“I know,” said Sasha. “An app where you point your phone at an avocado and it tells you if it’s stringy or brown inside.”
“I want one called Richup,” said Nate. “It goes through all your photos and adds in a Rolex and a horse.”
They all laughed and spent the next hour coming up with terrible ideas as Shelby gamely pretended to consider them. After a while Sasha needed to use the bathroom and Shelby led her inside, showing her the two staterooms, the galley, the dining room, the salon, and then finally the head. While the boat was at least fifteen years old, it was neat and well maintained, with shiny chrome and cherrywood details. It was truly a floating apartment.
Shelby made up snacks in the galley, Ritz Crackers with cubes of Vermont cheddar, a pile of grapes, and a plastic tray of Oreo cookies. She carried them out to the deck with a stack of paper napkins all bearing the name of the boat, The Searcher, in fancy gold foil. Around midnight Sasha yawned, and so she, Cord, and Olly said their goodbyes and left the lovebirds alone in their floating nest.
Olly gallantly offered to carry their trash and recycling to the bins by the parking lot, and together they made their way along the pier, talking quietly so as not to rouse anyone who might be sleeping in the neighboring boats.
“She’s a sweet girl,” Sasha murmured. “She seems to really like Nate.”
“Shocking, right?” Olly replied.
“I hope one of her projects works,” Sasha mused.
“She’ll be fine.”
“I mean, there are millions of apps published every year. It’s a long-shot career path.”
“Oh, these are just for fun. She’s basically been retired since she was thirty.” Olly chucked the trash into the bin.
“What do you mean, retired?” asked Sasha, confused.
“Shelby was employee seventy-three at Google. That’s millions in stocks.”
Sasha felt her jaw drop. Shelby was loaded, super-super-superrich. She started to laugh. “Oh, Nate,” she said, shaking her head. “He can just buy himself a Rolex and horse.”
TWENTY
Georgiana
When Georgiana was a teenager Truman Capote’s house was sold for a record-breaking $12.5 million to the founder of Rockstar Games. The house, a four-bay, five-story townhome on Willow Street between Pineapple and Orange, was sacred ground in the neighborhood. Capote had famously written both Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood while living there, he had lounged on the porch, he had published an autobiographical essay about the neighborhood, and given his friends tours of his place. Capote belonged to the fruit streets. When the maker of Grand Theft Auto slapped down his checkbook and took the keys to 70 Willow, the sound of collective pearl-clutching could be heard from the Promenade to Montague Street. The new owner applied for some permits: to put in a swimming pool, to strip the yellow paint, and to demolish the porch. It was a nightmare. Who, in Brooklyn Heights of all places, would trade Audrey Hepburn for that?
In the weeks following the terrible gender reveal party, Georgiana kept thinking about Capote’s house. The Landmarks Preservation Commission met with the new owner and together they came up with a plan. He could have his pool, but then he would return the home to its Greek Revival heritage, restoring the original facade, matching the historic brick, and using those deep Grand Theft Auto coffers to rejuvenate it to nineteenth-century glory. The owner would get to live there comfortably, but he could still honor the history and culture he inherited. In fact, he would make it better. Maybe that’s what Sasha was doing at Pineapple Street. Maybe Georgiana was just a pearl-clutching neighbor being a giant snob.
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.