The Suitors Read Online Free Page B

courted ourselves by people dazzled by money, and we could smell them a mile away.
    Romantic idealists, my sister and I were interested only in love and friendship. Money turned out to be a most inconvenient advantage, attracting fortune hunters while often driving everyone else away. Few decent men even dared approach us if they weren’t well-off, and if they were, they couldn’t quite stomach the fact that we frankly didn’t need them to get by. It was the same thingwith friendship. How could we invite people on holiday or to a restaurant if they couldn’t return the favor? It was equally complicated for us to give our friends gifts without unintentionally making them feel obligated to us.
    “No arrogance, no ostentation”: the mantra of our childhood. As if we’d needed that! Because we were so miserably conscious of our wealth that we had always tried obsessively to hide it from our friends.
    Sometimes that was easy. We never mentioned our trips on private jets or those endless afternoons in the changing rooms of couture houses with our mother, the couturier, and his head seamstress. And we hardly risked bumping into our little pals chez Givenchy, Saint-Laurent, Ungaro, or on the tarmac at Le Bourget, Teterboro, or Biggin Hill.
    Our predicament turned dicey when we had to convert our nanny into an English granny, or the driver picking us up at school into a family friend. It became frankly hair-raising when we had to keep coming up with the appropriate traffic jams to explain being late for school on Monday morning after a round-trip to New York on the Concorde.
    Our house betrayed us. Rare were the friends Marie and I dared invite home. We’d tell them that our town house was just an ordinary apartment building shelteringmany families. Already puzzled by the maze of service stairs we climbed to reach our floor (thus avoiding our imposing front door, which would have given the game away), our guests invariably wondered why there was no kitchen and no bedroom for our parents. So we’d casually refer to our “duplex” to reassure them, as well as to account for the dumbwaiter that delivered our meals, which were revolting, actually, because our chef, no doubt considering himself too distinguished to feed mere children, handed this chore off to a kitchen boy.
    Later, during those tough internships when our father decided to introduce us to the real world, Marie and I continued honing our skills in the art of dissimulation. At one point I was a lowly employee in the accounting department of a construction and public works firm where I wasn’t allowed to leave the building without permission from my boss, a truly odious bully. I used to slip quietly away, however, to the office of the CEO (a living god accessible only to department heads), who just happened to be a friend of my parents and welcomed me with piping hot coffee and a game of chess. One day my creepy little boss discovered the scam. Drenched in sweat and worry, he buttonholed me in a hall to apologize while begging me to put in a good word for him. His obsequious flip-floppingdisgusted me, but I was chiefly relieved that my colleagues, who had taken me under their wing (and for whom I surreptitiously punched in every other day), did not suspect a thing. Otherwise, they might have felt like fools, and in a way, they would have been right, since I had never really been one of them and thus had never needed their protection, which my visits with the CEO would have made cruelly clear.
    I’d been a coward, behaving like someone safely ensconced in a cushy position. In my defense, though, I should say that at that time, the wealthy were all considered assholes. And it didn’t help that most people I met flaunted their “political consciousness” mainly by posing as enemies of the rich, a situation that would reverse itself ten years later, when heirs and heiresses would be welcomed to parade around in magazines like movie stars. Deep down, though, nothing