The Suitors - By Cecile David-Weill Page 0,8

trips on private jets or those endless afternoons in the changing rooms of couture houses with our mother, the couturier, and his head seamstress. And we hardly risked bumping into our little pals chez Givenchy, Saint-Laurent, Ungaro, or on the tarmac at Le Bourget, Teterboro, or Biggin Hill.

Our predicament turned dicey when we had to convert our nanny into an English granny, or the driver picking us up at school into a family friend. It became frankly hair-raising when we had to keep coming up with the appropriate traffic jams to explain being late for school on Monday morning after a round-trip to New York on the Concorde.

Our house betrayed us. Rare were the friends Marie and I dared invite home. We’d tell them that our town house was just an ordinary apartment building sheltering many families. Already puzzled by the maze of service stairs we climbed to reach our floor (thus avoiding our imposing front door, which would have given the game away), our guests invariably wondered why there was no kitchen and no bedroom for our parents. So we’d casually refer to our “duplex” to reassure them, as well as to account for the dumbwaiter that delivered our meals, which were revolting, actually, because our chef, no doubt considering himself too distinguished to feed mere children, handed this chore off to a kitchen boy.

Later, during those tough internships when our father decided to introduce us to the real world, Marie and I continued honing our skills in the art of dissimulation. At one point I was a lowly employee in the accounting department of a construction and public works firm where I wasn’t allowed to leave the building without permission from my boss, a truly odious bully. I used to slip quietly away, however, to the office of the CEO (a living god accessible only to department heads), who just happened to be a friend of my parents and welcomed me with piping hot coffee and a game of chess. One day my creepy little boss discovered the scam. Drenched in sweat and worry, he buttonholed me in a hall to apologize while begging me to put in a good word for him. His obsequious flip-flopping disgusted me, but I was chiefly relieved that my colleagues, who had taken me under their wing (and for whom I surreptitiously punched in every other day), did not suspect a thing. Otherwise, they might have felt like fools, and in a way, they would have been right, since I had never really been one of them and thus had never needed their protection, which my visits with the CEO would have made cruelly clear.

I’d been a coward, behaving like someone safely ensconced in a cushy position. In my defense, though, I should say that at that time, the wealthy were all considered assholes. And it didn’t help that most people I met flaunted their “political consciousness” mainly by posing as enemies of the rich, a situation that would reverse itself ten years later, when heirs and heiresses would be welcomed to parade around in magazines like movie stars. Deep down, though, nothing had changed, because money, having neither reputation nor personality of its own, is a constant magnet for fantasies and projections, and will always channel its share of bitterness and dreams.

“As for knowing how to hunt down a rich husband,” I finally admitted to Marie, “you’re right, we’re probably not up to this. And I’m only attracted to weirdos. I like trying to fix problem men, I can’t help it.”

“Yes, so I’ve noticed,” said my sister slyly, alluding to my two years of nightmare wedlock to a man I’d found irresistible and who’d proved mad as a hatter. “But why couldn’t you fix up a rich weirdo?”

Good point. I laughed. “Shall we give it a try?”

“You bet!”

“But how do we find these Prince Charmings?”

“Oh, please!”

Marie and I are very close. I’m thirty years old, she’s thirty-two. We live a few blocks from each other. At the local café we’re known as “the sisters,” even if we go there separately, I with my son and Marie with her lovers. Our close relationship hasn’t always been obvious because we are quite different, almost opposites. My sister looks Swedish, while I could be Brazilian. She has our father’s blond coloring and the svelte silhouette of our mother, a brunette like me, and I got my solid, down-to-earth looks from our father. Marie is always impeccably turned out, whereas I seem to be at