Pineapple Street(78)
Kristin had a therapist on Remsen Street and Georgiana made a weekly appointment. She spent the first hour telling the story of Brady and used up half a box of tissues, but in the following weeks they talked more about family, about money, about Sasha and the prenup. Georgiana was starting to see that her relationship with money was all intertwined in how she thought about friends and marriage. Unbeknownst to her, she had been trained her entire life to protect her wealth. They had tax advisers and investment advisers, they made careful end-of-year adjustments to offset losses, and while they could enjoy the fruits of their labor (or the fruits of their ancestors’ labor) they were raised with the holy understanding that they must never, ever touch the principal. Intertwined with this doctrine was the fact that marrying outside their class would dilute their wealth. It was best for the rich to marry the rich. Georgiana hadn’t ever realized how deeply ingrained this belief was in her psyche.
The fact that Georgiana had called Sasha “the Gold Digger” made her burn with shame. Georgiana had been wrong about Sasha not signing the prenup, but that wasn’t even the point. It was classist, it was snobbish, and it was exactly the kind of attitude that she needed to work against. You couldn’t seek to fight inequality in the world while preserving it in your own family.
“It’s like the Truman Capote house,” Georgiana explained to her therapist, twisting a tissue between her hands as she sat on the tweed sofa of her tiny office. Her therapist was a trim woman in her sixties, carefully dressed in neutral colors, a local in the neighborhood who shared an office with a child psychologist, which meant the bookshelves displayed not only Freud and Klein but also tiny plastic figurines, miniature moms and dads and babies. Georgiana was sometimes tempted to play with them as she talked. “Everyone in the neighborhood was outraged when Truman’s house sold to someone with new money,” Georgiana explained with dismay.
“You know what’s funny about that?” the woman asked, her eyes twinkling merrily. “Capote didn’t even own Seventy Willow Street. He rented the basement apartment from his friend. He just gave tours of the house when his friend was on vacation.” Georgiana had to laugh.
* * *
—
When she got home that night she called Sasha, biting her lip as the phone rang. She really hated talking on the phone—everyone her age texted—but when Sasha answered, Georgiana cleared her throat and pressed past her awkwardness. “Sasha? It’s George,” she said. “I was wondering, would you like to play tennis sometime?”
* * *
Since Georgiana had been confronting a lot of uncomfortable truths about herself lately, she lay on Lena’s pullout couch on a Sunday morning and decided she felt ready to admit to one more: she really actually liked onion rings. There was no excuse for her to order them that Sunday. She wasn’t hungover, she wasn’t on her deathbed, and she hadn’t even gone for a run that morning, but, she acknowledged, they were wonderfully crispy and sweet and so, together with Lena and Kristin, she paid ten dollars for a large order from Westville.
As they lounged and watched rich ladies fight on TV, they waited for their food and dissected the night before. They had been out in Cobble Hill, and Kristin had ended up kissing the bartender at Clover Club. It was regrettable because now they couldn’t go back there, and they had such nice cocktails.
“There must be some night he’s off,” complained Lena.
“I think he’s the manager. It’s ruined.” She sighed, full of remorse. “So what are you going to do about Curtis, George?” Kristin was drinking her second Gatorade of the morning, wearing a matching sweatsuit that made her look like either Hailey Bieber or a very stylish Teletubby.
“I don’t know what to do. If I were him, I’d probably block my number. I’ve been so hot and cold,” Georgiana admitted, pulling Lena’s dog onto her lap for support.
“How did you last leave it?” asked Lena.
“I told him I was too busy to hang out.”
“So, could you just tell him you got less busy?”
“No, I think that would be fake. I lied to him about Brady, and if I want to move forward with him, I should probably try to be honest from now on.”
“Ugh, honesty is the worst,” Kristin groaned.
“The worst,” Georgiana agreed and got up to meet their onion rings at the door.
* * *
—
A few days later, Georgiana stayed late after work, watching her colleagues shut down their computers in their various bedrooms and parlors and butler pantries. She took a deep breath and opened up the Scribus layout designer she used to make the company newsletter, changed the font to Times New Roman, and crafted her version of a mea culpa, her attempt at a boom box held aloft outside a suburban window, a dispatch that would lay her heart bare in a way Curtis might understand.
It is November and much of Georgiana Stockton’s cohort has absconded to the far reaches of Brooklyn where her clan dresses in sequined gowns to dance to nineties pop music while chugging vodka and eating pickles. Georgiana has, for more than two and a half decades, blithely joined in these costumed celebrations, her greatest concerns chiefly centered upon finding good outfits for theme parties and maintaining a 5.5 tennis ranking. But now, at the age of twenty-six, Georgiana Stockton is ready to grow up.