Chapter 1

Christie

When you met Christie for the first time, it took only minutes to learn that she was from Greenwich, Connecticut, but months could go by before you got another solid fact out of her. After a couple of years in New York, she realized that she had to give people a little more information to stop them from digging, so once she’d mentioned Greenwich she would quickly add that she’d gone to “the high school,” meaning the public one. The first time she said this, you’d find her forthrightness refreshing—disarming, even, in the midst of so many pretenders. You’d be prompted, perhaps, to admit something about yourself—the fact that you were doing Jenny Craig, for instance, and had to sneak the packaged food into your office microwave when no one was paying attention. But then you’d overhear Christie making the same confession to someone else, and it would lose its charm. It was just Fact No. 2, which, added to Fact No. 1—her childhood in Greenwich —represented the sum total of what could be stated about Christie Thorn’s background, about her entire life before college and New York, where I’d met her.

Plus, you couldn’t help being suspicious of her motives in revealing Fact No. 2. If, at a party, a group of people were standing around, sharing a corner of a room, and someone made an opening bid— mentioning Hotchkiss or St. George’s, say—Christie would always pointedly interject, “Oh, I wouldn’t know. I went to public school. Greenwich High. That’s right—I was a good old suburban kid.” Of course, Christie and the person who had mentioned boarding school were d...