Her mother would drop her off at the school, then walk away hurriedly, as if she were being followed, and Casey would stand at the school gate to smell the warm scent of her mother’s hand in her own palm, wishing she could run fast and catch up with Umma.
Leah opened the door and left. Jay sat on the sofa, still wanting a cup of coffee but feeling too exhausted to get up again. Casey couldn’t speak to him, so she went to shower.
14 HOLD
SABINE JUN GOTTESMAN HAD NO CHILDREN of her own. Her husband, Isaac, who was twenty-five years her senior, had four children from his two previous marriages, and although he could have afforded private school tuition fees, weddings, and legacies for many more children, he chose his third wife on the basis of her intelligence and devotion, taking into favorable consideration that for Sabine, her career was her greatest creative act. From the beginning, her policy had been no children, and at his age, he preferred to enjoy his twin grandsons during brunch on the first Saturday of the month with his third daughter and favorite son-in-law. Neither Isaac nor Sabine had ever felt comfortable around infants.
Isaac’s adult children—three married girls and a boy who was taking over his business—liked Sabine. He’d anticipated some resistance about her age, but they approved of her, refraining from calling her the usual names. All four children were exhausted from years of distrusting their half-siblings from the other marriage and were merely trying to hang on to the attentions of their charismatic father, who was sensitive to criticism. They were relieved that there would be no more heirs, and to boot, Sabine possessed a fortune of her own. Their father’s third wife was treated as a chic aunt who sent birthday gifts from Asprey and Hermès. They did not discuss Sabine with their respective mothers.
If young people preferred Sabine, she also preferred them and took to employees who were floating through a life in retail. She adopted their shapeless hopes, sent them through FIT, Parsons, or the School of Visual Arts, and they became buyers or managers, and a couple of them owned notable boutiques on Elizabeth Street. Tonight, Casey Han, a Korean-American and a great favorite of Sabine’s, and her fiancé, Jay, were coming to dinner.
Before company came, it was Isaac’s habit to check the bar—an enclosed space in the gallery-style living room behind a pair of rosewood paneled doors. This was something he preferred to do himself, having tended bar while going to business school. Once, a comely benefactor of the ballet asked Isaac for a kir royale at his home, and after tasting it, she’d scrutinized her host, unable to believe that Isaac Gottesman—the charming mogul who owned dozens of blocks of prime Manhattan real estate and served as trustee of both the Columbia Business School and the New York City Ballet—could mix her favorite cocktail better than Yanni, the barman at the Oak Room. Isaac was a man who enjoyed knowing how to do things like that. He could pull coins out of children’s ears and make a clean three-point shot.
Sabine entered the living room fresh from her shower, scented richly with her vetiver perfume. She wore a long Nehru jacket with slim matching pants. The shrimp color of the fabric made her dewy complexion even prettier. She kissed her husband’s just shaved cheek and asked him for a neat whiskey. Each night, she had an aperitif before dinner, and with her meal, she drank two glasses of red wine.
In a wonderful mood, Sabine carried her drink to her reading chair near the solarium to enjoy the last bit of April dusk. She sipped her whiskey slowly and opened a book about Diego Rivera resting on the Giacometti coffee table. Before meeting Sabine, Isaac had never met anyone who actually read the text in these coffee table art books.
His wife was only forty-two, and in their marriage, she’d grown more refined. They’d met twelve years before when she came to a lease closing at his offices. That morning, Isaac overheard a young Asian woman tell the receptionist in her accented English that she was the new tenant for one of his buildings in Chelsea—a thirty-thousand-square-foot raw space on Eighteenth Street. Back then, her voice was louder and her tone more insistent. A speech therapist had since cured her of these inferior qualities. Out of curiosity, Isaac sat in on the closing, and the leasing broker who worked for the man whose name was above all the doors and engraved on the letterhead stammered, not knowing if his tack should be carrot or stick with the tenant Mr. Gottesman could not stop staring at.
At the closing, Sabine was far more intelligent than her broker or expensive lawyer. While she signed the six copies of the telephone-book-size lease, she evinced no fear at entering into a three-million-dollar, ten-year, triple-net lease with Gottesman Real Property. That morning, Isaac gave her every term she’d asked for. She was thirty years old then, he found out at the closing dinner—a meal he’d contrived—and three months later, she agreed to marry him. When he brought up a prenuptial agreement, she said without blinking, “Isaac, I have found you, and I will never leave you. I intend to make you happy. Never, ever again insult me with your talk of money.” Against his matrimonial lawyer’s advice, Isaac married her without one.