The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 21: July 16

Today I visited a summer camp attended by a lot of wealthy New York City kids. I had not been around so many eleven-year-old girls since I was eleven. The campers were composed, and stylish, and, sure, in the Maine woods, where one of the main activities was “llama care,” their preternatural confidence and sense of entitlement struck me as pointless survival skills, but most of their lives weren’t happening in the Maine woods. I found myself harshly judging these children. They would get everything they wanted in life (real life), and would it even prove a challenge? Probably not as challenging as keeping the llamas’ fur from snarling. Probably not as challenging as sleeping in an incredibly spacious teepee. Achieving happiness, well, that was another matter, but isn’t it for everyone? In this elusive quest, the wealthy are not especially burdened, though perhaps they feel the failure more acutely. It is maybe harder not to get something if you’ve mostly always gotten everything.

Certain recent encounters with very rich friends (people who were rich from birth) have confirmed: we are, on a basic psychological level, different people, and these differences can rankle me morally. My moral rankle, however, is complicated. It’s disingenuous. It’s a form of self-loathing. Because for many years, I wished more than anything that I had been born rich. My family was middle-class and rich by the standards of many, including my friends. (I attended a public school near the projects; my best friend lived in a near-derelict apartment building that, in keeping with the occasionally benevolent ironies of Maine real estate, had a beautiful view of the harbor.) But I knew my family could be much, much richer. As an eight-year-old my fantasy was concrete, modest, and thus not beyond the realm of possibility, except that it completely was. I wanted to live in an old mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Very specifically Greenwich, a place I’d never been. I chose Greenwich because each Sunday I read the New York Times Magazine’s real estate section. I cut out pictures of mansions for sale in Greenwich and tacked them to my bulletin board. I knew, even as a kid, that a belief in one’s ceaseless entitlement could not be acquired later in life. Even if I managed to become rich, I would always be faking entitlement.

Whatever. I was happy to fake it.

Since my parents did not share my wealth fantasy, I eventually discovered boys to be the quicker route. In high school I dated a boy with money, or what counted as money in my town. He wore torn sweaters and drove an Audi and was adept at stealing radar detectors from the country club parking lot, a talent I understood as his form of artistic expression because he was rich. He didn’t need to steal anything. (I was not wrong about his creative gifts; he would grow up to become a successful defrauder of insurance companies.)

After high school I fell in love with a rich boy from Virginia. (I didn’t fall in love with him because he was rich; he remains, other than my husband, the love of my life.) Through him I lived the rich life I’d dreamed my entire childhood of living, sort of. Richmond was no Greenwich. His family owned (I can still remember) two Audis, a Porsche, a Saab, and a BMW. They had a beach house, a hunting property, and a ski condo. That I loved him so much, and that his family was so warm and inclusive, meant that I fell into his world like a thirsty girl into a well. Every once in a while I’d poke my head out and wonder, What am I doing here? I couldn’t have a conversation with his female friends without faking an identity of assumed ease and privilege (and ease with privilege). These girls flew to London for the weekend to shop for debutante dresses. Their debutante parties were decorated by set designers from Cats. (They had debutante parties!) All of his friends went to Ivy League schools, even the self-admittedly dumb friends. Where I came from, being admitted to such schools was like winning the escape lottery, and many smart people I knew didn’t win, and ended up at the paper mill or a local community college. Every once in a while I’d call home exhausted and upset — upset by the amount of energy it took to fit in, upset that I cared to expend that energy in the first place. I think my parents were relieved by my periodic cracks. I imagine they otherwise thought they’d lost me to another planet, one to which theirs offered very infrequent shuttle runs.

Still, I loved this boyfriend; I was convinced I would marry him. This belief resolved certain anxieties and illogicalities (despite my desire to be rich, I wanted to be a novelist). Of the many pressures I felt as I one-eye squinted toward adulthood, the pressure to support myself, or the question of how I would do so over the long term (and in the manner to which I was newly accustomed) was not one of them. It’s not as though I lost my drive. I made good grades because I always did. I overachieved because I always did. I got grants and pursued non-remunerative careers because that’s what interested me. But to know in the back of my mind that I would always have a very nice place to live, and money to eat in very nice restaurants and to buy very nice clothes and to go on very nice vacations, well, this was extraordinarily calming to me.

At a certain point, however, wealth — not money but lots of money—started to represent, ironically, the inverse of possibility. It seemed oppressive; it changed people’s circuitry. One summer, my boyfriend and I accompanied his family on a trip to Spain. We ate every meal with his family. His parents and I talked more than was advantageous, if we wanted to remain fond of one another, about important matters. His father was conservative; he was also extremely perceptive, altruistic, and intelligent, which these days does not go without saying. He’d grown up with nothing; he was a self-made man. Still, it was wearing and occasionally enraging to tussle with him on political and social topics while I was staying in the villa he’d paid for, and eating the many fancy meals he paid for. I felt guilty that I experienced anything other than gratitude toward him.

Two years later, my relationship with my boyfriend began to falter. I’d like to claim that this faltering had nothing to do with the fact that, once I hit my early twenties, I no longer fantasized about being rich. (I fantasized, at most, about being able to pay my bills. This seemed ambition enough where money was concerned.) Soon I would be dating a broke PhD student with a disregard for money so entrenched that he would spend a semester living rent-free in a tent pitched on the concrete floor of a friend’s garage. I learned to be a different person through him, and maybe I accomplished this on my own, but it doesn’t, even at a remove of a few decades, feel that way. I needed guidance. I was still at that point where a boyfriend was an opportunity to try out different identities, not just an opportunity to have sex and be loved. As my male friend in graduate school once said, “Men want a relationship, but women expect a world.” I don’t think, in other words, that my expectations were atypical, or that I was atypically using men as a means to better, or simply alter, because my goals had changed, my circumstances. According to this friend, I was behaving like every other woman he knew. I’ve never considered whether or not I provided the men I dated a new identity to try out. What would it have been? I was blonde and clever and fun, but I can’t imagine that I changed a man’s world as they often changed, or promised to change, mine.