Pineapple Street(81)

The other thing, the thing that sucked to talk about, was the secret lurking worry that other people were using them. Using them for their weekend homes, their good alcohol, their big apartments, their parties, their internships, their closets, their, well, their money. Darley saw it all the time to varying degrees—guys who bought their girlfriends jewelry and laptops and paid for expensive vacations, only for them to realize the guys were essentially bribing their way into a relationship; guys who amassed crowds of hangers-on when they paid for bottle service or houses in the Hamptons. There was a difference between sharing your good fortune and being taken advantage of, and sometimes discerning the difference could break your heart. It was just easier, in some ways, to stay close to those who liked you but didn’t need your AmEx to have fun.

There was a clique of girls at her high school, a clique Darley occasionally joined for lunch when her own friends were out sick or traveling. They were called the Rice Girls because, everyone said laughingly, “They were all white and they stuck together.” Darley’s own group was exempt from such derision because Eleanor was Chinese, but deep down she knew it was the same thing—she hung out with a group of rich girls who all had nearly identical upbringings. They all had wealthy parents and grandparents, they all had maids and nannies, they all had tropical vacations and restaurant birthdays and closets full of skis and rackets, and, in Eleanor’s case, a three-thousand-dollar set of golf clubs.

Since the Stocktons were old money, they were more or less discreet with their filthy lucre. They flew coach unless the flight was really long, they drove their cars until the clanking noise became untenable, and they never, ever redecorated. But upon closer examination, the daily cost of life was eye-watering. The maintenance and taxes on the limestone on Pineapple, the maisonette on Orange, the country house on Spyglass, the memberships at the Casino, the Knickerbocker Club, and Jupiter Island, the kids’ Henry Street School tuition (kindergarten and first grade were fifty grand apiece), and Berta’s salary all added up. Sometimes Darley wondered if her father even knew how much was flowing from the taps, or if his assistant wrote the checks and he signed them without bothering to take his eyes off his blueprints.

Whenever a bill or an expense surprised Darley—the closing costs when she bought her apartment, an assessment from the Jupiter club when a hurricane ripped off the deck—her father would shrug and say, “It’s a rounding error.” And it was true. He could make or lose more in one deal than any of them could realistically spend in five years, including years when they bought property. It was a life of great privilege and ease, and Darley was grateful. But she also knew it made it harder for her to make friends. There were only so many people to whom her world made sense.

When Darley told this to Cord once, he squinted and looked perplexed. He didn’t seem to feel this way at all. “You need to loosen up, Dar. This is a city full of interesting people.” To Darley this was the central difference between them, and the reason she ended up with Malcolm and he ended up with Sasha. She needed someone she had known and trusted for years, while he could fall in love with a girl at a bar. For Darley, deep connections were made over time, through years of friendship, a slow unveiling of the many layers we build up around ourselves. She had been burned too many times by supposed friends: The college roommate who dropped out of school and begged her for a two-thousand-dollar loan to help her sick mother. It was only months later that Darley discovered there was no sick mother, only a cocaine habit, that the money was gone. The camp friends who stole her phone card and used it to call their boyfriends from the pay phone by the dining hall, racking up a hundred dollars in six weeks. The girls her first year at Yale who came over to watch movies on her projector and borrowed her car to get pizza but talked about her as a spoiled rich girl behind her back. The time one of those girls put a dent in her car and never even offered to help have it fixed. Darley knew that her family money made her vulnerable to these sorts of leeches, so she had long ago built up walls to protect herself. She had worried Cord never built those walls, that he let himself follow women and friends like a pilot flying through fog. That’s why she had been so resistant to Sasha, why it had taken so long for her to let her sister-in-law in.

She thought about her own prenup for the millionth time. Maybe she had made a stupid mistake when she gave up her trust, sure. But her biggest mistake had been giving money so much power over her life. By keeping Malcolm’s secret she was buying into the idea that her world was a club only available to those with a seven-figure income. And she didn’t want to live that way. She wanted, for the first time in her life, to peel back her bitter rind and open up to the sweetness within.



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Everyone always said that it was the moment you stopped trying to get pregnant that you finally conceived. That you found love when you’d stopped looking. That your silk midi-length La DoubleJ dress went on sale the day after you bought it full price. (Okay, maybe that one was different, but it annoyed Darley nonetheless.) So it was, by that same law, that Malcolm got a new job the week after they confessed his Deutsche Bank firing to the Stocktons.

Tilda and Chip were outraged on Malcolm’s behalf about the Azul debacle. They understood right away that the CNBC leak wasn’t his fault, they were unequivocally compassionate about his ordeal, and, even better, Tilda took revenge into her own hands and served it in the most fabulously snooty way possible: She made sure that Chuck Vanderbeer and Brice MacDougal were blacklisted from every private club in New York City and disinvited from every society gala from the Junior League Winter Ball to the MoMA Armory Party. They wouldn’t be able to get a squash court in this town ever again, and Darley had to laugh knowing that Tilda had actually hit them where it hurt.