“I apologize for my behavior,” he said. I wasn’t sure how to ask him about his family, how far to go, and what I should know. But it came spilling out of him anyway.
“My father is in more trouble than we ever thought,” ZK said, visibly stiffening, reverting to some schooled behavior. “There are issues now for the whole family.” He said he was reluctant to go into the details, but gradually it came pouring out.
Years ago his father had invested with Bernie Madoff and lost most of the family fortune, which was bad enough. But as time passed and many of the investigations took years to complete, it surfaced that Northcott Sr. had not only invested with the Ponzi con man but fronted the fund to many families in his social set for preferred fees in the last days of the scam. He narrowly avoided a prison term by ratting out other people he knew who had done the same thing, ruining their families as a result. The revelations were coming to light after years and years of investigations. As a result, at sixty-eight he earned the animosity of his oldest friends in New York’s Social Register.
ZK’s mother filed for divorce to protect herself and the other children from further repercussions, and his father had withdrawn to their mansion on Gin Lane, one of the last original houses near Georgica Beach, not far from the famous Grey Gardens.
His father had squandered the remaining family funds to pay his hefty legal fees to avoid jail, failing to pay the bank mortgage. Now the Bank of America—a bank the Northcotts helped found in 1904—had sold the land and begun the process of auctioning the actual house out from under him plank by plank. It was the house in which ZK had spent every summer of his childhood.
56
It was remarkable how dull Tabitha’s house had become since she remained sequestered in her room. The houseguests dwindled, including Flo and Balty. Zoya was especially happy I had decided to stay a few days. She told Tabitha, hoping that would motivate her to leave her room, but it didn’t.
Occasional reporters would appear outside and try to gain entry, but it seemed that Robert Francis or a PR agent or someone had successfully kept a lid on the incident at the Talkhouse. It made me think that for every LiLo event we heard about on TMZ, there were at least two or three more.
Jess was haggling with the gallery about the date, and, though she was confident they would come through, she was afraid to let me send out my eBlast. Keeping track of days passing was a challenge. Waking up at noon and staying up until four in the morning made it hard to determine where one day ended and another began.
The next night I shared my fanciful pursuit of Donna Karan with ZK. He laughed.
“Lisbeth Dulac has the hottest indie fashion blog and you’re not sure you’re worthy to meet Donna Karan?” he said. “These are the things that make me wonder whether you arrived here from outer space. Would it help to meet Donna’s daughter, Gabby?” he asked. I nodded eagerly.
“So let’s go to Tutto,” he said. Tutto Il Giorno was this ultracool Italian restaurant in Sag Harbor owned by Donna Karan’s daughter, Gabby. True to form, ZK was an old buddy of Gabby’s husband, Gianpaolo, who shared ZK’s passion for racing Ducati motorcycles. I decided to take my first check and celebrate and, at the same time, make a potential connection for Designer X.
ZK picked me up at Tabitha’s on his Ducati 1100 S, and before long we were eating and drinking the night away with Gianpaolo, Gabby, and Maurizio, the restaurant’s other owner and chef. Espresso martinis were the drink of choice. Gabby was more than generous in accepting my invitation to the forthcoming Designer X fashion show. She said she would be heading back to the city the next day and would love to attend.
As we closed the restaurant down, the men began to argue about the relative merits of their motorcycles. This turned into a bet, and they decided to race to Sagaponack.
I held on to ZK for my life as we zipped down the back roads of Sag Harbor to Sagaponack. ZK was winning, but I think he pulled back when he noticed my nails digging into his leather jacket. I was holding on in sheer terror. We smoothly pulled into the driveway of an empty ultramodern mansion owned by a Bosnian multimillionaire friend of Maurizio’s. After a few touches of the security pad, we were all inside.
Here was an entire nine-bedroom villa fully lit up without a soul in sight. In the Hamptons the locals call these “zombie houses”—kept absolutely dustless, the refrigerator fully stocked, the wine cellar with three hundred bottles chilled exactly at fifty-five degrees, the air-conditioning full blast throughout the house, with not a leaf in the swimming pool in the middle of the summer. It was just one of the thousands of mansions expensively maintained throughout the Hamptons, with landscape lighting illuminating every tree on the property throughout the night as if it were Christmas.
ZK grabbed a twenty-year-old bottle of wine and some glasses as we all drifted through the rooms of the house.
“Here’s to being in the Limelight,” ZK said to me as we toasted. After a little while, Maurizio and Gianpaolo wandered off and ZK gave me a tour of the trove of modern art displayed throughout the house—artists that ZK knew well and sometimes personally. Artists I didn’t have a clue about. I nodded as if I had some awareness of art history, which I did not. Nervously spinning my bracelet about my wrist, I worried once again that I was over my head with ZK. But he was so comfortably inebriated and we were so relaxed in each other’s company, I felt reassured.
“We’re really just two drifters, you know,” ZK said to me. “We should escape! I could start over in L.A. We don’t have to stay here. We’d be better off leaving. It would be good for you, too, a new fashion world to conquer.” I wondered if he intended to leave everyone he knew and grew up with. More than that, I wondered if he really meant to take me to L.A. with him. The fantasy made my head spin.
We kissed by the pool and kissed in the living room. We kissed again in the kitchen and kissed in bedroom after bedroom after bedroom until we were more than kissing. We stripped off our clothes, letting them fall into puddles on the lacquered oak floors, and fell into the nearest bed.
Before, ZK’s kisses would sweep me away, seizing me, engulfing me. But that night we were unhurried and slow, deliberately drowning in each other’s arms, soothing each other and losing who we were.
“I’m not Holly. I’m not Lula Mae, either,” Audrey said in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “I don’t know who I am. I’m like Cat here, a no-name slob.” Like Audrey pretending to be Lula Mae pretending to be Holly Golightly, I pretended to be somebody I wasn’t and ZK was my Fred. His inner life was so secret; who knew who he was pretending to be?
We cuddled in the master bedroom beneath the weight of luxurious comforters overlooking an arbor that glowed in the dark sky. That night the lost lonely little boy inside ZK, not the flawless dashing Kennedyesque fashion darling, made me shiver and melt. It was the man who seemed apart; more so after sharing with me his family’s fall from fortune. Resting in his arms, I pulled myself tight against his body.
Somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up with a start and realized ZK was watching me. We kissed again and I curled up into him, trying to hold every part of him close. Comparing this moment to any other moment in my life, I couldn’t recall being more content; words didn’t come close to truly describing how I felt.
“It’s a shame that you fell for someone like me,” he said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
I put my finger to his lips.
“Be quiet. Don’t say that,” I said and snuggled closer. Someday I would tell him the truth about where I came from, and he would realize how little his father’s stature and money mattered to me.