The Fall of Princes by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online

glasses leading their children around to private schools.
    The sound of his voice is comforting, and I feel cheerful and ask all the right questions.
    I take care to step lightly on the sidewalk. Another thing my mother used to teach us was that a light footfall was a sign of good breeding. I’ve learned it pretty well, pacing much of the time around my apartment, so the downstairs neighbors won’t feel they’re living in an Edgar Allan Poe story. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or something. I expend a great deal of energy trying not to look or seem peculiar.
    I’ve been to Phuket, I want to tell sweating Chris, and China. I’ve been to Cuba. Stayed at Hotel Nacional. Stayed at the Ritz, in Paris, which makes me the kind of man who stays at the Ritz. I’ve had more money in my pocket than you have in your bank account most days.
    His girlfriend works at the Chanel counter at Saks. She’s a makeup artist. I tell him we’ve never met.
    Chris keeps walking toward the first apartment. He’s done this yesterday. He did it the day before. As far as Chris is concerned, he’s been doing it forever.
    We look at seven apartments, except that three are in the same building and two of those are identical, just on different floors. A long time ago, I went to a party in one of these apartments, or one in the same line, as they say.
    There is something fatally wrong with every one of them. Well, naturally, there has to be. Like, for instance, one has this peculiar fifties miniature oven, so small you could barely fit a chicken into it. Chris asks me if I cook a lot. Oh yes, I say, I entertain pretty often.
    The technique is to make some generally favorable remark when you first walk into at least some of the apartments so that Chris doesn’t get too discouraged. And, of course, with the first or second apartment, you have to say, Chris, this is exactly the apartment I don’t want. Just so he knows.
    Seeing apartments is essentially a sordid business. Looking at an apartment that the tenant hasn’t moved out of yet makes me really squeamish.
    One time, I looked at this nice apartment, prewar, doorman, nice, and the tenant hadn’t moved out and when I opened the bedroom closets there were all his clothes hanging there and I realized the tenant was a midget. Boy, that was weird, and I imagined myself living this kind of miniature life, never forgetting the deformed little suits, the tiny shoes, always feeling like Alice after she’s gotten really big.
    I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and it was rent-stabilized and had a working fireplace.
    You spend about ten minutes in each apartment, each redolent with lives lived totally unaware of your own, each filled with the promise of an imaginary life you might live there, where your clothes would go in the closets, where you would put the sofa and the television, and how loud it would be from the street.
    I always imagine, right off, where I would put the Christmas tree. I know it’s trivial; it’s two weeks of the year and, besides, I haven’t had a tree for years, not a full-sized one, just a little table-topper, as tacky people say, but I don’t know what else you call it when it sits on a table and isn’t even a tree, really.
    But I try to find a spot and picture a majestic eight-footer, covered with all the extravagant ornaments I’ve saved from my old life, the days when everything glittered too brightly.
    Somewhere in these lonely rooms there is the ghost of the life I might have there. Somewhere there is room for a wife and two or three children and a Sussex spaniel and Barbour jackets and travel tickets lying on the kitchen table.
    In that lovely room I see her. Her hair is colored once a month by the best colorist in the city, tawny blonde with highlights. She’s a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton and she never cooks so we eat out all the time, or order in, and the three children are in private school, the youngest girl at Spence, the boy at Collegiate, the elder