She met him on the ground floor of the Casino, and they hit for an hour, Georgiana screwing up her footwork and missing easy shots and serving like a complete asshole. When they finished Cord teased her gently. “You a little hungover, George? Big night last night?”
“What makes you think that?” she replied icily as she changed out of her tennis shoes.
“Um, maybe the fact that you stink of booze or that you sweat a line of eye makeup down your cheek? Did you even wash your face last night?”
“I did not,” she admitted.
“Did you sleep at a dude’s?” Cord asked. “Did you hook up with someone?”
“No, God.” Georgiana’s face prickled with heat.
“Oh you did. You had sex with someone. You got a maaaaaan,” he started singing.
“Stop, Cord,” Georgiana said, annoyed. Cord grinned and zipped his racket into his case. They walked down the stone steps and onto Montague Street. Georgiana felt wretched. Her face was red, her hair was dirty, and, apparently, she had mascara all over her cheek. As they walked, Cord linked his elbow through hers like they were a courting couple promenading in Elizabethan times. He knew he had pushed too far and was trying to make up for it. As they rounded the corner of Montague and Hicks they nearly smacked into another couple, a man and woman walking a big greyhound. Georgiana locked eyes with the man. It was Curtis McCoy. There was a moment when they both stopped and time froze. Georgiana felt lightheaded, woozy with humiliation. And then Cord said, “Whoops, hey big dog,” and led her on by the elbow and Curtis quickly looked away. He and the woman continued down Hicks with their dog, and Georgiana let her brother chatter, carrying on a one-sided conversation all the way to her apartment, where she would lie on the couch and stew in a fetid swamp of anger and self-recriminations for the rest of the day.
* * *
—
Georgiana had her first panic attack the summer before college. At the time she thought she had just smoked too much weed, but in retrospect the dizziness, the closing in of her vision, and the sense that her heart was no longer working were a product of a life she felt was spinning out of control: moving away, leaving her friends behind, the knowledge that outside of her neighborhood and school nobody cared who her parents were, and the bit of glitter and fairy dust that came with being Darley and Cord’s sister couldn’t help her anymore. In the weeks following Brady’s death, she felt that old panic nipping at her heels. She would be in meetings at work and feel certain she was sliding out of her chair, unable to remain upright. She would speak and her face would go numb and her mouth would go dry. She would hang up in the middle of calls as the words stuck in her throat. She had a bottle of Valium her mother had left in a handbag, and by breaking them in half she managed to ration them out, but when she shook the bottle and heard the sound of distinct pills hitting the plastic cap, she called her GP.
Her physician was away for the week, and Georgiana wept on the phone to her receptionist until she made her a same-day appointment with a doctor who had agreed to fill in. He was old and kind, and when Georgiana described her symptoms, he pulled a large drug manual from his bookshelf and read her descriptions of the different choices aloud. Regular antianxiety medications could take two weeks to begin working. He wrote her a prescription for sixty Klonopin and told her to take them morning and night.
The day of Brady’s memorial she swallowed one and a half pills before putting on a black dress and taking the subway to the Upper East Side. She sat with a group of her colleagues in the back and watched Brady’s parents, both broken with grief, greeting family at the front. They both worked for Oxfam; he was following in their footsteps. Brady so closely resembled his mother that it pained Georgiana to look at her. At the service his best friend spoke, his older brother spoke, and Amina spoke. Amina was small and elegant, in her early thirties, and Georgiana felt herself staring. This was the woman who held half of Brady’s heart. His friend, his brother, his wife—one by one they stood and laid claim to Brady’s memory. But he had loved Georgiana too. She knew it, and yet she suffered alone, groggy and dizzy from the medicine, listening quietly in her pew as Brady’s wife cried and wrapped her arms around his family.
Without Brady at work, Brady on Tuesday nights, Brady on weekends, she had nothing to look forward to, and she measured her days only in miles run and hours slept. Darley noticed an article in the paper about the plane crash, but when she asked about it, Georgiana deflected. “They were project managers in Pakistan, I didn’t know them,” she lied, sure that even saying Brady’s name aloud would break the dam of her emotions. Cord continued to drag Georgiana out to play tennis on weekends, unable to ask about her clearly visible pain but convinced, as all WASPs are, that exercise would cure whatever ails you. Lena was the only one to ask directly about the anxiety pills, noticing that when they drank Georgiana slipped quickly from buzzed to blackout. “Babe, whatever you’re taking isn’t working with alcohol. You have to pick your poison,” she advised. Georgiana was still humiliated that she had kissed Curtis at the party in front of so many people, but somehow his snubbing of her on the street made it strangely better. She pictured his frozen expression, his girlfriend and his dog, and though she still felt a measure of embarrassment, she also, in some ways, felt a surge of power.
* * *
—
She was eating lunch at her parents’ apartment, picking at a plate of smoked salmon and dark pumpernickel and reading the sports section of the paper, when her mother held up The New York Times Sunday Style section. “Do you know someone named Curtis McCoy? He was your class at the Henry Street School.”
“What?” Georgiana startled. How did her mother know about Curtis?
“There’s a piece about young billionaires giving away their inheritance, and he is interviewed. His father is Jim McCoy. I remember he was quite unpleasant at the winter fundraiser.” She sniffed and handed Georgiana the section.
It is August and much of Curtis McCoy’s cohort has absconded to Martha’s Vineyard, where the McCoy clan has their notable array of properties, a private section of the island that has been known to host rock stars and presidents, where it is not uncommon to see motorcades quietly swooshing past the stone gates. The McCoy family has, for three generations, owned the second-largest defense company in America, Taconic, manufacturers of cruise-and guided-missile systems, sold to both the U.S. government and, controversially, Saudi Arabia. Curtis McCoy, at the age of 26, is ready to wash his hands of the family business—but divesting himself of his great fortune is a more complicated matter than one might guess.
“Giving away my inheritance isn’t something I can legally do in one day—nor is it something I would want to do in one day. I am still learning a lot about the best ways to shed myself of this blood money.” Curtis McCoy is part of a growing movement of millennials who have grown up as one-percenters but are unwilling to perpetuate the systems that have put them there. “People like me shouldn’t exist,” McCoy says from his Brooklyn apartment. “I’m twenty-six years old. There is no logical reason for me to have hundreds of millions of dollars.” McCoy and his contemporaries reject the very concept of inherited wealth and are working to dismantle the regulations that allowed for their situations in the first place. Despite the fact that the title suits him, McCoy doesn’t define himself as a philanthropist （“There is something gross and elitist about claiming the mantle of ‘philanthropist.’？”） but is working with family lawyers to try to gain access to more of his inheritance sooner, doing all he can to distribute his wealth among a variety of nonprofit organizations. “This money came from warmongering, and it’s my goal to use it to promote peace. I hope that by speaking out I can encourage others in my position—or people with any sort of inherited wealth—to search their souls and decide what that money means and how they might use it to undo wrongs of the past.”