“No?” I’d whispered, thoroughly spooked by the calm confidence rolling off this woman I’d just met. She was a new archetype for me.The Poised New Yorker.“I’m not, I, I can’t do that. I can’t.”
“Really? You should test that hypothesis before you decide—with him.” She pointed at a finance bro. Black slacks, painfully crisp white shirt, pale scalp glistening between the buzzed darts of his spiky, too-short haircut. “Come on, you can see his wallet in his back pocket. Show me that you’re better than Indiana—”
“Illinois, actually—”
“That’s what I said.”
But I couldn’t do it, not right then. Even after he locked his lasers on me, the “little redhead” he “found.” He lectured me about the importance of getting a real job—like he had, at his dad’s firm, easy!—and investing in mutual funds, and then he stepped outside to make a call. “Order whatever you want on my tab,” he’d said. And after ten minutes without him showing back up, I did. A Diet Coke. Then, after thirty minutes, and the bartender asking if I knew how to get his card back to him, and Renata watching me swivel my ice cubes around and around, I got us shots and three orders of cheesy bacon fries.
That’s how it was for the longest time. Renata, me, open tabs, smiling. The bills were mostly paid, either by the opportunistic patronage of Manhattan’s richest men (who love to slip you a hundred if they think your phone’s getting turned off), modeling work (abysmal for non–nepo babies), or brand deals (I started documenting my outfits online right when fashion content shifted from blogsto social media; lucky me). But then a friend’s momager approached me—offering to pay a month of rent if I asked this ancient stockbroker out who’d been creeping on her daughter.Help me prove to her that he’s a fifty-one-year-old man who’d date any twenty-one-year-old girl. She knows I’m asking you and thinks he’s going to say no.
Just one text, with a link to my old headshots.
Secretly, I’d thought he was going to say no, too.
Chapter 3SYMMETRICAL RESPONSE
Unless you’re born with asilver spoon in your mouth—or you get extremely lucky in life—you really have no idea how easy rich people have it. And I’m not talking about, like, Uncle Kenny who made a hundred thousand dollars flipping the family property he inherited. I’m talking about the rich, therealrich.
But the easiness kills them.
You know those dog breeds that start chewing coffee table legs if they’re left indoors for too long? Labradoodles, or whatever? That’s the 1 percent. At any moment of the day, they’re inundated with the psychological torture of being better-off than the other 99 percent of humanity, totally disconnected from how life works. They’re alone. Always. They don’t have roommates they begrudgingly learn to love, or cousins that text them for twenty dollars. They didn’t sob at prom because someone made fun of their thrift-store dress; they had debutante balls, or secret-society meetings, or take-your-child-to-the-stock-market-floor day. Their lives are an escalator always going up, never broken down, andonly occasionally sucking their shoelaces into the claw-mouths of death.
They wish they could feel real pain. Actual suffering that bears real goals and personalities and growth. That’s why they hurt the rest of us, I think. Sadism is as close as billionaires can get to humanity, physically.
I see shades of Christian Grey in Imogen Baldwin, though most of her anger is directed toward Bernard—rightfully. Loud, defiant classical music hammers down the hallway of her dance company’s rehearsal wing, and I wait in a studio doorway for her to finish the song, watching her work. She’s in a black leotard, dark blonde hair slicked back, white practice skirt floating around her legs as she cuts through the motions. To anyone else, she’d look like the picture of Sugar Plum Fairy grace. But I see her eyes dart to me in the full-length mirror as she practices her pas de deux, alone.
“Isn’t it a little early forThe Nutcracker?” I ask when the song’s done.
“I’m looking forward to the person I’ll be this December.” She touches her updo with a similarly sleek smile, sounding barely out of breath. “Have you seen our performance before? Most wouldn’t recognize the song.”
“No.”
There’s always a pause the first time I don’t give someone details about myself; the annualNutcrackerday trips with Grandma and Mom, hot chocolate, velvet dresses, a family tradition before Mom passed and we couldn’t afford the tickets anymore. Nine years of fairy tale, dancing mice, animal transformations, Clara’s tenacity breaking the Prince’s curse. I keep it to myself.
Imogen nods, clearly understanding how this is going to work. “Thank you for meeting me here. I guess I just wanted to see…”She swallows. “It’s been nice, throwing myself back into rehearsals—as nice asSwan Lakecan be at the moment. I’ll send you tickets.”
“No need.” I follow her to a long, flat wooden bench in front of the mirrors. A little lumbar support would be nice for us mortals. “We’ll need to keep this brief. From here on out, we text.”
She nods again. “Like I mentioned before, I have connections with three job openings on the team—junior executive assistant, travel coordinator, and personal clothing manager. Stark-Benzin is choosy with new employees. My friends say they’ll review all new hires at the end of the season, in November, at which point you could exit if you’d rather not quit before then. It’s a shorter season, too. They’re redesigning multiple circuits for new safety protocols. Personally, I believe the assistant role would give you the most access, but perhaps the travel or fashion roles work better with your background.”
Okay, this ballerina is beyond Christian Grey.American Psycho, maybe? Either way, I’m slightly impressed. She’s done a lot of the leg work I usually do. Which begs the question… “Do your friends know you’re Trojan Horsing them?”
“I haven’t mentioned it,” she sniffs.
Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve rubbed elbows with a client’s inner circle. Sometimes friends or family catch on that my meet-cutes are a little too coincidental, or that it’s strange that a twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker is suddenly interested in their seventy-year-old uncle who lives on the West Coast, golfs to unwind, and waxes poetic about Reaganomics when he’s drunk. Usually, though, people don’t want to notice—because people love a love story. Especially when it’s a little unrealistic, kind of unlikely. That’s the magic. Random meetings. Fate at a coffee shop. Rich man, normal-ish girl. People ignore the hints that I’m faking it, the telltale clues that, hm, maybeshe’s not here for the right reasons, since I’m selling an illusion people want to believe.True love conquers all! Compromise is possible! Love at first sight is real and your boss-father-friend-whatever is proof! Also, see, he can’t be that bad if someone loves him, which she does!
Like lemmings over a cliff.
Imogen goes to change into recovery footwear, giving me space to click through the three job descriptions. It’s a tough choice. The junior executive assistant role would let me stick my grubby little fingers into quite a few email inboxes, but it reports to an executive, and that seems a smidge too dangerous. Per Stark-Benzin’s website, travel coordinator would guarantee that I’d be on the road with the team. And it’d be the easiest, probably. A headache, but mostly plane ticket bookings and melatonin gummies. I could literally only-one-bedroom Bernard and me. Right at the start, when he’d need to be chivalrous and bashful.
On the other hand, personal clothing manager would be… clothes.
A scratchy feeling creeps up my throat as I read the description:Founded by the Stark brothers outside Berlin in 1992, Stark-Benzin has become synonymous with modern motorsports and technical distinction. Our personal clothing manager joins the premiere Formula 1 racing team as a stylist to our drivers, to make visible our world-renowned aesthetic.The position is a one-season contract outright, starting in March with the Australian Grand Prix and ending in November at São Paulo—though the ideal candidate would understand they may work out of our offices in Surrey (England) and New York City.So, I’d need to sweet-talk the team into letting me travel. But they have to be desperate for candidates this close to the starting date, right? Plus, flirting over fashion choices, telling Bernard how good he looks in those tacky F1 team T-shirts, working in how I used tobe a model and now I’m an influencer and, oh, can he please save me with his money?
And—man.
Clothes.
