Page 41 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
“I wasn’t eating off myknife,”Karen said.
I said, “Karen. It’s Hemi’s apartment. And he’s right.” He probably thought I hadn’t taught her table manners, but the fact was, wedidtend to be a little cavalier about how we scooped out our toast toppings, and our house-brand jam jars had a disgraceful tendency to sit bare-naked on the kitchen table. We used canned whipped cream, too, and had been known to get the giggles and squirt it directly into our mouths after Thanksgiving dinner. We were all kinds of low-rent.
“No,” Hemi said, “it’sourapartment.”
Not so much,I thought but didn’t say. The last thing I wanted to do was to throw anything back in his face. It was probably just that this apartment was the biggest I’d ever seen, and “homey” it was not. The distance from my place to Hemi’s may have been only fifteen miles, but it might as well have been measured in light years.
The kitchen itself was impressive enough, all black marble and stainless steel, massive, forbidding German appliances, and pot racks hung with gleaming copper-bottomed pans. Not to mention the sarcophagus. Then there were the two major bedrooms, each with its own luxuriously equipped bath, a thoroughly fitted-out home gym complete with an impressive set of weights that explained the size of Hemi’s muscles, his office, another smaller bedroom, and a separate little suite off the kitchen. And, of course, that foyer, which was the size of Karen’s and my living room—and a whole lot better furnished.
When Hemi had given us the tour the night before, Karen’s favorite room hadn’t been the guest suite that would be her own, but the much smaller bedroom and pocket-sized bathroom off the kitchen, their built-in storage as cleverly compact as a ship’s cabin, finished off with a single window that looked out over the park and boasted a tiny window seat beneath.
“So cool.” She’d tested the table that pulled down from the wall to one side of the window seat, forming a neat, if minuscule, desk. “Tiny home all the way. Upscale Cinderella. Could I maybe have this instead?”
Hemi had said, “These are staff quarters, although Inez doesn’t live in. But I may need to change that. So—no.”
Karen and I had looked at each other with our brows raised before Karen had said, “Oh.Staffquarters. Guess not, then.”
Hemi had moved on, then, to the mammoth, high-ceilinged living/dining room with its French doors that led out to a terrace and a view onto the park, and then we’d been back in the foyer to collect our suitcases, standing on the squares of black and white marble that, I could attest, wereverycold against the skin.
It was all perfectly elegant, but also unquestionably masculine and ruthlessly spare, a place of hard lines and stark colors, of white walls, black leather, glass, and marble, without a single stray piece of paper, kicked-off shoe, or carelessly discarded recharging cord to humanize it. Part of that was probably the weekend-absent Inez, but I’d bet it was Hemi, too. I had to wonder what would happen when Karen wasn’t just sticking her knife in the jam jar, but was carrying her toast absentmindedly through the living room and dripping jam onto the sofa because she was reading.
Suddenly, I longed to be back in Hemi’s grandfather’s shabby little house on the hill above Katikati. Instead, I wrenched my mind back to the present and said, “Karen’s not changing schools. She’s happy there, she’s on scholarship, and it’s a great school. And there’s the subway.”
Hemi said, “No,” Karen said, “Right,” and I said nothing. I might not be a Buddhist, but the last thing I wanted to do was fight. My over-the-top reaction to Hemi’s apartment was like my initial over-the-top reaction to him: something that stemmed from my own fears, and that I needed to get under control.
Eventually, Hemi said, “When you’re ready, Charles will take you to your apartment.”
Hemi had told me the plan the night before. A moving company would transport whatever we wanted to keep to Hemi’s place, and then would make the rest…disappear.
While we did our sorting out, he’d be working. He’d told me that he’d never taken off more than a few days at a time since he’d first come to New York, and I was sure I was about to see much, much less of him once he began picking up the reins after three weeks away. Not exactly a reassuring thought.
“We’re really doing it?” Karen asked. At least she turned to me to ask the question and not Hemi.
I took a deep breath and said, “Yes. We are.”
By the time we got to the apartment and Charles was climbing the stairs to the fifth floor behind us with a stack of folded-flat cardboard boxes under each arm, I felt as if I were moving underwater, swimming through a zone of unreality.
Except that I couldn’t swim.
The only home I’d ever known looked shabbier than ever in contrast to everyplace we’d been over the past weeks, and was holding about a city block’s worth of stale, musty New-York-in-summer air. I went to the single window, tugged at the stubborn, yellowing shade, wrestled with the always-sticky sash, looked out across the air shaft at the brick wall of the building next door, and thought,Why would this be hard to leave? You’re crazy.
When I turned around, Charles was crouching on the floor, beginning to assemble and tape boxes, and Karen was helping him.
“When you’re done,” Charles told me, “call me. I’ll drive you home and come back for the movers.”
Drive you home.
Home.
As always with Hemi, everything was moving on oiled wheels, and moving fast. Hemi had made me give him all the information on the apartment already, too, so he could pass it on to Josh. The management company, the utilities—it would all be “taken care of.”
“Thanks,” I said, wiping my palms on the shorts I’d worn against the heat of early July and the job ahead. “I really appreciate it.”
“It’s my job,” Charles said.
“Can I ask you…” I hesitated, but I needed to humanize this thing, somehow, the luxury of having other people attend to everything I’d always had to handle myself.
“Yes?” he asked.
