Zack cocked a confused eyebrow. “I honestly have no idea who you are talking about.”
“Piper. Yes. That was it.” Isaiah flung his napkin across his lap when the waiter brought him his clam chowder, made from New England clams caught fresh that very morning. “The professor from the art school.”
Zack laughed, unable to believe it. “Do you mean Pilar, the woman who taught Latin dance at the community college?” He didn’t wait for his father to scoff. “I haven’t been with her since Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t serious.” Great ass and super limber, though. Zack wondered what she was up to now.
“I don’t suppose any of your romantic relationships are that serious.”
The glorified BLT appeared before Zack. “No. Can’t say I’ve found someone worth being serious with yet.”
“Ah, yes.” Isaiah cleared his throat before dunking his spoon into his soup. “That’s something I wanted to talk to you about, son.”
Here they went. Again.
It wasn’t the first time Isaiah sat his son down and attempted to teach him about the wiles of women, particularly how they loved to cling to rich, young men who looked even slightly put together. He loved pointing out the rash of their fellow billionaires who had recently married women with hardly any means. “Not every man can marry an Alice,” he often said. “A lot of them marry Jasmines.”
Zack barely knew who these people were.
“Your mother had a rather brilliant idea recently,” Isaiah said at the end of his spiel. “One of her friends from college – Ramona Huxley, don’t know if you remember her – has a charming and very pretty daughter who is about to start her junior year at William & Mary…”
Zack had to restrain the eyeroll threatening his skull. “Alesia Huxley, right?”
“Yes! So you know her?”
“I dated her last year, Dad.”
“You did?”
“Yup. For a whole two weeks before we mutually decided to end it.” Zack took a large bite out of his sandwich. “So if you’re thinking of setting me up with her, I can already tell you that it’s not going to work out.” He swallowed, refusing to choke on the bit of sundried tomato that threatened his windpipe.
“Zachary,” his father said, moody visage unwavering, “you’re thirty years old and still acting like you’re twenty. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re not getting younger.”
“Come on, Dad, you’re acting like I’m your aging daughter with the dusty uterus instead of your virile son who doesn’t have the fate of the family hanging over his head, anyway.”
Isaiah inhaled a breath deep enough to choke on. “Your oldest brother…”
“Is going to marry one of the prettiest, wealthiest single women in New York, I know, I know. I’ll make sure to be at the wedding and in all the pictures.” Zack wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand. “And Evan will probably marry the daughter of an up and coming Chinese businessman to solidify those ties.”
“Zachary.”
“What do you want from me? I’m not inheriting the company. I’m not your only son.”
`Isaiah laid a firm hand on the table. Not intimidating, not strong, but firm. The man was not interested in sending the fear of God into his son. What he wanted was to catch Zack’s undivided attention, knocking him off whatever train of thought he had hitched a ride on.
“You do not have many expectations, no,” he softly said. “But the ones you do bear are still as important as your brothers’.”
Zack sighed. “I’m not interested in heiresses, Dad. I’m sorry. I’ve dated plenty, both to your knowledge and outside of it. They’re fun, but way, way, way too intense for me.”
“I don’t mean in making us more business and financial connections, Zachary, although your mother and I certainly wouldn’t turn them away.”
Something sour went down Zack’s throat. “Then what?”
“Your mother may be more rigid about this than I am, but ultimately, all I really care about is you maintaining some decorum in your personal life. Our business hinges on us having good standing with the buyers of the world. Buyers who have their own rigid standards for how our family should act. I don’t care who you date in the end.” He drank from his glass. “But I want to make it clear that any and all antics must be reined in. You are not twenty-one anymore. You are thirty. Just because you are the youngest of three sons does not mean that you can have any image that you want. Being a Bohemian is all well and good in certain circles, Zachary, but at some point you must settle down.”
Zack could barely believe his ears. “I didn’t think I was that crazy…” He knew his parents did not approve of how often he showed up in the tabloids, where every so-called journalist and internet comment speculated who he was dating next and what kind of drugs he did to fuel his libido and creative energy. They did not care that he spent his adult life thus far doing “art,” but the fact he made decent money from it and received some acclaim from the art world’s toughest critics canceled out some of the more embarrassing aspects of saying, “This is Daniel, the good Firstborn who will soon be marrying a princess. This is Evan, the ambitious rugrat now tearing up the business world across the globe. And this is Zack… he… paints pictures of naked people.”
“Is this coming from Dad the steel magnate, or Dad the concerned father of three?”
“When you reach my position, Zachary, it’s both. I must always consider the image of our family, but contrary to what you may currently believe, I want my children to be accomplished and satisfied. I remember what it was like to be your age.”
“You were married by my age.”
“Only recently married. We didn’t have Daniel until I was in my thirties.” Isaiah waved off the approaching waiter. He didn’t continue until he was sure they had more privacy. “But I was single and in my twenties once. I dated my fair-share of women, including those my own parents would have never approved of… and they were the liberal ones compared to my Grandmother, who insisted I marry a good, formerly Jewish woman.”
Zack scrunched his nose. “How is that possible?”
“Conceal it like my grandparents had.”
I can’t believe I told Rachel about the Feldsteins. It was a hush-hush secret when Zack was growing up, although he couldn’t understand why his grandmother honored the traditional Jewish holidays in her chambers but acted like Christmas was the only winter holiday in public. My generation doesn’t care as much, right? Daniel and Evan had never shown any interest in their Jewish heritage, and neither had Zack. If any of them married a Jewish woman, it would have been complete coincidence. Not like Great-Grandmother Feldstein was still alive to relish it.
But he also knew that he was not supposed to ever bring it up. Definitely not around the press, because there were families that would treat them differently, whether it was socially acceptable or not. Another thing Zack found deplorable about the class he had been born into. Who cared what anyone’s religion was? How many “recovering Catholics” had he met through the years? There was more than one affluent Muslim family holding their heads up high at the country club and shooting dirty looks back at the people who glared at them first. The Singaporean Wu family who kept their American home near the Feldman estate flaunted their wealth and sophistication every chance they had. The upper class – and the beyond superior class, like the one Zachary and his neighbor Kathryn Alison were technically children of – was slowly becoming more and more diversified whether the old guard approved of it or not. But Isaiah Feldman would grit his teeth to have someone outside of the family bring up his supposed heritage. “My great-grandparents were Slovenian, this is true,” he once curtly told a nosy journalist. “But they had the understanding that this is America, and the past doesn’t matter. My own genetic makeup is remarkably German thanks to my grandmother and mother, thank you.” He left out the Polish woman his own grandmother had married. And his Ashkenazi German mother. Or so the family legends declared. Henrietta Feldman’s family – who had fled Nazi Germany, ahem – was from Berlin, and that was all anyone said about that.
Zack’s mother was a smattering of German as well. She loved pointing that out.
The lies people like my family tell. Zack was not raised in the Jewish faith. If he had children, they would not be either. By the next generation of Feldmans, it could very well be completely erased from the family history books.
Was that okay? Were they treating it as a blemish, or one of those things people grow away from after raising children in America?
Zack looked away from his father’s glistening blue eyes. “I don’t show up in the papers on purpose,” he finally said. “Regardless of what Mom may insist. I’m living my life. I happen to enjoy the company of women. I admit I’ve made a few blunders in the type of women I date. But like you said, Dad… you know what it’s like to be single in your twenties.”