ANONYMOUS DONOR by Colleen Morrissey
Of course, Paula met the millionaire when he backed into her car. She was away at the time. She worked as an outreach coordinator for a nonprofit operating out of downtown Minneapolis. The parking was plentiful but expensive, so she took the bus. He left a note.
Hi, it said, I backed into your car this afternoon. I’m really sorry. Please give me a call and let me know what I can do. – Anthony. And he wrote his number.
She peered at her bumper – a thin scratch in the paint, perhaps two inches long, and there might have been a very small dent. When she called, she thanked him for doing the right thing.
“Oh, of course,” he said. His voice was warm and careful, like a radio announcer’s.
She said she’d get two estimates at two different body shops to make sure they got a fair deal and then would let him know.
“I’ll probably just pay you out of pocket,” he said. “Premiums, you know.”
Even though the damage seemed to be so minimal, both estimates topped a thousand dollars.
“Since they’re both so high,” she said when she called him back, “I’d be willing to get a third estimate at a body shop of your choice.”
“No, no, that’s fine. I expected something like that. Can you email me the estimates, just for my records, and maybe I can cut you a check?”
His email address had a domain that she wasn’t familiar with, “inzomniac,” followed by the rudimentary “.com.” When he replied thanking her for sending the estimates, his email had an automatic signature: under his name, Anthony Barrett, “Inzomniac, Inc.”
She Googled “Inzomniac” and found a website advertising an app whose tagline was Can’t sleep? Don’t waste the night. You signed up for an account and entered your location, and when you launched the app, it would point you to late-night or 24‑hour bars, laundromats, or other businesses. The “Inzomniac Meetup” option would show your location to other users who’d opted in, if you wanted to “commiserate your sleeplessness and while away the wee small hours in good company.” Millions of people had purchased it, according to the download counter. Paula clicked the “about” page and found at the top of a short list of bios, Anthony Barrett: Founder & CEO. Anthony came up with the idea for Inzomniac in his junior year of college when, wandering the halls of his dormitory at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, looking for someone, anyone else who couldn’t sleep, he wished there was a way for insomniacs to find each other. That was it. The other staff bios had pictures of various young people hamming for the camera with their lists of quirky weekend interests alongside, but Anthony’s had just the one sentence and no picture.
They met in person at the body shop. Paula was surprised to find that he looked like he did real work and owned real things. She had been expecting, based on the fact that he was the creator of a mobile app with a Z in the title, some thin hipster-nerd with scruffy hair and thick glasses. But he was well-groomed, with a wide, square chin and a sharp haircut. So unlike the men she had dated and who were her friends. They always seemed to retain something of boyishness despite the fact that they all grew beards once they hit twenty-two. Anthony looked put-together.
He held out his hand to shake hers. “Paula,” he said. “Honda Accord. I’m so sorry.”
After he wrote the check for the estimate, he asked if she would like to go get coffee while they waited for the repairs to be done – just a fender-bender, and they had a replacement part already in stock, so it would only take an afternoon. After receiving his cup, he wanted to pay for hers as well, but Paula adamantly refused. “You’re paying for the repair, no more owed.”
“Oh, I just wanted to buy you coffee.”
She waved him off, hiding her pleasure by turning to pay the barista.
At their table, she asked him about creating his app, confessing that she’d been unable to help Googling him.
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh only half-lightened by a laugh, “I have horrible insomnia, since I was a kid. I only get a full night’s sleep maybe fifty percent of the time. Other times, if I get there at all, I can’t get there until three or four. There’s only so long you can try to work during those times, wired as you are, and I’d end up feeling like I was wasting my time watching TV or on the internet or something. And it was so isolating. So – the app.”
“Did people sign up right away?”
“At first, it was just me and this weirdo kid who went to Minnesota too, meeting up in an all-night diner near campus. But I got interviewed by the Minnesota Daily about it because my roommate was on the paper staff, and then lots of people signed up, and it turned into an actual business. Now we’ve got most of the major cities in the U.S. covered, along with some European ones.”
“Do you still keep an account?”
“I do. But now – I don’t know. It feels weird to use it, somehow, anymore. So I end up in bed with my phone in my hand, refreshing my Twitter feed until five a.m.”
“Right back where you started,” Paula said.
He smiled at her. “Right back where I started.”
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t need to sleep as much,” Paula said.
Anthony shook his head. “You know not what you ask.”
Paula debated asking the question forefront in her mind, but something about the way Anthony talked made her feel it would be funny and not uncomfortable. “Do people use your app for sex?” she asked.
He grimaced good-naturedly and admitted, “Yes – but, you know, most of it is very wholesome, very PG.”
Paula laughed.
“I’m serious. People send us emails all the time with pictures of their late-night bowling leagues they’ve organized through the app, their fantasy football teams that meet at 3 a.m., dozens of people coordinating. It’s sweet.”
“But it doesn’t help you anymore,” Paula said. “You’re in bed checking Twitter.”
Anthony leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh, but he was smiling. “I’m in bed, checking Twitter.”
* * *
Naturally, they began dating. Paula knew Anthony must have some money, but she didn’t find out just how much until she saw his apartment for the first time. He lived in the Mill District, the fashionable part of the Downtown East neighborhood that was replete with museums, restaurants, and music venues. She had been prepared to pity him for the run-down closet he no doubt occupied. But, riding in his car for a nightcap after dinner one night early on, they turned off Third Avenue into the parking garage of The Carlyle, a luxury high-rise Paula knew by reputation only.
Paula found she couldn’t say anything until they’d arrived at his apartment. Glossy wooden floors. Rough-hewn marble-slab chimney in the middle of the living room floor, a bar flanked by stocked wine racks that went all the way up the wall, full-length windows looking out to the Mississippi riverfront. Large, heavy artwork on the walls.
As he poured her a bourbon from his bar, she said to him, “This is so nice.”
“Thank you,” he said, without looking up from his pour.
“So – you have money, huh.”
He corked the bourbon bottle, set it down on the bar top, and then looked at her. “Yes.”
“I didn’t realize how much.”
“I wasn’t trying to hide it.”
“Really?”
“Well, not really. People get weird about it. Justifiably so, I guess.”
“I’m trying not to be weird about it.”
He smiled at her. “I know.” He pushed her tumbler toward her.
Paula hated the silence that happened as she sipped the bourbon. It tasted excellent to her, but she wasn’t sure if it was actually excellent.
“Does it bother you?” Anthony asked her. “The whole thing, in general?”
“No, no,” she cut off a swallow to say. “I was raised not to think about other people’s money. It doesn’t change the way I think about you at all. I’ve just – never known someone with so much money.”
He nodded. “It is weird. I don’t go out of my way to talk about it when I meet somebody new, because people tend to treat you differently. Even in small, little ways. With women I was seeing – you don’t mind if we talk about this?”
She shook her head.
“There was just the littlest difference, and I could always tell, no matter how little. Like, after they’d find out, they would be a little bit more willing to let things go, a little bit less confrontational. I didn’t want to be in a position where I thought I could get away with something. I don’t want to be that guy.” He looked at her. He took her hand across the bar.
* * *
For their first few dates, before they’d settled into a relationship, they did normal things. They saw movies. They went to the cities’ events, the State Fair and the Renaissance Festival, where they ate funnel cake and roast turkey legs. They had drinks at the noisy, dark, chic places downtown. Anthony, it turned out, loved the theater, and the first time he suggested they see the touring ballet coming through – Swan Lake, one of her favorites – Paula didn’t even think twice about dropping the $60. She had been thrilled because she herself was a dancer, and his wanting to attend a performance delighted her and made for a delicious moment when they settled into their red velvet theater seats and she told him that she, too, danced.
“Really? Ballet?”
“No, modern. But I can go en pointe.”
“Oh, such respect. You are very graceful.”
She grinned. “It was my major in college.”
“How did your parents feel about that?”
“Oh, it wasn’t one of those things where I defied my parents,” she said. “In fact, they were far more convinced than I was that something would come of it. Talent always gets recognized – their favorite thing to say. There’s always room for the best.”
“And are you any good?” A flirtation. “Could you have gone pro?”
She smiled, shrugged, and said, “I had my chances, but it didn’t pan out. It’s for the best. Better to do it just for the love of it.”
“But you could always teach?” he said.
“Sure,” she said. “The woman who owns the studio I go to, she told me that the next opening she has is mine.” Paula laughed. “But none of the teachers want to retire or leave.”
“Those reedy old ladies who teach dance,” Anthony said with a shake of his head, “they live forever.”
Only two weeks later, when he sent her a link to the ticket page of the Broadway musical in town, Cabaret, and Paula saw the $100 price for best-seat prices ($80 for second-best, even), she bit her lip and bought the ticket. But on the third time he sent her a link to another steep ticket, she had to call him.
She tried so hard to sound non-accusatory. It was so early, and she realized only in this moment just how much she liked him and how afraid she was. “I don’t mean to put a damper on anything, but I just – frankly, I can’t afford to keep going to these performances so frequently.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not trying to be weird about it,” she gushed. “You understand that I’m saying this not in any weird way?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course. Forget about the opera. Let’s do something else.”
And Paula was happy to meet him at a movie theater, where she eagerly bought a $7 box of Milk Duds and a barrel of soda to show him that she was fun and not cheap.
* * *
Though Paula was a very good dancer, in fact one of the standouts of Macalaster’s program, Paula knew she wasn’t the best. She always knew, but she wasn’t particularly sad about it. Everyone assured her that the scouts from the big dance companies who attended senior capstone performances would invite her to audition, but Paula found herself wishing they wouldn’t. At family gatherings, all her relatives wanted to talk to her about was dance and how big a star she was bound to be, and no one asked about her child psychology or pedagogy classes. Paula was good with people, and by the time she was ready to graduate, her parents were surprised to find that she had minored in elementary education. “We didn’t even know you were taking classes,” they said.
Despite her reluctance, it simply wasn’t in Paula to throw her senior capstone performance. When everything extraneous was removed, when the audience and every threat behind it blacked out, she loved to dance. Afterward, all the underclassmen embraced her and her parents charged backstage with armfuls of roses.
A week later, she got an email from a scout at one of the dance companies in New York, inviting her to audition. Sitting with the email open before her, all Paula could see was a few swift years of exhaustion, competition, deferred desire, bleeding feet, before the miniscule window for unwanted stardom closed. Catastrophe. Paula declined the audition invitation and let everyone think that none had come. Paula’s parents made gritted-teeth comments about East Coast snobbery. Paula said nothing.
She looked through the job listings for education jobs that weren’t teaching. A learning disability nonprofit service was just starting out and didn’t mind her inexperience. Paula moved into a cheap apartment, hoping to save up enough money eventually to open her own dance studio. She pictured herself teaching little girls in pink leotards, and the prospect filled her with happiness, but on her very modest income she imagined it would be at least a decade before she could save or build up enough credit to qualify for a loan for a business that, one of her friends who majored in accounting told her, probably wouldn’t be profitable for years. By day, Paula traveled to all the elementary schools in the Twin Cities to assess the needs of their dyslexic, ADHD, and autistic students and try to convince the schools and individual parents to hire the service. At night, she would dance with a local studio, where she was grateful not to be the star.
But she liked being able to talk about dance to Anthony, whose grandmother had apparently been a locally-famous ballerina and had taught him all the positions, which he was able to reproduce perfectly for Paula in his stocking feet. “She wanted me to be a little ballerino so bad,” he said, “but my dad just wouldn’t hear of it.” Dance had something of a road-not-taken vibe for him, and he only refrained from coming to see her at her studio even though he begged because she sheepishly forbade it – at first. And then she consented to his coming for the last fifteen minutes one night to pick her up for a date afterward. But they didn’t make it to dinner. They went to his apartment, where he rubbed the insides of her thighs in the dark of his bedroom and murmured, “Dancer,” with admiration.
* * *
She got used to things slowly with Anthony. She hadn’t moved out of her original cheap apartment even though she’d been there for six years because moving was such a terror. After they first slept together, she’d still been mostly asleep when he, smelling of shaving cream, had kissed her goodbye to go to work, and so when she’d woken properly she was alone in tasteful but obvious opulence. She’d gotten out of there without showering or eating, even though he’d turned on the heated bathroom floor for her.
When she invited him over to her place after that, she worried about her lack of a proper table. The way that the cable outlet had been set up in the unit had necessitated that the television be placed in a certain spot, which meant that her couch needed to be placed in a certain spot, which left nowhere for a table that wouldn’t block the sliding doors of her little balcony.
“Sorry, you’re going to have to eat on your knees,” she said to him, handing him a potholder to shield his hands from the hot soup bowl he would cradle.
“Oh, good,” he said, “this way we can watch the movie while we eat.”
And then the next time he came over, he had two long, thin boxes made of cloth and wood stacked in his hands – lap desks, he explained. The surface, where they could put their plates, was a glossy rosewood, and the part that got laid on your lap was a coarse, creamy two inches of linen filled with plastic beads that settled on your knees like a pillow. He left them at her place when he went away.
He’d just show up with things like this. She broke her favorite serving bowl, and when she opened the door to him a week later he held a replacement. When she complained about how hot her non-air-conditioned apartment got when it was above eighty outside, he came with a huge standing fan, one of the fancy bladeless kinds that didn’t make noise, to put by her bed. It was sweet. But it happened too often.
“Look,” she said, “you have to stop with the little things.” This was three months into their relationship, after they’d broken into the comfortable boyfriend-girlfriend territory, and she could be blunter with him. “I want to be able to complain about something to you without you interpreting it as a request for you to fix it.”
She could see Anthony stiffen. They were peeling garlic for dinner at her place with the new rubbery gadget Anthony had bought after they’d struggled last time with the papery skins. After their first time having sex, they were almost always at her place if they stayed in. Anthony didn’t seem to mind. “I don’t interpret it as a request,” he said. “I don’t think you’re, like, shaking me down.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I just meant that, I don’t know, it makes me feel weird.”
“I want to do nice things for you,” he said.
She put her hand on his arm. “You can do nice things for me,” she said. “It’s just, the money . . .”
“Okay,” he said, “divorced from anything particular about me, you’d be okay hypothetically with a present from someone you’re seeing, right?”
“A small present.”
He held up the garlic peeler. “This doesn’t look small to you?”
“A small present every once in a while. Not every time you decide I’m missing something.”
He shifted his jaw with a blank look on his face. Then he said, “Okay, but what does ‘small’ mean? Small is relative.”
“Small like . . . nothing for my apartment small.”
He gazed at her. “Okay,” he said with a decisive nod. He returned to the garlic. “Okay, that’s fair.” And, for a while, when he appeared at her door, he was empty-handed. But when small things, very small things, things he could get away with, found their way to her again – like a jawbreaker, her favorite candy, discovered in his pocket during an intimate moment, and he laughed so low – she didn’t know how she could object, how to object when she was also enchanted.
As some time went by, she stopped protesting, even half-heartedly, when he threw a package of her favorite fancy chocolates into their grocery cart when they shopped for dinner ingredients. She stopped noticing, even, when he brought three bottles of wine instead of one to their nights in at her place (one to drink and two to leave “for the house”) – until she caught herself and made herself notice anew, told him to quit it already, this was the second time and she didn’t want to have this conversation again. She doubted herself.
After a while, though, the little gifts crept back in once again, and then got bigger, and she found it simply too tiresome and awkward to remind him continually not to do it. So the re-gift became her recourse. At first, Paula’s friends benefited – a cashmere scarf for one because Paula “didn’t like the color but didn’t have the heart to tell Anthony,” a bottle of expensive olive oil for another because Paula “didn’t really cook.” But she couldn’t keep doling things out to the same people without it attracting attention or Anthony hearing about it. He seemed to have figured out, consciously or unconsciously, that she would raise less objection to food, so he often got her cheeses (chèvres, bries, gruyeres), exotic fruits (dragon fruit, star fruit, wintertime mangoes), dainties that she would never think to buy herself (capers, toasted pine nuts, stone-cracked pepper and champagne mustard). Paula kept a few she couldn’t bear to part with – like the jar of olive-bruschetta-stuffed sun-dried tomatoes in oil canned by their favorite restaurant – and then dropped the rest of these things off at the food bank behind a nearby church. That is, until the lady who minded the bank caught her setting down on the front step her semi-weekly box, this one stocked with chocolate-covered espresso beans. The woman thanked Paula profusely but asked her if she could bring non-perishables next time? And maybe some shampoo and tampons? Those were the things they really needed. The woman handed Paula a list of things the food bank always accepted, and Paula was so embarrassed that she never went back.
What could she do? She couldn’t leave things anonymously around the Twin Cities like a couch on the curb with a cardboard sign that says “free.” She talked it over with her mom on the phone, and, much to Paula’s surprise, her mom said, “Honey, you’re doing what? You’re giving away his gifts? What on earth? That is just – I can’t think of anything more disrespectful.”
All Paula could say was, “What?”
“You treat others’ generosity with respect, Paula,” her mother said. “I don’t understand how you could have been doing this.”
Paula was cowed in the way only her mother could have cowed her, and she mumbled, “It honestly didn’t occur to me that it would – I mean, it just made me feel so weird, I had to do something with it. I couldn’t just keep it all.”
Her mother sighed and demanded, “Honestly, what’s the big deal? Look, to totally cut yourself off, to refuse his gifts, is to put up a wall between you. It’s like saying that there is, for sure, a fundamental difference between you. And that you are only allowed to show affection in a certain way.”
And with the power of an incantation, her mother’s words – coming from the woman who, when Paula was a child, made her reuse Kleenexes if the sneeze wasn’t too big – clicked open a padlock somewhere in Paula, and she kept the stuff.
* * *
Then, the plane tickets. They met in June, and when November came she sighed one night over the fact that she wouldn’t be able to go to her family’s Thanksgiving, which was held at her grandparents’ in Colorado. Paula’s parents were quite comfortable, financially, but they still had a mortgage to pay, and they always drove, taking their vacation days to manage the fourteen-hour trip over a few days. For Paula, fourteen hours in the car was okay for a week’s visit, but just wasn’t doable for the three days of Thanksgiving. She’d only managed to afford to fly three years out of the six she’d been supporting herself.
“Well, you know, I can – cover a plane ticket,” Anthony said.
She was horrified that he might think that she had been dropping hints. “No, no, I didn’t mean to suggest – “
“I know,” he said. “Look, I know it feels weird, but really, what else is it for? Seriously, what else is the money for? If you can go home for Thanksgiving, it will make me really happy.”
“No, I don’t like it,” she’d said outright.
He opened his mouth, stopped himself, and said, “I respect your boundaries.” She couldn’t help but smile at his therapy language, and when he saw this little slack, he said, “But really.”
“No, we talked about this.”
“We talked about no apartment things. Think of it this way: It’d be okay if a guy who made forty-five thousand a year bought you dinner, right?”
“That’s dinner.”
“It’s relative. Like I said last time. Round-trip flight across a few Midwestern states? Like, four hundred dollars? That’s dinner.”
“We’ve never eaten a four-hundred-dollar dinner.”
He sighed. “I’m not going to press this. If you’re uncomfortable, you’re uncomfortable.”
She turned away from him. She’d had no trouble accepting gifts from past boyfriends from her own – class sounded like such a stupid concept to think about when it came to actual people in her life rather than some public-radio economic discussion. She knew it bothered him when he felt separated from her like this. They hadn’t talked about it since she’d put her foot down with the garlic peelers, but after that happened, an uncomfortable awareness arose in the two of them, and little things sometimes happened, more frequently than before, to conjure up the ghost of his money to chill them. They’d be strolling around downtown, popping into trinket shops filled with home decorations or luxury bath products, and she’d idly pick up a $30 bar of soap and physically react to its price tag – a disbelieving wince – before she’d remember that he didn’t have the same frame of reference. He would look over her shoulder at the price and would make a face too, but they both knew it wasn’t real. For her, thirty dollars for soap was unthinkable. For him, it was just indulgent.
She didn’t like those moments. Not for her own sake – for his.
“But,” she said, “if you’re buying plane tickets, you have to come too.” She didn’t really want him to come, though. They’d only been seeing each other for five and a half months, which she didn’t consider long enough for a trip, and she just wanted to spend time with her family, not have to entertain someone and negotiate his interactions with everyone.
“Oh, thanks,” he said with a broad smile, “but I’m expected at home, too. I’ll get it all arranged.”
The next day, she got an email itinerary and confirmation of her round-trip ticket.
* * *
Paula met his mother when Anthony flew her from Duluth into Minneapolis for Christmas and New Year’s, which he did every year. Michelle Barrett was a special kind of Northern-woman hard, the kind that is chiseled by cold and ferociously-played high school soccer, the kind that gets channeled into robust church charity events, the kind that made Paula envision a no-nonsense working-class upbringing. But then Paula was stunned to learn that Anthony’s mother had been the daughter of one of the wealthiest independent farmers in the state.
“If you ate a turkey anywhere in northern Minnesota between 1950 and 1970, it was probably one of my dad’s,” Michelle said. She leaned over the marble island in Anthony’s kitchen to slap Paula’s hand for emphasis, then laughed. Her charm bracelet tinkled and her cheeks bunched up into red balls and her curly blonde-white hair shook. She was someone Coca-Cola would cast to play a twenty-first-century Mrs. Claus, and Paula trusted her at once. “But,” Michelle went on, “Anthony’s father wanted us to strike out on our own, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I made sure Anthony grew up with the same do-it-yourself attitude.”
She was widowed just before her son turned fifteen, her husband taken by a drunk driver. Anthony had told Paula this on the drive to pick Michelle up at the airport, to prepare Paula in case it should come up. Paula imagined the two of them right after the father’s death – Anthony, a teenager, still uneasy and perhaps a little ugly, the both of them having to mourn but also trying to soften the other’s mourning. She felt a little guilty for romanticizing their broken family, but she couldn’t help feeling her heart warm, in the schmaltzy but sincere way of so many Christmas movies, at imagining the son making enough money to bring his widowed mother to him each year.
And Paula had seen, already, what Michelle meant, the distinct lack of exorbitance in what Anthony did spend. Every time Paula saw him pick up something to buy, something ordinary like a sweater, she observed him turning it around in his hands, examining its quality, checking its price, thinking it over. Paula loved the carefulness. The discrimination.
There were other things, too. Small things, small revelations of taste and habit that endeared. His insomnia continued to plague him even after their most rigorous and tiring bouts of sex, so he’d do little things around her apartment while Paula slept like the dead. She’d wake up to find her living room tidied, her microwave cleaned out, the magnets on her fridge arranged in her initials. When he’d done something not immediately obvious, he’d leave her notes mimicking the one he’d left on her car when he’d hit it: Hi, I set up your new modem this morning. I’m really sorry. Please give me a call and let me know what I can do. – Anthony. And he’d write his number, as if she didn’t know it. She’d text him when she found the note, pretending to arrange reparations for the “damage,” feeling stupid and happy.
Anthony was a good man. Sometimes, though, there’d be a little whisper – after he’d do something thoughtful like leaving a tip for a barista or helping up a toddler that had keeled over on the sidewalk – a whisper that asked if he was good because his money allowed him to be. And sometimes she wondered, too, whether she herself was pure of intention. His particularity with the things he bought made the little things he chose for her all the more bewitching – what exquisite, tiny pleasures, these gifts and comforts. What added chocolate shavings on a whipped dessert.
* * *
By Christmas, all Paula’s friends knew that Anthony was a millionaire – she’d been dating him long enough that she had, some time ago, strategically dropped this information to the right person in her circle, who fulfilled her expected role of spreading it around. When the introductions were made at the first of the season’s parties, everyone was duly delighted with him.
But odd things got said to her when he was out of earshot. “Well, you know, Warren Buffet is super nice,” one of these friends said, unprompted. “He says that the rich should pay more taxes, and he made his granddaughters take the bus home from college.” And Paula found herself replying with repetitions of Michelle’s cute foreshadowing stories of Anthony’s record-breaking popcorn sales as a Boy Scout, learning the value of a dollar, all in a verbal dance that seemed compulsory and somehow beyond her control.
At Paula’s office party, held in her boss’s rickety, book-stuffed home, she let Anthony drift off into the kitchen while she got into conversation with Sam, her officemate and development director. She expected to be able to gush. Sam, one of Paula’s favorite people in the world, was a redheaded woman with short, darkly-painted fingernails and thick-framed glasses. But Sam wasn’t adopting the same grinning, eager posture as expected. Instead, she wore a weird smirk.
“So,” Sam said, just loud enough for Paula to hear, “nice work.”
“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sweetheart, I’m kidding,” Sam said, laying a hand on her arm.
Paula felt herself blanch. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be defensive.” She realized that it was everyone’s niceness that had actually put her on her guard.
Sam shrugged. “That’s only natural.”
“Sorry,” Paula said again. “I feel bad.”
“The real crime would be if you pretended it didn’t exist. The money, I mean. That would just be false. Look, can I tell you something?” Sam raised her wineglass so that it hovered around the outside of her mouth, as though she were blocking anyone from lip-reading. “I have a trust fund.”
“Oh,” Paula said. “I never knew.”
“Well, yeah. It’s not something that really comes up because it’s weird.”
“How big is it? If you don’t mind me asking?”
“I get about five thousand dollars a month.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah. But, see? Even you, who’s dating this multi-millionaire, reacted like I’d just told you I’d done sex work or something.” Sam swiped with play chastisement at Paula’s arm.
“I’m sorry,” Paula said.
“No, it’s a lot of money, but you just demonstrated it, the whole problem. I mean I don’t really need to be working, but I am because I like it and I want to make a difference with kids and because I don’t want to sit around on my ass all day. Like, I want to be a productive member of society and stuff.” She laughed. “But even knowing all that – these people,” she gestured by lifting one finger straight out from her wineglass to all their coworkers in their cable-knits and their Warby Parkers, “would still think of me differently. It’s not their fault. Money does that.”
“Do people give you a hard time when they find out?”
“Nah, no, not really. But they seem to automatically believe you come from the same circumstances that they do, which sort of – excludes you, without them realizing they’re doing it. Like, when people talk about their student debt, I just shut the fuck up because what am I going to say? Correct them? ‘Actually, that crippling debt hanging over you and preventing you from fulfilling the American dream? I don’t have that, thanks. Just thought I’d let you know.’ ”
Paula laughed and thought back to all the times she’d traded debt figures with a new acquaintance, a perverse icebreaker.
“But, anyway,” Sam said with renewed enthusiasm, “I wanted to ask you something. We just got a big anonymous donation – like, a big one. Like, ten thousand dollars.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Was it Anthony?”
Paula blinked. Her eyes automatically sought out Anthony, as though seeing him would tell her the answer, but he was still out of sight in the kitchen. “I have no idea,” she said.
“Would it be likely to be him?” Sam asked. “Does he do a lot of charity work?”
“Honestly, I have no clue,” Paula said. “He never talks about it.”
“Well, that would be par for the course with a Minnesotan, wouldn’t it?” Sam frowned. She had often griped to Paula about Minnesotans’ notorious, self-effacing silence when it came to philanthropy. All the nonprofits in the Twin Cities would often receive huge bequests or anonymous donations and would have no idea they were getting them ahead of time, making it incredibly difficult to plan things. “Could you find out?” Sam went on.
“Sam,” Paula scolded, “no, I couldn’t, you know I couldn’t. And wouldn’t.”
“I know, I know,” Sam conceded. “But if he’s going to become a major donor for us, I’d love to be able to know, for once, that it’s gonna happen, that’s all.”
* * *
“Everyone really likes you,” Paula said in Anthony’s car on the way home as she reached out and placed her hand on top of his, which rested on the gearshift.
“Yeah?” he said, and he shook his head. “I always feel so weird in these situations.”
Paula cocked her head back with exaggerated puzzlement. “You’re amazing at parties,” she said. “You’re the most amazing-at-parties person I know.”
“No, I mean – ” He shrugged one shoulder as though trying to shake off something without removing his hands from the steering wheel. “When I’m obviously the wealthiest person in the room. By a long shot. And everybody knows it.”
“Oh.” Paula didn’t say anything for a moment. She was about to try and find out if he’d been the anonymous donor, despite what she’d said to Sam, but now she was glad she hadn’t started down that track. “Should I not have told people?”
“I don’t think that would’ve been possible. If you hadn’t told your friends, it would have been weirder when they did find out.”
“So what’s to be done?” she said with a small laugh.
“Nothing,” he said, sober. “There’s nothing to be done. That’s why it’s so awkward.”
She didn’t know what to say. She just settled for a closed-mouth, one-syllable noise that was like a laugh, looked out her window, and caressed his hand.
* * *
On New Year’s Day, Paula brought her family and Anthony brought his mother to brunch to meet each other. They drank mimosas and Bloody Marys and had the kind of convivial conversation where every other sentence is something cheerfully self-deprecating and insincere – Paula’s mother complained about Paula’s father and Anthony’s mother complained about Anthony and they got along like two old sitcom characters.
Paula’s sister Steph was a brash, ambitious brunette in her junior year of college, obsessed with what she called “clean living.” Steph wanted more than anything to be a health consultant for any NGO that would send her overseas, and so naturally she dominated any conversation she entered – and she took the lead in interrogating her sister’s rich boyfriend. At one point, the two of them got deep into a conversation, seated beside each other.
Watching them, Paula remembered a time back when she herself had still been in college and high-schooler Steph lived with their parents. Steph refused to go to Walmart to Christmas shop, and Paula couldn’t help sniping, “Why, because they’re a large corporation? You practically keep Starbucks in business, Steph.”
Steph had simply looked at her for a moment, and then she’d calmly said, “No, because Walmart mistreats their workers. Starbucks gives its employees health insurance.”
“But they’re The Man,” their father had joked as he futzed with his coat buttons.
Steph rolled her eyes and muttered, “Hippie bullshit.”
“What was that?”
“Hippie bullshit,” Steph said, louder.
“Hey, settle down,” said their father. The joking tone disappeared.
“Well, don’t minimize the stuff I care about, like it’s some flower-power stuff,” Steph had said. “I’m not stupid.”
Now, Paula watched closely as Steph talked to Anthony. When it came time to part ways, Paula went to hug Steph, who thumped her back and said, “He’s a good guy.” Paula was pleased, because her sister tended to fault-find, especially when it came to men.
Anthony wanted to foot the bill for brunch, but Paula’s father wouldn’t let him. But then Paula saw Anthony leave a fifty-dollar bill under a plate before they left.
A few days later, Paula went over to Steph’s apartment to pick her up for lunch while Steph was still on her winter break. As she waited in Steph’s bedroom in order to avoid her stoner roommates lighting up in the living room, Paula surreptitiously tidied up. Steph babbled from the bathroom, where she was finishing her makeup, about a philanthropic trip to Central America she wanted to organize with her World Activists Club. Paula didn’t pay much attention until Steph reappeared in the bathroom doorway with a latched‑on eyelash curler obscuring her face like an eye patch, saying, “And I already drew up a funding request for the Student Activities Board, but they said that since it’s not open to the general student body, they can’t fund it. Isn’t that the most fucked‑up thing? Student Activities will literally cover like $300 worth of balloons for a fucking casino night for Sigma Gamma Fuckwit – seriously, there’s an entire chapter in my treasurer handbook just called ‘balloonery’ – but they will put zero dollars towards actually establishing a clean water supply for an entire community in need.”
“The priorities come out looking pretty unfortunate,” Paula said, “but you didn’t actually expect the university to pay for you guys to dig a well in Honduras, right?”
“We weren’t just going to dig a well. We were going to establish a regional transportation system to purify and carry water from an aquifer – “
“Wow, and you thought a Student Activities Board was going to cover that?”
Steph sighed, released her right eye from the curler, then clamped it onto the lashes of her left. “Not in total, no. We’re not stupid. We were going to use the money for a scouting trip, to go get the lay of the land. It was going to be a jumping-point. And, you know, once people find out that somebody’s given you money, then they’ll give you money.” She plopped her free hand onto her hip. “But until that happens, no one gives you shit.”
Paula fussed her fingers over the edge of Steph’s dresser – a plywood thing from someplace like Target with a plasticy finish that showed a million oily fingerprints. “I could see,” Paula ventured, “if Anthony would be interested.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m not making any promises . . .” Paula could not hide it from herself: She liked this.
“No, no, I understand,” Steph said. “But that would be great. It really is for a good cause, an excellent cause. Tell him we could name the project after him.”
“He likes to keep his philanthropy quiet.” Paula had never heard Anthony talk about his philanthropy, anyway, except what she’d overheard when he was talking to his financial advisor on the phone. It was one of the phone calls he’d often leave her presence to take, she in the living room and he in the kitchen, where the spool of numbers and esoterically businessy words he’d utter sounded like made‑up shades of paint, the kind of phone calls that would fill her with vague but acute unease. She still had no idea whether he was the anonymous donor Sam had told her about.
“Oh, no, that’s cool too,” Steph said. “Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Paula.” She released her lashes and went to the dresser to pump some lotion onto her hands from a bottle resting on its top.
“Remember, I’m not promising.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Steph breathed as she rubbed her slick hands together.
A pause. “You’re going to stain your dresser if you keep lotion there without a cloth under it,” Paula said.
“Oh, God, let’s go.”
That night, Steph emailed Paula her proposal, and Paula didn’t bother looking at it.
* * *
She brought up the project with Anthony when they were on their way to meet some of his friends at the Minneapolis Club. She described it as they headed downtown from her place, ending with, “I mean, they’re college kids, so they don’t know what they’re doing, so – I mean, your call.” She tried to quash the nervous, unaccountable lump she felt in her throat.
Anthony shifted his weight to one side, and propped the arm not on the wheel on his door. “Well, I’ll take a look at it,” he said. “Do they have a – sort of, business plan drawn up, or something similar?”
“Yep, yep, Steph emailed it to me. I’ll forward it to you.”
“Okay.” Something strained in his voice. He let his arm relax and looked at her. “You didn’t promise her, though, did you?”
“Oh, no, no, of course not. Come on.”
“Well, I’ll be honest,” he released a dry laugh, “I’m kind of taken aback that she would ask you to ask me. I mean, we got on fine at brunch, after she fucking grilled me for fifteen minutes about business ethics, but we’ve only met that one time.”
“Oh,” Paula said. “She didn’t ask. I – brought it up.”
“Oh.” He looked at her like she’d just said she’d taken up a strange hobby. But then his expression changed into one of peculiar pleasure. “Okay,” he said. He smiled.
The friends of his they were meeting in the second-floor pub at the Minneapolis Club were a mix of people she’d met before, at his company’s Christmas party, and people who’d flown in from San Francisco, other people in tech, all young, all men. They were extremely nice but quickly devolved into shop talk, except for Anthony’s friend Nick, who was Inzomniac, Inc.’s CFO to Anthony’s CEO. He pointedly rose from his seat between Anthony and a man drinking PBR out of a pilsner glass and came down to sit beside Paula.
“This is the guy whose strongest opinions in high school were about Halo,” Nick said to her, indicating Anthony’s animation over search engine optimization.
“Oh, did you know Anthony in high school?”
“Oh, yeah. We go all the way back.”
“Is he really different now?”
Nick gave her a funny smile and paused. Then he took a drink of his beer and said, “He has fewer friends.”
Paula laughed. “Uh oh.”
“No, I mean – wouldn’t you be careful if you were him?”
Paula didn’t answer. She watched Anthony laugh comfortably along with the men from San Francisco. They were at home with each other. Paula turned back to Nick with a smile and said, “Did he sleep any better in high school?”
“Nope.” Nick smacked his lips at the tail-end of a swallow and grinned. “Couldn’t sleep then, either.”
In the car on the way back to her place, Paula asked Anthony, “Do you ever hang out with any of your friends from home, other than Nick?”
“Not so much anymore,” he said. “You know – they all left home or got different jobs with different friends. I only visit about once a year for Thanksgiving because I bring Mom here for the holidays. We’ll go out for a beer when we’re there, but that’s about it. Why do you ask?”
“Well.” She laughed. “I guess I just wondered – why do you only hang out with rich people?”
He twisted his mouth to one side. “I know. It looks bad. And I feel bad about it sometimes. But,” he twitched his head like he was trying to crack his neck, only it made no sound, “it got too hard. You know? It got too hard. Like, the people I went to school with, when we graduated it was right as the recession hit.” Paula nodded. “I would hang out with them in their,” he sighed, “just fucking heartbreaking apartments. I would sit around on their futons drinking their Natty Light, and I wouldn’t dare invite them back to my place because they would see how much better it was. They knew I had money, but I don’t think it really ever sunk in, and if they saw my place and my stuff they’d see. Like, I’d save my old, crappy clothes for when I’d hang out with them. I wasn’t trying to lie, but I couldn’t walk into their basement rooms wearing something that cost their rent. And they made me angry, too, you know? Like some of them were fine with just being managers at a Best Buy, because they’d just given up, and I wanted to shake them and ask what they even went to college for. And it just got too hard.” He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then, “Some of them were on the brink of not-making-it, you know? And I couldn’t do anything about it. Offering them my – money? It would have been the most disrespectful . . . You know what it’s like now.”
“I know?” she said, almost a gasp.
“Now you do.”
“No, I don’t.” She didn’t know why she felt the need to insist this.
“Yes, you do.” His voice had gotten low and throaty, akin to the way his voice sounded sometimes when he stroked her neck with just his fingertips because that was exactly what would make her want to die because it felt so good. “The way you offered help for your sister’s project. It’s like you felt it was your money, too.”
Paula turned her face toward her window and brought up her fingers to worry at her lips. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to presume . . .”
“No.” They had stopped at a red light, and he turned to look at her. “I’m glad. I want you to feel that way. It makes me feel – good that you feel that way.”
He put his hand on her knee – his heavy hand all coarse and warm through the nylon of her tights – and she felt a profound, cutting pain.
* * *
And she couldn’t help it – she saw her life spread before her like the ending of a book she would have complained about in a college class. Too tidy. But she had never been captivated by the romance of poverty, not even when she was at her most young-and-romantic. Wouldn’t it be beautiful, to know she was okay, forever? But every time Anthony turned to her or looked at her a little longer than she thought was normal, she heard a panicked screech in her head with words she was ashamed to think, words about herself and him, like kept and trophy. “I’ve been looking,” Anthony said with a sly smile one night, “at this space for sale in Summit Hill. A little place with lots of windows, perfect for a dance studio.” The very moment, the very second she’d accepted the plane ticket from him for Thanksgiving, that’s when she’d been compromised. She should have taken nothing, nothing. But that couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be true. Something like money couldn’t do something like that. If she were destitute, it would have been different. But she wasn’t. She was solid. Didn’t have much money, true, but that was only because she hadn’t had a chance yet. She was still very young. She remembered her mother’s words about putting up walls, and the moments would pass quickly.
On a Friday in February, Anthony texted her in the middle of the afternoon to ask if she could meet him at their favorite place downtown to sit at the marble-top bar for happy hour small plates. As though psychically attuned, Steph texted her almost immediately afterward: Anything from A about the $$$?!? It was accompanied by one hopeful-looking and one impatient-looking emoji. Anthony hadn’t mentioned Steph’s project again since she’d first brought it up over a month earlier, but Paula half-wished he’d just forgotten about it. When she found him at the bar, however, with her mind swept blank by a strange, muted dread she’d felt since Steph’s text, it was all she could think to say.
“Hey, have you given any more thought to Steph’s water project?”
Anthony grimaced good-naturedly. “Yes, actually. Paula,” he straightened the drinks and appetizer menus in front of him, “investing in your sister’s idea is – not a good idea. It’s poorly organized, and it has much, much more heart than sense. No offense, but your sister’s plan is charity tourism. Bunch of privileged college kids going to some third-world country to get fodder for their grad school application essays and their Instagrams.”
“Oh.”
“But I’m going to do it,” Anthony went on. “I’m going to invest in Steph’s plan. It’s going to be a shit-show,” he laughed, “but it’ll happen.”
“Why?” Paula said. “When you just said?”
He leaned toward her, touched his arm to hers. “Because you asked me,” he said.
Paula couldn’t look at him. She looked instead into the flower of light inside her wineglass. This was bad. Paula surprised herself with how bad it felt. “No, no,” she said. “If you’re going to do it like that, don’t do it at all.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Just throwing it at Steph like that, like you’re flushing it down a toilet, because she’s my sister.”
He was visibly taken aback. “It was your idea.”
“I know. I’ve changed my mind.” She dropped her voice down, unable to be so openly wounded any louder. “Don’t ever say something like that again. Don’t ever think about something to do with me like that again.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I understand. I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“Are you crying?”
“Yes.”
“Honey, honey, why?” He put his arm around her, and she leaned from her stool onto him.
“I wish you had less money,” she said.
He laughed. “No, you don’t.”
She put her hand on his chest, felt it solid through his suit jacket. “No, I don’t,” she whispered.
He had gotten quiet too. “You just have to stop thinking about it that way. That’s what I learned. You have to stop thinking about it as an abstraction. You have to think about it case by case, whether to use it, and you make a decision. Like which clothes to wear. That’s all.”
Paula didn’t believe him. And she could tell that he didn’t believe it himself. But he had presented her a doorway out, and she was so tired of questioning.
Colleen Morrissey’s stories have appeared in The Southeast Review, Cincinnati Review, Monkeybicycle (print and audio), and in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014.