NEW TIMES -- Natvar Series. By Marta

We bought a refrigerator for the kitchen of the new Institute. The kitchen had no windows. We built it right next to the big utility sink, the only running water in the loft. Only cold water came through the one tap. For the months of construction we did not cook in the Institute that we were creating. We went down to the Annex. That’s what we called it, Mark’s apartment on West Twenty Fourth St., a walk-up railroad apartment.

But then when all the walls were up, the carpet down, we made a sort of kitchen. We bought a real refrigerator and two sets of hot plates. Natvar said that when people came for a yoga class in the evening they could also purchase dinner, and that dinner would be soup, salad and bread, and we would serve it on plastic trays and people could sit on the lobby floor in tidy rows to eat and we should oversee it. Extra income for us. He ate in his room when people started to stay for dinner. Tracy was the cook.

She had left her husband to come and live with us. She slept in the loft bed in the office. She got up first in the morning and made us breakfast. She didn’t like having to get up first and would sometimes be complainy and cranky. I had no sympathy. Natvar was the only one allowed to complain. The rest of it seemed to be about how much you could take.

Tracy left for the day, going to Arianna’s apartment to help her with secretarial things. Natvar left too every morning to go to the homes of his clients – all of them wealthy – to give them their private yoga classes.

I stayed home and Mark stayed home. Mark had things to do in the office. Before the girls came and I became their school mistress, I had tasks in the morning – cleaning and secretarial. It was a new time. We had the new Institute and Natvar was getting all these new clients. When we were at the first Institute Natvar had only gone out twice a week to see Prince Michael. But now he was going out every morning and coming back at lunch time, full of stories and excitement.

Now he had a leatherbound appointment book in which I typed his appointments. Now he wanted us all to look good because every day he was with these monied New Yorkers and he wanted to be one of them.

One Sunday we went to Bloomingdales and we left with Natvar wearing a long flowing camel hair coat. It cost $500. We put it on my mother’s credit card. She had left the card with me. She had no money, but she said I should get myself something. Natvar said we would pay her back. He loved the camel hair coat. He did look elegant and aristocratic in it. He came home, saying with delight that Arianna, who was his client, had dubbed it the “drop dead” coat, and this he loved, repeating it often.

He wanted us all dressed well. But there was no money. I did not ask for anything. I had no money. I stole as much as possible to make the grocery money go farther. Natvar loved my ability to steal, the way I could get caviar this way, jams, cheeses. But stealing began to consume me. Whenever I walked into any store I could only see what I could steal, and what I could steal was not always what I wanted, and the two – what I could get and what I wanted – became confused in my mind, impossible to tell apart.

Mark now was dressing better. He seemed to be able to do it, to follow Natvar’s model on this one. Mark, who had just been a boy in sweatpants and Salvation Army overcoats, suddenly knew how to wear a button-down shirt and leather shoes. He went in and out of it. Sometimes he looked perfect, almost Natvar’s double, in a sweater vest that Natvar had handed down to him, looking fresh and clean-shaven, every hair in place. “My Markey Boy,” Natvar might say at these times, tweaking Mark’s ear. I was surprised by Mark’s ease with this stuff, felt almost betrayed, betrayed by both of them, because suddenly now I was not good enough, my baggy pants and Army Nave tank tops – none of it was any good. I should be like Arianna, like all the women Natvar saw all day – make-up, panty-hose, sleek suits.

It was a very different. time. Suddenly, Natvar wanted us to be successful and sophisticated. I missed the first Institute. It had been cozy there, much smaller. And we’d all been friends. It had become grueling with this second Institute. First, the building, done with money Natvar persuaded Mark to ask his parents for. “Your parents have it – of course they do,” and though Mark had hesitated for days and even run away – that was the first time Mark ran away, ran away for several days, but then came back, came back to be welcomed, chastised, ripped apart with words by Natvar, but essentially reabsorbed after he’d been punished and done some penance – our Crown Prince who could be such a bad bad boy.