“It was terrible, really,” Samantha said, shaking her head at the memory. “If Rachel or Lucy ever did something like that I’d be livid. But at the time it seemed only fair. I mean, they were on safari downtown, so why shouldn’t we do a little hunting, too? That’s how we saw it, anyway.”
―
The men they chose were often barely more than boys themselves. Graduates working the lower rungs of Wall Street. All three of them — Samantha and her housemates — walked miles through the city every week. One of them, a girl called Jade from Ohio, had swum for the state as a schoolgirl. They had firm bodies, good legs. So it was never difficult to get attention. “A short dress from Century 21, arch the back, high heels. Pathetic, really, but that was all it took. We saw it all as another trade I guess.” She paused, drank from her Baileys. “And I think they did, too.”
The men paid for the drinks, the checks. Sometimes, in that final year, the drugs. In return, Samantha and her housemates gave them attention. A display of attraction. But that was all. Most trading nights ended with one of them raising an arm as if officiating at a race and the three of them climbing into a cab, scribbled numbers and business cards in their purses. Occasionally, though, four bodies rode that cab, not three, the night’s trading having evolved for one of them into a more significant exchange.
At thirty-one, Ryan McGinnis aspired to the gravitas of middle age the way his older colleagues wished they could recapture their youth. After ten years as a currency trader for JP Morgan, he owned an apartment on the Upper East Side and a five-bedroom antebellum house in Greenwich, Connecticut. When he’d first met Samantha, Ryan had been drawn to her accent and the shape of her neck. But also to her knowledge of art and Europe. Three times a week he trained in a gym with a view over Central Park, mixing creatine with his protein drinks in the changing room. He shaved his chest and had a CD pack of Teach Yourself Italian on his bedroom shelf. He made Samantha laugh and looked at her in a way that made her feel prized.
Unlike the other men Samantha had brought home from their trading nights, Ryan wanted more. Within weeks of his buying her a French 75 on the rooftop of 60 Thompson, placing it in front of her like a checkmate, her life had changed. She knew it was impossible to live in New York and not feel the slipstream of the money flowing through its veins, to escape either its residual heat or the shadows cast by its light. But with Ryan, Samantha suddenly found herself at the financial heart of the city. As a consequence her life became strangely split, between the final weeks of her student days — completing course work, hanging prints, sending off CVs and portfolios — and a nightlife of privilege. Cipriani, the Rainbow Room, diamond earrings left on her pillow in the morning.
The Parsons end-of-year photography show was held at a gallery in Chelsea. A broad industrial space on the first floor of a decommissioned warehouse. Ryan accompanied Samantha, moving through the crowds like a fish in the wrong shoal. They were going out for dinner afterwards, and Samantha was painfully aware of how angular his suit looked among the hoodies and T-shirts, and how exposed she felt in her own strapless top. She watched him look. He paid close attention to the hung work, his eyebrows raised in quizzical amusement, as if everything he saw held a secret joke. When Samantha saw him nod at another student’s father as they crossed in front of a print, she’d felt more like his daughter than his lover.
Before they’d left for dinner Ryan bought one of Samantha’s Mirage prints: Manhattan’s skyline miniature on a far horizon, escalating between two hackberry leaves, gigantic in the foreground, an ibis taking flight across the South Tower of the World Trade Center. “For Greenwich,” he’d said, as they’d stepped onto the street. “It’ll look good there.” He swung his jacket about her shoulders. “Above the fireplace, or maybe in the kitchen.”
When they’d woken the next morning, Ryan had asked Samantha to accompany her photograph. It was time, he said, for him to move out of the city, and he wanted her to move with him. His place in Greenwich had been empty for three years. They were lying in bed in his apartment, the hum of the air-conditioning already contending with the heat outside. From where she lay she could see the tops of the trees in Central Park. “It’ll be great,” Ryan said, running the knuckle of his forefinger along her jaw. “C’mon, trust me.”
Samantha said yes, as much because she didn’t know what else she’d do if she didn’t as through any desire to stay with him. Her father, having neglected the child of his first marriage, was now absorbed in the lives of those from his second. Her mother, meanwhile, had broken it off with the doctor and returned to Britain. In the apartment on MacDougal they’d all talked about finding assistant positions, of sending portfolios to photo editors. But so far nothing had come of it. After three years of studying, the months ahead of Samantha were empty, unknown. Ryan was offering to fill them. They moved to Greenwich the next month. A few weeks later, on a bench beside Long Island Sound, Ryan proposed, and again Samantha said yes.
Whenever she travelled back into Manhattan to visit her Parsons friends or her old flatmates, Samantha felt fortunate. Many of them were working in retail stores now, or waiting tables. Some had found jobs in galleries, organising private views, sitting for long hours at front desks in cavernous spaces. One of them was stripping in a lap-dancing bar. Life after university had been pared of the certainties of their student days. The aspirations they’d once fostered seemed suddenly out of reach. In comparison, Samantha had few worries. No rent to pay. A steady relationship. And time. This is what Ryan had also promised her. Time to pursue her photography, free of the constraints of shifts in a diner or a cocktail bar, or any of the whole messy business of living.
But on her return journeys to Greenwich, twisting the engagement ring on her finger, Samantha often found herself staring for long minutes through the train’s windows. How had she come to call the destination on her ticket home? It was not her home. And it wasn’t Ryan’s, either. The house was too large, too unlived in. Like all the houses in their neighbourhood, it felt outsized, as if it had been built for a larger species than humans. Their neighbours were older, polished, and settled. Some had children of Samantha’s age, or even grandchildren who came to stay on vacations. When she and Ryan visited them for drinks, her heels sinking into their soft lawns, Samantha had to resist breaking the scene. She wanted to scream or tear off her clothes, just to see what would happen when their calm waters were disturbed.
From Monday to Friday every week Ryan woke at six-thirty a.m., showered, dressed, and drove his Porsche Boxster down Interstate 95 to work in the city. Sometimes he stayed there overnight too. Samantha would get up later, alone in the echoing house. She began making plans for photographic projects.
―
“I wanted to try and get under its skin,” Samantha said, shifting a leg from under her. “Have you ever been there? Greenwich?”
Michael shook his head. “No.”
“It’s beautiful. But—” She broke off, frowning. “It’s as if the place is vacuum-sealed. Like there’s no way in.”
―
For a few weeks she tried photographing the wives in their cars: tiny women lost in monstrous SUVs, their painted nails clutching the steering wheels like the feet of caged birds. Stopped at the lights, checking their lipstick in the parking lot. But Ryan soon put a stop to that. A member of his country club said something to him after a tennis match. It was a passing remark, but enough, about his wife preferring to look at paparazzi photos rather than be in them. “For chrissakes, Sam,” Ryan had said when he’d come home. He was still in his shorts and T-shirt, a sweat patch between his shoulder blades like the map of a long country. He poured himself a neat bourbon. “Set up a darkroom, hire a studio, do whatever you need. But just leave their fucking wives alone, will you?”