The Fall of Princes by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online Page A

girl at Foxcroft where we let her go because of her equestrian passions, and, face it, she’s not ever going to be a Rhodes scholar. Every morning, I kiss them and go off to McCann-Erickson where I am a global creative director, working on some of their biggest accounts. I am pivotal. I am rewarded beyond the common imagination.
    I see her in another apartment, I see her. She looks sort of like Barbra Streisand at the end of
The Way We Were,
and she works as head of one of the departments at the library and I work at a small publishing house and we are very leftist and the children go to the Little Red Schoolhouse and then on to Horace Mann when they get older. We only have two children. Our hearts would hold a dozen, but that’s all we could afford. We use our MetroCards all the time, and we take a subscription in the Family Circle at the Met and the children will grow up to lead lives intense with intelligent ideas and passionate views and commitments.
    Every apartment grows other rooms, grows organically into a place where a family could live for years and years.
    And, in every apartment, there is always a Christmas tree. It’s all covered with beautiful ornaments, Bavarian glass, that we have collected over the years and put away with care and never broken any of, except that one time the tree fell over, all mixed in with funny kids’ stuff and a tree topper made out of rhinestones and popsicle sticks that Kate made when she was six and which now fills her with both uncertain pride and mortification every time we take it out and put it right at the very tippy-top.
    In one life, the Plimpton/McCann life, we give each other extravagant fur and remote-controlled things and bijoux and bibelots, and we leave Christmas afternoon to go skiing in Europe for a week, because the airports are empty on Christmas Day.
    In the library life, we share mittens and scarves and
Letters of Leonard Woolf
and baskets made in Third World countries and then we eat a big dinner in the middle of the afternoon and then we go for a walk in the snowy, almost deserted streets.
    In one life, we are giddy but anxious. In the other, we are happy. Just a happy family.
    In another apartment, I live with a woman. She is tall, with the long, lean body of a swimmer. She is ten years younger than I am, and she wears designer clothes and shoes that cost a month’s salary for most people. She is a graphic designer and the apartment is a monument to good taste. We are wholly happy in ourselves, and we have no children. I am a writer. I write novels that make people feel better about themselves, and they sell quite well. You’d know me if you saw me, from the dust jackets.
    We entertain a lot—actresses, publishers, people from the arts—and we discuss Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists and Le Désert de Retz around coq au vin and Muscadet.
    She once wrote to me from Paris, “You are to me as water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.”
    In any case, every case, we are a tribe, a law unto ourselves, filled with quirks that have come to seem perfectly natural to us. We have the pride of knowing that there is no other group of people in the world with our unique qualities of beauty and intelligence, or kindness or grace or strength. We are only wholly ourselves when we are together. Each completes a part of the whole.
    But the apartments I look at today couldn’t hold any of this. They could hold only me, and I feel bereft each time a door closes behind us.
    On West Twelfth Street, we meet another broker with her client at a double brownstone. The apartment is composed of the back half of the ground floor and the first floor, what used to be called the parlor floor.
    The other client is English, in his early thirties, and we all go in together and look at this peculiar apartment. He is eating a green apple.
    We go in to the space, as city dwellers say these days, the space. The ground floor is peculiarly divided into two small rooms, one a kind of office, I