Free Food for Millionaires (7 page)

Casey examined Ella’s fine and rare features. There was a strength there she hadn’t noticed before. It was the way she held her head erect, as if she had eyes in the back of her head as well and those eyes looked straight out to the other side of the steakhouse. Casey had been wrong about her. And she’d been envious of a good person who’d wished her well.

“After lunch,” Ella said, “we can go and check you out of the hotel. You can come stay with me. I would love that.” Ella borrowed Ted’s assurance and the finality of his gestures—his convincing use of charisma and simple words.

Casey nodded. Today, she would have followed Maud the salesperson home.

Ella asked for the bill and paid it.

5
BOND

A
DOZEN YEARS OF BALLET LESSONS
had given Ella Shim ideal posture. She was seated on a deeply cushioned sofa in her bright living room—her back pin-straight, her head bent slightly as she reviewed a recipe for lamb. There were four cookbooks tabbed with rack of lamb recipes on top of the coffee table and a thick one spread open on her lap. The following week was Ted’s thirty-first birthday, and she wanted to re-create the dish that Ted had liked so much at Bouley, but she didn’t have the exact recipe.

Ella was an accomplished cook. She loved to read cookbooks and food magazines. In high school, she’d enjoyed planning special menus for her father, who encouraged her interest by buying her Mauviel copper pots and installing wooden dowels in the kitchen walls so she could dry her hand-cut pasta. When church guests visited the Shim household in Forest Hills, Ella offered them her dense orange-flavored pound cake, candied rhubarb scones with Irish butter procured from Dean & DeLuca, or Dr. Shim’s favorite:
pâte à choux
cream puffs with
hong cha.
At Wellesley, Ella had missed her windowed kitchen in Queens. Her current two-bedroom Upper East Side apartment, which her father had purchased for her after graduation and where she and Ted intended to live after they got married, had a nice-size kitchen with enough counter space to roll pie crust and to put up kimchi.

At the moment, she was absorbed in the taste memory of the lamb she’d eaten with Ted at the French restaurant on Duane Street. She felt she could create a dish close to it.

Seated near her on the wing chair upholstered with crewelwork, Ted was checking the movie schedule in the
Times
. He was annoyed at having agreed to see a foreign film that Ella’s houseguest had recommended. From the living room, they could hear the sound of running water from the guest bathroom. It was Friday night, and Casey was getting ready to meet friends at the Princeton Club for Virginia’s send-off to Italy.

Ella drafted a list of ingredients and cooking instructions in her loopy girls’ school cursive. She was also trying to figure out how to convince Ted to help Casey get a job. His buddies from HBS dispensed favors for one another all the time.

“Ted, can’t you help her?” Ella didn’t look up from the orange-and-white-checkered cookbook.

Ted snapped the newspaper shut. But the sight of his pretty fiancée bent over her cookbooks made him smile. He was smitten with her delicacy.

“My dear Ella,” he said, making his face stern, “your friend. . .” He paused. Ella had never mentioned Casey until she’d moved in. And now this so-called friend who had quite a mouth on her had been camping out at Ella’s place for four weeks. “Casey isn’t the least bit interested in finance,” Ted continued. “I doubt she knows the difference between debt and equity.”

“But. . . Ted, you didn’t always know the difference, either.” Ella looked earnestly at him. “People have to learn things. And they have to be taught. Right?”

“Your friend already interviewed on campus with the Kearn Davis investment banking program in the spring,” he said.

“And?”

“And she was dinged.” Ted rolled his eyes. “What was she thinking? Your friend applied to
one
firm. What balls.”

He’d applied to eight banks in his senior year at Harvard and was invited to join seven. After working for four years at Pearson Crowell, a bulge bracket investment bank, as an analyst and later as senior associate, he got into Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Then he chose Kearn Davis, the sole securities firm that had rejected him as an undergraduate. In four years, Ted was made an executive director, and he was slated for managing director in January. He was two years ahead of his own plan.

Ella looked at him and inhaled before saying, “You have no reason to dislike her.”

“I don’t dislike her,” he said. “I’m merely being rational, Ella. Applying to just one program shows nerve and a sense of overentitlement. These Ivy League girls,” he muttered. “And it shows a lack of seriousness.” He folded the newspaper lengthwise, then stared her down, half smiling. He was impressed by Ella’s insistence. Normally she gave up fairly quickly, but Ted preferred challenges.

“Listen, sweetheart. . .” His voice dropped a pitch, and he sounded sincere. “I know you’re trying to help. But, you know, I’ve worked hard for my good name. You can’t expect me to risk my reputation by giving my word on an individual I don’t know well and who seems to me preternaturally unable to stick it out.”

Ella tilted her head and exhaled through her thin nostrils. Ted didn’t believe in yielding any advantage unless he had to. Two years ago, he’d spotted her at the Au Bon Pain near the Citicorp building in midtown and had pursued her single-mindedly. His colleagues and HBS friends treated her as though she were a coveted prize, and she felt afraid to speak to them.

But what Ted didn’t understand was that Ella had been pursued and flattered before. She loved him because he was a boy, anxious and hungry, running from Alaska. He was the son of immigrant cannery workers and had an older brother working as a mailman in Anchorage. His sister was a former professional bodybuilder who taught aerobics, and she was raising two sons as a single mother. Ella would have loved Ted if he’d had nothing but his desire. She was attracted to him because he was so clear and because he was so unflappable. But beneath all that, she saw the self-doubts that he could not concede to her or to himself—his terrors drove him. She liked all of that, too.

Ted and Ella heard the pipes shutting down as Casey’s shower ended, and Ella lowered her voice. She appealed to him again, because she felt he, more than anyone else, ought to understand Casey’s situation.

“She’s been sending out résumés all month, and she hasn’t heard a thing.”

“The economy, Ella. I know you feel sorry for your friend. . .”

“Her father hits her. She can’t go back home. You have to help her. She has no money, and she won’t take any from me.”

“You offered her money?” Ted made a face of incomprehension. “What is it with you, princess? You think the stuff grows on trees?”

“Ted. . .” Ella shut her cookbook.

“Tell her to get any job.”

“That’s what she’s trying to do.”

“Any job. Sell lipsticks or gloves, or whatever it is that she used to do in college.”

“She might. But it’s one thing to work in retail while you’re in college, and another thing to do it full-time after.” She stopped herself. “Her parents don’t have any money, and her sister’s applying to med school next year. Her boyfriend cheated on her.”

Ted snorted. “That’s what you get for dating white guys.”

Ella ignored this. “But her family can’t help her. And what’s the point of succeeding, Ted, if you can’t help others with your power?”

“I help plenty of people.”

Ted sent money to his parents each month, and last year, with his enormous bonus, he bought his brother and sister their condos in Anchorage.

“I didn’t mean that you don’t help anyone.”

“Casey and her family are not my problems, Ella. And they’re not yours, either. Her sister can’t take out loans for med school?” With his right hand, he pointed to his heart. He had just paid off the last of his education loans and was now putting aside money for his nephews.

“Not everyone is like you.”

She gathered the cookbooks, stacking them alphabetically, and returned them to the shelf. She had no desire now to make the lamb dish. They would just go out for his birthday.

Casey entered the living room, dressed in a narrow black skirt and an ironed white shirt. Her bruises were no longer visible, and she looked pretty with her wet hair combed back sleekly, a fresh coat of red lipstick on her mouth. She hadn’t put on her shoes yet, and Ted glanced at her bare feet. For a thin girl, her calves and ankles were a little thick.
Moo-dari
, he thought, legs shaped like daikon radishes.

Naturally, Casey noticed his glance and immediately crossed her ankles.

“Good evening,” she said with a kind of mock cheer. She’d heard enough of the conversation and decided to pretend otherwise. Ted Kim was not the helping kind. Why couldn’t poor Ella see that?

“Hey, Casey,” Ted said, not caring in the least if she’d heard anything. He turned to Ella, gesturing that they should head out. “We can get tickets at the theater. I don’t think everyone in town is running to see this.” He pointed to the obscure ad for
Farewell My Concubine
in the
Times
.

“It’s very good, Ted.” Casey smiled at him. Ted was a triple-A, self-made jerk, but he was good-looking. He was five eleven and built like a runner—wiry, with long legs. His black hair was cut short, and the gel he dabbed on top made his hair look damp. The top button of his dress shirt was open, and the tendons of his neck framed a hard Adam’s apple. She liked the imperiousness of his expressions. If she were interested in dating assholes, he would be an ideal candidate.

“You might even enjoy it,” Casey said. “A bright guy like you—I would think you’d like cultural enrichment now and then. A good yuppie should know more than wines and resorts. Not that you need any help in the arts or leisure department,” she said, grinning. “Or in any department, for that matter.” She smiled, having managed to sound facetious and generous at once. Casey pursed her lips shut, waiting for Ted’s riposte.

He harrumphed, and Ella laughed.

“And how’s the job search going, Casey?” he said. Now he was smiling.

“Sabine said I could work accessories on Sundays starting next month, but she’s got nothing for me during the week. She replaced me when I quit after graduation. And things are slow in the accessories world,” Casey said. “You know, Ted. The economy.”

Ted smiled and lifted his chin.

“Ella’s been so good to let me stay here, but this can’t last forever. I will get a job. I hope I get a job.”

Before Ella could say anything to assure Casey that she could stay as long as she liked, Ted jumped in. “The economy will pick up. Cycles,” he said, speaking as one economics major to another, knowing she would understand his meaning.

He picked up the paper, then dropped it on his chair. He glanced at Ella, and on cue, she rose from her seat and got her purse. She paid careful attention to him—that was what he wanted from her, and it was not hard to do.

Later, after the movie and dinner, she and Ted didn’t talk about Casey, but early Monday morning, Ted phoned the Asian sales desk, where his friend Walter Chin had said they were looking for an assistant. He didn’t think Ted should send in a friend for the gig. “Low pay, high abuse,” Walter said. And the head of the desk had anger management issues.

Ted answered, “Not to worry; she’s not a close friend.”

Casey’s interview was set for the following week. He had only to bring her by.

Virginia’s father came by the club to sign for the night’s tab. He and Jane stayed for a glass of champagne and were now heading out for a grown-up dinner, leaving behind the two dozen or so recent graduates at the Tiger Bar.

“You guys don’t need chaperones anymore,” Fritzy said to Chuck Raines, a lacrosse player who was working as a corporate paralegal at Skadden, Arps. Fritzy tapped the boy on the shoulder genially with his fist, wanting to feel young again. There had been a time in college when Fritzy felt like he was of the crowd. He had been a member of the eating club Ivy, as was his father, who’d died when Fritzy was twelve, though everyone agreed that he was really nothing like his father—a handsome and chatty senator from Delaware. Fritzy and Jane Craft stood side by side next to their daughter: He wearing his J.Press blazer to conceal his perpetual shoulder stoop, and Jane, six feet tall, an inch shy of her husband, in her size twelve Belle France dress with its high lace collar. The tiny lavender floral print on the black background obscured her thickening middle. Jane’s build was more solid than Fritzy’s—his frame being slight, like that of his mother, Eugenie. The Crafts, married twenty-six years, shared the same coloring—light hair, sky blue eyes, skim-milk complexion with cheeks that flushed easily—in bold contrast to Virginia, with her black curls and olive skin. The first thing you’d notice about Virginia’s face was what she called her Mexican lashes—their remarkable length and dark color. Alone, Virginia passed for a striking white girl of the exotic variety, but beside her parents, she was markedly foreign. She’d been called Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and, once in London, black Irish. Early on, she’d learned to spit out the race of her biological parents—half Mexican, half white—then let the unlucky guesser squirm with the facts of her adoption.

Before leaving the club, Fritzy kissed Virginia on the crown of her head, saying to the bartender, “Feel free to dilute their drinks.” Chuck, on his third beer, laughed and raised his glass to Virginia’s dad. The kids clustered in groups of threes or fours around the perimeter of the bar—its walls covered with class photographs and Princeton memorabilia—drinking and catching up on any news since June. Some ate the burgers and chicken Mrs. Craft had ordered beforehand. Casey knew everyone except for a couple of the girls from Brearley who’d come by to say hello. They were much like the girls from Ivy—cool legacy types with a casual manner and Ivory girl complexions. Expensive haircuts that didn’t look fussy. All terrific at cocktail prattle. It was impossible to imagine them mixing with their fellow Brearley alumna Ella.

After the Crafts left, Virginia and Casey went off by themselves to a secluded table below the photograph of an ancient crew team. This was Casey’s first vodka gimlet for the night, and it was delicious.

“How is it living with Ella Shim?” Virginia pulled her lips to the left corner of her mouth. She did this when peeved.

“It’s tolerable.” Casey frowned, feeling a little disloyal to Ella. “She’s nice.”

“And has Jay called?” Virginia, who’d always liked him, was not yet willing to give up on him as Casey’s beau. Jay Currie was a dick for what he did, but it was unquestionable in Virginia’s mind that he loved her best friend. It wouldn’t have surprised Virginia if they got back together. “Or should I ask, how many times has he called?”