Jade
Twenty minutes, Mrs. Sanchez had said. stood outside the door Mrs. Sanchez pointed to, wondering if she should knock
or go in or run away. A woman in green scrubs with a stethoscope around her neck, peeling off a pair of latex gloves, came
out.
Would he recognize her? Would he talk to her? Would he even be awake?
“You the daughter?” she asked.
“Friend,” said . She looked nothing like George, and was too young to be his daughter.
“Go on in. He’s sleeping.”
George’s bedroom was on the same side of the building as the one had spent four nights in, so it shared the same view
across Fifth Avenue and down onto Central Park. The same sets of children and nannies were still walking around.
It was warm in the room, almost as warm as it had been outside. George’s eyes were closed and watched him, wondering
if he was thinking or dreaming. He was wearing navy-blue striped pajamas and his hair, thin enough to reveal the age spots
along his hairline, had been dampened and parted neatly on the side: he was part decaying body, part patient, but also part
the spit-shined schoolboy he must have once been.
“George,” she whispered. He didn’t stir.
It was so hot in the room. was wearing a pink tank top under the blouse she’d worn to work so she removed the blouse and laid it
across her lap. She watched George’s eyes move back and forth under his eyelids.
George, who had listened and encouraged and fed her when she was hungry and cared for her when she was hurt. George, the only
person in the world who thought was capable of all the things she herself thought (knew) she was capable of. George,
who’d made her promise she’d start LookBook, no matter the risk, even though she believed risks were for people with safety
nets, not for people like her.
After a time his eyelids fluttered. “?” The eyes closed, then opened again. “I knew you’d come.”
“Of course I came,” she said. “I’m here, George.”
He nodded, and his eyes stayed open. He watched her, considering. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. His voice was low, no more
than a dry whisper, really, and she had to lean closer to him to hear it. “A real and true beauty. Your youth...” He trailed
off.
His hand was lying on top of the bedsheet; she placed hers on top of his and squeezed it. This is a dying man, she thought.
This is a kind, dying man.
She took her hand from his and held it against his cheek, and then, without thinking twice about it, she kissed him, her full,
young lips against his old, papery cheek. She leaned her forehead against his, pouring out her respect and her sadness and,
yes, her fear—fear of death, fear of mortality, fear of being left alone again. She poured gratitude for his real, pure love,
the purest love she’d felt up to this point in her life.
The affection cost her nothing; it was a punctuation, a grace note.
It cost her nothing until an unfamiliar voice said, “Dad? What. The Fuck. Is going on in here.”
And then it almost cost her everything.
In the doorway stood a woman; behind her was Mrs. Sanchez with an expression on her face that said, very clearly, that ’s
twenty minutes had come and gone. had never put a blouse on so fast in her life.
“This is Mr. Halsey’s daughter,” said Mrs. Sanchez.
“I was just leaving,” said .
“I should hope so ,” said the daughter. Then she said, “Jesus, Dad. Really?”
wouldn’t learn the daughter’s name until three days later, when the Times ran George’s obituary. She looked like a Cleo, a short name with a hard edge, a name that brooked no contradictions. Smooth
hair, simple gold jewelry, tailored pants that most definitely did not come from Zara. A slender leather belt around a slender
waist. But in fact her name was Serena, which had a softer sound; which implied a calmness and an amicability that this woman
did not exhibit. The son was named Edward.
went to the funeral. It was Catholic. Catholic! This surprised her, especially considering what she’d gathered of the
Upper East Side. had received her First Communion, and after that, nothing. But now, in the back of the church on Eighty-Third
Street, some sort of sorrow and familiarity clutched at her heart: the priest’s words, the responsorial psalm, the intercessions,
these all rang a bell in her distant memory. When, at the end of the service, the choir sang “Be Not Afraid,” cried,
and her tears were genuine. The only person who had believed in her was gone.
(That wasn’t in the court filings; wasn’t in the deposition, the way felt at the funeral.)
After the funeral introduced herself to the daughter. (She knew she’d made a mistake in the bedroom, but she didn’t know yet, of course, what was coming.) Serena smelled like jasmine and she had a chestnut bob that was so sleek, so bluntly cut, that wanted to reach out and stroke it. She had one of those upturned noses, small and perfect. Eyelashes that could have been real or could have been subtle extensions.
“I’m ,” she said. She put out her hand, and the daughter, looking up and down, ignored it. A familiar sense of shame
and dismissal enveloped .
“You’re the one from his bedroom.”
nodded and said, “Your father was very kind to me.”
“Well, he never mentioned you,” Serena said. Her voice was cool and low, like it had just emerged from an ice cave. This casual
cruelty—it seemed so practiced; it seemed like it came so easily —loosened something in . She thought for a fraction of a second about holding back, about disappearing, about taking the high road , but she didn’t.
“Oh?” she said. “Did you talk to him enough that he would have mentioned a new friend? I didn’t get the impression that you
were close.”
Serena’s shoulders, already set back (Pilates, guessed), moved back even more. Her chest rose a fraction of an inch;
her chin lifted. Everything about her said, Who do you think you are?
“Of course we were close. He was my father .”
“Huh,” said , still stung by the way Serena was looking at her, so, in return, putting out her own stinger. “That is not
the picture he painted for me.”
There was a barely perceptible flinch behind those cool gray eyes.
George had told her about Serena and Edward. He’d been in his late forties when he married for the first time, a woman twelve years younger, and he was nearly fifty when Serena was born. The marriage was rocky, the wife, by George’s account, prone to theatrics and instability (“I should have known when I married a Broadway actress”) but it endured for a decade (“There was straying,” George said, without elaborating). By the time of the divorce George had fallen in love with another woman, who eventually became his second wife and the true love of his life. The second wife was stable and loving; the second wife was a rock and this allowed George to be a rock for her too. Zero drama.
Serena never forgave him for the divorce and the remarrying; she wouldn’t hear that there was another side to the story aside
from her mother’s. Five years ago, the second wife died. George tried to reconnect with his children at that point, but by
then the harm was done. The myelin that covered the fibers of their relationship had been irrevocably damaged. They would
accept his money, it turned out, if not his love. But he was still their father, and a very wealthy man, and when he died,
they each received a massive inheritance.
Minus the half a million dollars he left to , with the stipulation that she use it for “expenses directly and indirectly
related to the creation of her business.”
George’s children came at her like vipers. Well, Serena did. Edward was a playboy living in South Beach with strategic stubble
and a year-round tan, too oblivious to be a viper. Serena contested the will on the grounds that had seduced an old,
dying man to get his money. Into the public record went the story of Serena walking in on with her forehead pressed against
George’s, her hand on his face, her blouse off. Into the record went an affidavit from Mrs. Sanchez, who said that in the
month before her employer’s death she had gone to visit her family in Mexico for one week. When she returned, her employer
had “a spring in his step” that had not been there before. Mrs. Sanchez, who had once seemed like an ally, shifted her wheel
hard to the left when money was involved. (I’m sorry, thought Juliana, is having a spring in one’s step illegal? )
Nowhere in the record did it say how lonely George had been in the final years of his life. Nowhere did it note the absence of his children and the fact that the only person he saw on a daily basis, the only person who truly had an idea of the quotidian details of his life, was on his payroll. Nowhere did it say how all the way to the end George retained an unguarded sweetness, his eyes like those of a Labrador, warm and eager to please.
You know what else wasn’t in the court filings? What a bitch the daughter was.
After a time, Serena understood that she didn’t have the grounds to keep the money from . She could continue trying, if
she chose to. But she’d be looking at a pretrial date more than eight months out; a trial could take years, and during all
that time Serena’s money would be held up too. Serena didn’t want her money held up (shocker); she dropped the contestation,
and ’s money came through.
hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing illegal. Nothing immoral, even. There was nothing she needed to hide from. But it
could be a stain on her name, all of those public records of this messy business, and she wanted to start fresh and clean.
She wanted to leave behind the girl from Lawrence, the girl from George’s bedroom. She wanted to honor her benefactor. People
change their names all the time. You don’t need to explain it to anyone.
Later, in interviews, or when she spoke to business school classes, or when she was invited to join onstage panels with large
audiences at conferences for business entrepreneurs, or when she gave her TED Talk, she spoke of the money from an angel that
helped get her started.
Friendship, love, money—all of these were vast, complex landscapes that could not be excavated in the course of a single talk
or interview. People always assumed that she’d left off a word; of course she must have meant angel investor. But she didn’t. She just meant angel.
With the money George left her, Juliana worked full-time on LookBook. She hired three people: a technology developer, a stylist, and a marketer. Anyone else she needed she hired on a contract basis. She rented space in the WeWork building near Rockefeller Center. Five hundred thousand dollars sounded bottomless to someone who had grown up the way had grown up, but it wasn’t bottomless. She had to husband her resources.
(What a strange phrase that was. Why not wife your resources?)
Just keep moving, she told herself when she felt unsteady or uncertain or unworthy or scared. Just. Keep. Moving. She looked
in the mirror and sometimes she saw Juliana George, but sometimes she saw the girl from Lawrence, the foster kid, the scholarship
student, the outsider, always looking in.
Just keep moving.
A year after she got George’s money, LookBook launched. Then they turned a profit. Then the profit got bigger. The company
kept working, kept improving the technology, tweaking the algorithm. They had the college students, then they had the post-college
crowd, then they had the suburban moms, and, once they had the suburban moms, it felt like they had the world.
But they didn’t have the world yet, not until five years ago, when the luxury brands started coming to her . Everybody had pieces they couldn’t sell! Nobody wanted to liquidate! More negotiations, more meetings. If she got luxury
brands on board, she could reach an entirely new consumer. At Fashion Week she had invites to all the shows. She went to as
many as possible, to see what the designers were doing. Her wheels were turning. She could feel the momentum building. She
networked whoever she could, wherever she could.
Sunday came, the third full day of Fashion Week. Juliana was tired! She’d started at Tory Burch at 10 a.m .; by 8 p.m. she was toast. But also, she would have killed for some toast. Nobody ate at Fashion Week. At a networking party at Chelsea
Piers she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. When she opened them, a man who looked like a model but as it turned
out later wasn’t a model remarked to her that the hors d’oeuvres were so small he could hardly see them.
She laughed. “They really are very small.” Then, because she was there to network, she stuck out her hand and said, “Juliana
George.”
“David Carr. Nice to meet you.”
Can you fall in love with one handshake? Of course not! That’s absurd. But, maybe. She felt something. He felt something too. What was it? It was indefinable. They moved to a corner of the room; they talked a bit more.
He was there with a friend, a pro golfer, who had already disappeared.
Then Juliana, who had by then learned not to let an opportunity go by, who had learned that fortune favors the bold, gathered
her considerable courage, said, “I’m so hungry. Do you want to get some food? Some real food? Like... a burger, or a fourteen-egg
omelet?”
She watched him consider this and then watched him say yes. She’d play that over and over again in her mind over the next
few years, the indecision, then the moment of decision. Her heart was beating so fast.
“I would love to get some real food,” he said.
Maybe you can’t fall in love with one handshake, but what about one evening? What about a night? What if you eat at an all-night
diner on Sixth Avenue, then walk from Fifty-Fourth Street all the way down to Battery Park, then back again (eight miles in
total), talking the whole time, compressing the normal first weeks or even months of a new relationship into a few hours?
What if you tell this brand-new-to-you person stories about your childhood you’ve never told anyone? What if he tells you
his stories, which are tamer than yours, but to you so interesting simply because they are so normal ? A midwestern upbringing, a father and uncle and mother and aunt and cousins galore. Summers at a lake, weekends at high
school parties, the kind you see in the movies, an old Miata that became the gateway to his passion?
What if he doesn’t touch you after that first handshake until, oh, around 2 a.m ., when he takes your hand so casually, as though you are a couple, as though you always walk around linked together like this? And what if he rubs the knuckle of your right forefinger with the thumb of his left hand and you think you might actually melt into the sidewalk?
What if you don’t even kiss until you watch the sun rise from a bench on the High Line? What if you kiss for a second time
outside your apartment, and what if you are completely serious when you label this the kiss you will be trying to find again
for the rest of your life?
What if you come up for air and you say, “My roommate—” at the same time that he says, “I shouldn’t—I can’t—” And then he
touches your temple, and you don’t think you’ve ever felt anything so erotic in your life?
What if he says, “I have to tell you something. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say it. I can’t—I’m engaged, Juliana.
I’m engaged to be married.”
What if the bottom drops out then, and you spend years wishing you could reclaim it.
She knew they both felt the same thing. That’s the key to this entire story: they both felt the same thing .
She saw him again, three weeks later, in Central Park. He was with a tall, beautiful blonde. If you looked quickly you might
have thought you were seeing the ghosts of John-John and Carolyn Bessette. Juliana was walking, trying to clear her head from
a stressful day. The couple was sitting on one of the wood-and-concrete benches along the perimeter.
Juliana and David saw each other at the same instant, just when Carolyn Bessette stood up to take a phone call. When she raised
the phone to her ear Juliana saw the diamond winking on her ring finger. The woman walked away, out of earshot. David said
Juliana’s name, and she moved closer to him. He said, “Listen, I—”
“It’s okay,” she said. There was that shame again, the shame she’d never fully gotten rid of. “It’s fine,” she repeated. She’d
come to realize, playing the night over and over again in her mind, that she had misread the situation. Again.
She’s like obsessed with my mom.
She wasn’t normal, like everyone else. She wanted to say, I have never felt this way about anyone. She wanted to say, I know you felt it too. And she wanted to say, You’re making a huge mistake. But that was desperate, and desperation was Gordon’s weakness, not Juliana George’s. So what she said was: “It’s okay.
We hardly know each other. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
She walked away, exited the park as fast as she could, not realizing until she was out how close she was to George’s old building.
She made sure she was far enough away before she let herself start crying.
She had thought that love, once she found it, would win out over everything else. But what did she know of love, really? Remember,
she’d been raised without it.
Taylor was an Important Person whose father ran a Big Company; it wasn’t hard to track the details online. Nearly a year later
Juliana made one last effort, writing that email on the eve of the wedding. When David didn’t answer, and when she saw the
wedding announcement in the Times , she told herself to give up. It’s over, it’s done! Walk away! Wash your hands of all of it. Look at all you’ve achieved.
Look at LookBook! Your company needs you. The last thing you need is a complicated personal life.
But oh, even so. Emily Dickinson had it right. The heart wants what it wants. Boy, does it want what it wants.
Time marched on, and on. Series B investing was happening, people were vying to invest. LookBook’s cash position swelled;
so did the board. Some were partners, and some were critics, but she had a board ! She had a company ! She had money ! By the time Juliana was ready to think about taking LookBook public, she’d been making a good salary for seven years. Market standard, this was called. Can you imagine what market standard felt like to someone like Juliana? She, who had learned to live on nothing, who had no time to spend money even if she wanted to? She’d moved into a slightly bigger apartment in New York, with no roommate, and her clothes were better, obviously, but other than that she lived much the same way she always had, which was running like the wolves were chasing her.
She tried, she really did. She continued to date. She had relationships. Some lasted weeks; one lasted a few months. But LookBook
always came first, and she never felt the same way with another person as she had with David.
This past winter, her financial advisor told her she needed to diversify. She had too much in cash. She should buy property
now, with a small down payment, and when the IPO came, when the windfall came , she could pay it off.
It was a problem she never in a hundred million years thought she’d have—the problem of too much cash. She thought of telling
her old Boston College roommate whose dress she’d once had to borrow for Thanksgiving that she had too much cash. “The money will be safer in real estate,” her advisor said. “Away from the vagaries of the market.
Plus, then you get to enjoy it.”
She almost asked what enjoyment was, as a joke, but not really as a joke. Sure. She would put something into real estate.
“Where?” she asked him. “Where should I put something into real estate?”
He folded his hands and looked at her across his desk. He blinked from behind his big brown glasses and said, “That’s up to
you. Where have you always wanted to own a home?”
She still googled Buchanan Enterprises. She knew that Brice Buchanan had bought land on Block Island, and also a home that had undergone extensive renovations. She’d come across an interior design blog with a feature on the house; she knew from this that David and Taylor would become summer residents. She’d read everything she could about the island. Seven miles long and three miles wide. Shaped like a pork chop. Three hundred and sixty-five freshwater ponds, one for every day of the year. Migratory songbirds traveled there, and bachelorette parties traveled there, and a reclusive Hollywood actor owned a home there.
“Block Island,” she told her advisor. “I loved it when I used to go there as a kid.” This, of course, wasn’t true. It wasn’t
a bad idea, she went on, to have a home base where she could throw parties to put more eyes on LookBook ahead of a potential
IPO, to get the social influencers more involved. To get people talking. When you raise the profile you raise the value.
“Makes sense,” agreed her advisor. “And once the IPO goes through, the sky is the limit.”
Next steps. Find a Realtor. Buy a house. Sign the papers. Hire a decorator. Throw a party, then another, then another, to
introduce yourself to the island, to promote the brand, to raise excitement before the IPO. A wise investment will pay back
in spades.
Lots of people came to Juliana’s parties. It was a small island, and when word got around, people showed up: locals, and social
media influencers from the mainland, and rich people whose boats were docked for the night or the weekend at Payne’s or Champlin’s.
But David Buchanan didn’t come, and he didn’t come, and he didn’t come, until one night she heard about the golfer Jack Baker,
who not only knew David Buchanan but who was living with him. Living with him! Recovering from an Achilles injury, stepping off the Tour, staying with his old college friend, because, why not? They had
plenty of room.
And it got even better. The young woman in the small cottage next door, the one she could send her assistant, Allison, over
to invite to a party? That was David’s cousin.