out—is very dark and still. Returning his key to his jacket pocket, Oliver’s fingers brush the thin card he’d been summoned back to retrieve from Marian’s doorman, and it pierces his mood a bit to think of the disagreeable Barton Ochstein, with his heavy hand touching Oliver’s thigh through Marian’s skirt. The fiancée of a person like Ochstein was hardly likely to care for flowers, herself—beyond, Oliver thought dismissively, the tiresome brand recognition of one dozen sterile blood-red roses in a cheap white cardboard box. Still, he will have to give Ochstein’s commission some thought. Because Oliver does not sell ugly flowers, or flowers with their smells removed, or bouquets for the season. He assembles beautiful, living flowers, and he sends them out into the world with hope that they might receive their due in appreciation.
Oliver is aware that he belongs to a distinct occupational segment of his demographic group, set well apart from the officially sanctioned career designations—law, business, medicine—that account for an overwhelming majority of his peers. In addition to this majority, the far smaller yet equally prestigious calling of “artist” in its variant forms, is acknowledged, even afforded bragging rights sometimes exceeding the aforementioned career choices, though only in certain families. Between these extremes, however, there is little in the way of viable career territory. The children of well-to-do Jewish families do not seem to join the police department, become aerobics instructors, drive trucks, or run travel agencies. They are not housekeepers, office managers, landscape designers, or franchise owners. But every now and then, one of them might pop up in an unconventional role, salvaged from suspicion (their parents salvaged from pity) only by the undeniability of a very specific talent.
He imagines the members of his parents’ generation at an annual gathering, a holiday open house of sorts, in a venue vast enough to hold the Jewish upper middle class of Manhattan and its more affluent suburbs. In the outer vestibules (the temple grounds, the antechambers to the Holy of Holy) are the younger parents, avidly shaking down the competition on the subjects of SAT scores, GPAs, and, above all, fat letters from the handful of approved colleges. (Adam Weintraub got in everywhere! Simone Sternbaum was wait-listed at Vassar. Juliane Lieberman doesn’t test well. No one can believe Yale took Sarah Gold—just because her older sisters went there and her father is Steven Spielberg’s lawyer. It’s so unfair!) Inside, the parents are older, and while there is even more at stake, there is also an air of calm. (Things are now out of their hands, after all—shrugs all around.) Even so, envy courses in myriad subterranean rivers, because here, finally, points are awarded and the children sorted: lawyers to one corner, doctors to another, Wall Street over here, permissible alternate professions (architecture, publishing, academia, journalism, Hollywood, Washington) over there. Then there is a small designated area for the creatives, the artists, the marchers-to-a-different-drummer: the girl dancing with ABT, for example, the two promising novelists, the composer (with a commission already from City Opera! Only twenty-nine!), the girl who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets and teaches at NYU, the wunderkind painter who sent his slides right from Harvard and got a show at Andre Emmerich, the guy who directed all the musicals at Fieldston and now does off Broadway.
And then there is the place to which Oliver is directed. It is sparsely populated, indeed.
Hello, hello, these few greet one another. Everyone shakes hands. They are very interesting people in this little corner, and they are glad to meet. One of them might be a chef, for example. And that does not mean a cook! It means a chef—and not only a good chef but a wildly gifted and ambitious chef, already with a well-reviewed and
Oliver is aware that he belongs to a distinct occupational segment of his demographic group, set well apart from the officially sanctioned career designations—law, business, medicine—that account for an overwhelming majority of his peers. In addition to this majority, the far smaller yet equally prestigious calling of “artist” in its variant forms, is acknowledged, even afforded bragging rights sometimes exceeding the aforementioned career choices, though only in certain families. Between these extremes, however, there is little in the way of viable career territory. The children of well-to-do Jewish families do not seem to join the police department, become aerobics instructors, drive trucks, or run travel agencies. They are not housekeepers, office managers, landscape designers, or franchise owners. But every now and then, one of them might pop up in an unconventional role, salvaged from suspicion (their parents salvaged from pity) only by the undeniability of a very specific talent.
He imagines the members of his parents’ generation at an annual gathering, a holiday open house of sorts, in a venue vast enough to hold the Jewish upper middle class of Manhattan and its more affluent suburbs. In the outer vestibules (the temple grounds, the antechambers to the Holy of Holy) are the younger parents, avidly shaking down the competition on the subjects of SAT scores, GPAs, and, above all, fat letters from the handful of approved colleges. (Adam Weintraub got in everywhere! Simone Sternbaum was wait-listed at Vassar. Juliane Lieberman doesn’t test well. No one can believe Yale took Sarah Gold—just because her older sisters went there and her father is Steven Spielberg’s lawyer. It’s so unfair!) Inside, the parents are older, and while there is even more at stake, there is also an air of calm. (Things are now out of their hands, after all—shrugs all around.) Even so, envy courses in myriad subterranean rivers, because here, finally, points are awarded and the children sorted: lawyers to one corner, doctors to another, Wall Street over here, permissible alternate professions (architecture, publishing, academia, journalism, Hollywood, Washington) over there. Then there is a small designated area for the creatives, the artists, the marchers-to-a-different-drummer: the girl dancing with ABT, for example, the two promising novelists, the composer (with a commission already from City Opera! Only twenty-nine!), the girl who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets and teaches at NYU, the wunderkind painter who sent his slides right from Harvard and got a show at Andre Emmerich, the guy who directed all the musicals at Fieldston and now does off Broadway.
And then there is the place to which Oliver is directed. It is sparsely populated, indeed.
Hello, hello, these few greet one another. Everyone shakes hands. They are very interesting people in this little corner, and they are glad to meet. One of them might be a chef, for example. And that does not mean a cook! It means a chef—and not only a good chef but a wildly gifted and ambitious chef, already with a well-reviewed and
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