—it screamed the most basic desires a man has while seeming utterly ignorant to how and what might give a woman pleasure. Dick had bought the house, he’d explained to her, as a lure to his growing sons, hoping that they would find the place cool enough to want to come out with their friends, and not mind the “old man” being around. As far as she knew, they had not been out much, either.
Olga found this both funny and sad. She wished her family felt the need to use luxurious real estate to draw her presence. Instead she was lured by nothing more than the promise of a pastel, the timeless power of guilt, and, of course, love. She’d wondered if it was the money or the divorce that had degenerated Dick’s family so. Where Dick seemed so lost and lonely, her Tío Richie, also divorced, now remarried, had ended up with more than ever. Always surrounded by his kids and, whether he liked it or not, both his current and former wives. The sum total of the Hamptons house, and Dick’s place in it, made Olga feel a vacuousness that not even sex that night—as she expected, on the kitchen counter—could shake. Indeed, if anything, the sex only succeeded in bathing her in a strange wave of melancholy. The evening left her feeling genuinely sorry for Dick, and nothing was less arousing than pity.
By the next morning, the feeling had not abated. If anything, overnight, it had strengthened and mutated into something more pointed and nagging: guilt. It surprised her. It was her first time sleeping with Dick since she had begun fucking Matteo. It was not the sex that evoked the guilt as much as the stark contrast in how she felt about the before and after. In the moment, she hadn’t noticed this with Matteo, but once back in bed with Dick, it crystallized for her: it had been pleasant, a relief really, to fuck someone without the aura of mutual condescension surrounding the act. For the first time, certainly with Dick, but possibly in recent memory, it occurred to her that sex without disdain might be a good thing.
She needed to end things with Dick. Sooner rather than later, and ideally, nicely.
Overwhelmed by the sadness of the house, she asked Dick’s driver to take her out at noon, though the benefit didn’t start until two. Dick, who had signed up for back-to-back SoulCycle classes, wasn’t there to notice. She sat at a bar in town nursing a glass of wine and Googling guests she wanted to meet at the Blumenthal party until her brother picked her up and off they headed to Southampton.
* * *
IT WAS A perfect day and the party was centered around the estate’s vast swimming pool, which the hostess, or more likely the housekeeper, had decorated with large red and white floating peonies. The cocktail tables had been covered in denim tablecloths with little white vases filled with more red peonies atop them. The entire affair had a casual Americana vibe, assuming that Americana’s backdrop was a $20 million beachfront estate. Two of her past clients were there, and Olga was genuinely surprised by how many other people recognized her from Good Morning, Later. But, make no mistake, the star of the show was her brother, whom Olga had always envied for his ability, when with his donors or on television, to transform into a person who was white palatable while still remaining very much himself. He wasn’t quite code-switching so much as he managed, miraculously, to speak several languages simultaneously, creating a linguistic creole of hip-hop, academia, contemporary slang, and high-level policy points that made Olga marvel. More astounding, he knew exactly when and with whom to finesse which aspect of himself, which proved, as Olga observed her brother, remarkably counterintuitive. He gave one of his older white male supporters a fist dap and slapped his back, and as he walked away Olga heard the man tell his wife that Prieto could be the Latino Obama. He called the hostess of the event Ma, which Olga was certain would offend, if not confuse her, but instead she blushed and kissed his cheek. Yet he was deft enough to know that, when greeting two of his older Black supporters—Prieto’s events almost always brought out monied people of color—to call them sir and ma’am, and ask after their children, which inevitably led to the retrieval of a phone and, remarkably, a FaceTime call to their adult children traveling out of state. Her brother had staff for these events, but used no handler, remembering details—from profound to minuscule—about his supporters and constituents.