Chapter 3 Olivier
Olivier
Three months before the honeymoon
Let’s be clear about one thing: Cassie came on to me first. At the hotel, women often did—I was manager of customer relations after all—which felt nice until I realized I never got to do the choosing.
They chose me, flirted with me, cooed about my “cute” accent, as if I were a child showing off a trick and not a thirty-two-year-old man with a serious job in one of the world’s most thrilling cities.
Some also invited me back to their room, and I always politely declined.
It was tempting, of course, but I’d never do anything so stupid as to compromise my job.
Cassie was different. She literally came to me, as in I met her in front of the apartment I rented in Brooklyn Heights—a small but functional one-bedroom on the basement level of a sprawling brownstone.
It’s a thing I discovered quickly about New York City: the rich lived on top of the poor, crushing them into the darkness.
Here there was no pretense of equality. Though I wasn’t poor per se. Not yet anyway.
When I spotted my landlady in front of the house, my first impulse was to hide in the corner bodega.
I’d procrastinated telling her I had to break my lease, and now that her husband had died so suddenly two days earlier, I was seriously considering packing up my few belongings and going without a word.
By the time Ms. Crowes noticed the apartment was empty, I’d be back in France.
But then, I saw that she was busy chatting to a young woman and figured I was safe.
“Oh, Olivier!” Ms. Crowes said as I approached, seeming overexcited to see me.
“This is Cassie, Tim’s daughter.” Then she turned to the young woman.
“And this is Olivier, our tenant. Well, my tenant now, I guess. Olivier rents the downstairs unit.” She talked so fast that her cheeks were flushed by the end of the sentence.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said to Cassie.
Her face showed no emotion. I didn’t know my landlord had a daughter but if I did, I would never have pictured her looking like this.
Her blond hair was on the wrong side of yellow—a shade New York girls avoided with five-hundred-dollar coloring appointments, which we sometimes booked for our guests—her eye makeup was too heavy-handed for daytime, and her wrap dress gaped too much at the neckline, though I couldn’t tell if that was intentional.
Her slouchy black bag tried to be on trend but was clearly fake leather.
These were the sort of things I’d started paying attention to since working at Bhotel.
Now I could spot a Rolex a mile away, counting down the days until I could afford one of my own.
Still, there was a mix of fierceness and fragility to Cassie in her stark gaze and round baby face, her chin pointed upward in defiance.
You could tell she was trying. She wanted to be someone.
“Cassie’s staying with us for the funeral,” Ms. Crowes said, her voice shaking. “With me, I mean.”
I had been getting ready for bed when I’d been startled by the red flashing lights of an ambulance out the window.
Intrigued, I’d gone outside just as the medics were loading my landlord—or rather, his body—onto the van.
I’d consoled poor Ms. Crowes as I helped her book an Uber to follow him, which is how I’d learned about the fatal heart attack.
My last days in New York were ending with a corpse, as if things weren’t bad enough already.
“Really sorry for your loss,” I said again, glancing at my front door. So close.
“Is your fiancé on his way?” Ms. Crowes asked Cassie. But before she could respond, the older woman’s cell phone rang and she excused herself with a weak smile.
“Where are you from?” Cassie asked me, an eyebrow raised.
“I’m French.” At that point, most people, most women, would start gushing about that one time they went to France, the best meal they ever had at a restaurant tucked at the end of a tiny street in Saint-Germain, the way the Eiffel Tower twinkled in the night, how magical the city felt, and wasn’t I lucky to be from there!
I usually said, Yes, yes, so lucky, not pointing out that I’d emigrated to another country across an ocean for a reason. Many reasons, in fact.
But Cassie didn’t say anything.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the amused smile that appeared on her lips, so I felt compelled to explain. “I work at a luxury hotel chain, Bhotel. My bosses in Paris sent me over to manage guest relations at our Madison Avenue location. We have the most amazing views over Central Park.”
Best left unsaid: the fact that I’d had to practically beg for the opportunity to come here or that I’d been let go nearly three weeks ago due to some bullshit restructuring brought about by the American investors.
“Very cool,” Cassie said, her eyes narrowing with intrigue. “Did you know my father well?” Her tone was clipped, far from devastated. More like provocative.
“Only a little. I helped him move stuff into their basement when he needed an extra pair of hands. That sort of thing. Tim was a nice man.”
“Hmm…” Cassie said, casting a loaded glance at Ms. Crowes, who was now standing at the top of her stoop, absorbed in her phone conversation. “A nice liar then.”
I didn’t respond. It sounded like more drama than I wanted to involve myself in, which was none. I already had plenty of my own.
“Did you know he had a daughter?” Cassie said.
“No, sorry.” I searched my mind for an excuse to get out of the conversation, but something about it made me feel a little better. It was good to be reminded that other people were fucked up, too. “Did you know him well?” I added without thinking.
“Nope. He took off when I was three, maybe four. I didn’t know he lived in the city and definitely didn’t know he had this.” Cassie looked back toward the house. I couldn’t tell if she meant the brownstone or the put-together wife. Probably both.
“I’m sorry—” I started mechanically.
“And then she—his “new” wife—calls me out of nowhere, tells me all my father’s children should be there, and that it’d mean a lot if I came.
To her, because of course it’s all about her.
The ‘right’ thing to do or whatever. She said she’d pay for my trip.
I’m sure she just felt guilty for everything I didn’t have growing up, but I never come to the city so… ”
So…Cassie was using her estranged father’s sudden death as an excuse for a vacation. My interest was piqued now. “Where do you live?”
“A small town two hours north, in the Hudson Valley. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
Ms. Crowes had gone inside, and judging from the relieved look on her face when she answered the phone, she wasn’t coming back out to hang out with her loving stepdaughter.
I was starting to forget I had better things to do, such as leaving the country before being kicked out of it, since my visa, which was tied to my job at Bhotel and only valid for a month after my employment ended, was now expiring in mere days.
I told myself I wasn’t actually curious about Cassie.
I only welcomed the opportunity to take my mind off my situation for a minute.
“Your mother didn’t tell you about him?”
“If I knew he had all this”—again she pointed at the house and the pretty tree-lined block—“I probably would have turned up here a long time ago.”
“Families…” I said with a shrug. I hadn’t spoken to mine in years, but the memory of our last interaction was carved in my brain forever.
Cassie’s eyes lit up with a mischievous air. “So you’re French…like, from France?”
It wasn’t the first time I was asked the question. Americans—even the worldly New Yorkers—could have such a narrow-minded view of immigration, of what it meant to “be” from a different country.
I only had time to nod before Cassie continued. “And you’re coming to the memorial tomorrow?”
I hadn’t planned on wasting one of my last days here by attending my landlord’s funeral.
My time in the city had taught me that you never really knew New Yorkers, even the ones who lived right above you.
Most of them were particular about what they revealed and only did so when and if it served them.
At first I found it thrilling—here I could be a totally new person, all my past mistakes forgotten—until it worked against me.
I never saw it coming. My boss was kind and friendly, a blank face, up until the very moment she told me I was being let go, my visa and my future here be damned.
“Please!” Cassie said, pressing her hands together as if in a prayer with a smile. “I won’t know anyone there.”
She pouted, trying, and failing, to look cute.
“What about your fiancé?” I asked. I still fully intended to walk away and never see her again, but she probably took my question as a sign that I was flirting back.
As I said that, we both glanced at her ring finger, which was bare.
“We’re not… It’s complicated. Come on. They have a cellar full of expensive wines. She’s hosting a wake afterward, and I’m sure she’ll put some out. And if not, I’ll get it myself. She owes me. She owes me so much.”
I let out a small laugh before I realized that Cassie was suggesting stealing her dead dad’s wine from his grieving widow. Then I grinned openly. That sounded kind of fun.
***
We did just that. I had been so motivated by the work opportunity in New York that I’d perfected my English to the nth degree, always practicing my accent and looking up the meaning of new words I encountered.
Still, the pastor’s sermon and the religious verses flew right over my head.
They also seemed to go over Cassie’s, who wore a dress too short to be appropriate.
She paid little attention to the service and focused instead on casting judgmental looks at the mourners, especially Ms. Crowes, who was flanked by her and Tim’s two sons, in their late teens.
We drank the wine, ate the food, again and again.
Cassie asked me questions about France and Paris, but she was also curious about life in “the big city.” I gave her the varnished version New Yorkers feed to out-of-towners: the bright lights, rubbing elbows with celebrities at the latest brunch hot spot, the endless options of amazing things to do at any time of day and night.
Cassie lapped it up and it made my heart twitch.
At first, coming to New York had been an exit route, a solution to my desperate urge to get out of France.
But now I genuinely loved it here. I was a brand-new me with a real career and a half-decent apartment.
I’d even started to make friends with some of my colleagues.
I was creating a life for myself here, and losing my job meant losing it, too.
I hadn’t even had a real chance to make it in the Big Apple.
Hadn’t saved anywhere near enough money.
It’s not just that I wasn’t ready to leave.
I couldn’t leave. Or at least, I couldn’t go home.
I didn’t remember how Cassie and I ended up at my place.
Correction: I didn’t want to remember. Anytime I did something bad—like sleeping with a girl right after her estranged father’s funeral—I found it easier not to connect the dots in my memory.
Did it really matter how Cassie came to straddle me on my couch, her breath thick with booze as she unbuckled my belt?
She was still there the next morning when I woke up. An hour later, she got dressed and left. I figured it was the last I’d see of her.
But she knocked on my door that afternoon—once, twice, three times—until I answered.
“Hey, what’s up?” I hung in the doorframe, blocking the way.
“I think I’ll stay in the city for a while, check out some of these spots you told me about.” Cassie pushed past me and slipped inside.
A few questions popped into my mind: Did she have a job?
Even if she wasn’t actually engaged, was anyone waiting for her back home in her country town?
But I didn’t care enough to ask—I really should have cared enough to ask—so I went to fish out my two remaining beers from the fridge.
Cassie dragged a dining chair back and sat down, accepting the bottle I handed her like we did this all the time.
She took a swig. “Maybe you could show me around.” Then another one. For a small woman she drank thirstily.
My mind started buzzing, and not only because of the hangover. Since being let go from Bhotel, I’d spent every waking moment trying to figure out how I could stay in the States, and by now I knew two things for sure: the only solution cost too much, and I was running out of time to make it happen.
Still, a sliver of hope gnawed at me. Cassie shouldn’t have come back, but she did. If I could convince her, I’d get another shot at making it here. But how? I had nothing to offer.
“I’m kind of broke.” It wasn’t quite so simple: I’d saved every penny I could since moving here, but it didn’t amount to all that much. A few thousand dollars paled in comparison to the debt I’d racked up back in France. Though it was much easier to ignore it while I was here.
I’d heard about immigrants paying American citizens for a fake marriage, which led to a very real green card.
It was the golden ticket to staying in the country legally—to be able to work, and then maybe even start a business.
Make real money again. The American way.
Many actually got away with these marriages.
It wasn’t so hard, apparently, but you had to pony up big money to the person who agreed to be part of the scheme.
I didn’t have that. I didn’t even have a fraction of that.
Cassie smirked. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
My prospects for my last few days here amounted to wallowing in self-pity as I wandered the streets—making up stories for what I would tell people back in France.
In reality, no one would care about what had happened to me.
My parents didn’t speak to me anymore. My brother couldn’t even look me in the eye.
And as for the friends I used to have, well…
they’d have my head on a stick if they ever saw me again.
I took a long sip of my beer, not wanting to seem too eager. I had nothing else to lose, so I might as well try. “What’s first on your list?”