him his food and they’d fallen into a surprisingly effortless conversation.
“Here as in Caiette?”
“Well, here and then Vancouver.”
“Great city,” he said. “I keep meaning to spend more time there.”
He slipped her a folded bill as he was leaving—she thanked him without looking at it—and it turned out to be a hundred dollars, folded around a business card on which he’d scrawled a cell phone number. A hundred-dollar bill? Mortifying in retrospect, but she always appreciated the clarity of his intentions. It was always going to be a transactional arrangement. When he beckoned, she would come to him. She would always be well compensated.
Why not you?
Soho
That last summer in the kingdom of money, Vincent and Mirella met up in Soho on a subtropical afternoon, where they lingered for a while in Faisal and Mirella’s loft and then went shopping, less out of need than out of boredom. Dark clouds filled the sky. In the late afternoon they wandered down Spring Street with no particular destination in mind, having spent several thousand dollars each on clothing and lingerie, and Vincent was admiring a yellow Lamborghini parked across the street when Mirella said, “I think the rain’s about to start”—and they walked faster, too late, the first thunderclap sounded and the downpour began, Mirella took her hand and they broke into a run. Vincent was laughing—she loved being caught in the rain—and Mirella didn’t like what rain did to her hair, but by the time they reached the corner she was smiling too, she pulled Vincent into an espresso bar and they stood just inside for a moment, pleasantly chilled by the air-conditioning, pushing wet hair away from their eyes and surveying the damage to the shopping bags. Mirella’s bodyguard came in a moment later, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.
“Well,” Mirella said. “Shall we stop for a coffee?”
“Let’s.” Vincent had been on the East Coast of this continent for two and a half years now, but she was still startled by the violence of the summer thunderstorms, the way the sky turned green. They found a minuscule table by the window and sat there with their little coffees, wet shopping bags crowded around their legs. They’d fallen into a companionable silence, and as they watched the downpour, Vincent realized that she felt perfectly at ease, for the first time in recent memory. The truth was that in the kingdom of money, before she’d met Mirella she’d been extremely alone.
“Do you find that shopping is actually incredibly boring?” Vincent felt guilty saying this aloud. It was only possible to say it because Mirella hadn’t come from money either. Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing.
“I know it’s in poor taste to admit it,” Mirella said, “but it’s incredible how quickly the novelty wears off.” There was something about the way she looked up just then, the way the light caught her face, that made Vincent think of a nursery rhyme from childhood, her favorite verse from the Mother Goose book in the elementary school library, read so many times that she had committed it to memory by the time she was five or six: She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the girl of the golden city…
“At first it felt like some kind of compensation,” Vincent said. “You remember the times when you had to choose between rent and groceries, and it’s like, ‘Now I can afford this dress, so balance has been restored in the world,’ but after a while…”
“After a while you find you’ve acquired enough dresses,” Mirella said. “If Faisal knew the extent of my shopping habit, he’d probably stage an intervention.”
Although of course the clothing wasn’t the point, Vincent thought later, on the train back to Greenwich. It wasn’t the stuff that kept her in this strange new life, in the kingdom of money; it wasn’t the clothing and objects and handbags and shoes. It wasn’t the beautiful home, the travel; it wasn’t Jonathan’s company, although she did genuinely like him; it wasn’t even inertia. What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.
When she arrived home, Jonathan was waiting in the living room. He’d been working but closed his laptop when she came