Our bosses weren’t born this way, eccentrics on the Forbes list. They were regular, middle-class people once, who used to do their own laundry and choose their own bug spray and drive their own cars. We watch them struggle to remain themselves, but wealth is changing them. They are accustomed to people making their path through life as frictionless as possible. There is no coming back from that, except in a Goldie Hawn movie. We are changing, too. We’ve gotten used to having money in the bank, going to the bookstore instead of the library, buying clothes or groceries without checking the prices first. We remember our life before, when we paid the dental school in installments for the work of removing our teeth. There are a lot of things we will look the other way from to avoid going back. The world around us is changing, too, and we are the ones changing it. The yawning income gap that separates us from our bosses is replicated now in the gap that separates us from our friends and neighbors. Our streets used to be full of teachers and mechanics and seamstresses and artists, but now only lawyers and bankers and trust fund kids can afford to stay, those of us whose wagons are hitched, in one way or another, to the ultrarich. We fill the nearby schools with our children, whom we have raised on organic fruits and nanny shares and test prep tutors. We are afraid to tally the cost of all the choices we’ve made. We think thank God I paid off my student loans. Thank God I bought before the market went nuts. Thank God this job isn’t going anywhere. We would have to be an idiot to get ourselves fired from this job. Or not an idiot, just too furious to function, too angry to pretend.

21

Phoebe

Phoebe and James walked together along the cottage path. It was like being in the wings of a theater—people running this way and that, some in costume and some all in black with headphones and clipboards, ferrying odd items to the party on the other side of the terrace wall: a rolled-up rug, a doll-sized bicycle, a gleaming steel pail. Then they turned left, passing between two cottages, and followed a dirt path up the hillside. They fell into a familiar ease. She’d been awkward as hell the first few times James drove her and Ted. She tried to act natural in the back seat while Ted, beside her, was consumed in his work. One day she asked if she could sit up front, and from that day on, she genuinely looked forward to James’s company, especially when it was just the two of them.