He stood up and made his excuses. He had a conference call from Los Angeles that couldn’t be avoided—he’d only just gotten the message on his BlackBerry. “You can’t stay for dessert?” Enid asked. Then she exclaimed, “Oh, damn. There go the numbers.” His absence meant there would be an uneven number of men and women.
“Can’t be avoided, Nini,” he said, kissing her on her upturned cheek. “You’ll manage.”
He made it only halfway down the block before he called Lola. Her casual hello made his heart race, and he covered it up by becoming more serious than he’d intended. “This is Philip Oakland.”
“What’s up?” she said, although she sounded pleased to hear from him.
“I want to offer you the job. As my researcher. Can you start this afternoon?”
“No,” she said. “I’m busy.”
“How about tomorrow morning?”
“Can’t,” she said. “My mother’s leaving, and I have to say goodbye.”
“What time is she leaving?” he said, wondering how he’d gotten into this desperate-sounding exchange.
“I don’t know. Maybe ten? Or eleven?”
“Why don’t you come by in the afternoon?”
“I guess I could,” Lola said, sounding uncertain. Sitting on the edge of the pool at Soho House, she dipped her toe into the warm, murky water. She wanted the job but didn’t want to appear too eager. After all, even though Philip would technically be her employer, he was still a man. And in dealing with men, it was always important to keep the upper hand. “How’s two o’clock?”
“Perfect,” Philip said, relieved, and hung up the phone.
Back at Soho House, the waiter approached Lola and warned her that cell phones were not allowed in the club, even on the roof. Lola gave him an icy stare before texting her mother to tell her the good news. Then she slathered herself with more sunscreen and lay down on a chaise. She closed her eyes, fantasizing about Philip Oakland and One Fifth. Maybe Philip would fall in love with her and marry her, and then she’d live there, too.
“It’s beautiful,” Annalisa said, stepping into the foyer of Mrs. Houghton’s apartment.
Billy clutched his heart. “It’s a mess. You should have seen it when Mrs. Houghton lived here.”
“I did see it,” Mindy said. “It was very old-lady.”
The apartment had been stripped of its antiques, paintings, rugs, and silk draperies; what was left were dust bunnies and faded wallpaper. At mid-afternoon, the apartment was flooded with light, revealing the chipped paint and scuffed parquet floors. The small foyer led to a bigger foyer with a sunburst inlaid in the marble floor; from there, a grand staircase ascended. Three sets of tall wooden doors opened to a living room, dining room, and library. Billy, lost in memories, stepped into the enormous living room. It ran the length of the front of the apartment, overlooking Fifth Avenue. Two pairs of French doors led to a ten-foot-wide terrace. “Oh, the parties she had here,” he said, gesturing around the room. “She had it set up like a European salon, with couches and settees and conversational clusters. You could fit a hundred people in this room and not even know it.” He led the way to the dining room. “She had everyone to dinner. I remember one dinner in particular. Princess Grace. She was so beautiful. No one had any idea that a month later, she’d be dead.”
“People rarely do,” Mindy said dryly.
Billy ignored this. “There was one long table for forty. I do think a long table is so much more elegant than those round tables for ten that everyone does these days. But I suppose there’s no choice. No one has a large dining room anymore, although Mrs. Houghton always said one never wanted more than forty people at a sit-down dinner. It was all about making the guests feel they were part of a select group.”
“Where’s the kitchen?” Mindy asked. Although she’d been in the apartment once before, it had been only a cursory tour, and now she felt envious and intimidated. She had no idea Mrs. Houghton had lived so grandly, but the grand living appeared to have taken place before Mindy and James moved into the building. Leading the way through swinging doors, Billy pointed out the butler’s pantry and, farther on, the kitchen itself, which was surprisingly crude, with a linoleum floor and Formica countertops. “She never came in here, of course,” Billy explained. “No one did except the staff. It was considered a form of respect.”
“What if she wanted a glass of water?” Annalisa asked.
“She would call on the phone. There were phones in every room, and each room had its own line. It was considered very modern in the early eighties.”
Annalisa looked at Mindy, caught her eye, and smiled. Until then Mindy hadn’t known what to make of Annalisa, who managed to appear self-contained and confident, without revealing a peep of information about herself. Perhaps Annalisa Rice had a sense of humor after all.
They went up to the second floor, examined Mrs. Houghton’s master bedroom, large bathroom, and sitting room, where, Billy noted, he and Louise had spent many pleasant hours. They peeked into the three bedrooms down the hall and then went up to the third floor. “And here,” Billy said, throwing open two paneled doors, “is the pièce de résistance. The ballroom.”
Annalisa walked across the black-and-white-checkerboard marble floor and stood in the middle of the room, taking in the domed ceiling and the fireplace and the French windows. The room was overwhelmingly beautiful—she had never imagined that such a room, in such an apartment, could exist in a building in New York City. Manhattan was full of wonderful secrets and surprises. Gazing around, Annalisa thought that she had never desired anything in her life as much as this apartment.
Billy came up behind her. “I always say if one can’t be happy in this apartment, one can’t be happy anywhere.” Even Mindy was unable to come up with a retort. The atmosphere was full of longing, Billy thought, what he called “the ache.” It was part of the pain of living in Manhattan, this overwhelming ache for prime real estate. It could cause people to do all kinds of things—lie, stay in marriages that were over, prostitute themselves, even commit murder. “What do you think?” he asked Annalisa.
Annalisa’s heart was racing. What she thought was that she and Paul must buy the apartment now, this afternoon, before anyone else saw it and wanted it as well. But her trained lawyerly mind prevailed, and she kept her cool. “It’s wonderful. Certainly something for us to consider.” She looked at Mindy. The key to getting the apartment lay in the hands of this jumpy neurotic woman whose eyes bulged slightly out of her head. “My husband, Paul, is so particular,” Annalisa said. “He’ll want to see the building’s financials.”
“It’s a top-notch building,” Mindy said. “We have the highest mortgage credentials.” She opened the French doors and went onto the terrace. Looking over the side, she had a clear view of the corner of Enid Merle’s terrace. “Have you seen this view?” she called to Annalisa.
Annalisa came outside. Standing on the terrace was like being on the prow of a ship sailing over a sea of Manhattan rooftops. “Gorgeous,” she said.
“So you’re from…?” Mindy asked.
“Washington,” Annalisa said. “We moved here for Paul’s work. He’s in finance.” Billy Litchfield had whispered to her in the church to avoid “hedge-fund manager” and use “finance” instead, which was vague and classier. “When you talk to Mindy, emphasize how normal you are,” Billy had advised.
“How long have you lived here?” Annalisa asked politely, turning the topic away from herself.
“Ten years,” Mindy said. “We love the building. And the area. My son goes to school in the Village, so it makes things easier.”
“Ah.” Annalisa nodded wisely.
“Do you have children?” Mindy asked.
“Not yet.”
“It’s a very child-friendly building,” Mindy said. “Everyone loves Sam.”
Billy Litchfield joined them, and Annalisa decided now was the time to strike. “Is your husband James Gooch?” she asked Mindy casually.
“He is. How do you know him?” Mindy asked, looking at her in surprise.
“I read his last book, The Lonesome Soldier,” Annalisa said.
“Only two thousand people read that book,” Mindy countered.
“I loved it. American history is one of my obsessions. Your husband is a wonderful writer.”
Mindy took a step back. She wasn’t sure whether to believe Annalisa, but she liked the fact that Annalisa was making an effort. And considering James’s coup with Apple, maybe Mindy had been wrong about his fiction abilities. It was true that James had once been a wonderful writer; it was one of the reasons she’d married him. Perhaps he was about to become a wonderful writer again. “My husband has a new book coming out,” she said. “People in the business are saying it’s going to be bigger than Dan Brown. If you can believe that.”
Having said the words aloud, and having liked how they sounded, Mindy now began to believe James’s success was a distinct possibility. That would really show Philip Oakland, she thought. And if the Rices took the apartment, it would be a blow to both Enid and Philip.
“I’ve got to get back to my office,” Mindy said, holding out her hand to Annalisa. “But I hope we’ll be seeing each other soon.”
“I’m impressed,” Billy said to Annalisa, when they were on the sidewalk in front of One Fifth. “Mindy Gooch liked you, and she doesn’t like anyone.”
Annalisa smiled and flagged down a taxi.
“Have you really read The Lonesome Soldier?” Billy asked. “It was eight hundred pages and dry as toast.”
“I have,” Annalisa said.
“So you knew James Gooch was her husband?”
“No. I Googled her on our way out of the church. There was an item that mentioned James Gooch was her husband.”
“Clever,” Billy said. A taxi pulled up, and he held open the door.
Annalisa slid onto the backseat. “I always do my homework,” she said.
As predicted, the job as Philip’s researcher was easy. Three afternoons a week—on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—Lola met Philip at his apartment at noon. Sitting at a tiny desk in his large, sun-filled living room, Lola made a great pretense of working; for the first few days, anyway. Philip worked in his office with the door open. Every now and then, he would poke his head out and ask her to find something for him, like the exact address of some restaurant that had been on First Avenue in the eighties. Lola couldn’t understand why he needed this information; after all, he was writing a screenplay, so why couldn’t he just make it up the way he had the characters?
When she questioned him about it, he took a seat near her on the arm of the leather club chair in front of the fireplace and gave her a lecture about the importance of authenticity in fiction. At first Lola was mystified, then bored, and finally fascinated. Not by what Philip was saying but by the fact that he was speaking to her as if she, too, possessed the same interests and knowledge. This happened a few times, and when he went back to his office abruptly, as if he’d just thought of something, and she’d hear the tap of his fingers on his keyboard, Lola would tuck her hair behind her ears and, frowning in concentration, attempt to Google the information he’d requested. But she had a short attention span, and within minutes, she’d be off on the wrong tangent, reading Perez Hilton, or checking her Facebook page, or watching episodes of The Hills, or scrolling through videos on YouTube. If she’d had a regular job in an office, Lola knew, these activities would have been frowned upon—indeed, one of her college friends had recently been fired from her job as a paralegal for this particular infraction—but Philip didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, it was the opposite: He appeared to consider it part of her job.
On her second afternoon, while looking at videos on YouTube, Lola came across a clip of a bride in a strapless wedding gown attacking a man with an umbrella on the side of a highway. In the background was a white limousine—apparently, the car had broken down, and the bride was taking it out on the driver. “Philip?” Lola said, peeking into his office.
Philip was hunched over his computer, his dark hair falling over his forehead. “Huh?” he said, looking up and brushing back the hair.
“I think I’ve found something that might help you.”
“The address of Peartree’s?”
“Something better.” She showed him the video.
“Wow,” Philip said. “Is that real?”
“Of course.” They listened to the bride screaming epithets at the driver. “Now, that,” Lola said, sitting back in her little chair, “is authenticity.”
“Are there more of these?” Philip asked.
“There are probably hundreds,” Lola replied.
“Good work,” Philip said, impressed.
Philip, Lola decided, was book-smart, but despite his desire for authenticity, he didn’t seem to know a lot about real life. On the other hand, her own real life in New York wasn’t exactly shaping up to be what she’d hoped.
On Saturday night, she’d gone clubbing with the two girls she’d met in the human resources department. Although Lola considered them “average,” they were the only girls she knew in New York. Clubbing in the Meatpacking District had been both an exciting and depressing adventure. At the beginning of the evening, they were turned away from two clubs but found a third where they could wait in line to get in. For forty-five minutes, they’d stood behind a police barricade while people in Town Cars and SUVs pulled up to the entrance and were admitted immediately—and how it stung not to be a member of that exclusive club—but during the wait, they saw six genuine celebrities enter. The line would begin buzzing like a rattlesnake’s tail, and then all of a sudden, everyone was using their phones, trying to get a photo of the celebrity. Inside the club, there was more separation of the Somebodies and the Wannabes. The Somebodies had bottles of vodka and champagne at tables in roped-off tiers protected by enormous security guards, while the Nobodies were forced to cluster in front of the bar like part of a mosh pit. It took another half hour to get a drink, which you clutched protectively like a baby, not knowing when you’d be able to get another.
This was no way to live. Lola needed to find a way to break into New York’s glamorous inner circle.
The second Wednesday of Lola’s employment found her stretched out on the couch in Philip’s living room, reading tabloid magazines. Philip had gone to the library to write, leaving her alone in his apartment, where she was supposed to be reading the draft of his script, looking for typos. “Don’t you have spell-check?” she’d asked when he handed her the script. “I don’t trust it,” he’d said. Lola started reading the script but then remembered it was the day all the new tabloid magazines came out. Putting aside the script, she went out to the newsstand on University. She loved going in and out of One Fifth, and when she passed the doormen now, she would give them a little nod, as if she lived there.
But the tabloids were dull that week—no major celebrities had gone to rehab or gained (or lost) several pounds or stolen someone’s husband—and Lola tossed the magazines aside, bored. Looking around Philip’s apartment, she realized that with Philip gone, there was something much more interesting to do: snoop.
She headed for the wall of bookcases. Three entire shelves were taken up with Philip’s first book, Summer Morning, in various editions and languages. Another shelf consisted of hardcover first editions of the classics; Philip had told her that he collected them and had paid as much as five thousand dollars for a first edition of The Great Gatsby, which Lola thought was crazy. On the bottom shelf was a collection of old newspapers and magazines. Lola picked up a copy of The New York Review of Books dated February 1992. She flipped through the pages until she came upon a review of Philip’s book Dark Star. Boring, she thought, and put it back. On the bottom of the pile, she spied an old copy of Vogue magazine. She pulled it out and looked at the cover. September 1989. One of the headlines read: THE NEW POWER COUPLES. What was Philip doing with an old copy of Vogue? she wondered, and opened it up to find
out.
Turning to the middle of the magazine, she found the answer. There was a ten-page spread of a much younger Philip and an even younger-looking Schiffer Diamond, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, feeding each other croissants at a sidewalk café, strolling down a Paris street in a ballgown and a tux. The headline read: LOVE IN THE SPRINGTIME: OSCAR-WINNING ACTRESS SCHIFFER DIAMOND AND PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR PHILIP OAKLAND SHOW OFF THE NEW PARIS COLLECTIONS.
Lola took the magazine to the couch and studied the pictures more carefully. She’d had no idea Philip Oakland and Schiffer Diamond had once been together, and she was filled with jealousy. In the past week, she’d felt moments of attraction to Philip but had always hesitated because of his age. He was twenty years older. And while he looked younger and was in good shape—he went to the gym every morning—and there were tons of young women who married older celebrities—look at Billy Joel’s wife—Lola still worried that if she “went there” with Philip, she might get a nasty surprise. What if he had age spots? Or couldn’t get it up?
But as she flipped through the photo spread in Vogue, her estimation of him rose, and she began calculating how to seduce him.
At five P. M., Philip left the library and walked back to One Fifth. Lola should be gone, he figured, and another day would have passed during which he had managed not to attempt to sleep with the girl. He was attracted to her, which he couldn’t help, being a man. And she seemed to be attracted to him, judging by the way she looked at him through a strand of hair she was always twisting in front of her face, as if she were shy. But she was a little young even for him and, despite her knowledge of everything celebrity and Internet, not very worldly. So far, nothing much had happened to her in life, and she was a bit immature.
Riding the elevator to his floor, he had an inspiration and hit the button for nine. There were six apartments on this floor, and Schiffer’s was at the end. He walked down the hallway, reminded of the many times he’d been here at all hours of the day and night. He rang her bell and then rattled the door handle. Nothing. She wasn’t home, of course. She was never home.
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