My cousin Barry Vishniak's heyday in New York was the eighties. He was at home with the filth and corruption, high prices, dirty subway cars, and unlimited girls girls girls on 42nd Street. Back then, Ed Koch was mayor, Reagan was in the White House, and the high percentage of mental patients babbling and screaming on Manhattan streets made Barry feel saner, more secure. By the time I got there, New York was Giuliani-ized, Disney-fied. The Upper West Side, where Barry once lived, had become no different from Scarsdale. "That's why I moved to Jersey City," he told me as we walked up Broadway one warm afternoon in March, 1997. "I can't take how clean everything is anymore, and the smugness. The fuckin' YUPPIE smugness." He opened the door to Zabar's, and a rush of people spilled out the door, as if they'd been trapped in there for days. Barry wanted to whet his appetite, to inhale a little nova lox and sample fifteen different kinds of olives.

"Remember that night, back in '82?" he asked me, referring to when I'd come to New York as a teenager to interview at Barnard and he took me out for my first ever sushi dinner. I assured him I did, for he had, just as he was doing now, insisted on walking into Zabar's beforehand, to work up an appetite, the way two Irishmen might start their evening at the local pub. As he wandered up and down the aisles, pushing and shoving his way from cheese to candy to fish, I thought about that night and the bet he'd insisted on making with me: whoever ate and drank the most got twenty dollars. Not exactly fair, as I'd never had saki before, or much alcohol at all for that matter. At one point, I got up to go to the ladies' room and walked into a brick wall. Within moments a big welt formed on my forehead. In the cab on the way back to his apartment, I had to puke into Barry's ski cap.

"You still owe me twenty bucks from that night," he said. "I won fair and square."

"I overslept and missed my interview," I reminded him. "I almost didn't get into college because of you. Not to mention all the coke you were snorting beforehand gave you an unfair advantage." The coke part had only dawned on me years later. Back then, age seventeen, I thought he was just very energetic and prone to colds.

He shrugged. "A bet's a bet, kiddo," he said, as we exited the deli. "Everyone in New York learns to play the angles eventually. Except the suckers and the tourists."

"Uhuh," I said.

"So what are you up to tonight?"

It occurred to me that he might be expecting an invitation to dinner—I was on my way to meet some coworkers in Soho—but something stopped me from asking. I was no longer seventeen. Back then, it had been enough to me that he lived in Manhattan, slept two hours a night, and spent money like it was not his own, which was more or less the truth—he was a stockbroker. He had no boss or budget—two words which ruled our parents' lives—and all I wanted then was to be just that free. On my rare visits, I trailed after him from club to cab to restaurant, studying his tastes, hanging on his every word and gesture.

Those days felt long gone. Barry, once trim and dark-complected, with the charisma that came from tremendous drive and unlimited uppers, was now a short, balding man with an enormous belly, smelly cigars, tattered shirts, and a still unnamed profession. There was a slightly wild look in his eye, deep pouches of exhaustion on his face, a constant sniffle. I had only been at Hoffman and Hoffman a few months and was, at that moment, going to meet the other publicists in my department. People in Armani suits who drank Cosmopolitans and carried their Dunhills in small silver cigarette cases. How would they react to an evening with cousin Barry? Not well, I suspected.

On the other hand, Barry had just hooked me up with Jack Fingerhut, the real estate king, who, for a mere $2800 above first month's and security, had gotten me a rent-stabilized studio. Meaning affordable rent for life. Most people had more chance of being hit by the crosstown bus than they did of getting their name on a stabilized lease in the boom nineties. Wasn't that worth, at least, an invitation to dinner?

I felt a little ashamed as I kissed his cheek and told him I had to leave, but I couldn't invite him out with the crowd from Hoffman and Hoffman. My mother would point out, at this juncture, that this did not make me a snob, merely a survivor. The problem was, he was family, and from somewhere deep in the earth my grandmother was wagging her finger at me. My father was shaking his head. Barry was his favorite nephew. His gutsy nephew, he once called him. Gutsy and good to his mother.

"You have dinner plans?" I whispered, glancing down into the mouth of the subway. Tentatively, I put my foot on a lower step.

He shooed me away with his hand. "Go, go, earn that $2000 you owe Jack," he said.

"It's $2,800," I called back. I felt suddenly better; he had forgotten, momentarily, about what was likely his own kickback.

The next time I saw Barry was four months later, in the summer. He was sitting at a table off West End and 84th, around the corner from my new apartment, with two men. He was wearing a navy blazer, camel-colored pants, pale blue shirt. Usually my cousin was in baggy, wrinkled khakis and a tattered oxford. If he hadn't called to me, I wouldn't have recognized him. The café featured glatt kosher food. Outside, a giant photo of the Lubavitcher rebbe looked on blankly above the words "Get ready for Moshiach."

The men were introduced to me as Rabbi Davidman (beard) and Rabbi Perez (clean-shaven). Perhaps Barry saw shock in my expression, for he gave me a look that felt like a warning.

"Did I ever tell you, gentlemen, about my participation in Operation Moses?"

He began a long tale about his role in the airlift and rescue of several thousand Ethiopian Jews, a secret mission into a hostile dictatorship conducted by the Israelis in 1985, and then again in '91. Barry described how the army had used El Al planes, removing chairs and seat cushions to pack more people in.

"My parachute didn't work right," he said, "and I got lost from my unit, somewhere in the Sudan."

"Oh," I said, leaning forward. "And what exactly did you do then?" In 1985, my cousin was still a retail stockbroker in the two-person operation that made him a lot of money before he was hauled to court on insider trading charges. He'd gotten off on a technicality, a fumble by a young SEC lawyer. I was sure his travels that year had not taken him past Newark.

I looked at the two rabbis; they were riveted. Barry's abilities were inherited from his father, my Uncle Vishniak, whom he closely resembles. Uncle Vishniak was known for never telling the truth under any circumstances, except in cases where it didn't matter. Luckily, he always worked for the transit authority.

"So there I was, alone in the desert," Barry continued, "and within two days I was outta water." There was a black bird following him, he said, a strange kind of crow, which he shot. "That ugly bird saved my life. The feathers were wet enough that I could suck the water off them. The meat could be roasted. And then the eyes of certain wild birds. . . ." He paused for effect. "You can poke them out with a knife and eat them, they're full of iron."

"What can I get for you?" The waiter suddenly appeared at my side.

"Bring her a chicken sandwich," my cousin said, and waved him away.

"Really, I have to be going."

"Annie here is one of my only living relatives," Barry told the two men. "Most of our family is dead."

"Or in jail," I whispered. Barry pinched my leg under the table.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I realized that my cousin, without anyone's knowledge, was about to become a rabbi.

"So when, exactly, have you been in school?" I asked. "At night? Is there such a thing as a rabbinical correspondence course?"

"I'm sure I told you about it," he said. "There's a new seminary, over in the sixties."

"Flexible class time," Rabbi Perez said. "For working people. We take on a lot of older students. Your cousin here has taken to Talmud study like a duck to water."

"Talmud is all about playing the angles," Barry said to me.

The two rabbis looked at each other, puzzled, but I was beginning to put a few things together. I got up, this time insistent on leaving. The rabbis rose, too, and Barry, suddenly the only one sitting, jumped up, dropping his napkin on the ground.

"Take care of yourself," Barry said.

"Be well," said each of the rabbis.

"Your father," I said to my cousin, kissing his pudgy cheek, "would certainly be proud."

Whenever I worked late that year, which was more often than not, I liked to walk home through the streets of Manhattan, to let off steam. I had my regular route, walking from 57th and Sixth over to Central Park South, up to Columbus Circle then up Central Park West. After ten p.m., the street itself was quieter than my apartment, plus the doormen were always out, silent and vaguely protective. You saw plenty of young and middle-aged women walking alone that time of night, their Ferragamo pumps making a click click click on the sidewalk. Their faces—our faces—were set in exhausted determination: Someday hard work would surely triumph over economics and we'd pay off our Visa bills and trade the nagging symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for a down payment on something permanent. Meanwhile, our eyes darted here and there in the darkness, trying to separate the rapists from the eligible single men.

On one such evening, I spotted a building with a large cardboard star of David outside. This had to be Barry's seminary, I thought, walking toward the area of Lincoln Center where Broadway and Columbus unite. Halfway there, I saw my cousin in a crowd, coming out a side door.

I called to Barry, and he turned around and smiled, came toward me with his arms outstretched, a book in one hand.

"Let's walk this way," he said, going back toward the park.

"Don't you want to go out with your friends?" I asked.

"Friends," he said. "You think I have anything to say to that bunch of losers?"

"But you're going to be a rabbi," I reminded him.

"It serves my purposes," he whispered, taking my arm.

"When you applied, didn't they need to see a copy of your diploma?" I asked. My cousin had dropped out of college in his senior year, 1973, forfeiting his scholarship and briefly entering a commune in San Francisco.

"I got them a copy of my diploma."

"You sent a fake diploma to a rabbinical school? Jesus, you're going to hell. . . ."

"First off, if you knew anything about our faith," he said, a faint smile playing on his lips, "then you'd know that there is no real conception of hell. There's Gehenna, which ain't such a bad place. Heaven, on the other hand, what's heaven? A bunch of Jews waiting around in limbo for the Messiah? A shortage of cute blondes and no Eggs Benedict? Fuck that. Second, the seminary counts life experience. Something you could use a little more of, if you ask me."

I assured him that New York had already given me enough experience for several lifetimes, and that as it was, I was exhausted and discouraged. I had been in Manhattan about six years at that point, and was wondering who in the whole city could afford to live decently without a trust fund, a rich spouse or, as Barry had warned me, an angle to play.

"I got a letter from Robert last week," Barry said. At the mention of his older brother, he lowered his voice.

"Any chance he'll get out early?" I asked. "For good behavior?"

"No chance. They throw the book at attorneys. A wasted life. He was the smartest one in the whole God-damned family."

"I know," I said. "I know." If there'd been a horse race (which in a certain way there had been), Robert, the oldest of us cousins, Barry, his baby brother, and I, twenty years Robert's junior, were the front runners to break away from the family vocations—generations of postal and blue-collar workers and small-time crooks. I'd gone to college because they'd done it; applied for the same scholarships, done the same dance. But of the three of us, none was as handsome or brilliant as Robert. It couldn't have been easy for Barry, growing up in his shadow.

Once, when I was twelve or so, Robert came back to Philadelphia for a few days and the whole family showed up to see him. Thirty of us all stuffed into Aunt Stacia's tiny row-house. I was sure Robert didn't even notice me, but after dinner he insisted we go for a walk, just the two of us. I jumped up and practically ran to the door, for I rarely got his full attention when he came back, everyone wanted to see him, touch his fine suits and taste the caviar he brought from New York. He was the prodigal returned. Barry was likely out in some neighbor's car that night, getting high. He was just as bright, in his own way, but already known as the family fuck-up. Even I, who worshiped both of them, could see that Robert was the genuine article and Barry some kind of imitation. One had started college, the other had finished it and gone on to law school. One was physically promising, the other perfected. One chased women, the other was chased by them, and had married the daughter of an enormously wealthy man. When Robert was around, Barry was even more prone to say the wrong thing, be a little too affectionate or over-anxious, even crass.

We only went to the end of the block. Robert stopped there, silent. He took a bill out of his wallet, folded it in thirds and placed it in my palm. "This is a secret between you and me," he said. "Don't tell your mother. Don't tell anyone." It was a $50 bill, the first one I'd ever touched. I looked up at his face, towering over me: he had blue eyes and thick black hair, enhanced by what my mother called bone structure. "I'm only letting you have this money under one condition," he said. "You have to spend it on something useless and beautiful. Don't let anyone talk you into putting it in the bank. You promise?"

I nodded. There was something sacred about the oath. Perhaps I took it too seriously, because I walked around with that money for years, couldn't let go of something he'd given me. Everywhere I went, I looked for the perfect object, the one possession that would lift me into his realm of beauty, wealth, and culture. I never spent that money. Over two decades later, it was still in an envelope in my underwear drawer.

I tried not to think about what it was like for Robert in prison. We didn't understand the extent of his crimes, or why he was sent to a federal facility, incarcerated with gang members and murderers. By all rights, he should have gotten a year or two in a white-collar place; he was accused of embezzlement and money laundering. Amateur theatrics, Barry said. He was working night and day, he told me, to try to get Robert pardoned or his sentence commuted.

"When was the last time you saw him?" I asked. The two brothers had not gotten along for years: Robert's second wife, Crea, a Miss Porter's girl if ever there was one, couldn't stand Barry, had long ago banned him from their home in Greenwich.

"Six, seven years," Barry replied. "Hey, blood's thicker than water. We were close as kids, in our way. I don't blame him 'cause his wife had that thing about canned fruit."

I smiled, vaguely remembering an incident in which Barry, on his last visit to Robert and his bride, had made a late-night raid on the family refrigerator in nothing but his undershirt. Crea, hearing the noise, came in and found him in the light of the open door drinking all the juice out of a large can of imported Brazilian pineapple chunks, leaving the fruit to dry out and rot on the bottom. This, she pronounced, was the last straw.

I'm sure, for both brothers, that incident now felt like a universe away. For it was Barry who was out there acting on Robert's behalf, and Robert, the great white hope, who'd been rendered powerless. I wondered just then where I might end up. My own future felt like anyone's guess.

"Robert got the brains and the looks," Barry continued. "And you, Annie, you got the class. But me, I got none of that, you know. That's why I need to . . ."

"Go to rabbinical school?" I asked, cutting him off. "You need God on your side?"

"Yeah," he said, and put his arm around me, pulled me close and planted a wet kiss on my cheek. "You smell like a million bucks, kid. You always smell like a million bucks."

I didn't know what he was up to with this rabbi thing, doubted it was legal, but I was rooting for him. How could I not be?

About a year later, it all became clear. Barry was out in East Hampton, rabbi to the very rich and somewhat famous. I'd asked him, when he was ordained in a small auditorium on 122nd Street, if he knew enough Hebrew to carry this off. Enough? He'd laughed at me. Enough for the laity, he said. For none of them knew what was what anymore, and the richer they were, he added, the less they knew. A nice sermon every now and then, about the virtues of charity, or family values, was all that was needed. A good excuse to stand around eating and trading stock tips.

He led me out of the crowded reception of rabbinical students and their parents, and onto a high balcony that overlooked a courtyard. All around us were life-size bronze sculptures of men lost in prayer. Perched on top of their unusually wide shoulders were tiny, almost insignificant heads.

"Jacques Lipschitz," Barry told me. "He did these statues."

"I think you underestimate the demands of what you're getting into," I said.

"Hey," Barry said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke out the side of his mouth. "All they want from me is weekends and holidays. Nobody else wanted a position that asked for so little." He paused. A certain intense twinkle came into his eye, almost but not quite lecherous. The force of it made his eyes water. A new scheme he'd thought up, or a wild, out of control desire for something he couldn't quite describe.

"What?" I asked. "What's that look about?"

He wiped a tear from his eye. "Schmucks!" He dropped his cigarette butt to the ground, stomping on it with great gusto. "They all thought part-time was below them. Perfect for me to swoop in and get the spoils. Do they even realize who my congregants will be?"

A few months later, I came to know exactly who they were. By then, opportunity had knocked for me in the guise of a project for Hoffman and Hoffman—beefing up the public image of a company called Double Vision, which made fitness videos and did a quiet underground business in soft porn. They had gotten some bad press of late and we were hired to fix it. So while Barry was bestowing Sabbath blessings out in the Hamptons, I was in the office until eleven every night, learning as much about the flesh-peddling business as possible, including the remarkably high profit margin and enormous revenue opportunities offered by international cable sales. Though much of Double Vision's product came through the standard channels, there was one independent porn director/producer whose name, Victor Lampshade, sounded remarkably familiar. I dismissed the observation immediately, for how would I ever have met such a person before? Eventually, Lampshade called me, after receiving a memo I sent him on the advertising and promotion of his new film, Down Under, about a group of Australian coeds hitching their away across the United States.

"Annie, Annie Lieberman?" he asked. "Jesus, could that be you?"

"Uhuh," I said cautiously.

"It's Vic, Vic Lampshade? Your cousin Barry Vishniak's college roommate." He paused and I searched my memory, but came up with no picture of him, nor any reason for him to remember my name. "I came to your family for Thanksgivings during school," he said, then reminded me, as if to prove his credentials, of Aunt Stacia's much lauded duck, of Robert's first wife, who everyone swore was a Rothschild, and of how Uncle Vishniak always smelled of ear wax. "You were a cute little girl," he added. "I used to bring you bath toys. Until Barry told me if I ever did it again, he'd wait until I was asleep and cut off my . . . "

"Are you the one who's very very tall?" I asked quickly. "Beard and glasses?"

"That's me. Seven feet," he said, and laughed. "Helps with the camera angles. I do my own camera work, you know. Creative control is very . . ."

"I'm sure." It was all coming back to me. Mother and Aunt Stacia had often complained about both his table manners and how much food he could put away. Barry's parents, though in a perpetual state of debt, always offered enough to eat, particularly at holidays, even if it meant that Aunt Stacia spent the next six months beefing up her coupon files and buying day-old. But Victor Lampshade was not a relative, and his invitations quickly came to an end.

"Have you been in contact with Barry recently?" I asked.

"Not in a year or two. I used to string my movie out-takes together—the ones that weren't allowed by the triple X rating system—and send them to him every year for Christmas. In return he'd send me . . ."

"He's a rabbi now," I interrupted.

While his secretary scurried around in the background, attempting to find a paper bag—I believe he was having trouble breathing—I quickly got off the phone. A few days later, I advised Double Vision to stop distributing Lampshade's work once his contract ran out. His porn, I pointed out, was not soft, nor was it art. It was simply in bad taste. It was Lampshade's earlier movie, Turkish Delight, about a group of Turkish coeds hitchhiking their way across the United States, that had garnered so much negative attention from both feminists and the Muslim Anti-Defamation League.

Things went exceptionally well after that. A series of interviews with major fashion and fitness magazines, and the removal of Victor Lampshade's films, cleared the air for our client and created a fresh buzz. There was talk at work of my being promoted as I had worked so hard on the project. I also began dating Bruce Barnett, the president and founder of Double Vision. He was that essentially Darwinian genus and subspecies: the Manhattan self-made man. He'd risen from the slums of Bensonhurst to own a full floor on 72nd and Central Park West plus a house on the beach in Bridgehampton, and he understood the value of everything he'd earned.

Bruce's house on the beach had a magical quality, the insides achieved by a rigorous team of decorators, and the outsides more or less put there by God Himself. Three stories with a balcony jutting almost into the ocean, the place felt at times like a giant luxury liner. Off the sun room was a tennis court, and underneath the balcony, for those who preferred chlorinated water, was an Olympic-size pool. Inside, the house was full of Dutch modern furniture, abstract expressionist art, and apricot-colored carpets. During my weekends there, I often thought of Robert, locked in his dark little jail cell with no view. He would have appreciated the house's teak baseboards, marble jaccuzi and proximity to the ocean. I was still trying to impress him, if only in my imagination. To make myself worthy of his tastes. An accomplished sailor, as well as fencer, golfer, horseback rider, and any other activity forbidden to us in childhood, Robert had always seemed a natural to this world, as if born into it, whereas I was only faking. Bruce was faking, too, in his way. It was something we had in common. That, and how much we both enjoyed his money.

The more I went to Bridgehampton that year, the more all roads seemed to lead not to the easy polished class of Robert, but to the harsh angles of Barry. It turned out that when Bruce was in the Hamptons, he occasionally attended Rabbi Vishniak's synagogue. I asked him about it once, never letting on that Barry was my cousin.

"The rabbi's an idiot," he said, for he was a direct kind of person, used to having his opinions listened to. "I don't understand how he gets away with it. Skipping half the service, sermons that sound like they come out of a cracker jack box. He pinches women's butts during the Kiddush."

The thing was, Bruce found it amusing. I think a lot of them did. Like so many of Barry's congregation, Bruce was there because once or twice David Geffen had shown up, and Michael Milken, even in the midst of his prostate problems, had been known to drop by. In his own strange way, my cousin was becoming the success he'd always wanted to be.

About six months after Barry came to Congregation Mikveh Israel by the Sea, Bruce and I were at the Union Square Café for dinner. It was a Friday night, when reservations had to be made six months in advance unless you knew someone, and Bruce did. We were at a private balcony table on the second floor—the equivalent of a box at the opera. Just after the appetizers, I thought I spotted my cousin and a woman at a corner table on the ground floor.

"Are you all right?" Bruce asked, for I was growing pale. He'd just ordered his second bottle of an expensive Cabernet Franc. Bruce was the kind of drinker who took cover behind the status of his hobby—he had a wine cellar in the country and a man who stocked it for him. After we finished the second bottle, I knew he'd order several samples of port, spread out in front of him in silver thimble-like shot glasses, so that I could pick one. He was always happiest when I pointed to the most expensive brand; he'd smile and say "that's my girl." But I had the feeling, were he not wealthy, he'd have happily downed malt liquor in his kitchen.

"I have to go to the ladies' room," I said. "Start the wine without me. I'll be back."

"Fancy meeting you here," Barry called out when he saw me. He stood up very straight in his navy blue suit and began to glance upward at the higher tables. "Is that your date?" he asked. "That thug up there? Old enough to be your father . . ."

"He's not a thug," I said. "Cosmopolitan magazine voted him one of the most eligible bachelors in America."

"That only means he's got alotta money," Barry said. "Oh, boy, I wish my brother was here, he'd laugh his ass off." He introduced the woman he was with as Claudine.

"Pleased to meet ya," Claudine said, and stuck out a profoundly manicured hand, long red fingernails decorated with stripes and stars, like tiny American flags. She was wearing a tight white cotton sweater and a suede mini-skirt. Her legs were unusually long and shapely and she'd outfitted them in clear stockings touched with bits of gold thread and suede boots that came up above her knees. It was a look, that was for sure.

"What," I whispered, "are you doing out on a Friday night? It's the Sabbath."

Claudine giggled.

"Is she a congregant?" I asked.

"More or less. She's Jewish. That's good enough. Now that it's winter, and the season's over out there, we only have services once a month. Can't get a minyan together otherwise," he said, reminding me that a minyan was ten people.

"I know what it is. Aren't you afraid one of your congregants will see you?"

He gestured for me to come closer, then whispered that he was on his way out of the rabbinate, something very big was about to happen for him. When I asked him if he'd like to have dinner some night the following week, he told me he couldn't, for he was full up with hospital visits. "Bikur Cholim, visiting the sick," he said. "It's an essential part of my job."

I looked over at Claudine, who was just then digging something out of her fingernail with the toothpick from her martini olive. "Is that how you two met?" I asked. "Hospital visits?"

"I think your date is getting restless," Barry said, peering into the rafters. "Better get up there before it's past his bedtime." Then he turned to Claudine and said, "This is a lesson for ya, honey. These days in New York, if you're rich enough, even if you're a thug and practically geriatric, you can buy pretty much any woman you want. . . ."

I didn't hear the end of what he said, turned and walked away, my face burning. It was not what he said as much as the horrible way he said it, and to an audience. For even then I still believed there was a chance I'd fall in love with Bruce Barnett. That, I told myself, was what separated me from Barry—I could never marry solely for money. He, on the other hand, would jump at the first rich woman who crossed his congregational path. That must have been the reason he took the job in the first place. I retreated up the steps to Bruce and his three thimbles of port, convinced that I had finally reconciled myself to the truth: Barry was incapable of loving anyone but himself and his bank account. His attempts at good will toward me over the years were likely just another scheme, a ripoff I had yet to discover. He had crossed the line that night, humiliated and embarrassed me, and I did not intend to forgive him.

Not long after that, a small piece in the New York Post told of a seventy-five-year-old congregant of Barry's who had died of brain cancer and left him four million dollars. Just a few months before his death, this man, who manufactured semi-conductors, had married for the third time. The woman, said the article, was only thirty and named Claudine Goldschmidt. Clearly, the same Claudine I had met. Because the will had been changed so close to the time of death, the family was contesting it, both in terms of Claudine's inheritance and Rabbi Barry Vishniak's. Barry had been fired from his synagogue but he would eventually be a rich man, assuming the will stood up in court. Knowing Barry, whatever Claudine inherited, he'd most likely taken a percentage for brokering the match.

When he called me, a year later, the nineties were coming to an end.

"Come on kid," he said, "I'm sorry I was such a shit to you that night at Union Square. I was drunk, and jealous of that rich old guy up in the good seats. But now I'm a rich old guy with all the good seats I can handle. And you've never been a grudge holder."

He was right, I can never stay mad, it's not in my nature. A new century was dawning, a fresh start, and forgiveness seemed the only alternative. That or turn my back on him forever.

"What are you doing with all that money?" I asked.

"It's invested. Most of it's in dot-com stock. How's the job going?"

"Fine, I just got a promotion."

"Yeah, what's that mean? Another eight grand a year before taxes? A window in your office?" Unfortunately, he was right. That was exactly what I'd gotten, plus a title change and much longer hours. "You still with that thug?"

"No, I'm with a friend of his. It's a long story."

"Maybe you didn't get the class after all," Barry said. "Maybe you're no different from me, or from Robert. What's this one's name?"

"Charlie. He's in venture capital. He says in a few months, the roof's going to fall in on all these dot-com stocks. I suggest you think that over."

"I got a broker," he said. "Listen, I'm calling to invite you to my wedding. Why don't you bring whatever his name is? It's out in Rhinebeck. You'll like this girl I'm marrying, she has a master's degree."

"I thought you were dating Claudine?"

"Claudine?" His laugh was high pitched and hysterical, like a smug hyena. "Well, I wouldn't call what Claudine and I did dating, not by a long shot. But she did help make the two of us much richer."

I hesitated. "You still being sued? For that man's money?"

"I won," he said. "A will's a will. It's going to be a blowout wedding. You being my only living relative who's mobile, I hope you'll be there."

"You know, there are a few others you could invite," I said. I didn't name names, but he knew who I meant. More distant cousins—mail carriers, department store clerks, receptionists—honest people with children, pumping their own gas and paying large mortgages.

"Them?" Barry asked, and laughed.

I came without Charlie, who did not need talking out of any event related to my family. Claudine was at the wedding, and so were the two rabbis I'd met with Barry on West End Avenue. I was shocked to see them; my cousin's suit had created a local scandal. They assured me it was all hot air, and besides, he'd just donated $150,000 to their seminary.

The bride approached me at the smorgasbord before the ceremony and asked if I was the cousin Barry often spoke about. She had a magnificent sweep of blonde highlights, and was several inches taller than her future husband. But what struck me most, as she put out her hand to grasp mine, was how fine and white her skin was, alabaster and poreless, soft as the finest imported silk.

"Are you a hand model?" I asked, keeping hold for several extra seconds. I'd never touched anyone quite like her.

"Oh, no," she said, and smiled. Her voice sent tiny chills up and down my spine. "I do take good care of my hands and feet though. Would you like the number of my manicurist?"

I took a lipstick liner out of my bag and handed it to her. She wrote the number on a cocktail napkin, all the while describing her new job—she had just finished grad school—as the head of a nonprofit that funded day care centers in poor urban areas. I couldn't imagine such a woman loving my cousin, even with some of his better qualities, but she didn't seem the type to marry for money.

"We'll have to have lunch some time," she said, and almost but not quite kissed my cheek. Her breath was like a whiff of mint ice cream. After she walked away, the two rabbis approached, assuring me she was Jewish, despite the fact that her last name was Christmas, Margo Christmas.

"The mother's Jewish, at least," said Rabbi Perez.

"Christmas is not her real name," said Davidson, piling some more raw tuna on his plate.

During the ceremony, held in a solarium with a view of the Hudson River, I sat next to Claudine, now the millionairess, who was wearing a white see-through strapless Versace dress and very little underwear. I wondered if she was trying to upstage the bride, yet she seemed sincerely moved throughout the ceremony, dabbing at her eyes from the moment the organist began. My cousin beamed as he walked down the aisle; I'd never seen him look so happy. I wished suddenly that Robert could have been there. Then I would have asked him the following: Was it possible I had gotten it all wrong? That Barry, of the three of us, was the one truly capable of love?

"Do you know how he met Margo?" I asked Claudine.

"I think he hired her," Claudine whispered.

"Secretarial work?" I suggested hopefully. "Catering?"

"Not exactly," she said. "She worked her way through grad school with a girlfriend, it was a clever business if you ask me. Very high end, very expensive."

I didn't say a word, but as the bride made her way up the aisle to Barry, Claudine could tell I was all ears. "They hired themselves out," she said. "You know, two girls?"

"Two girls?"

"It's not like they let anyone touch them or anything. More like a performance." She described to me the evening, six months earlier, in which my cousin had received a wonderful surprise phone call, out of the blue, from his old college roommate, Victor Lampshade.

"I'm familiar with him," I said.

Claudine looked not a bit surprised. She told me how, in celebration of old times, the men got enormously wasted and called on the services of two women whose number Lampshade knew by heart: Margo Christmas and her partner, Debbie December. When Barry woke up the next morning, he didn't remember anything of the night before. "Everyone was gone," Claudine said. "Except Margo. She was sleeping right next to him. Isn't it romantic?"

After their honeymoon in Nice, Barry and his bride moved back into the city. Not long after, he lost most of his money in bad Internet investments. I have no doubt he'll get it back again, somehow. Through it all, Margo stayed with him, and they seem the happiest of couples. She has been an excellent influence on Barry; he speaks more softly, is less inclined to lash out or use crude language, and no longer talks of the rabbinate.

Recently I received my one and only letter from Robert, written from his jail cell. Barry, he wrote, had succeeded in getting him moved to a lower-security facility where he was much more comfortable, but he didn't want to talk about himself. "I'm deeply concerned about my brother," he said. He wanted me to confirm how Barry met his wife, was horrified that his brother would marry a girl he could simply pay for. He went so far as to ask about her family background, feared they might have children and then Barry would really be stuck. Robert was always a social snob, and it had clearly gotten worse since his incarceration and second divorce. Both his ex-wives had been socialites, his only daughter a member of Connecticut's horsey set.

I wrote back to the post office box and long series of numbers that my cousin had become. I told him of my recent break-up with Charlie, and my decision to leave New York and all its trappings. Lately I had been thinking a lot about that fifty dollars he gave me so long ago, and how I had been searching unsuccessfully for the perfect object ever since. That was the difference between us: my cousins wanted more, more, more, so much more that they'd never have to think about Aunt Stacia's humiliating economies. And I wanted one priceless acquisition, the one possession that would illuminate my life and separate me, once and for all, from everything desperate, cheap, or poorly made. In the end, the result was the same. Robert was in jail, Barry could not relax for a moment, always playing the angles, and I was stuck in middle management, maxing out credit cards and dating men mostly for their ability to pay for expensive dinners. In short, I told him, there is no talisman. The faster we run from what we come from, the more the past stretches out in front of us like a never-ending freeway.

I went on to assure Robert that I'd recently lunched with Margo Christmas Vishniak. An article in the paper had lauded the work her organization does for children in the South Bronx, and we toasted her success. Not only does she have a master's degree in public policy from Yale, I assured him, but in my opinion she is the nicest person to come into our family in a long time.