K., by Haley Ahn Steinberg

Prose

K.

By Haley Ahn Steinberg

K and I became close around the time he was publicly accused of sexual harassment. I had been working for several members of his family for nearly two years, though I seldom dealt with him directly. K’s wife, Jennifer—thin-boned, ice blonde, yoga instructor—had hired me to look after her aging father in a vague and often redundant domestic capacity. My job involved drawing up daily schedules for the Park Avenue patriarch, Mr. Pettit (6 p.m. drinks at the Union Club, dinner at Le Charlot), and managing precarious relations with Jennifer’s twin sister and her sister’s estranged husband. Later, another estranged relation—Mr. Pettit’s brother, Gerry—crawled out of the woodwork and demanded our attention. He’d been living in a squalid apartment not ten blocks away, where he was slowly losing his mind. No one had heard from him in decades. Family there was like that. If I’d had a couple of drinks and someone asked what I did for money, I’d say: “family mediation.” Really, I was the same as the rest of them. I was hot for money and power.

While I established myself in a quasi-secretarial role at the Upper East Side apartment, I also did odd jobs at Jennifer and K’s loft in Noho. I supervised people setting up for and clearing up after parties, or went out into the hot rush of lower Broadway for expensive salads that would have left any reasonable adult hungry and a little bit depressed. Mostly, I kept Jennifer company. The loft was a prison of white—white floors, white walls, white tables and cushions. It was more art studio than family home, which was, maybe, the point. K’s irregular hours often placed him there during the day.

One winter afternoon, I wrapped the family’s Christmas presents while he painted a large canvas in the middle of the room. It was a house of glass, of inner windows and windowed doors. It was clear to me even then that he was putting on a show for me. As carefully choreographed and deliberate as a bird of paradise. I had observed K closely at his mother-in-law’s memorial reception a few months earlier. After making his rounds, he approached the table I shared with the other women, mostly health aides, who worked at the apartment. He’d looked each of us in the eye for too long and thanked us for coming, oblivious, or not, to the fact that we were all loaded off top-shelf liquor from the open bar. “I bet you that man doesn’t touch a drop,” my mother said later when I called her. “He sounds like the kind of person who needs to be in control.”

I was 21 and the kind of person who ordered all the wrong drinks at all the right bars. All that winter I wore a metallic red-brown eyeshadow, which I referred to as my ‘coked-out Ray Liotta’ affect. I had not known K’s type up close before I met him. I’d only heard stories. He was the longtime publisher of a prestigious New York art magazine. The New York Times, in a 2017 article, described him as a “power broker in the art world.”

Another frequent characterisation: “international art-world personality.” He was a magnet at parties and a party magnet, a man about town, who dressed in monochromatic suits of lemon yellow, scarlet and tangerine. He was born in Missouri to bohemian German Jews who ran a cabaret in St. Louis called the Crystal Palace. They were swingers and riverboat gamblers. K married three times. A previous wife, I was told, was living in a psychiatric hospital.

In our early encounters, K acted old-school and bluesy. He was small and elf-like and weightless, an effect counterbalanced by the hungry intensity with which he held a gaze, a conversation. It was such a perfect cliché: when K kicked it into charm mode, he made you feel like The Only Girl In The World. He endeared himself to me quickly. The first time I worked alone with him at the apartment, he cooked us Japanese yams and gave me a set of hand-painted sake glasses (my mother was right—he didn’t need them).

K resigned from the magazine once the allegations were made public. He brought mountains of mail home, which we opened, along with K’s first online bank accounts. He spoke about small, inconsequential things, like his love of notebooks and New Mexico. He asked me about school, about my writing. On that day, and others, I’d go home in the evening and read about the accusations of sexual harassment against him. Nine women, then fifteen, then twenty-one. At small, dark bars with friends, I condemned him. Alone, I thought: this feels interesting. It would be fine, I reasoned, because I never got that close to men anyway. But that was one of the problems with K. He fit the mold so perfectly that he could almost seem boring.

In legal discovery, an email from one of the magazine’s other co-publishers: “I remember... telling K that his behavior toward women had to stop, to change,” it said. “It could really hurt all of us. He [K] became angry, clenched his fists. ‘I’m never going to stop. Never,’ he said.”

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