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Fool's Gold and Sweaters
I'd never found spoiled to be a particularly charming trait, but I suppose that until then, I'd never seen spoiled coupled with competence. There was something mildly irresistible about these boys of privilege. It may have had something to do with the way they took care of you--they did it so naturally that one could almost forget that behind all the chivalrous gestures and seemingly intrinsic class, was a massive heap of money, enabling it all--and really, I think the half of it can be summed up in way they wore their sweaters.
Plain, simple, fitted so as to look flawlessly casual. It wasn't that they were above ordinary sweaters, but rather that the idea of purchasing merchandise from someplace other than their usual high-end haunts...had never seriously crossed their minds. And they were boys, not men, a factor which somehow only added to their charm. The coveted material would likely meet its end far sooner than its price tag predicted. A spontaneous rugby match or some unusual late-night scheme would leave the mothers, upon a holiday visit home, to hold up the ruined article and sigh in the way that mothers do--that is, with a mixture of disapproval and fondness (but mostly fondness)--before putting it aside to give to the help at a later date.
I was utterly captivated. I was a young American girl, upper-middle class (nearer the upper), but like many compatriots of similar economic standing, I had always secretly wished to grow up poor. So how strange to step into a land where the rich were rich and made no apologies. Suddenly, I could almost understand the charm of the extravagant life led by those foreign creatures of my lost generation novels. It was as if I was seeing the world through the eyes of one of Hemingway or Fitzgerald’s characters…but not Jake or Nick. No, I was one of the mindless masses, the ones who chase the glitter and glister and drink to forget it. Yet there I was, finally caught in the trap I had never understood. It was an old world with a new world’s twist, and I can think of few combinations that could prove deadlier...
