Everything Changes

and at some point during that thrilling, sleepless weekend, I forgot to worry about it and just accepted that she was mine, that it could really be this easy, and the way she devoured me left no doubts that I was hers as well.
    “Come and meet my parents,” she said to me a few months later.
    Her parents lived a few blocks over from her apartment on the Upper East Side. When I arrived, the uniformed doorman informed me that I was expected. “What floor?” I said.
    “Fifteen.”
    “Fifteen what?”
    He just smiled and pointed toward the elevator. “Just fifteen.”
    The elevator opened into a private vestibule with only one door, at which Hope was waiting, looking radiant in a white cashmere sweater and black stretch pants and boots. She led me into a gargantuan anteroom with a marble floor and a large diamond-shaped skylight cut into the high ceiling. There were doors at various intervals, leading deeper into the apartment, and at the far end of the room was a grand staircase that went up to the second floor. I’d heard about apartments like this, had seen them in movies, but I never really believed real people actually lived in them. “Nice place,” I said.
    “Don’t let it freak you out,” she said apologetically.
    I shook my head. “It’s beautiful.”
    Hope’s father, Jack Seacord, had inherited his father’s medical supply company and grown it into a publicly traded, multinational conglomerate, of which he was still majority owner and CEO. He was a large, athletic man in his late fifties whose small, commanding features were jammed between the jutting slabs of his prominent forehead and chin. His smile was plastic, like a politician’s, and he had a quick, efficient manner about him, shaking my hand and sizing me up in the same instant. His lone displays of affection were reserved for Hope and seemed just a tad abnormal to me, his kisses landing squarely on her mouth, his hand resting casually on her backside, fingers stroking absently as he held her next to him.
    Hope’s mother, Vivian, was a stunning woman, a long-limbed brunette with a gleaming, Botox-smooth porcelain complexion, a pixie haircut, and a languid, feline expression, a cat in sultry repose. In her prime, she’d actually been a rated tennis player. Now she sat on the boards of various museums and philanthropic foundations, and had this whole down-to-earth vibe that usually seemed so contrived in obscenely wealthy women, but seemed completely genuine in her case.
    He was unimpressed. She thought I was hilarious, and told me so repeatedly, her loud laughs reverberating off the ceilings. Neither thought I was good enough for Hope, but naturally they were too polite to say so. It was evident in the way Jack nodded seriously as I explained what I did for the Spandler Corporation, his seeming lack of condescension simply a highly stylized version of it. “I know the company,” he said. “Great little outfit.” Vivian found me to be refreshingly grounded, which was fine for passing the time, but in no way made me a suitable mate for Hope. Hope’s only sibling, an older sister named Claire, was a militant lesbian living in LA, which Vivian mentioned with contrived pride at every possible opportunity, the word “lesbian” rolling off her lips with a practiced flourish. Claire’s outing had left Hope as the sole remaining member of the Seacord progeny to bear the burden of her parents’ dreams of succession, and that was a pretty tall order for a middleman to fill. So the dinner was a friendly affair, warm even, but there was a general undercurrent of shoulders being shrugged in the manner of the underwhelmed.
    After dinner, Hope and I cuddled on a couch in one of the many densely decorated dens scattered throughout the labyrinthine halls of the massive apartment. “So,” she said, curling up into me. “What do you think?”
    “They seemed great.”
    “Oh, come on,” she said, hitting my chest lightly. “They were awful. But they mean well.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “It’s okay, Zack. I’m not blind.”
    “No. I meant the part about them meaning well. I didn’t get that at all.”
    She giggled and kissed me.
    “Your father seemed disappointed.”
    “He’s just very protective.”
    That’s because he’s maybe a little too into you.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got that.”
    “Lucky for you, they don’t get a vote.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    “They won’t cut you off, or something?”
    Hope laughed.