barely remembered him as it was.
“Why?” Calvin asked, a little too quickly. “Do you know anything about it?” He sounded eager, for once, to hear what she had to say.
Nina looked up, about to tell him everything she was thinking. But the unfiltered greed smeared over his sweaty face made her stop.
“No,” she said. “I don’t. What is it?”
He squinted, causing the wrinkles that were showing more and more around his eyes to deepen. “It’s a coin,” he said. “Have you been able to find Eric? It’s important.”
More confusion. “No. I keep telling you, he’s not returning anyone’s calls or messages.” She didn’t mention the letter that had come back.
“Did he ever introduce you to any of his friends? The ones he made in college?”
Nina frowned. “Not many, no. He wasn’t particularly interested in coming home in college, so we never really met his cohort…”
“No one? John Carson, Jude Letour? Michael Faber? Any of them ring a bell?”
Mutely, Nina shook her head.
Calvin swore profusely, picked up the coin, and hurled it across the room, where it hit the mahogany wainscoting with a clink, then fell noiselessly to the rug.
“Why? What’s this all about?” Nina asked. “Does it have something to do with that dirty coin?”
Calvin sneered. “God, you’re so clueless, you know that? That ‘dirty coin’ is more valuable than this entire apartment.” He crossed the room and retrieved the coin from the ground, cradling it in his palm like it really was the treasure he claimed. “Can I ask you something? And will you be completely honest?”
Nina paused. This felt like a trap. “I…”
“Is there something about me specifically that says ‘not like you’?”
Nina cocked her head, unsure what to make of the question. The sudden show of vulnerability was unlike anything she’d ever heard from her “husband.” “I don’t know what you mean. Not like me personally? Or not like…what?”
“Not like you.” Calvin wagged one hand up and down, pointing at her general being. “All of you. The ones with ten houses and thousands of trust funds. The ones who own chalets in the Swiss Alps and private islands in the Caribbean. The ones who think ten million is chump change and have for three hundred years.”
Nina considered. She didn’t know how she could pick the other two girls with trust funds out of her orientation group at Wellesley, but she knew them immediately, just as they had known her. Nor could she explain the exact ways in which, beyond his ill-fitting clothes, Calvin stood out no matter what at every social gathering, every casual salon, every cocktail party.
It was a thousand things and none at all. But always there, nonetheless.
Still, she knew she couldn’t speak the truth: if fitting into the world of generational wealth was Calvin’s goal, he should give it up now. Some were better at it than others, but her husband was certainly not one of them. And by now, she knew he never would be.
“I grew up with nothing,” he said before swiping the bottle of gin off his desk and pouring a large quantity into what looked like a used coffee cup. “Did you know that?”
Nina was quiet. She had known he hadn’t grown up in luxury, of course. But not nothing.
“My father was Hungarian. He was actually imprisoned during the Cold War uprising and then fled the country after it failed. He made it to New Jersey and ended up in New Brunswick, where he met my mother.”
Nina remained quiet. Calvin had never spoken about his family before. She wondered now why she had never thought to ask.
“And then he died right after I was born,” he continued. “Cancer. Weak son of a bitch. My mother barely spoke English and worked as a housecleaner. We shared a townhouse with two other families scraping by. She was a whore, though. Pulled up her skirt for any man who would help with the rent. And when the last one got her hooked on crack, she started doing it professionally too. Like I said, a fuckin’ whore.”
Nina closed her eyes, not wanting to hear any more or imagine what kind of life would make a man talk about his own mother like that. Even she had more respect for Violet than this, and she wasn’t exactly mother of the year.
Calvin poured another heavy dollop of gin into his cup and tossed it all back in one go. “I left when I was sixteen. Moved around from house to house, doing whatever I could to