TWENTY
Georgiana
When Georgiana was a teenager Truman Capote’s house was sold for a record-breaking $12.5 million to the founder of Rockstar Games. The house, a four-bay, five-story townhome on Willow Street between Pineapple and Orange, was sacred ground in the neighborhood. Capote had famously written both Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood while living there, he had lounged on the porch, he had published an autobiographical essay about the neighborhood, and given his friends tours of his place. Capote belonged to the fruit streets. When the maker of Grand Theft Auto slapped down his checkbook and took the keys to 70 Willow, the sound of collective pearl-clutching could be heard from the Promenade to Montague Street. The new owner applied for some permits: to put in a swimming pool, to strip the yellow paint, and to demolish the porch. It was a nightmare. Who, in Brooklyn Heights of all places, would trade Audrey Hepburn for that?
In the weeks following the terrible gender reveal party, Georgiana kept thinking about Capote’s house. The Landmarks Preservation Commission met with the new owner and together they came up with a plan. He could have his pool, but then he would return the home to its Greek Revival heritage, restoring the original facade, matching the historic brick, and using those deep Grand Theft Auto coffers to rejuvenate it to nineteenth-century glory. The owner would get to live there comfortably, but he could still honor the history and culture he inherited. In fact, he would make it better. Maybe that’s what Sasha was doing at Pineapple Street. Maybe Georgiana was just a pearl-clutching neighbor being a giant snob.
Kristin had a therapist on Remsen Street and Georgiana made a weekly appointment. She spent the first hour telling the story of Brady and used up half a box of tissues, but in the following weeks they talked more about family, about money, about Sasha and the prenup. Georgiana was starting to see that her relationship with money was all intertwined in how she thought about friends and marriage. Unbeknownst to her, she had been trained her entire life to protect her wealth. They had tax advisers and investment advisers, they made careful end-of-year adjustments to offset losses, and while they could enjoy the fruits of their labor (or the fruits of their ancestors’ labor) they were raised with the holy understanding that they must never, ever touch the principal. Intertwined with this doctrine was the fact that marrying outside their class would dilute their wealth. It was best for the rich to marry the rich. Georgiana hadn’t ever realized how deeply ingrained this belief was in her psyche.
The fact that Georgiana had called Sasha “the Gold Digger” made her burn with shame. Georgiana had been wrong about Sasha not signing the prenup, but that wasn’t even the point. It was classist, it was snobbish, and it was exactly the kind of attitude that she needed to work against. You couldn’t seek to fight inequality in the world while preserving it in your own family.
“It’s like the Truman Capote house,” Georgiana explained to her therapist, twisting a tissue between her hands as she sat on the tweed sofa of her tiny office. Her therapist was a trim woman in her sixties, carefully dressed in neutral colors, a local in the neighborhood who shared an office with a child psychologist, which meant the bookshelves displayed not only Freud and Klein but also tiny plastic figurines, miniature moms and dads and babies. Georgiana was sometimes tempted to play with them as she talked. “Everyone in the neighborhood was outraged when Truman’s house sold to someone with new money,” Georgiana explained with dismay.
“You know what’s funny about that?” the woman asked, her eyes twinkling merrily. “Capote didn’t even own Seventy Willow Street. He rented the basement apartment from his friend. He just gave tours of the house when his friend was on vacation.” Georgiana had to laugh.
When she got home that night she called Sasha, biting her lip as the phone rang. She really hated talking on the phone—everyone her age texted—but when Sasha answered, Georgiana cleared her throat and pressed past her awkwardness. “Sasha? It’s George,” she said. “I was wondering, would you like to play tennis sometime?”
Since Georgiana had been confronting a lot of uncomfortable truths about herself lately, she lay on Lena’s pullout couch on a Sunday morning and decided she felt ready to admit to one more: she really actually liked onion rings. There was no excuse for her to order them that Sunday. She wasn’t hungover, she wasn’t on her deathbed, and she hadn’t even gone for a run that morning, but, she acknowledged, they were wonderfully crispy and sweet and so, together with Lena and Kristin, she paid ten dollars for a large order from Westville.
As they lounged and watched rich ladies fight on TV, they waited for their food and dissected the night before. They had been out in Cobble Hill, and Kristin had ended up kissing the bartender at Clover Club. It was regrettable because now they couldn’t go back there, and they had such nice cocktails.
“There must be some night he’s off,” complained Lena.
“I think he’s the manager. It’s ruined.” She sighed, full of remorse. “So what are you going to do about Curtis, George?” Kristin was drinking her second Gatorade of the morning, wearing a matching sweatsuit that made her look like either Hailey Bieber or a very stylish Teletubby.
“I don’t know what to do. If I were him, I’d probably block my number. I’ve been so hot and cold,” Georgiana admitted, pulling Lena’s dog onto her lap for support.
“How did you last leave it?” asked Lena.
“I told him I was too busy to hang out.”
“So, could you just tell him you got less busy?”
“No, I think that would be fake. I lied to him about Brady, and if I want to move forward with him, I should probably try to be honest from now on.”
“Ugh, honesty is the worst,” Kristin groaned.
“The worst,” Georgiana agreed and got up to meet their onion rings at the door.
A few days later, Georgiana stayed late after work, watching her colleagues shut down their computers in their various bedrooms and parlors and butler pantries. She took a deep breath and opened up the Scribus layout designer she used to make the company newsletter, changed the font to Times New Roman, and crafted her version of a mea culpa, her attempt at a boom box held aloft outside a suburban window, a dispatch that would lay her heart bare in a way Curtis might understand.
It is November and much of Georgiana Stockton’s cohort has absconded to the far reaches of Brooklyn where her clan dresses in sequined gowns to dance to nineties pop music while chugging vodka and eating pickles. Georgiana has, for more than two and a half decades, blithely joined in these costumed celebrations, her greatest concerns chiefly centered upon finding good outfits for theme parties and maintaining a 5.5 tennis ranking. But now, at the age of twenty-six, Georgiana Stockton is ready to grow up.
Georgiana is part of a growing movement of millennials who have been raised as one-percenters but are now realizing they are assholes. “People like me shouldn’t exist,” Stockton says from her Brooklyn apartment. “I’m twenty-six years old. There is no logical reason for me to have Chanel sunglasses.” Further to that, Stockton has been untruthful with someone she would like to get to know better. When he attended a presentation on her company’s work in Pakistan, she led him to believe that only her friend Meg had perished in the plane crash. The truth is that she had also been sleeping with a married man who died that day. Her grief and guilt were real, but she deeply regrets having obfuscated the truth from someone who had shown her great kindness. Stockton knows that it will be hard for people to believe she has turned over a new leaf, but she hopes that by finally acknowledging her mistakes in this article, Curtis McCoy, local heartthrob and excellent kisser, might give her a second chance.
Georgiana dragged in a photo of herself smoldering at the camera and saved the article as a PDF. She composed an email to Curtis, attaching the file and simply writing, “In case you missed this week’s Style section.” She pressed Send and listened to the whoosh as her missive made its way across the air, chopped into little data packets, hopped between hubs, carried by the airlines of cyberspace to reassemble before Curtis’s eyes.
She hoped he would read it. She hoped he might understand how a good person would have done something so stupid. She hoped he might help her be better.
Georgiana wanted so badly to be better, but she still had so much work to do. Bill Wallis had come up with a plan for her to set up a foundation and fund the first million from her own account. He had consented to sit on her board, and so had Tilda. Together the three of them would agree on grants to nonprofits, and Georgiana hoped that over time they would move more and more money from her account to the foundation until her trust was gone.
She still thought about Brady, still thought about Amina. Sometimes she sort of wondered if she would always regard Brady in the same way. Or if over time she might consider the fact that he was older than her, more powerful than her, as evidence that he might not have treated her fairly. She wasn’t sure. For now, she just hoped that Amina was okay, she hoped that she had found peace. Georgiana knew that their paths might cross again someday, working side by side toward the same common good, and she liked to think that would make Brady happy. That his legacy on this earth, however complicated, had doubled in his absence, the two halves of his heart joined in the same pursuit, that all the love he had shown Georgiana might radiate out into something truly good.
