Wuthering Brooklyn Heights

A gothic horror in Blundstones

Cate was married. Cliff knew this, and she and Ed would never open their relationship.

But, Cliff hoped, as he wandered across the frigid and gloomy moors of Cadman Plaza Park toward Montague Street, maybe if Cate had a better picture of his real estate portfolio, she would be down to join his polycule. In a deranged and obsessional gesture, Cliff had quietly bought the brownstone where Cate grew up. And renovated it with Elizabeth Roberts Architects. Hand-painted de Gournay wallpaper in the dining room and a backyard sauna and everything. Cate would be sure to fall into his arms when she saw it.

Oh, how bitterly, tragically wrong he would be.

Cliff was dark in complexion after going overboard at Sugared + Bronzed Boerum Hill, but he was too obsessed with Cate to show much of any kind of restraint, even with a spray tan. Though Cliff and Cate went to Packer together in their youth, Cliff was a scholarship kid, and even though Cate never held it against him, she only seriously dated guys who also summered in Montauk. She did let a boy with a house in Quogue go to second with her one summer at a camp social at Vega, but she denied it when the rumor spread.

But now that the renovation was done and the COA was issued, Cliff (and his poor wife Isabella, who was totally pressured into the poly thing) was firmly established in Brooklyn Heights, and ready to invite Cate over for a week-night dinner party where ketamine would be casually offered.

On Montague Street, Cliff shivered under his Carhartt WIP sweater and clutched his Stone Island parka around him tight as he waited in line for a croissant at L’Appartement 4F.

He could wait in line for the viral yet somehow not over-hyped pastry for an eternity, and it would not approach the agony of the lifetime spent longing for Cate. After an interminable trudge from the corner of Henry Street toward the bakery door, Cliff got his croissant, the delicate pastry crumbling in his rough hands. It wouldn’t satiate his hunger for Cate, but it was a suitable distraction. As he fought through the Zepbound to enjoy the layers of butter pressed between pastry dough, all he could think of was how nuts Cate would go for the townhouse.

How did he come into his fortune?

According to his house manager Nelly, who’s a total gossip despite the NDA: After Packer and Sarah Lawrence, Cate’s editor brother Eddie got Cliff a scullery fact-checking job at The New Yorker — unheard of for a kid who didn’t get into Yale. But after a total beat-down by an unhinged Eddie, Cliff fled to Wharton, then after a stint as a summer analyst at Goldman, pivoted to McKinsey and was promoted through the ranks until he was poached to do in-house consulting by a washable rug startup exactly before it IPO’d. He cashed out and went in as a first round investor in a reality star’s cosmetics brand, and finally came into the fortune that would get him Cate’s dad’s former townhouse in Brooklyn Heights. All cash.

Cliff hoped to return to Cate’s life with every intention of getting her into that backyard sauna, but fate dealt him a terrible blow.

She was pregnant. And insisted on a home birth.

Despite her doula’s intention-setting ceremony, rose quartz sourced from Brazil on her altar, AND a custom essential oil blend WITH sandalwood, after giving birth to a baby girl she named Maeve Sylvie, Cate died.

Cliff had just finish his second (he was insatiable) croissant (this time pistachio rose) when he got the tragic WhatsApp from an old Packer classmate: “So bummed to hear about Cate. I know you guys were tight back in the day. Sending big love brother lmk if you need anything.”

Cliff, consumed by howling grief, retreated under the earth and took the 3 all the way to 14th Street and switched to the L, and then he got off at Bedford and cold-plunged at Bath House.

Despite the circulation reset, his soul was still shattered. He longed for Cate the way he longed for a table at Sailor. After all this time, a lifetime of waiting and yearning and renovating, she was gone and he would never have the chance to show her the media room he had installed in the garden level. He even used the same sound guy who did Public Records.

Bereft, he called his ayahuasca Shaman. “Ryan!” he howled at the blonde man in a tunic on FaceTime. “I need to sit with you in ceremony to conjure someone. The plant medicine will know.”

Within 90 minutes, Ryan was sitting in half lotus on Cliff’s plush Nordic Knots rug in the “cuddle puddle” room off the primary suite, brewing the hallucinogenic tea.

After chugging the sacred South American plant medicine and vomiting violently, Cliff saw Cate, ghostly in a long white, ruffled nightgown from Salter House.

She beckoned to him, her lip quivering under the filler that her dermatologist SWORE would look natural. “Cliff,” her ghost whispered in a hideous rasp, “You fool. For the all-in cost of this place with the renovation budget, you could have bought a turn-key townhouse in any other neighborhood in Brooklyn AND gotten a cute place upstate. With a pool.”

As she disappeared back into the recesses of his tortured mind, he pleaded with her to stay: “I cannot live without my life! I also cannot live without the iced draft nitro matcha latte from Cha Cha Matcha!”

And with that howling utterance, Cliff knew there was only one place for him to go after being so thoroughly destroyed by the ceaseless cruelty of Brooklyn Heights: Tokyo.