Five Night Stand: A Novel by Richard J. Alley

Author:Richard J. Alley [Alley, Richard J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2015-05-11T23:00:00+00:00

6.

Guests are filing in and Ben signals to Marcie to get off of her phone. She turns her back to him and continues her low-volume argument. Ben shows a couple to their table. He should fire Marcie, he knows, for a myriad of reasons, but it is an asset, he also knows, to have guests greeted at the door by those breasts and then escorted to a table by that ass. Marcie is as much a decoration and fixture as the deco wall sconces and ornate millwork on the bar.

“What is it you’re waiting on?” Ben asks Andrew as he crosses back to the hostess stand. Andrew is leaning against the bar and staring at the door with a steaming cup of coffee at his elbow.

“What? Nothing, just watching the customers.”

“She’s coming back tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she know your auspicious beginnings yet?”

“Shut it, Ben.”

Though Andrew Sexton knows who to ask for when he enters the hushed womb of Brooks Brothers, he never goes there anymore. He knows where and how to order off-menu from Midtown to Chelsea to SoHo. His favorite restaurant, though, serves Vietnamese off the books from a converted apartment over a donut shop in Alphabet City. If he ever needs to get someplace, a car service could be at his door in minutes, yet he’s memorized the subway and crosstown bus schedules.

Andrew Sexton was raised among privilege, attending the best schools and running with the most starched of Upper West Side boys and girls. His grooming was looked after and impeccable, and he was raised to take over the investment banking of his father and his father before him. It is a pedigree that boasts founding fathers of banks, foundations, a city, and a country. Andrew wants none of it. “What is it you want, Andrew?” a girl once asked him, a lily-white girl of seventeen in her pink bedroom with fresh linens and a view of Central Park. She was astride young Andrew in name-brand bra and panties, but she wasn’t talking about sex. She knew Andrew wanted her—they all did. She wanted to know what he wanted from life, what he might provide her from those steel and glass buildings at the southern tip of her island. She ran the manicured nail of a long finger down his hairless teenage chest and asked again: “What is it you want?”

“I’m going to be an artist.”

It was the answer she wasn’t expecting; it was the first time he’d said it out loud and surprised even himself when it came from his lips. It would be the last thing anyone expected to hear from a Sexton. And what sort of artist? They would ask. Fine arts? Studies in Rome and Paris? Days spent copying the masters in the Louvre and Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, champagne-filled nights in the arms of a baroness? That was all acceptable, though barely—a distraction and hobby for his early years. Abstract expressionism? A bit more difficult to swallow, to convince Mother and Father’s friends that it is worthwhile.

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