Chapter 12
Rachel left shortly after having a breakfast of toast and eggs in Zack’s personal abode. She said she had a meeting with a client. Just as well, because Zack had a meeting with his father. Sure, his father called it lunch, but Zack knew it was a meeting.
It probably had nothing to do with business.
Nevertheless, he would have to dress up well enough to pass off as a billionaire heir in whatever fancy restaurant his father chose. This meant foregoing the T-shirts and shorts. But it didn’t mean saying goodbye to his favorite pair of sandals.
He enjoyed the air on his toes while he locked up his apartment. The next door neighbor’s door also closed with a soft click.
“Did you forget those files for the Brunswick’s?”
“Nope. Got them right here.”
“Good, good.” Kathryn Alison let out a harried breath. A few feet away, Zack pocketed his keys while deciding between walking – in this heat, in these clothes – and taking a ride share to his meeting. His bike would muss up his nice clothes, and his car wasn’t worth dragging out of the parking garage for a few blocks. “Oh. Good morning.”
Zack had hoped they wouldn’t notice him. Probably didn’t recognize me in these clothes. He turned around and flashed the neighbors one of his most charming grins. They often didn’t work on Kathryn.
They almost always worked on Ian Mathers, the only man who could smile better than Zack and get away with it.
“Morning!” Zack held up his hand, hoping that it would be good enough for a wave. “Lovely Monday morning, isn’t it? Off to work?”
Ian kissed his girlfriend on the cheek before sprinting toward the elevator. “I’ll go ahead and get the car started. Later, Feldman!”
Kathryn, who took her time fixing her ponytail and readjusting her bag strap, waited until her boyfriend had disappeared into the elevator before saying anything else to Zack. “We have a business meeting to get to. Well, he has a business meeting. I’m helping.”
“Surprised you don’t get married and share the merry load.” Ah, yes, the M word. The perfect word to utter should Zack want to get a rise out of his neighbor. The tabloids and society pages were always speculating when Ian and Kathryn were going to finally tie the knot after two years of intense dating. I should know all about that. I get a show at least once a month. “But I know why you doooon’t.”
Kathryn rolled her eyes and took one step past him in her nude heels. “Feminism?”
“Psh. Yeah, right.” Zack followed her to the elevator. “’Cause you’re waiting for a better man to come along and make all your real dreams come true.”
They were stuck waiting for the elevator Ian hogged on his way down to the parking garage. “Is that what I’m doing? Thought I was taking my time and enjoying my life.”
Enjoying was right. Zack couldn’t help himself as he leaned down toward her ear and whispered, “Loved the show last night.”
Kathryn blushed, yet kept her perfect posture as she rebuttoned the bottom part of her white silk blouse. “Did you? All ten minutes of it?”
“Come oooon, you know you can do way better than him.” The light signaling the next elevator’s arrival finally dinged. “Take me, for instance. I can go for at least fifteen.”
Kathryn kept a wary eye on him as she stepped into the elevator with a well-dressed woman from one floor up. Zack kept his next comment to himself when he joined them.
It wasn’t until they reached the lobby that Kathryn finally replied. “Who said only ten minutes was his idea?” She stepped out, her confident gait mesmerizing both Zack and the middle-aged woman who asked for his help stepping out. This is gonna be a long day.
***
Isaiah Feldman had expensive tastes. He wasn’t the biggest spender in his family – that honor had gone to his mother, who singlehandedly bought an entire island back in the ‘90s only to turn around and sell it to the Warren family because her husband had a stroke upon hearing the news from his accountant. Their son had acquired the same luxurious tastes and desires as his mother, but had his father’s financial sensibilities.
He also knew his youngest son really well. So well that, even though he often begrudged Zack for his lifestyle, he knew better than to pick a place like the country club or the Rooftop Gardens to have lunch with only him. One of those places required closed-toe shoes, and the other required ties. Two things Zack would rather eat than actually wear.
Instead, Isaiah had forwarded his son the address for a place called Bell Jar’s, which took more than simple Googling to find. Great. In the Monroe building. That meant it was sure to be extra stuffy, because the only family in town that could make the well-established Feldmans feel inferior were the damned Monroes and that deplorable “dynasty” they were hell-bent on building. Or at least that’s what Zack picked up on the grapevine. He made a point of avoiding families that would rather smell their own flatulence than be within fifty feet of Zack in his cargo shorts. So of course the king douche owns the biggest yacht at the marina. One he barely used since marrying the second prettiest blond in the city. (The first was Kathryn, of course, but only because Zack was still nursing that bruised ego from his college days.)
As expected, Bell Jar’s was a cozy soup and sandwich place that charged way more than any of the help or ingredients were worth. But people didn’t come here for the best taco salad in New England, now did they? No. Zack knew damn well that people like his father made reservations for Monday lunch at Bell Jar’s because of status. They wanted to be seen there, even if they paid extra to reserve one of the private rooms usually held for the Monroes’ business meetings. They must be out of town today.
Zack found his father sitting at a small table overlooking the grand view of the downtown commercial business district. Daresay it’s better than the view from my apartment. It helped that this side of the building didn’t compete with any other skyscrapers for a view.
A few of the other diners murmured as he walked by. Most of them were the housewives of the rich gossiping about which island they were flying to next or who was having an affair with their French tutor. Men who weren’t having quiet business meetings were old enough to be Zack’s grandfather. Too bad that man died years ago, from complications of his stroke.
“There you are.” Isaiah, who had shaken his personal assistants for this personal lunch, stood up from their table and attempted to smile in fatherly pride. “You always look good in a collared shirt, son.”
Zack pulled out the chair opposite of his father and sat down with only a nod. A waiter appeared before he could start warming his seat. “Don’t suppose they have BLTs here?”
The waiter helpfully pointed to one of the specials of the day. Instead of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, however, it was marketed as, “Tender, honey-infused pork, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh greens.” Whatever. It would do. Even better if it came with sweet potato fries. That should’ve been fancy enough for this place.
The menus were taken away. Isaiah mentioned that he had already ordered right before Zack walked through the door – which insinuated that he assumed his son would be late, not that he would ever admit that.
He also wouldn’t admit that anything he asked his son was only a lead up to the real reason he had arranged this meeting. Zack wasn’t dumb. He knew his father’s interest in him stopped at how he affected the family. Zack didn’t have to go into the steel business to still reflect on the Feldman name and image. How many times had his father sat him down to discuss what the flagrant partying on yachts and going out with a different woman every week looked like to the world? I know what both you and Mom fear the most. They never outright said it, but they feared their youngest disaster knocking up some middle-class gold-digger and losing half his fortune to child support, alimony, or both. Unlike his brother, Zack didn’t have the classiest tastes in women.
Unlike his damned brothers.
Daniel, the heir-apparent who had been courting the same well-bred New York heiress for the past five years. Evan, the bright-eyed box of new ideas that had made Feldman Steel more than its fair share of money over the past two years. Both of them had solidified their place in the Feldman family. Daniel was on track to responsibly take over the company Stateside and continue the Feldman name with class and sophistication. Evan was ambitious enough to live abroad and bring in more international clients with murmurs of establishing a separate-yet-parallel company.
Then there was Zack. The youngest. The laziest. The artist.
“The least you could do is apply your artistic talents to architecture,” his big brother Daniel had told him. “Buildings need steel, right?”
“Film is one of the biggest industries,” Evan had cut in. “So many great networking opportunities. Don’t suppose you could turn your talents toward Hollywood, hm?”
Zack wasn’t interested in architecture or film. He wanted to carve statues and paint pictures. Nobody in the family had time for that.
So when Zack finished talking about the latest commission he had decided to take on, his father grunted a few meaningless words and changed the subject. “And what about that woman you were dating? That, hm… Penelope. No. Polly. What was her name?”
Zack cocked a confused eyebrow. “I honestly have no idea who you are talking about.”
“Piper. Yes. That was it.” Isaiah flung his napkin across his lap when the waiter brought him his clam chowder, made from New England clams caught fresh that very morning. “The professor from the art school.”
Zack laughed, unable to believe it. “Do you mean Pilar, the woman who taught Latin dance at the community college?” He didn’t wait for his father to scoff. “I haven’t been with her since Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t serious.” Great ass and super limber, though. Zack wondered what she was up to now.
“I don’t suppose any of your romantic relationships are that serious.”
The glorified BLT appeared before Zack. “No. Can’t say I’ve found someone worth being serious with yet.”
“Ah, yes.” Isaiah cleared his throat before dunking his spoon into his soup. “That’s something I wanted to talk to you about, son.”
Here they went. Again.
It wasn’t the first time Isaiah sat his son down and attempted to teach him about the wiles of women, particularly how they loved to cling to rich, young men who looked even slightly put together. He loved pointing out the rash of their fellow billionaires who had recently married women with hardly any means. “Not every man can marry an Alice,” he often said. “A lot of them marry Jasmines.”
Zack barely knew who these people were.
“Your mother had a rather brilliant idea recently,” Isaiah said at the end of his spiel. “One of her friends from college – Ramona Huxley, don’t know if you remember her – has a charming and very pretty daughter who is about to start her junior year at William & Mary…”
Zack had to restrain the eyeroll threatening his skull. “Alesia Huxley, right?”
“Yes! So you know her?”
“I dated her last year, Dad.”
“You did?”
“Yup. For a whole two weeks before we mutually decided to end it.” Zack took a large bite out of his sandwich. “So if you’re thinking of setting me up with her, I can already tell you that it’s not going to work out.” He swallowed, refusing to choke on the bit of sundried tomato that threatened his windpipe.
“Zachary,” his father said, moody visage unwavering, “you’re thirty years old and still acting like you’re twenty. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re not getting younger.”
“Come on, Dad, you’re acting like I’m your aging daughter with the dusty uterus instead of your virile son who doesn’t have the fate of the family hanging over his head, anyway.”
Isaiah inhaled a breath deep enough to choke on. “Your oldest brother…”
“Is going to marry one of the prettiest, wealthiest single women in New York, I know, I know. I’ll make sure to be at the wedding and in all the pictures.” Zack wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand. “And Evan will probably marry the daughter of an up and coming Chinese businessman to solidify those ties.”
“Zachary.”
“What do you want from me? I’m not inheriting the company. I’m not your only son.”
`Isaiah laid a firm hand on the table. Not intimidating, not strong, but firm. The man was not interested in sending the fear of God into his son. What he wanted was to catch Zack’s undivided attention, knocking him off whatever train of thought he had hitched a ride on.
“You do not have many expectations, no,” he softly said. “But the ones you do bear are still as important as your brothers’.”
Zack sighed. “I’m not interested in heiresses, Dad. I’m sorry. I’ve dated plenty, both to your knowledge and outside of it. They’re fun, but way, way, way too intense for me.”
“I don’t mean in making us more business and financial connections, Zachary, although your mother and I certainly wouldn’t turn them away.”
Something sour went down Zack’s throat. “Then what?”
“Your mother may be more rigid about this than I am, but ultimately, all I really care about is you maintaining some decorum in your personal life. Our business hinges on us having good standing with the buyers of the world. Buyers who have their own rigid standards for how our family should act. I don’t care who you date in the end.” He drank from his glass. “But I want to make it clear that any and all antics must be reined in. You are not twenty-one anymore. You are thirty. Just because you are the youngest of three sons does not mean that you can have any image that you want. Being a Bohemian is all well and good in certain circles, Zachary, but at some point you must settle down.”
Zack could barely believe his ears. “I didn’t think I was that crazy…” He knew his parents did not approve of how often he showed up in the tabloids, where every so-called journalist and internet comment speculated who he was dating next and what kind of drugs he did to fuel his libido and creative energy. They did not care that he spent his adult life thus far doing “art,” but the fact he made decent money from it and received some acclaim from the art world’s toughest critics canceled out some of the more embarrassing aspects of saying, “This is Daniel, the good Firstborn who will soon be marrying a princess. This is Evan, the ambitious rugrat now tearing up the business world across the globe. And this is Zack… he… paints pictures of naked people.”
“Is this coming from Dad the steel magnate, or Dad the concerned father of three?”
“When you reach my position, Zachary, it’s both. I must always consider the image of our family, but contrary to what you may currently believe, I want my children to be accomplished and satisfied. I remember what it was like to be your age.”
“You were married by my age.”
“Only recently married. We didn’t have Daniel until I was in my thirties.” Isaiah waved off the approaching waiter. He didn’t continue until he was sure they had more privacy. “But I was single and in my twenties once. I dated my fair-share of women, including those my own parents would have never approved of… and they were the liberal ones compared to my Grandmother, who insisted I marry a good, formerly Jewish woman.”
Zack scrunched his nose. “How is that possible?”
“Conceal it like my grandparents had.”
I can’t believe I told Rachel about the Feldsteins. It was a hush-hush secret when Zack was growing up, although he couldn’t understand why his grandmother honored the traditional Jewish holidays in her chambers but acted like Christmas was the only winter holiday in public. My generation doesn’t care as much, right? Daniel and Evan had never shown any interest in their Jewish heritage, and neither had Zack. If any of them married a Jewish woman, it would have been complete coincidence. Not like Great-Grandmother Feldstein was still alive to relish it.
But he also knew that he was not supposed to ever bring it up. Definitely not around the press, because there were families that would treat them differently, whether it was socially acceptable or not. Another thing Zack found deplorable about the class he had been born into. Who cared what anyone’s religion was? How many “recovering Catholics” had he met through the years? There was more than one affluent Muslim family holding their heads up high at the country club and shooting dirty looks back at the people who glared at them first. The Singaporean Wu family who kept their American home near the Feldman estate flaunted their wealth and sophistication every chance they had. The upper class – and the beyond superior class, like the one Zachary and his neighbor Kathryn Alison were technically children of – was slowly becoming more and more diversified whether the old guard approved of it or not. But Isaiah Feldman would grit his teeth to have someone outside of the family bring up his supposed heritage. “My great-grandparents were Slovenian, this is true,” he once curtly told a nosy journalist. “But they had the understanding that this is America, and the past doesn’t matter. My own genetic makeup is remarkably German thanks to my grandmother and mother, thank you.” He left out the Polish woman his own grandmother had married. And his Ashkenazi German mother. Or so the family legends declared. Henrietta Feldman’s family – who had fled Nazi Germany, ahem – was from Berlin, and that was all anyone said about that.
Zack’s mother was a smattering of German as well. She loved pointing that out.
The lies people like my family tell. Zack was not raised in the Jewish faith. If he had children, they would not be either. By the next generation of Feldmans, it could very well be completely erased from the family history books.
Was that okay? Were they treating it as a blemish, or one of those things people grow away from after raising children in America?
Zack looked away from his father’s glistening blue eyes. “I don’t show up in the papers on purpose,” he finally said. “Regardless of what Mom may insist. I’m living my life. I happen to enjoy the company of women. I admit I’ve made a few blunders in the type of women I date. But like you said, Dad… you know what it’s like to be single in your twenties.”
His father cocked his lips into a ruthless grin. “Probably even better these days. Back in mine, we had to be a bit more diligent.”
“Ah, but now we have social media and more technologically advanced paparazzi. So while women are sexually freer than ever, everyone else knows about it too.”
They toasted their drinks to that.
“Don’t have any illegitimate siblings out there, do I?”
“Not to my knowledge.” Isaiah lowered his voice. “But between you and me, I hear I have a half-sister out there somewhere.”
“No way. Not Pop spreading his seed like a dandelion.”
Isaiah shrugged. “I never heard more than a few whispers growing up. If she exists, she’s either dead or so hidden away she may not even know who she is.”
What a blasé way to say that about his own supposed sister. “Does Uncle Roy know?”
“Ah, your uncle…”
‘He’s in town, you know. Got in about a week ago. Have you seen him yet?”
“I can’t say he’s stopped by the house.”
Zack rolled his eyes. While both of his parents had blue eyes, everyone told him that his more resembled his mother’s light sky blue ones instead of his father’s deep cerulean blues. Can’t say I’ve ever stared at them for myself. “He’s not going to, either. You could send a whole parade to grab him off his yacht and he would go down with the biggest fight you’ve ever seen.”
Isaiah’s lip twitched. “Yes. He is rather stubborn like that.”
“You should go down to the marina and see him. Besides! You haven’t seen the changes I’ve made to the only woman I’ve ever truly loved.”
“I’m sure she’s delightful, son.” Isaiah left it at that. Like with art, he didn’t share the same passion for the marina life. He was far more likely to go to the opera with Daniel or an antique car show with Evan. Boating had skipped a generation and fell upon Zack’s shoulders.
And Isaiah was as stubborn as his big brother Roy. Except where one was too stubborn to give up on the family business, the other was too stubborn to ever go back. Sometimes I swear I will never forgive my uncle for abdicating his rightful inheritance and making my father the supreme ruler of Feldman Steel. What kind of life would Zack have lived if he truly grew up the youngest son of the youngest son in a world where only the oldest truly mattered?
“Whatever happened to the young woman you were dating in undergrad?”
Zack, who had almost finished his sandwich, suddenly lost his appetite. “Why are you bringing her up?”
“Because she’s the last woman I remember you being serious about.”
“You’re sounding more like Mom right now.” Who was this man? Since when did Zack’s father consider himself that invested in his youngest son’s love life?
“I’m guessing by that tone that it didn’t end well.”
“She cheated on me, Dad.”
Isaiah sighed. “I seem to recall now.”
“Yeah, bit of a sore spot, huh?”
“Son,” Zack’s father continued to shake his head. “Enjoy your youth, but don’t let your past hold you back from embracing your future.” He stood up, coat slung over his arm. “I need to go.”
Zack was left to stare at the wall after his father showed himself out. A lunch discussing his past, his future, and all the shit in between? Sounded like the kind of thing he needed a friend to help recover from.
Usually, he would have called Seth and demanded they go out drinking. That day, however, he had other ideas.