I never knew rich people till I came here. “Trusties,” we call them, the array of full-time people who don’t have to earn a living because someone—granny, grandpa—left them money. Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby that the very rich are different, but I’d say that even the not-so-rich are different, very different.

The worst part of it is that people pretend. They pretend to work, they pretend to professions they never practice. They even pretend to careers that never happened. We knew an older woman, whose husband had been involved in every peace movement of his long lifetime, and whose only job, ever, had been a couple of days running the elevator at Bergdorf Goodman, to embarrass his mother. The wife claimed an illustrious career, dropping names—The Voice, Robert Maxwell—whenever the subject of work came up. But any question about the when and where was met with utter silence, a blatant change of subject. I only realized later that it had been a terrible faux pas, not to accept her account of herself, and to notice that her frequent phone calls and visits always resulted to my cooking something, driving somewhere, or giving her something from the garden.

The rich are needy, too, in many ways.

Only one person I’ve ever met here came right out and asked. He became completely enamored of me, to his wife’s dismay, and confidential. He told me how he was the only person in his family not diagnosed as crazy or on antidepressants, and that he was a photographer. (Keep the previous paragraph in mind: that is, he had a studio and took a lot of photos.) He wanted me to come for a session, and we could work on a book together.

We met at an Easter party at the home of a mutual friend, soon after I came to the Berkshires. The kids ran around outside, and Stuart [all names in this blog have been changed] sat close to me and talked, and talked. Finally, he looked towards Jack, nodded to himself, and asked, “You are one of us, aren’t you?

I had no idea what he meant.

“Private school, and, well, you know, family….?”

Inherited money. Trust funds. The moniker I’d learned already, “independently wealthy.” Jack was the richest man in the whole county, I’d been told, but he lived in a squalid farmhouse I visited with trepidation (and, I have to admit, curiosity).

No, I shook my head. But I’m not sure Stuart believed me, or heard. I had to stop returning his phone calls eventually, and a year or two later he disappeared from the area, leaving his wife and kids. Snug and well-medicated in a comfortable home, I’ve always assumed.

I still have a book on community he gave me, and I give him credit for coming right out with the question that I’ll bet is on their minds all the time. Is someone one of them?