Gold Digger

He met her at the Plaza in October, on a Tuesday, at the hour when the light came in low and made everyone in the room look like they had just inherited something. She had not. He had. She knew it before he sat down. He found this out later, but not soon enough to matter.

Her name was Vivienne. It had been Vera in Cleveland and Virginia in Chicago and would be, eventually, something French in Havana, but in New York, in 1924, in the Plaza bar, it was Vivienne. She was twenty-four years old, and she was drinking the new thing — pretzel-infused vodka, lychee, elderflower, a single drop of rose, a white foam that broke against her lip and made him think, foolishly, of a wedding cake he had not yet been to.

He bought her the second one. By the third he was telling her about his mother’s house in Newport. By the fourth she was laughing at something he had not realised was a joke until she laughed, and he understood, with a small lurch in the chest, that he would spend a great deal of money trying to make her laugh again.

By Thanksgiving he had bought her a coat. It was sable, and it had cost what his father had paid, in 1898, for the parcel of land on which the family bank now stood. He did not tell her that. She did not ask. She wore the coat to dinner at the Colony, and to lunch at the Ritz, and to the theatre on a Wednesday in early December, and each time he watched her put it on he felt the small private pleasure of a man footing a bill he could afford.

By Christmas, a ring. It was his grandmother’s. His mother had not wanted it to leave the family. His mother had said so, at Thanksgiving, looking at Vivienne across a long table of silver, in the small clear voice she used for things she meant. He had given it to Vivienne anyway, in a box from Cartier, because the box from Cartier was, he understood, part of what she was being given.

She wore the ring for eleven days.

On the second week of January she was in Havana with a man whose name he had never been asked to learn. He found out from a friend of a friend at the Knickerbocker, who told him kindly, the way one tells a man his horse has died — with regret, but also with a kind of efficiency, because there were other horses, and the racing season was long.

He did not begrudge her any of it. He had known. Everyone had known. His mother had known at Thanksgiving and his friends had known at the engagement dinner and the doorman at her building had known the day she moved in, when two trunks went up and one came down full of someone else’s letters. He had wanted, for a small and entirely particular stretch of months, to be the one who could afford her. And for a while he was. And that, he understood, was something.

He kept the receipts in a drawer in the apartment on East Seventy-Second. The coat. The ring. The Cartier box itself, which he had paid extra to have made larger than the ring required, because the size of the box, he had felt at the time, was part of the gift. Dinners. Hotels. A weekend at the Greenbrier. The little blue chits from the florist, dozens of them, going back to October, when he had still been buying her violets because she had said, once, that violets were her favourite flower. She had been lying. She did not have a favourite flower. She had never owned a thing long enough to develop a preference.

He married, eventually. A girl from Boston, of the right sort, who did not laugh at jokes he had not yet made. They had two sons and a long marriage and the sort of life that gets written up in three lines in the alumni magazine.

He kept the drawer locked. The drawer was not a confession; it was a kind of accounting.

When he died, in 1956, his nephew, clearing the apartment, broke the lock with a butter knife. He found the receipts. He found the Cartier box, empty, the velvet inside gone soft and slightly yellow. He found the little blue chits, bundled with a ribbon his uncle had tied around them, in 1924, in a kind of private joke nobody would now ever get.

The nephew thought they were love letters.

In a way, they were. They were just not addressed to the person he assumed.