The Rembrandt
Emily Neuberger
We’re really thrilled to have this excellent party story from Emily Neuberger. When the second wife of a billionaire invites you to a place with a wraparound terrace, you go. See what you see…
Happy almost spring,
The Editors
My first job out of college was executive assistant to the president of a major publishing company. I got the job at my college graduation. There wasn’t service inside the stadium, so I kept going up to the top tier to check my phone. I listened to the voicemail instead of the keynote speaker.
Until then, my work experience included many facets of childcare and the office assistant at my university department. I didn’t realize that an office assistant is to executive assistant what a house cat is to a tiger.
During my interview when I met my boss the first time, she and I had worn the same color nail polish, which I’d thought portended great things. Yet whenever she appeared at my desk, my words went heavy in my mouth and I spent every conversation conscious of the skin on my face.
I was to interrupt meetings when important calls came through, yet even the passing of a Post-It was beyond me. I was both too pompous and too ashamed as I hovered on her threshold, agents and authors gawking at my awkward intrusion, waiting for a personal invitation.
I regularly terrified major executives by forgetting to invite them to quarterly meetings during a time of heavy layoffs; once, I left a household name waiting in the lobby for twenty-five minutes. When I realized it, I watched my boss, one of the leaders in the industry, actually run through the hallway.
I excelled only at reading the manuscripts on submission. But the easy things, like mailing edits to authors or booking lunch reservations, I managed to fuck up like that was my real job.
My boss took all this with more grace than I deserved and spent my first review telling me a generous story about a mistake she’d made as an assistant. She was in charge of inviting people to an important book launch, and she spent an afternoon addressing and stamping envelopes. Only the night before the party, she woke up in a panic. The envelopes were empty. She had forgotten to put in the invitations. I recognized her generosity in sharing but privately didn’t think it applied; one giant mistake could happen to anyone, while I was burying myself under an avalanche of incompetency.
She understood this, too; she gently told me that this job wasn’t for everyone, and I should focus on what I was good at. I entirely missed the point. Even though I was intimidated by her intelligence, I didn’t listen to her advice, and stuck it out for two and a half more years, determined not to fail, until she gently broke it to me over sushi that I did not have a future in the industry.
—
A year before I left the company, one of our authors invited me to her launch party. She was a literary writer, one of the few I’d hoped to work for when I’d started, back before I knew how much of trade publishing was comprised of nonfiction peddling pseudoscience.
The party was hosted by the author’s friend, the second wife of a billionaire whom my boss called a “true democrat.” By now I was used to this sort of hypocrisy; this was the summer of 2017, and we were still blinking our eyes in the shock of the Trump presidency. The day after the election last fall, both of us got to the office early because we couldn’t sleep. We swapped stories about our slow, horrific realization that Hillary had lost — me at a watch party in a bar with a bunch of young women wearing blazers, my boss at a corresponding party at Megyn Kelly’s home. “She’s actually on our side,” my boss told me, and I felt I didn’t have the right to argue.
Just one other assistant was invited to this party. Lots of us were similar, at least from the outside: white brunettes, city transplants, with impressive educations and nimble minds full of pop culture, literature, and politics. The superiors all saw us as kids on our parent’s dime (the better to exploit you with, my dears) but while that was true of some of the girls, who got blowouts, lived in Manhattan, and dated men in finance, there were many of us who babysat on the side, took home the free food, and fell asleep on our long commutes home. I was firmly in the purse-bagel camp.
Tara, the other assistant at the party, was also in that camp and determined to ascend. She worked in publicity. “Holy fuck,” she said when we got into the art deco elevator. She’d been telling me on the subway ride to the Upper East Side that she and her boyfriend were opening their relationship. I listened with quiet terror.
It became clear to me, the moment I got inside, that “apartment” was not the correct word for this residence. When the elevator opened, I confronted an eight by six Liechtenstein.
“Um,” I said.
A person in a tuxedo appeared and asked if he could take my purse. I handed it over without asking if he worked there.
The Lichtenstein was the least of things. In one sweep of the room, I saw a Georgia O’Keefe painting, a Jeff Koons mirror shaped like a Gummy Bear, and, in the living room, a Chihuly chandelier. The domestic setting made them seem grander than their siblings inside of museums. A month earlier I’d gone to the Chihuly show at the Botanic Garden with my mom, and I wished I’d held on to my purse to take a photo to show her.
—
My boss reminded me of my mother, if my mother was childless, Soul Cycled, and had a penchant for statement eyewear. One night nearly everyone had gone home, except Tara and me. We’d just attended a panel where the assistants listened to the editors talk about how they established themselves. My boss told a story about coming to New York broke, leaning on competence long enough to survive the attrition when she earned responsibilities interesting enough to prove herself. It was the same story almost all the executives told, though many of them omitted family money. My option if I ran into trouble would be to move back in with my parents. A safety net, but one much closer to the ground.
I felt, as I always did when I heard these stories of ascent, that she was leaving something out. She mentioned all the steps between where I was and where she’d ended up, yet somehow, I had no better clue how to get there than before. I wanted her to describe exactly how she’d climbed the ladder, so I could learn and climb it myself.
After the panel, my boss returned to her office, then stopped outside it and looked at Tara and me. She was wearing a beautiful plaid blazer and patent leather brogues.
“You know, girls,” she began, as if picking up a dropped conversational thread, “people will tell you that you can do it all. A family and this business. But really you do have to choose. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.”
Then she went into her office.
Tara and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, then took our tote bags and went into the elevator, where we could talk about her without being overheard. There were plenty of moms in the business, though the first one who came to mind was an editor I babysat for sometimes, who, when I asked her how she got everything done, smiled and said, “I only sleep every other night.”
—
My author and the hostess were both women of about fifty, artistic, smart, the sort of women who weaponize their taste and know someone in every trendy business in New York. The Billionaire was about twenty-five years older, short and bald, with an overbite. I wondered what it must be like for my author, who was successful in my eyes but a single mom who survived on a literary fiction writer’s earnings, that her girlhood friend married this man.
They made some speeches, thanking us for coming and congratulating the author on her book, and then Tara and I felt permitted to fall upon the food. There were three stations: charcuterie, sushi, and dessert. There were no utensils except for the tongs to pull out the meats, which were cut into pieces the size of my face.
“My kingdom for a fork.”
A man my father’s age made eye contact over the table. “Eat it with your hands.”
I blinked.
“Your hands.” He dangled a piece of fat-marbled meat before me with a pair of tongs. I took it, afraid that if I didn’t, I’d get into trouble and ate it while he watched.
At that point in my life, I was too self-conscious to know that I could be a Pretty Young Thing. I felt sure that all PYTs must know this about themselves, and since I often felt like a walking head buzzing with thoughts like a beehive, I couldn’t be. When men behaved like this, it embarrassed me; I felt I had hoodwinked them. The truth was I was twenty-four and pretty.
Tara and I went over to the couch and took in the artwork and the people. I was wearing a secondhand designer dress that still looked cheap. Tara’s dress I placed as H&M. The other women almost exclusively wore caftans in rich colors, or loose black clothing. All wore sculptural jewelry. Tara and I found a catalog on the coffee table with all the art inside the place. I spotted most of the art around the living room, but there was one piece I couldn’t locate.
“It says there’s a Rembrandt,” I said.
Tara was more interested in identifying the party guests. None were famous of face, but she seemed to know many of them through their achievements: reviewers, gallerists, moguls of all stripes.
To me, the presence of a Rembrandt eclipsed any opportunity for career advancement. I’d visited Rembrandt’s house with my boyfriend in Amsterdam, and he’d gotten in trouble for sitting on what turned out to be Rembrandt’s portrait stool. My mother, who’d done bookkeeping but loved art history, had taught me to appreciate his use of light in his paintings, but the visit to his narrow, tall home had converted me to a fan. Each floor was dedicated to a hustle: one for living, another for his portrait studio, another for his school, another for where his students copied his most famous paintings and sold them at reduced price, and, my favorite floor, where he mixed his paints out of plants and stones. I loved that one of the greatest painters who ever lived had had to diversify his income. I associated him now with powdered lapis lazuli on a terra cotta tray.
While I paged the catalogue, I was eating a little crostini with pesto, then dropped it face down onto the white carpet.
We both went still. Then we looked up. No one was paying attention to us.
Slowly, never taking her eyes off the crowd around us, Tara put her foot in front of it so I could pick up the bread from the ground. It left a grassy mark the size of a quarter.
I started calculating how much I’d have to pay to get this rug cleaned. A month’s rent?
Tara stared at the green mark. “Run.”
We abandoned the couch and our plates and began to surf the party.
“Do you want to find the Rembrandt?” I asked her.
She looked at me like I was crazy, and I felt childish, a kid running under the elbows at a wedding reception. She turned to a man in a lime green suit and introduced herself as a publicist; she didn’t mention the word assistant.
The home spanned the whole floor, with a wraparound terrace that had views of the entire city. I thought of the Lion King. Everything the light touches…
I wandered for a few more minutes before I came upon the host couple. I thanked them for having me in a way my mother would have been proud of and narrowly saved myself from asking if there was anything I could do to help clean up.
“Your collection is amazing.”
The wife peered at me through thick glasses. I got nervous then and said the first thing that came to mind, which was, “My boyfriend and I —” I was always mentioning my boyfriend then, as if he was an achievement, “—recently went to the new Broad Museum in Los Angeles. It’s amazing that they made it free.”
The woman gave me a tight smile. I recognize now that they probably knew the Broads personally, and might have seen them as competitors, and my comment as a passive-aggressive suggestion. I was merely showing off the small bits of information that I knew about their world. A much clumsier offense.
“Is all your art here?” I asked.
“No,” the Billionaire answered. He was smiling at me. I found his energy bumbling and friendly, a chubby, hairless Professor Flitwick. “We have four homes, and we rotate the collection among them, and loan pieces to museums occasionally.”
I summoned the courage to ask after the Rembrandt. He blinked wet round eyes and I felt I’d intruded somehow. “It’s mentioned in the catalogue,” I said.
“Ah,” he said, and a smile stretched across his wide mouth. “You want to see it?”
“Yes.” I felt like I’d passed some sort of test.
He stepped away from his wife, who glanced at me, raised her eyebrows, then turned back to the party center. “It’s upstairs. Come, I’ll show you.”
I looked across the room to check on my pesto spot. It was still there. “Thank you.”
I followed him up the spiral staircase lined with Diane Arbus photographs. We passed my boss on the way.
“We’re going to see the Rembrandt,” I said.
She gave me a look I now realize was apprehension, a warning. “Have fun.”
I just smiled at her.
The Billionaire and I emerged onto a second floor as large as the first, and he took me through the children’s rooms, where four adolescents played video games on enormous geometric beanbag chairs. They didn’t acknowledge either of us. These children were already so much more powerful than I could ever hope to be; in fact, entertaining hope to be this powerful would rot me from the inside, turn me into a sort of Gollum. I thought of growing up here, in this place, in this life, and felt an emotional vertigo.
The Billionaire led me up the stairs again to the third floor.
We arrived at the master bedroom. He stopped at the threshold. By now, we were very alone, the children’s floor a buffer between us and the party. I could not hear the guests. The rug in the room was special, he told me; it spanned the room, which was, of course, larger than my apartment. I don’t remember why it was special, though, because by then it had occurred to me that he could do absolutely anything he liked to me and I’d have no recourse.
Creepy men struggled to find an entry point. I wasn’t all that innocent, but I had been taught in my midwestern Catholic way that anything short of body dysmorphia was prideful. I was embarrassed to imagine anyone trying to seduce me. This attitude disarmed older men who, in hindsight, had begun the prescribed path only to encounter my wholesome defenses. They then seemed to relax, let out their inner nerds, tell me about the things they were interested in, because I really did want to know, and assumed they only wanted to tell me.
So I followed the Billionaire into his bedroom, afraid that if I didn’t, it would be rude.
We passed the bed — larger than my kitchen — and he led me into a dressing room off the side.
“I keep it here,” he said, and I was relieved that we were still heading to the artwork, not just the most secluded room in the place.
The room was messy and doubled as a study. It was the only room I’d seen so far that looked like it could be in someone else’s home. The desk had pens and Post-It notes on it, and one of the dresser drawers hung open like a lolling tongue. Even the windows here were normal-sized, though they still showed an emperor’s view.
“Here it is,” the Billionaire said. He walked me over to the dresser. He was a head shorter than me. There were other, ordinary things on top: uncapped cologne, loose change, a discarded tie.
He picked up a glass rectangle.
“I keep it here so I can actually look at it,” he said. “It’s the only thing in this whole place I’d save in a fire.”
I was wondering if that included his wife and children when he handed it to me. I hadn’t been expecting this and my heart skipped a beat.
I held the Rembrandt in my hands.
I’d expected a painting, but it was a copper plate, the kind used to make prints. In it, an angel appeared to a group of shepherds. It was difficult to make out the design against the copper, though there was still ink dried into the grooves from when Rembrandt had used it himself. I turned it in the light and the drawing came out. It was glorious, how the scratches seemed to change before my eyes into a group of men, an angel, mere lines suggesting the rays of the sun, the tiniest nicks on their faces projecting profound awe. The whole thing was smaller than a postcard.
I stared at it for a long time, hoping that in some way, seeing and touching this object would change me, smooth me, deepen me, turn me into the sort of person who could exist alongside these things and shrug. But all that happened was my eyes filled with tears, because it was beautiful.
I both loved and hated that it was hidden up here, away from other people. I had long wondered how someone could possess the means to, if not end world hunger, significantly reduce it, and not do so; the thought provoked the same mental pain that happened when I thought too much about outer space. Yet I understood owning this Rembrandt and keeping it here, just for myself.
“Thank you,” I said.
I held it a moment longer, then put it back on the dresser.
“I want to show you something else,” he said.
I followed him. He took me into a bathroom.
Everything inside was white. The tub looked like it required swimming lessons to safely use. “This is my favorite piece in the house.” He smiled at me and pointed.
On a tiled pillar, directly across from the bathtub, hung a black and white photograph of boobs.
I stared at them for a long while. The Billionaire smiled at me, his front teeth making an impression on his bottom lip.
Finally, I said, “Those are some great boobs,” because they were. I, a small-breasted woman, found it important to express admiration for better-endowed women, so I didn’t seem bitter.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” He stared at the photo, sighed. “Life.”
My heart was pounding now.
“I think my friend is waiting for me,” I said.
The Billionaire didn’t protest, just hummed a little as he led me back down the stairs. I rejoined the party, and retrieved my purse, and tried to say goodbye to Tara, but she was on the terrace in the middle of a group of women from the Met.
I ran into my boss calling an Uber in the lobby downstairs. She looked at me over her red-framed glasses. “Did you see it?”
“Yes.” I tried to explain the copper plate to her but couldn’t. She just looked at me for a long time and then told me to remember this.
“These sorts of experiences don’t happen twice,” she said.
And it didn’t. A year later, I sold a novel, and my boss and I had our sushi lunch that precipitated my exit. “If you’re a writer, write,” I recall her saying when I first began, but hadn’t listened. She said nothing of the kind in our final meeting, but I had already lost the privilege of her advice, never having listened to it. Still that push was a kindness. A month after that, I got a job in a middle school, where I could be myself if I kept it PG. I wore clogs and jeans. And I made three times the salary.
My new job had no glamour. Instead of crisis about book advances and upset celebrities, I dealt with menstrual accidents and tears. And yet sometimes, in the middle of the crush of odorous adolescents and overstretched teachers it occurs to me, as if it happened in a dream, that I have held a Rembrandt in my hands.
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Emily Neuberger is the author of A Tender Thing (Putnam, 2020). Her writing has appeared in The Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, swamp pink, The Common, Joyland, The Sun, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere, and in 2023 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Brooklyn with her tuxedo cat and runs the reading series Sunday Stories.