Chapter OneIt was the summer of 1986 when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.
There was a matchbook in her pocket from Flanagan’s, the preppy hangout on Eighty-Fourth Street. Police learned she’d left the bar with him at four a.m. Unbelievably handsome guy, charismatic, popular Flanagan’s mainstay. By nightfall, they had him under arrest. She’d coaxed him into going to the park to have sex, he told the police. Her death had been a terrible accident.
PREPPY SEXCAPADE TURNS DEADLY! screamed the cover of the
New York Post.
Of course it had been an accident. Horrible, unthinkable, but an accident. “I liked her very much,” he’d tell police. “She was easy to get along with. Easy to talk to.” Why would a guy like him suddenly decide to kill a girl he liked? It made no sense.
Everyone had known him forever. Buckley, Surf Club, Gold & Silver committee. Remember that time he went down Ajax Mountain on one ski? That epic backgammon game in Palm Beach?
And her? Nice enough, the Flanagan’s regulars said, if a little annoying. She’d been after him all summer. That night, she’d hung around Flanagan’s until closing time, trying to get his attention. Kept going to the bathroom so she could parade by his table in the back where he sat drinking whiskey and playing cards. Outwaited all the other girls—Campbell Hughes, Minnie Potter, Brooke Limbocker. Waylaid him at the door and said, “Wherever you’re going, I’m going too.”
An hour later, she was dead.
Not that it was her fault. But that didn’t make it his.
“She forced my pants down,” he’d tell police, “without my consent,” straddled him, squeezed his balls—made it hurt. He’d yelled for her to stop, yanked her off him. She landed at the base of the tree and didn’t move. He thought she was kidding, but she was dead.
ROUGH SEX GONE WRONG! said the
Daily News.A freak accident, everyone decided. She hadn’t known when to quit.
“She was a very nice person,” he’d say. “She was just too pushy.”
But that wouldn’t be until August. It was still early June, and a different girl was on the cover of all the city tabloids, a young, beautiful model with an ugly gash down her cheek. A pair of lowlifes with razor blades had slashed her face outside a West Side bar the night before, hired by the girl’s landlord after she turned down his repeated advances.
BEAUTY AND THE CREEP, the cover of the
Post proclaimed.
Nina Jacobs bent over the doorman’s console to study the photos, wincing at the girl’s 150 black stitches. The model was twenty-four, six years older than Nina, but she looked years younger—round cheeks, angelic smile despite the gruesome attack. She was from Wisconsin. Nina pictured apple orchards and open country roads, log rafts drifting down the river, picnics on its banks with your neighbors. No wonder she looked so good-natured and gracious, even with the Frankenstein stitches. No wonder she’d felt safe meeting the landlord at a bar to get back her security deposit, despite the beard on him that looked like a layer of dirt. Nina wouldn’t have met that beard in Grand Central Station during rush hour. You knew better when you grew up in the city.
She glanced at herself in the lobby mirror. She was headed out to Flanagan’s to celebrate graduation with her Bancroft friends and, while she was at it, scout a candidate to please God take her virginity this summer before her apparatus rusted shut. She’d aimed for the opposite of her usual plain-Jane look: moussed-up hair and thick, dark eyeliner, Spandex skirt, and a satin camisole under a denim jacket. But now, with the model’s wholesomeness in mind, it seemed she’d swung too far in the other direction. “Smile,” she ordered her reflection. “This isn’t a lineup.” She rubbed off half the eyeliner and pushed down her hair.
True, it hadn’t been a banner day, starting with her mother showing up late to Nina’s graduation after Nina and the other graduates had already marched down the aisle and up onto the stage in their floor-length white dresses, where they sat in rows of folding chairs, looking, she imagined, like a choir of virgin sacrifices—as if she needed another reminder of her status. For weeks, her mother’s depression had been heavier and angrier than usual, with Nina and her father taking turns as targets. They hadn’t been sure she’d show up today at all, and Nina couldn’t say she was happy she had, watching the commotion of her entrance, Frances bumping and swerving down the row where Ira had saved her a seat just in case, inexplicably dressed in an argyle sweater and gray flannel skirt even though it was ninety degrees outside. People craned their necks as her mother kicked a man’s leg and hissed that he’d tried to trip her.
“Who is that?” Polly Jessup, seated beside Nina, had asked, but Nina just shrugged, so tense her shoulders got stuck up by her ears.
During the headmistress’s speech, her mother had squatted with her camera in the aisle, hollering Nina’s name like a crazed paparazza (Ohhh, Polly said, inching away) until, lightheaded from Nardil or Darvon, she lost her balance and toppled backward onto her butt. At the reception, she’d raged at the bartender over too many ice cubes in her cranberry juice and then threw one at Ira when he tried to shush her. When Nina tried to intervene, her mother slung what was left of her drink at her, splashing the white commencement dress scarlet.
But at least razor-blade-wielding thugs hadn’t ambushed Nina on the way home from the reception. She could walk into Flanagan’s tonight without a face full of stitches. And in even better news: eighty-six days, ten hours, and twenty-eight minutes until she finally, blessedly, left for Vanderbilt. Not her first choice, but her top picks had rejected her, maybe because she’d mistakenly checked “Native American” as her ethnicity on the applications. For some reason—she couldn’t rule out the shots of her father’s vodka she’d consumed while she filled them out—she’d honestly thought Native American meant “born in America,” and “Caucasian” somewhere in Asia. The applications were already in the mail to Brown and Georgetown before she realized her mistake. But the silver lining was that Vanderbilt wouldn’t be crawling with New Yorkers: she hoped to bask in the prestige surely afforded a girl from the Manhattan at a college in the Deep South.
As she crossed the lobby toward the door, she heard what sounded like belly-dancing music—cymbals and sitars and a man’s tremulous wail—coming from the doorman’s transistor radio. The doormen weren’t supposed to play music while on duty, but she secretly liked the idea of his music seeping into the walls of her uptight apartment building, the echo of thrusting hips and hookah pipes rattling the sugar scions and Daughters of the Revolution who’d barely let the Jacobs family past the co-op board ten years before. Nina still wasn’t sure why her parents so badly wanted to live here. Yes, it was an elegant building in a desirable neighborhood, but how elegant and desirable could Ira and Frances feel when, even now, the co-op board president, Carter Lorillard, insisted on greeting them in the lobby as “the Jewish Jacobses,” as in, “Always good to see the Jewish Jacobses,” or “How are the Jewish Jacobses this evening?” Nina had yet to hear him greet “the Episcopalian Sloanes,” or ask “the Catholic Ryans” how they were doing.
The doorman came back inside from fetching a taxi for a tenant. Freddie was in his thirties, lived in a basement apartment in the Bronx, and dreamt about opening a car wash one day. He gave her a wet-lipped grin as he approached. Nina’s father had once told her that he’d escaped some godforsaken country where half his family was still locked away in the bowels of a medieval government prison. His history made her stomach clench, but so did he.
“Black stockings very pretty against Miss Nina’s white, white skin,” he said.
She’d cut the feet off a pair of lace tights to resemble Madonna’s, although now she saw she might have chopped too much since in the lobby mirror they looked more like knickers.
“Leggings,” she corrected him. Her voice was stern, but that didn’t stop him from closing the space between them to embrace her. The doormen also weren’t supposed to touch the residents, but she submitted to his hug for the usual count of five, her unspoken quid pro quo for Freddie not ratting her out to her parents for various transgressions, like the time she and her friends tossed raw eggs out the bathroom window and a pissed-off casualty called the police. Or six weeks ago, over spring break, when she came home drunk from Walker Pierson’s after a humiliating effort to shed her virginity, with bits of her own vomit still caked in her hair.
The first time Freddie had surprised her with an embrace, she figured maybe it was a customary greeting in his country. She later noticed he didn’t hug any of the other residents—or leer at them or comment on their clothing or their figures—but it seemed too late to renegotiate their tacit agreement.
Copyright © 2025 by Cynthia Weiner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
