But at the end there had been a kind of drift. Later on, when his children looked back and tried to make sense of what had happened, they could pinpoint the beginning of his transformation to the loss of his interest in pleasure. Something opened up between Epstein and his great appetite—it receded beyond the horizon a man carries within himself. Then he lived separately from his purchase of exquisite beauty. He lacked what it took to bring it all into harmony, or got tired of the ambition to do so. For a while the paintings still hung on the walls, but he no longer had much to do with them. They carried on their own lives, dreaming in their frames. Something had changed in him. The strong weather of being Epstein no longer gusted outward. A great, unnatural stillness settled over everything, as happens before radical events of meteorology. Then the wind shifted and turned inward.
It was then that Epstein began to give things away. It started with a small maquette by Henry Moore handed off to his doctor, who had admired it during a home visit. From his bed, laid up with the flu, Epstein instructed Dr. Silverblatt on which closet he could find the bubble wrap in. A few days later, he twisted the signet ring off his pinkie and dropped it in the palm of his surprised doorman, Haaroon, in place of a tip; flexing his naked fist in the autumn sunlight, he smiled to himself. Soon afterward he gave away his Patek Philippe. “I like your watch, Uncle Jules,” his nephew had said, and Epstein unbuckled the crocodile strap and handed it to him. “I like your Mercedes, too,” said his nephew, at which Epstein only smiled and patted the boy’s cheek. But quickly he redoubled his efforts. Giving farther, giving faster, he began to bestow with the same ferocity with which he had once acquired. The paintings went one by one to museums; he had the crating service on automatic dial, and knew which of the men liked turkey on rye and which baloney, and had the deli delivery waiting when they arrived. When his son Jonah, trying not to appear driven by self-interest, tried to dissuade him from further philanthropy, Epstein told him he was clearing a space to think. If Jonah had pointed out that his father had been a rigorous thinker all his life, Epstein might have explained that this was thought of an entirely different nature: a thinking that didn’t already know its own point. A thinking without hope of achievement. But Jonah—who had so many chips on his shoulder that one evening, on a private tour of the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met, Epstein had stood before a second-century bust and seen his firstborn in it—had only answered him with injured silence. As with everything Epstein did, Jonah took his father’s deliberate draining of assets as an affront, and yet another reason to feel aggrieved.
Beyond this, Epstein made no effort to explain himself to anyone, except once to Maya. Having arrived thirteen years after Jonah, and ten after Lucie, at a less turbulent and agitated epoch in Epstein’s life, Maya saw her father in a different light. There was a natural ease between them. On a walk through the northern reaches of Central Park, where icicles hung from the great outcrops of schist, he told his youngest daughter that he had begun to feel choked by all the things around him. That he felt an irresistible longing for lightness—it was a quality, he realized only now, that had been alien to him all his life. They stopped at the upper lake, thinly sheeted with greenish ice. When a snowflake landed on Maya’s black eyelashes, Epstein gently brushed it away with his thumb, and Maya saw her father in fingerless gloves pushing an empty shopping cart down Upper Broadway.
He sent friends’ children through college, had refrigerators delivered, paid for a pair of new hips for the wife of the longtime janitor of his law office. He even made the down payment on a house for the daughter of an old friend; not any house, but a large Greek Revival with old trees and more lawn than the surprised new owner knew what to do with. His lawyer, Schloss—the executor of his estate, and his longtime confidant—was not allowed to interfere. Schloss had once had another client who’d caught the disease of radical charity, a billionaire who gave away his houses one by one, followed by the ground under his feet. It was a kind of addiction, he told Epstein, and later he might come to regret it. After all, he was not yet seventy; he could still live thirty more years. But Epstein had barely seemed to listen, just as he hadn’t listened when the lawyer strenuously argued against letting Lianne walk away with the entirety of her fortune, and just as he didn’t listen a few months later when Schloss again tried to dissuade him, this time from retiring from the firm where he’d been a partner for twenty-five years. Across the table, Epstein had only smiled and changed the subject to his reading, which had recently taken a mystical turn.
It had begun with a book Maya had given to him for his birthday, he told Schloss. She was always giving him strange books, some of which he read, and many of which he didn’t, a practice that never seemed to bother her—naturally free-spirited, she was the opposite of her brother, Jonah, and rarely took offense at anything. Epstein had opened the cover one evening with no intention of reading it, but it had pulled him in with an almost magnetic force. It was by an Israeli poet, Polish-born, who had died at sixty-six, two years younger than the age Epstein had just turned. But the little autobiographical book, the testament of a man alone facing God, had been written when the poet was only twenty-seven. It had overwhelmed him, Epstein told Schloss. At twenty-seven, he himself had been blinded by his ambition and appetite—for success, for money, for sex, for beauty, for love, for the magnitudes but also the nitty-gritty, for everything visible, smellable, palpable. What might his life have been if he had applied himself with the same intensity to the spiritual realm? Why had he closed himself off from it so completely?