Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  “Which is a good thing,” she said to Jenny, their conversation punctuated, as usual, by the occasional click of their wineglasses against their respective phones. Nora found it the ideal way to end the day: a little Chardonnay, her comfortable club chair, Jenny at the other end of the line.

  “I’ve never really understood the car-in-the-city thing,” said Jenny, who was a professor at Columbia and lived in university housing a block from campus. “It’s so male. But whatever. How are my godchildren?”

  “Much the same.”

  “Which means Rachel is making you totally crazy, and Oliver is completely chill. But don’t ignore the fact that the newest research shows your best chance of being well cared for when you’re aged is having a daughter.”

  “I feel aged already. This is going to be a big house for just two people. Although complaining about something like that makes me feel like a terrible person. I should count my blessings.”

  “Oh, honey. If you can’t complain to me, who can you complain to? And blessings are all relative.”

  “My first-world problems. That’s what they call them. ‘First-world problems.’ ”

  “Who does?”

  “Rachel and her friends. One of them will start complaining about how she needs a manicure, or she has salt stains on her boots, and somebody will say, ‘First-world problems,’ meaning, ‘There are real problems in the world and your nails don’t qualify.’ ”

  “I don’t think being worried about your kids leaving home and your husband’s moods is commensurate with salt-stained boots. Although I’m surprised that none of my students has used that turn of phrase. First-world problems. That’s actually a good phrase. Not to be pendantic, but it reminds me of the research showing that societies that eschew material possessions are happier overall.”

  “God bless you.”

  “What?”

  “Eschew. God bless you. Ollie did that with my father once, and he thought it was so clever. Although my father thinks everything Oliver does is clever. And has anyone told poor people that they should be happier overall?”

  “Ah, that’s the thing. The entire society has to eschew—don’t say it; now I’ll never be able to use that word again without cracking up—the entire society has to eschew material wealth.”

  “Do those societies exist?”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Jenny said. “They’re all matriarchal, too.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” Nora said.

  “It’s true, but if it makes you feel better, I don’t even care that it’s true. Hold on.” Without Jenny saying a thing Nora knew she was opening the refrigerator to take out the bottle of wine and pour some more into her glass.

  “I’m back,” Jenny said. Always.

  “My children are almost exactly the same age I was when I came to New York,” Nora said. “They’re almost exactly the age we were when you and I moved in together. Doesn’t that seem like a long time ago?”

  “It does,” Jenny said. “It seems like a million years ago, and it seems like it was just last week.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Nolan, Mr. Harris just called you,” said Nora’s assistant, Madison. “He’d like you to call him back as soon as you can.”

  “Who?” Nora said, standing in the doorway of her office.

  “Mr. Harris? He said you knew him?”

  “Did he give a first name?”

  “Bob?” Madison said. She handed a message slip to Nora. “He said to use this number.”

  “Close the door, Madison,” Nora said. “Please.”

  Nora looked down at the message slip in front of her, the request to call Bob Harris, founder and chairman of the investment firm where Charlie worked. For just a moment she had a nonsensical thought: that work was like school, and that just as the head of the middle school had called to tell her that Rachel would suffer an in-school suspension for hiding in the girls’ room during an obligatory morning meeting, his boss was calling to give her bad news about Charlie’s continued employment. Nora knew this was ridiculous, but she could think of no other reason that Bob Harris, a man who had become legendary for his cornpone demeanor and uncanny ability to make money, would call her. That was how he was almost always described: the legendary Bob Harris.

  “Well, hey now,” he said when she dialed the number, which was clearly his private line, no secretary, no intermediary, no screening. “I wonder if you and me could have a little meeting.”

  “About what?” Nora said.

  “See, that’s one of the things I always liked about you. You’re a straight shooter. None of this, Sure, Mr. Harris, when, Mr. Harris, whatever you say, Mr. Harris. About what? That’s what I like.”

  “Thank you,” Nora said. “About what?” There was something about Bob Harris that always brought out the peremptory headmistress in her.

  “I’ve got a business proposition for you, but I want to have a sit-down to talk more about it. How about if my girl calls your girl and they sync our schedules? What’s your girl’s name again? She told me but I don’t think I heard her right.”

  “It’s Madison.”

  “Well, hell, I did hear her right. Whatta ya know? Tell Madison to call Eileen. I want to get together real soon.”

  “About what?” Nora said.

  “There you go. Like I said, straight shooter. Nothing better. I hate the telephone. Let’s get down to brass tacks when I see you.”

  Nora put down the phone and looked at the clock on her desk. Jenny was in class, teaching, so she couldn’t call her. Her sister, Christine, would be barely awake in Seattle. And she certainly couldn’t ask Charlie why Bob Harris would want to speak to her. Nora was completely baffled, but there was no mystery in how her husband would react to a personal call from the man he felt insufficiently valued his talents. Unless he already knew. She had to hope Bob Harris didn’t run into Charlie in the elevator anytime soon, that assistant Eileen didn’t pass along the word to Charlie’s assistant, Maryanne, while they were picking up sandwiches for lunch.

  Nora wondered if Madison had recognized Bob Harris’s name. She wouldn’t put it past her. Madison had grown up in New York City, and she was as hungry a twenty-four-year-old as Nora had ever encountered. “This is my dream job,” she had said during her interview, following up with “I want to be you when I grow up,” which Nora told Jenny made her feel a million years old, and Jenny said would have caused her to shred Madison’s résumé. “Plus, I’m sorry, but how do you take seriously a person who is named after an avenue?” Jenny said.

  “You must have had at least one Madison as a student,” Nora said.

  “Of course I have,” said Jenny. “Right now I have a student named Celestial, and another named Otto, who insists on spelling his name with a lowercase o at the beginning. But I didn’t choose to hire them. They were thrust upon me.”

  Madison was a heat-seeking missile; Nora, by contrast, felt as though she’d fallen into nearly every job she’d had, although Jenny always insisted she was selling herself short. During the summer between sophomore and junior year at Williams she had wanted to stay on campus because the man with whom she was topsy-turvy in love was working on a historic restoration project nearby. There had been an opening for an assistant in the development office, which was fine with her, although she had had no idea what a development office actually did. Two weeks in, the assistant director was put on bed rest with a dicey pregnancy, and Nora found herself showing more rich alums around the campus than anyone had expected, and taking several trips to the enormous shingled houses of Nantucket and Naragansett while the director asked for what Nora quickly learned to call a significant multiyear gift. At the end of summer the director had asked her if she would continue part-time during the school year, and when the director left to go to the Folk Art Museum in New York City, she had taken Nora with her.


  Even before college Nora had understood that there was a kind of desire expected of smart and capable people that she had never really had, that wanting fever that so clearly ran through Madison’s veins. Nora’s ambition was a simmer, not a boil. Her best friend in high school had wanted to be an actress with a ferocity that was like a mental illness; it shaped the way Amanda looked at everything. Nora was certain that because of this she would succeed, that it was this inflammatory ambition, not talent, that made a difference. But in the back of her mind was the understanding that having that kind of hunger was a razor blade hidden at the bottom of the bag; that it meant that not getting what you wanted would be crippling. Nora had to admit that she was slightly relieved not to have it, to be content to move from one responsible position to another in a business that, after all, was all for a good cause. Raising money first for the folk art museum, then for the law school. The fashion institute job seemed a bit less like giving back to humanity, but it was the first time she’d been asked to head the office rather than sit second seat, and the money was good. There had been private-school tuitions, and the economy had hit one of those speed bumps that made Charlie ask if Rachel really needed to spend the summer at drama camp.

  The job she had now was some steps up from a development job, and it had literally fallen into her lap. The fashion institute had had a lunch to launch its exhibit of a collection of women’s clothes of the Jazz Age, the waitstaff weaving carefully among mannequins wearing beaded shifts, fur neckpieces, cloche hats. The Cobb salads and glasses of iced tea were already on the tables when they sat down.

  “When did the Cobb salad become the official lunch food of New York City women?” said the woman on her left, who had given them a modest gift although she could have afforded to give them something larger, and who was seated next to Nora so Nora could pry something larger out of her.

  “And why is a Cobb salad called a Cobb salad?” Nora said.

  From her other side came a loud, nasal voice: “It’s named for the owner of the Brown Derby in Hollywood, who invented it. Out of leftovers.”

  Nora swiveled. “Well, thank you for that,” Nora said, in her best development-officer voice, trying to read the woman’s place card without obviously squinting. (She would really have to talk to the staff about making the names larger on the place cards.) “And I’m so pleased that you’re interested in the institute. May I call you Bebe?”

  “You can call me Queen Elizabeth if you’d like,” the woman said, pulling the soft center out of the popover on her bread plate. “I’m not interested in the fashion institute. I’m interested in you. I want to offer you a job.”

  As soon as she got home that evening she called Christine and told her about the meeting she had had after lunch, which had taken place in the backseat of a Mercedes SUV. “She’s insane,” Nora said. “She wants to start her own museum, from scratch, and she wants me to run it.”

  “What kind of a museum?”

  “Jewelry. She wants to start a museum of jewelry with her own collection, which apparently is pretty large, and the collections of her friends after they die. She says she has two friends who are already willing to kick in.”

  There was a long silence. “Crazy, right?’ Nora said.

  “It’s a fantastic idea,” Christine said. “It’ll be a huge success, Nonnie. Women will beat down the door.”

  Nora was the one who was silent this time. Her sister and her husband had started a business in Seattle making yoga clothes with inspirational sayings written in tiny, almost imperceptible letters at the nape of the neck or the edge of the cuff, which Nora had thought was a waste of two good college educations. Each time Nora read a piece about the company—and there were many pieces about the company now—the number of millions it was said to be worth rose. Nora had once made the mistake of saying at a business lunch that her sister was the Christine of Small Sayings—“Shouting Is So Over” was their slogan—and she’d had to listen to fifteen minutes about the cotton, the fit, the durability, even the sayings, which Nora had once compared to those found in fortune cookies. “I know it sounds silly, but every time I put on that shirt that says ‘Today might just be the best day of my life’ on the hem, I feel good,” the director of development at Hunter College had said.

  “I have that shirt!” her assistant had chimed in.

  “Oh, come on, who’s going to beat down the doors to look at jewelry?” Nora said to Christine. “If you want to look at jewelry you can just walk into Harry Winston.”

  “Ordinary people aren’t going to walk into Harry Winston. They made me feel like a shoplifter the one time I was in there. Even Tiffany’s makes you feel uncomfortable. But with a museum you’re inviting them in and not even asking them to buy. Although the gift shop opportunities here are major. Major. You’ll get all those women who want to own some big honking opal but could never afford it and are thrilled to have a facsimile. Your whole crazy city is aspirational now, people spending more than they can afford, trying to live a big life that’s beyond them. This is perfect. It will be huge, I’m telling you.”

  And her sister had been right. Despite condescending comments in the art magazines and a few digs in the newspapers, the Museum of Jewelry took off almost from the day its heavy steel-and-smoked-glass double doors opened. There wasn’t much of the sort of work Nora had done before, raising money from people who were constantly being asked to write a check, the ones who were tired of being asked and the ones who just loved the attention. The museum had a decent endowment; Bebe sold three Impressionist oil paintings she said she had always found depressing, and supplemented that with a chunk of her late husband’s massive investment portfolio. And they had a large, rather handsome space that Bebe owned outright. Her husband had been a real estate developer, who, she said, saw Chelsea as an up-and-coming area before anyone else did. He had built a square Brutalist building close to the river that he intended to market as a mall for galleries, “one-stop shopping for the discerning collector.” (One of the things her husband loved about her, Bebe liked to say, was that she wrote his slogans.) But significant galleries were not charmed by the mall idea, and less significant ones couldn’t afford the rent, and then Bebe’s husband had died, went, according to Bebe, “out like a light in the car on the way home from Le Cirque.” Bebe took a tour of the empty building while the estate was being settled and, as she liked to tell reporters, she had a brainstorm while looking down at her cuff bracelet: the museum was born.

  Bebe’s own jewelry had been the bulwark, still was, but over time they had added a collection of black pearls here, a tiara that could be turned into a necklace there, some really spectacular rubies, a group of brooches that had been smuggled out of Czsarist Russia sewn into somebody’s skirt, and so on and so forth.

  Sitting at her desk now, looking out her office window, Nora couldn’t imagine a place that would have less appeal for a man like Bob Harris, who wore a Timex watch that looked as though it had been purchased in a drugstore many years before. They had certainly hosted corporate events at the museum, but they tended to be for cosmetic companies or women’s magazines. One of the law firms had had a dinner in one of their galleries, but it was for trust-and-estates clients, mainly the kind of older women who were most likely to appreciate the museum and perhaps become benefactors. Nora had realized that there was a certain sort of woman in New York who wouldn’t think of leaving her jewelry to anyone but her daughters and her granddaughters. But there was another sort—not as many, but enough—who loved the idea of having her name in a display case beneath an emerald parure, a word Nora had not even known until recently. They tended to be much like Bebe, a rich second wife, no children and no interest in those of her husband. And the law firm had been the one that represented Bebe, which went a long way to explaining why they had had a dinner there. Nora could imagine no possible nexus between Bob Harris and the Museum of Jewelry.

  N
ora had been at the museum from the beginning, when they were choosing staff, fonts, names for the place itself. They decided against Bebe’s name since her last name was Pearl. “People are just dumb enough to think there’s nothing but pearls in the place,” Bebe said, wearing what would become part of the collection, a huge cuff bracelet inlaid with rubies and a matching brooch shaped like a dragon. “What was your last name before you were married?” Bebe had once asked Nora, and when Nora told her, she rolled it around in her crimsoned mouth like a piece of hard candy: “Benson. Nora Benson. What a nice Protestant American name. But so is your married name. Benson to Nolan. You hardly went anywhere.”

  The suggestion was that Bebe herself had traveled some distance, and so she had. Her name had once been Edna Wisniewski. She had gone to a high school in Brooklyn famous for graduating nearly every one-hit wonder in the pre-Beatles pop era; on its wall of fame the two Nobel laureates in medicine were at the far end, back by the boys’ bathroom. The first year the museum was open the school added Bebe to the wall. There was a photograph of a portrait her husband had commissioned right after their marriage. The portrait itself hung inside the museum. It made Bebe look like Elizabeth Taylor, whose jewelry collection she had attempted to emulate. Bebe always dressed in bright Chanel suits with at least two or three stupendous pieces of jewelry, a brooch nestled over her breast, a bracelet that seemed in danger of decommissioning her arm, spectacular earrings. She told Nora that they were copies of the originals, but Nora couldn’t tell the difference.

  Nora never wore any jewelry to work except her wedding ring and a pair of diamond stud earrings. She had scarcely any good stuff, and it seemed somehow improper to wear costume jewelry to the museum. She wore a work uniform: black pants, black shirt in the summer, black sweater in the winter, black jacket, black wool coat, black suit jacket, all of it of good fabric and cuts. When she had a business lunch she wore a black skirt. “Someday, babe,” Jenny had said once, “you are going to cut loose and wear navy blue.”