Pineapple Street(10)
It was funny, Georgiana had always considered herself fairly well traveled for someone her age. She had been to France, Spain, and Italy; she had been on a safari in Kenya and seen the glaciers in Alaska; she had even walked along the Great Wall of China with her high school class. But her work had made her recognize how little of the world she had actually seen. She had been to tourist spots, rich cities and towns made for the entertainment of the wealthy. She had never witnessed actual poverty; she had never contemplated how people truly lived in the parts of the world where Condé Nast Traveler failed to list the best restaurants.
At one thirty she was starving, so she grabbed her sandwich out of the refrigerator and made her way to the large dining table. Everyone else had come and gone, so she sat alone and spread her napkin on her lap. When the chair next to her pulled back, Georgiana startled.
“This seat taken?” Brady asked.
“Please,” she replied. They had the whole entire table to themselves, and yet he was sitting right next to her. She had left her phone charging at her desk, so she had nowhere to look, nothing to pretend to be absorbed by while eating.
Brady opened a cardboard container and took out a grilled cheese, a small puff of steam escaping from the box. “Late lunch?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m pulling together a newsletter and lost track of time.” Georgiana retrieved a rogue piece of avocado from the ziplock bag.
“Is it about the outstanding work we’ve been doing on the Palm Tree islands?”
Georgiana looked up at him with a start, while he pretended to study his sandwich with an innocent expression.
“No. It’s actually about our plans to provide free nose jobs to the poor debutantes of Monaco,” she replied.
Brady let out a surprised bark of laughter and Georgiana smiled.
“Pretty funny,” he said. “So, how was your weekend? What did you get up to?”
“Played tennis, went out with some friends, nothing wild. How about you?”
“Well, it was kind of a bust. I was supposed to get together with some college friends and go out Saturday, but at the last minute my buddy sprained his ankle, so I ended up spending the evening with him at urgent care trying to get an X-ray.”
“Oh, that stinks.”
“Yeah, I was really looking forward to a night out.” He looked at her meaningfully. “At the Long Island Bar.”
“I like that place,” Georgiana murmured.
“Yeah.” He shook his head slightly. “Where do you play tennis?”
They spent the next twenty minutes talking about sports in the city—which public courts checked your Parks Department tennis pass, the supervisor at the Fort Greene courts who would save you a spot if you brought him a bacon, egg, and cheese. They talked about Brady’s basketball league, a bunch of guys who sometimes got so carried away that they threw elbows and had to go back to work as partners at white-shoe law firms with black eyes.
They had both finished their sandwiches and reluctantly crumpled up their paper napkins when a nearby meeting let out, and a pair of double doors opened and the room suddenly filled with colleagues marching back to their desks. Brady cocked his head and smiled before scooting out his chair. “See you around.” He scooped up her trash along with his own and headed off down to the first floor, as Georgiana floated back to her tiny maid’s room office, unsure whether she’d be able to write another word of the newsletter or would spend the next three hours staring out the window and replaying every single thing they had said and feeling her face get warm with pleasure over and over again.
THREE
Darley
Darley’s children were obsessed with death. They were five and six, and everyone said this was developmentally normal, but Darley secretly worried it meant they were tortured souls who would get face tattoos as teenagers. It was late afternoon, and they were at the Brooklyn Bridge playground, near the slides. Darley had found a sunny spot on the stone steps and was half watching her children run and half scrolling on her phone, filling up her cart for an online grocery order. Some of the kids’ classmates were there too, with their nannies, and the adults had nodded at one another, but instead of chatting they had all happily retreated into their little glowing screens.
The children had been trying to climb up the twenty-foot slide, all five of them in a line, boosting one another in a rare show of cooperation. Poppy was the ringleader, bossing the other children in her tiny, shrill voice, sounding more seagull than human, and Darley wondered briefly if it was wrong to hate the sound of a child’s voice. She focused on her phone, methodically shopping for dinner items—salmon for herself, mac and cheese for the kids, pork chops for Malcolm. She was debating the likelihood of Hatcher eating chicken that had been touched by rosemary when she noticed the children had all congregated under the slide. They seemed to be looking at something, and she watched as Poppy went to the edge of the playground to grab a long stick and run it back to the group. The afternoon was warm, and she smelled the ocean. The river was just on the other side of the trees, and Darley could hear the ferries blowing their mournful horns, could hear birdsong, and felt sweet contentment. There were days in New York when she was desperate to escape, desperate for the beach, for a garden, for a glassy lake, but then there were days like today when the leafy park felt perfect, when she wondered how she could ever contemplate any other life.