That first night, we arrived at his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, red brick with a black oak door, a tall stoop leading up to it. He ushered me into a foyer with high ceilings, reflective walls, splashy art providing the only color against a minimalist palette. We went to his industrial-sized kitchen with a giant stove, an outsize honed-granite island. He offered me a seat on one of its chrome-and-leather stools and poured us each a glass of scotch in cut-crystal tumblers. The ice cubes were perfectly square and crystal clear too, no cloudy cubes in this house.

It wasn’t that I was unduly impressed. I’d been in too many enormous, eye-wateringly expensive houses and apartments in New York by that point. I had had nights with men in several-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suites, men from far-off, unknown locations, spending an evening in the city before they jetted back to Europe or South America or California. My college boyfriend lived on Fifth Avenue. His liveried doorman called me Miss MacDonald.

But with Tom, it was different. Even the nouveau riche possess a learned, blasé way of commenting on their obscene wealth; they swaggered more than their old-money counterparts, but they knew that any display of giddiness or boastfulness was unseemly. Tom, however, exulted in it. He wanted to show off all this extravagance. It was as if he had just won the house as a prize, fully furnished, and wanted to parade his trophy before my eyes. I thought it was sweet, endearing even, that he had the temerity to be so vulnerable. Most men, especially men of power, shy away from any emotion close to excitement.

“Let me give you a tour!” he said, shaking the ice in his glass. He took my hand and guided me out of the kitchen, into the living room. There were portraits on these walls of his daughter, of his ex-wife, and instead of ducking my head in embarrassment, I went up and took a closer peek. “Apologies for that. This is still half her house, after all.” The ex-wife was pretty, tall and dirty blond, a tender smile. Their daughter looked like him.

“It’s no problem,” I said, before he led me away to another room, a dining room, and then a den, a windowless home office he called his tomb that included an old gas fireplace with a marble surround, wainscoted wooden paneling, slightly cheesy, over-restored nineteenth century hunting-party paintings, each lit with its own brass picture lamp. A mounted fox head or two would have been at home in that space.