Bookmarker tag: topic/wealthy-people (10 notes)

Oh ho ho ho, Mrs. Robinson. He has over two thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment and five records. Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and three Beatles.

You keep walking, thinking briefly about the Missing Person, the one who’s come and gone for good. Out into the sunlight of Fifth Avenue and the Plaza, a gargantuan white chateau rising in the middle of the island like a New Money dream of the Old World. When you first came to the city you spent a night here with Amanda. You had friends to stay with, but you wanted to spend that first night at the Plaza. Getting out of the taxi next to the famous fountain, you seemed to be arriving at the premiere of the movie which was to be your life. A doorman greeted you at the steps. A string quartet played in the Palm Court. Your tenth-floor room was tiny and overlooked an airshaft; though you could not see the city out the window, you believed that it was spread out at your feet. The limousines around the entrances seemed like carriages, and you felt that someday one would wait for you. Today they put you in mind of carrion birds, and you cannot believe your dreams were so shallow.

You are the stuff of which consumer profiles—American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model—are made. When you’re staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn’t it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?

As for me, I was surprised to find that I disliked the Gates Mills house even more after we moved in than I had on that first tour. I hadn't thought that would be possible. Usually it works the other way; as they get to know their new houses, homebuyers often discover their hidden charms. But I just kept uncovering absurdities. To me, number 699 was an intolerable house until almost $20,000 of work had been done, and then it was only barely livable. First off, I had to have an intercom system installed throughout the entire house just so that family members could communicate with one another. Without the intercom Alice and I had to go on search missions whenever we needed to find the boys, and I kept missing phone calls because I didn't hear the ring and whoever answered couldn't find me. It did no good in that house to yell; the curves and corners created natural sound barriers. And looking for someone was just impossible, the layout was so baffling. During our early weeks at Gates Mills, in fact, four-year-old Justin got lost several times on his way down to dinner from his remote bedroom. To the intercom system I added a telephone network. I saw no reason to run around the house in pursuit of a telephone. The telephone was my main sales tool, and I should have one handy wherever I went. Seven phones were not one too many, I decided.

“Why don’t we wait in the first class lounge so the girls can sit down?” my wife suggested.

“We’re riding hard-seat,” I said. “It’s only eight hours.”

The girls looked aghast. I watched them cast baleful looks their mother’s way, and saw, in their silky, seamless faces, the thick patina so many years of privilege had left behind. Suddenly I was enraged—enraged at both of them for not knowing what these privileges had cost.

“You can wait in line with the rest of the world,” I said. “It won’t kill you.”

Crestfallen, they gazed at me—their father, who rarely let them ride a bus for fear of all the germs and scrofulous characters they might encounter.

But after Google, Ev wasn't anywhere to be found at Odeo, either. He soon semiretired at thirty-two years old. His bank account had gone from a three-figure balance--often barely enough to cover his rent--to double-digit millions of dollars. For Ev, it was time to enjoy the good life, not get involved in another start-up. He began taking Italian cooking classes and exploring museums. He bought a house worthy of a millionaire with wide windows that overlooked San Francisco like a perched owl and a fast new car to put in the millionaire's garage. He went on expensive vacations with his new girlfriend, Sara, whom he had met at Google during an office party.

And that was basically that, although it took several more years before I was truly a catalogue girl with no prestige whatsoever. Just how many years I wasn’t sure, exactly, because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it. The years began passing in clumps, so that one day I was twenty-three (to the world) standing at the threshold of the mirrored room, and the next, ten years had passed and I was twenty-eight and a professional beauty, by which I mean a person in possession of phone numbers of sumptuous homes around the world where she (or he) will be welcome, a person adept at packing on a half-hour’s notice for a trip to Bali or a sailing cruise off Turkey’s southern coast, a person who will never have to pay for her dinner as long as she doesn’t expect to choose the company. Indeed, understanding how much she can reasonably expect is key to the professional beauty’s continued circulation, and requires the use of an obscure algorithm involving the variables of how good she looks, how easy she is to be around, and what, exactly, she’s willing to give in return. As the years go on and one’s looks and novelty wear off, one had better start cultivating some other skills. Of course, the professional beauty’s existence was generally an anteroom to some more permanent arrangement, and the ones with any sense married well as expeditiously as possible, while their stock was high. Such transactions weren’t necessarily base or grotesque; there were plenty of stops on the road to trading looks for cash before you arrived at the old carp at the end of the line whose breathing was audible at dinner and whose daughters were nearer your mother’s age than your own. In my case, marriage to money would certainly have been the prudent route, and yet I couldn’t seem to do it. Having forgone a marriage of love, how could I promise those very same things out of mere practicality? It seemed dull and frightening. Try as I might to interest myself permanently in the real estate owners I met, owners of yachts and islands and seventeenth-century castles, of Bonnards and Picassos and Rothkos and vintage cars and zoo animals, private screening rooms and fleets of chestnut horses, my concentration always broke; my mind wandered, another man came along, and the prior one fell away or married someone else or simply vanished.

‘I saw some funny things and some funny girls in those days, when I used to go boating on the river. Many’s the time I’ve felt like writing a little book called On the Seine, describing that carefree athletic life, a life of poverty and gaiety, of noisy, rollicking fun, that I led in my twenties.

‘I was a penniless clerk at the time; now I’m a successful man who can throw away huge sums to gratify a passing whim. I had a thousand modest, unattainable desires in my heart which gilded my existence with fantastic hopes. Today, I really can’t think of anything that would induce me to get out of the armchair where I sit dozing. Though life could be hard, how simple and enjoyable it was to live like that, between the office in Paris and the river at Argenteuil. For ten years my great, my only, my absorbing passion was the Seine, that lovely, calm, varied, stinking river, full of mirages and filth. I think I loved it so much because it gave me the feeling of being alive. Oh, those strolls along the flower-covered banks, with my friends the frogs dreamily cooling their bellies on water-lily leaves, and the frail, dainty lilies among the tall grasses, which parted suddenly to reveal a scene from a Japanese album as a kingfisher darted past me like a blue flame! How I loved all that, with an instinctive passion of the eyes which spread through my whole body in a feeling of deep and natural joy!

My neighbour laughed, and said that I was probably right. My parents fought all their lives, he said, and no one ever won. But no one ran away either. It is the children who have run away. My brother has been married five times, he said, and on Christmas Day he sits alone in his apartment in Zurich, counting his money and eating a cheese sandwich. [...]

Mixed messages, my neighbour continued, as we approached the cove and started to slow down, were a cruel plot device that did sometimes have their counterpart in life: his own brother, the one who had died a few years ago, a dear and generous person, suffered his fatal heart attack while waiting for a friend to come to lunch. He had given the man – who happened, moreover, to be a doctor – the wrong address, for he had just moved into a new apartment and hadn’t yet memorised the full details, and so while his friend was searching for him in a street of a similar name on the other side of town, he was lying on his kitchen floor with his life ebbing away, a life, what’s more, that apparently could easily have been saved had he been reached in time. His older brother, the reclusive Swiss millionaire, had responded to these events by having a complex system of alarms installed in his own apartment, for though he was a man who would never forget his own address he was also entirely friendless and miserly and had never had a lunch guest in his life; and indeed when his own heart attack came – which their family medical history made a likelihood – he simply pressed the nearest emergency button and within minutes was in a helicopter, being whisked to a top cardiac unit in Geneva. Sometimes it was as well, he said – and he was thinking of Theseus’s father here – not to take no for an answer, almost as a point of principle.

That could have been Ethan Levin, I think, as I watch the man’s nervous swipes at his hair and remember the whole story again, like it or not. Ethan had eight times the stock options I did. He wouldn’t have had to work for the next six start-ups, wouldn’t have had to do consulting. He’d be long retired by now, well into his own life of compensated idleness. He would have traveled the world, would have sat in business-class lounges everywhere, drinking a complimentary alcoholic beverage as he watched his fortune melt away. Money as transient as electrons. Wealth as weightless as data broadcast through the air, rising and falling in currents like weather, beyond anyone’s control. Yes, that’s how it should have happened: Ethan Levin was supposed to be rich like me.