Page 28 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Wonderful,” Mary Louise said. “So your parents must help out with the rent, right? Thank God for parents.” She said it like a joke, but there was a bite to her voice. Paul was shocked. He interrupted with “Uh, Tatyana, why don’t you sit there?”

Mary Louise said, “I’d love to sit with Tatyana, Paul, okay?”

Tatyana flashed Paul a “help me” look, but it was too late; Mary Louise had already seated herself next to Tatyana. Paul sat on Mary Louise’s other side to try to tamp down the interrogation.

*

One of the couples at the table was Tatyana’s shy friend Andrea, along with the guy she’d just started seeing, a very opinionated man named Arthur.

Tatyana introduced everyone.

Arthur was an architect and a self-proclaimed foodie, and he held strong views on just about everything. He had round black-framed architect’s glasses and a goatee and wore a crisp white shirt under a black blazer. Arthur believed that white truffles were superior to black, that homemade pasta was indistinguishable from dried and boxed, that truffle oil was entirely synthetic. At dessert, when he and several others, including Paul and Tatyana, had ordered the panna cotta, Arthur put down his spoon and said, “Mexican vanilla. Clearly.”

“Isn’t most of the world’s vanilla from Madagascar?” Paul asked.

“This is delicious,” said Andrea.

“I think vanilla is an underrated flavor,” Tatyana said. “If someone’s boring? They’re vanilla, right? Why notbeige?”

“And the thing about Madagascar vanilla . . .” Arthur began.

“What about Madagascar vanilla?” prompted Rick, who caught Paul’s eye, letting him know that he was having fun, triggering the guy.

“Vanilla is worth more by weight than silver,” Arthur went on. “Eighty percent of the world’s supply of vanilla beans is grown in Madagascar, which is one of the poorest countries in the world.”

“One of the five poorest countries,” Mary Louise said. “The poverty there is awful.”

“Well, it’s delicious,” Tatyana said.

“Vanilla is an orchid, actually,” Arthur said, settling back in his chair. “Each flower has to be pollinated by hand. On the very morning that it blooms. That’s why it’s so expensive. It’s a huge pain in the ass to grow.”

“Pollinated by hand?” Tatyana said. “All of the plants?”

Arthur nodded.

“So how much do the farmers who grow vanilla make?” Rick asked. At Reed College, he’d been big in Occupy Portland.

“Seventeen cents an hour,” Arthur said. “Seventeen cents.”

“That’s unbelievable,” Tatyana said. “Should we be boycotting vanilla?”

*

After dinner, when everyone was breaking up to go home, Tatyana excused herself to go to the bathroom. Mary Louise said to Paul, “She’s lovely.”

“You did kind of put her through enhanced interrogation,” Paul said.

Mary Louise drew close to him and said in a low voice, “So she met you at one of those fancy fund-raisers you go to, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I guess she knew you had money,” she said lightly, almost as if she were joking, but she wasn’t.

“Mary Louise, come on,” said Rick.

“Mary Louise, that’s not fair,” Paul protested.

“A lot of Russian women search for rich American men to marry, you know,” Mary Louise said. “It’s a thing. She’s an artist, she has no money, she meets a guy who works at a hedge fund—”

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